100% that’s exactly what private ownership is, an abstraction. What does it mean to own something? How can someone claim to own the land, or the food that grows on the land, or the things that were made by someone else’s labor? People in our society are raised to take these questions for granted, like the laws of physics, when in reality it is just an ideology.

If I put ten people in a room with only enough food for eight people to survive, and forced them to fight over it, meanwhile I am sitting there with enough food to feed everyone on earth, claiming it as my “private property” which I control, then you would have to be some kind of an asshole to believe that this situation really portrays the same universal “self-interests” of everyone involved.

And there are very certain things the ten people in the room can do to change the outcome of this situation, but they don’t end well for me who is hoarding the wealth.

That’s missing the point. I wasn’t just speaking on pre-colonial peoples, but on all human beings. The point is not that pre-colonial peoples lived in some kind of utopia where there was no conflict. The point is that two different groups of close knit communities are, in reality, just as likely to help each other than to engage in conflict. This negative idea of “tribalism” is just another way of phrasing the “human nature” argument which is literally just capitalist colonialist propaganda.

I’m glad you understand what I was trying to say! Not just that it’s offensive language, but that it’s a flawed concept. I can be in one tribe and you can be in another, and there is nothing about this “instinct” of close community that says you or I will not help each other’s tribes when the other is in need, that it must always mean conflict and greed. It’s just as likely, or more likely without capitalism, that one tribe would help to feed another. This idea of a negative kind of “tribalism” being the true human nature is pure propaganda.

The characterization of “tribal instincts” as being antisocial is an extremely biased starting point. Hundreds of thousands of native tribes all over the earth lived just fine with each for most of human history. Human beings with different social grouping of a wide diversity can live just fine with each other. The social and economic constructs that portray “tribalism” as strictly antisocial are also the main causes behind the major problems we want to overcome. To put it clearly, the issue is not tribalism; it’s capitalism, colonialism, and the state.

This is what is commonly know as contradiction of capitalism (one of many). It’s actually one of the reasons why there are frequent “crises” in the market. These crises were explained in detail by anti capitalists over a century ago, and it was shown that they are actually very predictable. Capitalists don’t care.