| " | I'm not really trying to make a value judgment on the profit-making itself, though I understand why it would look that way. My point is more that the difference between what we've been going through down here on Earth and what the rich went through is almost on polar opposite ends of the spectrum. |
| " | I can certainly say that I'd hope to see more in the way of philanthropy from these people who saw such massive increases to their wealth coming from the desperate and suffering masses. |
| " | I'm really not sure why you'd mention that aspect at the end, where you make it sound like time off due to covid took much of those profits away - they're still up 40% at the end of it all. And I'm gonna need a source on the idea of all employers offering paid sick leave for Covid cases, because I get the feeling a lot of them just made their sick employees take the hit. But that's just me being the pessimist toward Capitalism, because taking a pay hit for being sick IS the status quo. Every job I've ever held until my current one has had no PTO, sick time or otherwise. The difference is, this one's a nice office job that's full-time and cares for its employees - it's the Walmarts and McD's that I'm more concerned about. |
| " | sure but anybody with enough money is going to be happy and secure through any crisis really. Capitalism or otherwise |
| " | That's not actually true. The main reason that the US and the UK are prosperous places is because of exploitative relations with places like Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The developed, imperialist countries actively brutalized the people in these other regions and destroyed any sort of industry (for instance, India) and made these areas places for cheap labor or resource extraction. Through the act of deindustralization, it makes the colony (or neo-colony) reliant on the colonizer and also often creates a circumstance where the colony is forced to by goods from the imperial power. In the case of India, their textile industry was demolished and their economy instead became an export based resource economy for the British textile industry and that forced India to buy textiles at a higher price than the raw materials they exported. |
| " | Then of course, following WW2, most of these colonial possessions were given sovereignty, but due to their historical exploitation their development was very limited and was directed through US-based international organizations that essentially just saddled them with a ton of debt and have used that debt to force austerity. |
| " | Also, you claim about capitalism being the source of prosperity is really sketchy. I mean the majority of the countries in the world are capitalist countries but most of them are still poor. If capitalism brings prosperity then how is that the case? |
| " | The reason that things are cheaper is that as time goes on we develop technologically and changes in productivity so it stops really being reasonable or possible to ask thousands of dollars for this thing that is much easier to produce, cheaper in materials, or cheaper in labor invested |
| " | One way of judging the level of economic development in Africa five centuries ago is through the quality of the products. Here a few examples will be given of articles which came to the notice of the outside world. Through North Africa, Europeans became familiar with a superior brand of red leather from Africa which was termed “Moroccan leather.” In fact, it was tanned and dyed by Hausa and Mandinga specialists in northern Nigeria and Mali. When direct contact was established between Europeans and Africans on the East and West coasts, many more impressive items were displayed. As soon as the Portuguese reached the old kingdom of Kongo, they sent back word on the superb local cloths made from bark and palm fiber—and having a finish comparable to velvet. The Baganda were also expert barkcloth makers. Yet, Africa had even better to offer in the form of cotton cloth, which was widely manufactured before the coming of the Europeans. Well into the present century, local cottons from the Guinea coast were stronger than Manchester cottons. Once European products reached Africa, Africans too were in a position to make comparisons between their commodities and those from outside. In Katanga and Zambia, the local copper continued to be preferred to the imported items, while the same held true for iron in a place like Sierra Leone. |
| " | take a look at the world man.. |
| " | it also left them with massive investments in roads and infrastructure that india managed to capitalize on other nations did not. |
| " | I do still disagree with you however, as I see it if a person takes the risk to invest in something and build it up they deserve to reap the rewords... |
| " | As for poor capitalist nations.. yes they exist but I would still rather live in a poor capitalist state then a communist one... |
| " | The main problem I have with this argument is it puts all of the responsibility of the success of a firm on the owner or founder of it. It really downplays or often outright erases the very necessary contributions of a large amount of people who operate the business and produce the commodities that are sold. You could argue that they can just vote with their feet and leave exploitative workplaces, but people don't always have that option especially if they're limited by educational level, transportation, they rely on their employer for healthcare, etc. |
| " | Leftists view the relationship between laborers and owners as exploitative because people are paid less than the value their labor provides to a business when they do most of the essential work that allows the business to continue to operate. |
| " | One aspect I feel that supporters of capitalism don't really take into account is history and level of development prior to becoming a socialist country. Pretty much all state socialist countries were poor, agrarian, and/or born in the aftermath of some war. Marx's view... |
| " | A few comments on the "Deaths under Communism" |
| " | Dont get me wrong, Im not trying to say Capitalism is the ONLY system that works or even that it's the BEST system im only sayind it's the best system weve got for most people. |
| " | As for the india/africa thing... |
| " | If you decide to try to tally up deaths because of/under capitalism (which people have done), then you find similar or potentially higher figures, especially when you factor in yearly occurences like deaths to preventable diseases, malnutrition, lack of access to clean water (which if you're confused, the reason that people feel they can contribute these to capitalism is because capitalism produces the wealth and technology to prevent these problems but doesn't because it's not profitable to do so). |
| " | I could just say "That's not real socialism!" or "Marx said..." |
| " | If I had to choose a poor communist country or a poor capitalist country, I'd choose the former and that country would most likely be Cuba. |
| " | The problem for the free market when it comes to climate change is that there isn't really any mechanism within market logic to value ecology. |
| " | You may say that the consumer has the power to force companies to do x or y but do we really? |
| " | One problem I have with this section is the really vague nature of the word "development." . |
| " | people who live well in india live easaly as well as anybody in the USA or the UK |
| " | I want you to know... |
| " | Also, I think that I heard somewhere that either the domestication of animals or agriculture began in 6 different places around the world around the same time. Given a short search, it seems like animals were domesticated in Africa as well. specifically mentions goats, sheep, cattle, camels, pigs, donkeys, cats, dogs, and guinea fowl. |
| " | I can't really comment on the question of the time between the origination of the species and African society/why Africa didn't develop capitalism prior to Europe. I also don't know if any African society did/did not develop ships. It seems really likely that they would. |
| " | Yeah, I'm mostly just a Marxist. I think given the level of technological development that we currently have that capitalism's both holding us back and actively destroying the world and that a system that takes human needs and ecology into account would be better going forward. |
| " | Marx and the state/Is the Soviet Union socialist? |
| " | While the merely repressive organs of the old governmental power were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society. Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business. And it is well-known that companies, like individuals, in matters of real business generally know how to put the right man in the right place, and, if they for once make a mistake, to redress it promptly. On the other hand, nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage by hierarchical investiture. |
| " | the concept of capitalism does indeed predate Europe |
| " | Cuba |
| " | Videos about domestication |
| " | valuation of labor |
| " | But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal. |
| " | The State and the Free Market |
| " | Now what your talking about is currently impossible, it's some startrek federation level fantasy bullshit....but it might not always be...the core problem is scarcity |
| " | anyway look up civilization Tiers and Dysen Spheres if you don't already know about them there pretty damn cool. |
| " |
What Roser’s numbers actually reveal is that the world went from a situation where most of humanity had no need of money at all to one where today most of humanity struggles to survive on extremely small amounts of money. The graph casts this as a decline in poverty, but in reality what was going on was a process of dispossession that bulldozed people into the capitalist labour system, during the enclosure movements in Europe and the colonisation of the global south. Prior to colonisation, most people lived in subsistence economies where they enjoyed access to abundant commons – land, water, forests, livestock and robust systems of sharing and reciprocity. They had little if any money, but then they didn’t need it in order to live well – so it makes little sense to claim that they were poor. This way of life was violently destroyed by colonisers who forced people off the land and into European-owned mines, factories and plantations, where they were paid paltry wages for work they never wanted to do in the first place. In other words, Roser’s graph illustrates a story of coerced proletarianisation. It is not at all clear that this represents an improvement in people’s lives, as in most cases we know that the new income people earned from wages didn’t come anywhere close to compensating for their loss of land and resources, which were of course gobbled up by colonisers. Gates’s favourite infographic takes the violence of colonisation and repackages it as a happy story of progress. But that’s not all that’s wrong here. The trend that the graph depicts is based on a poverty line of $1.90 (£1.44) per day, which is the equivalent of what $1.90 could buy in the US in 2011. It’s obscenely low by any standard, and we now have piles of evidence that people living just above this line have terrible levels of malnutrition and mortality. Earning $2 per day doesn’t mean that you’re somehow suddenly free of extreme poverty. Not by a long shot. Scholars have been calling for a more reasonable poverty line for many years. Most agree that people need a minimum of about $7.40 per day to achieve basic nutrition and normal human life expectancy, plus a half-decent chance of seeing their kids survive their fifth birthday. And many scholars, including Harvard economist Lant Pritchett, insist that the poverty line should be set even higher, at $10 to $15 per day. So what happens if we measure global poverty at the low end of this more realistic spectrum – $7.40 per day, to be extra conservative? Well, we see that the number of people living under this line has increased dramatically since measurements began in 1981, reaching some 4.2 billion people today. Suddenly the happy Davos narrative melts away. Moreover, the few gains that have been made have virtually all happened in one place: China. It is disingenuous, then, for the likes of Gates and Pinker to claim these gains as victories for Washington-consensus neoliberalism. Take China out of the equation, and the numbers look even worse. Over the four decades since 1981, not only has the number of people in poverty gone up, the proportion of people in poverty has remained stagnant at about 60%. It would be difficult to overstate the suffering that these numbers represent. |
| " |
What is this chart based on? How do we do know that just two centuries ago the majority of the world population lived in conditions that are similar to the living conditions of the very poorest in the world today as this chart indicates? And how do we know that this account of falling global extreme poverty is in fact true? It is the research of hundreds of historians who have carefully assembled thousands of quantitative estimates that inform us about people’s living conditions that give us this global perspective on the history of poverty. In public discussions of the history of poverty the extent of this careful work is often overlooked. Such a deceptively simple chart on the global decline of poverty may then be easily dismissed as being based on little evidence. While there are substantial questions that introduce uncertainty which needs to be taken seriously, it would be a mistake to believe that historians do not have produced very substantial knowledge which informs us about the improvements of living conditions and the decline of global poverty. |
| " | historical reconstructions of poverty and prosperity do not just concern the amount of money people had in the past. This is a common misunderstanding that is often at the heart of misinformed critiques of historical research. |
| " | Yes, global poverty has gone down massively over time. By far the largest and most glaring fuck up your opinion piece writer made was incorrectly assuming that the people who study these things do not take non-monetary incomes into account. |
| " | Capitalism exports production to other areas of the world with much less developed labor movements and labor laws in order to cut production costs and to allow the producers to create cheap goods for developed countries that are also very profitable. |
| " | I trust the anthropologist over you |
| " | Again, different poverty lines are helpful for different questions. One of us published a research paper in which we suggest a poverty line of int.-$10.89. And recently the world did in fact make rapid progress against poverty relative to higher poverty lines. Every day in the last decade newspapers could have had the headline “The number of people living on more than 10 dollars per day increased by 245,000 since yesterday.” |
| " | or see this as a failure for socialism, |
| " | KevinSnowpaw wrote: |
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Take for example, Televisions, a few short decades ago a flat screen TV would run you several THOUSEND USD now you can buy a 50 inch at Walmart for 300 bucks... |
