Leonardo was the illegitimate son of a legal notary and a peasant.
Brunelleschi was the son of another notary.
Sebastien de Vaubon was the son of minor, broke nobility whose first position was for Louis de Bourbon, Prince of Conde.
Quite a few of the famous in the Renaissance lived by patronage from the aristocracy, but were not themselves wealthy or powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_notary#Distinction_f...
It is also a dismissive attitude of the incredible obstacles that scientists and inventors had to overcome as they tinkered in garages, rising before dawn to conduct controlled experiments on plots rented with money that should have gone to pay for necessessities, spent family savings on acquiring books, and devoted their lives to improving the human condition, merely to brand them as dilletantes who never had to work for a living.
Sure, wealthy aristocrats were over-represented but were a minority among the ranks of famous engineers and scientists. Most were of modest means, the sons of schoolteachers, reverends, carpenters, iron mongers, small shopkeepers, etc. Innovation is the child of the bourgeoisie.
* George Green (1790s-1840s), of Green's theorem fame, grew up in modest circumstances -- his father was a baker and he worked at the bakery when he was young in order to support himself.
* Benjamin Franklin (1700s-1790s) grew up in a family with modest means -- his parents could only afford 2 years of schooling and he worked on various odd jobs to support himself before achieving fame.
* C. F. Gauss (1770s-1855) - perhaps the greatest mathematician of all time -- was born to poor, working class parents. His mother was illiterate and the date of his birth wasn't even recorded.
* Isaac Barrow (1630s-1670s) -- was born into a middle class family, the son of a linen draper.
* Isaac Newton (1640s-1720s) -- his father became wealthy but then spent all the money and died before Newton was born. His mother had to give him away to his grandmother and when she died Newton lived with the family of an apothecary. Unfortunately he was passed around. Newton did attend some elite schools but he did so on scholarship.
* Thomas Newcomen (1660s-1720s) - inventor of the first successful steam engine -- was an iron monger and lay preacher, as well as an elder in a baptist church.
* Bartolomeo Cristofori (1650s-1730s) - inventor of the piano -- was a commoner who grew up in obscurity, worked for luthiers, and got his big break when he was hired to fix the musical instruments of the Medici family.
* John Shore (1660s – 1750s) - inventor of the tuning fork - was a professional trumpet player
* Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1680s-1740s) - famous physicist and inventor -- worked as a merchant in Holland - as bourgeoisie as it gets!
* John Kay (1700s-1770s) - inventor of the flying shuttle which helped kickstart the British textile revolution - came was the son of yeoman farmer, and apprenticed with a hand loom reed maker.
* Pieter van Musschenbroek (1690s-1760s) - one of the co-inventors of the Leiden jar -- was the son of an instrument maker.
* John Campbell, (1720s-1790s) - inventor of the sextant - was the son of a minister, and worked as an apprentice to a coastal vessel, then enrolled in the Navy, then was promoted to master's mate.
* John Dolland (1700s-1761) - inventor of the chromatic lense - was the son of a silk-weaver and worked as an optician.
* John Harrison (1690s-1770s) - inventor of the marine chronometer -- was the son of a carpenter and had no formal schooling. He also worked as a choirmaster.
* James Hargreaves (1720-1778) - inventor of the Spinning Jenny - was the son of an illiterate hand-loom weaver, and himself worked as a weaver and a carpenter
* Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) - scientist, natural philosopher, inventor (of carbonated water), discoverer of Oxygen, theologian, and author of over 150 books, was born to a large family of cloth finishers. He was also passed around to relatives. He worked all his life as a schoolteacher.
* Richard Arkwright (1730s-1790s) - developer of the spinning frame and pioneer of the industrial revolution - was the son of a tailor (although he died a Queen's knight). His parents could not afford to send him to school so he was tutored by his cousin.
* James Watt (1730s-1810s) - inventor and industrial age pioneer -- was the son of a shipwright and ship owner. He worked in his father's shipwrights.
* Samuel Crompton (1750s-1820s) - inventor of the spinning mule - was the son of a groundskeeper. His father died, when Crompton was a young and spin yarn to make up for the lost income, and that experience led him to develop the mule, which he worked on secretly at night.
* Henry Cort (1740s-1800s) - inventor of the steel roller and many other iron refining innovations - while there are no records of his birth or family, he first appears working for the Royal Navy as a paymaster.
* Andrew Meikle (1710s-1810s) - inventor of the threshing machine and contributor to the Rotherham Plough, he helped spark tha British agricultural revoluion. He worked as a millwright.
* John Fitch (1740s-1790s) - inventor of the steamboat - received little formal schooling, the occupation of his parents is unknown but he worked as an apprentice to a clockmaker.
Once a person clings to Marxism / Socialism, it's like that expression "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." They begin to see Marxist-related thought patterns everywhere, such as "Competency? that must be due to [class based] privilege!" rather than a person actually investing their time, studying/experimenting/researching/inventing/creating, despite hardships.
Recently, during the winter storm, I cooked breakfast for a neighbor (a college student studying Journalism). His response to me giving him some free food: "You know what this is, right? It's socialism."
Me: "Uh... it's just sharing some food one time." while quietly thinking: "Gee, I hope he doesn't call every aspect of sharing "socialism" because that would be annoying and cringey."
You are right - it's somebody with some food sharing one time. That's what it is, in the small.
But in the large, what do you call it? You want to describe a society where such acts are common place, and perhaps compare it to a society in which it is not. Or you want to discuss the relative frequency of these acts. At this point, you need more than "just a little thing a person did once that doesn't mean anything" to work with these concepts.
Then you get politics thrown into the mix, propaganda every which way, and next thing you know you've got somebody complaining about others "clinging to Marxism" on the internet.
Whether a society shares resources freely doesn't indicate socialism. Socialism is when the government enforces said sharing. Its about free agency.
Is it Utopia?
You can invent a new term for it, but it's still not socialism. In fact, it still will not be socialism if half of the society willingly donate some of their food to the other half.
Because even in an extreme libertarian society, people still can willingly give away things for free. In fact, in any form of society where ownership is to be respected, the act of charity is necessarily allowed to exist.
The core of socialism is social ownership, not just "sharing". Coming back to the scenario: the parent commenter would literally never own that food, and therefore be compelled to share, to imply that the act is in any way related to socialism.
You are free to make up some new terms yourself, but if you want to be able to actually communicate with others you need to be willing to look past these kinds of issues and understand what is actually meant.
[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/socialist [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_de_Saint-Simon
In this case, a person (or many people) gave away their own belongings for free.
To use the word "socialism" on such a phenomenon unironically would mean that socialism no longer describes a kind of society, as it now refers to individual choices. The meaning is fundamentally different. In that case, it should also lose all the negative connotations that come with its more formal meaning.
In that conversation, it didn't; the neighbor named it socialism, as a snarky attack, which means he was still referring to the definition that describes a society.
> you need to be willing to look past these kinds of issues and understand what is actually meant.
I don't really know what the neighbor really meant when he said that it was socialism. What the commenter did was not related to any "-ism" as far as I can think of. Maybe the neighbor did it on purpose because he didn't like being on the other end of charity. Maybe he really didn't know what socialism means, never looked it up, and used it as he guessed from whatever he was reading.
This sounds absurd, do you have any sources for this claim?
I doubt that. Marxism is essentially a modified labor theory of value, in the line of Smith and Ricardo. It says the source of value lies in the productive output of the working classes. It would make no sense, from a labor theory of value, to pinpoint the source of innovation at the capital owners, so I would be very surprised if you were able to provide a source for that claim.
(This is not whether Marx was right on wrong on these topics. Just pointing that he touched extensively all of them. Marxist thought is not constrained to a "labor theory of value").
Here's the most basic Marxist expression of the rich (the bourgeoisie) driving technological innovation, from the Communist Manifesto:
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. (...) It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades. (...) The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. (...) The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. (...) The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?
What is driving the innovation though, in Marx' theory, are the market forces. The bourgeoisie as the class of capital owners has to innovate to stay competitive with one another or perish at the market. That does not mean that they as individual persons have to be actual inventors, or that they really have much of a choice. Marx went to great lengths in the Capital to emphasize that it's not about the individual but the economic forces, e.g. he wrote clearly that the individual capitalist isn't morally bad for exploiting the workers, as he isn't free to chose: If the capitalist were to pay them (significantly) better, he/she would lose out to a competitor who didn't.
The whole point of his writings is that the economic reality forms the behaviour of the individual. Marx tried to explain the changes in the world by the underlying changes in the economy. The idea of placing agency at the individual would be dismissed as idealist/bourgeois thinking.
"Yes, this stereotype of innovation or invention being driven by rich dilletantes is absolutely false, and comes from a marxian historical analysis where the adherents didn't want to acknowledge that drivers of innovation for the most part were from the same background as, uhh, Marx himself, rather than from the nobility."