Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. It’s not perfect, but neither is any other system.
Industrialization lifts people out of poverty, capitalism sinks them into poverty by stealing the value of their labor as profit.
Also what’s with the phrase “lifted out of poverty?” The fuck does that mean? Why is this same phrase repeated anytime some criticizes capitalism? It’s like a stock phrase or talking point that makes you sound like a robot.
Are you sure about that, because last I checked the Soviets industrialized and their people still stayed poor as hell.
What’s your definition of poor? Because by the 70s most Soviet citizens had access to modern necessities like food, water, electricity, housing and healthcare, things which some Americans still don’t have. Their standard of living was significantly higher than it was in the early 1900s and better than actual poor countries in the global south. They weren’t as rich as the western nations, but those countries had a 50-100 year headstart on development so that’s to be expected.
People will often compare the Soviet Union to the United States and point to how much less they have and blame it on communism, but that’s not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be to a mexico that also had everything north of Mexico city bombed out in the 1940s. With that in mind the soviets don’t seem so poor.
Food, the modern necessity
This little comparison should be enough to get you laughed out of the room.
Industrialization happened because of capitalism.
Industrialization happened because of individual efforts to make the lives of workers close to them easier.
Lol, no steam engines without stealing from the worker, got it. 🙄
I mean, around that time, I’m pretty sure steam engines were literally considered ‘stealing from the worker’.
The same with many other forms of mechanisation.
It’s not that the luddites were wrong, just that they were easily beaten, because humans can’t compete.
There are critics and cynics, but the same is happening now around AI.
There’s not a worker in the world who will vote away their own job.
Unchecked control of the workers for industry will harm us all. We don’t need socialism we need strong unions.
The fuck are you talking about? This happens all the time.
No it doesn’t, historically people have literally burned down factories and assaulted those who were replacing their jobs.
There’s not a factory in the world with any significant number of workers that find some new innovation that makes all those workers obsolete where the workers go “oh yeah, let’s do that”
There are absolutely zero incentives for a worker too to support such a thing. If you think they’re going to somehow magically vote against their own interest and act in favor of the common good no matter the situation…
Well that’s very socialist thinking from you.
Literally every Red state in the US is a a group of people voting away their own jobs.
Because capitalism doesn’t provide a safety net for when you job is gone…damn you are fucking stupid
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Specifically metallurgy allowing steam engines that don’t explode
That’s pretty amazing considering Adam Smith didn’t write The Wealth of Nations until well after steam engines were in use in Britain.
Capitalism must be so powerful it can time travel!
Modern Capitalism is more a product of the Dutch East India company, chartered in the early 17th century, than Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations which was written as a critique of the subsequent 200 years of capitalist practices.
do you think Smith invented capitalism?
The BBC sure seems to think so
Steam engines - primitive ones - were first used in 1712, and The Wealth of Nations was written in 1776. Based on that timing I’d say industrialization caused capitalism, not the other way around.
Tell me you never read beyond cherry-picking a headline without telling me. Often regarded as the founder of the field of Economist, Adam Smith was a philosopher who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was the culmination of decades of studying the relationships between labor, capital, and markets (among other things.) This was during the early days of the industrial revolution.
Claiming he invented capitalism is like saying clouds bring rain. I am no historian, so I don’t claim one caused the other and I don’t really care all that much. But I DO know things are rarely so black and white as to have a single cause. And I know for damn sure Smith didn’t invent capitalism. Capitalism had to already exist for him to write a book studying it.
Trade and markets have existed for a long time, but prior to Hume and Smith the dominant economic model was mercantilism which asserted that there was a finite amount of money in the world and you could only get richer at the expense of others.
They looked at this and re-interpreted it, subverting the dominant paradigm. That sounds like invention to me.
Much ink has been spilled by historians on the roots of capitalism, and while there isn’t a true consensus on precisely where or when capitalism properly emerged, there is a consensus that capitalism existed long before Adam Smith, before the Industrial Revolution, before the field of economics existed, and before the rise of industrial capitalism which you seem to have conflated with capitalism more broadly.
Industrialization may or may not have been “caused” by capitalism, better minds than I will have to answer that. That said, if you can’t understand how capitalism and the cost of labor were likely factors in the rise of automation and industrialization, then I guess we have nothing more to say to one another.
Industrialization in the USSR didn’t happen? Damn. Where did all those nuclear power plants come from, then? What about that massive agricultural surplus? How did they develop their own computer technologies?
I’m amazed that you chose the three worst things you could have picked from the USSR. They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists, did not believe in genetics, period, and created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility (Gigantic centralized serf farms are bad if the local weather isn’t ideal! , and their computers were trinary garbage that barely functioned.
Soviets had a hydrogen bomb before their Western peers.
What’s more the world’s first nuclear power station at Obninsk was connected to the Moscow grid in June of 1954. The Soviets outpaced their American peers in nuclear power, rocketry, and advanced electronics well into the 1970s.
That’s flatly untrue. And it completely neglects their role in eliminating smallpox during the 1950s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/09/world/cia-says-soviet-can-almost-do-without-imports.html
They ended famine in Asia. A continent that suffered mass famine every ten to fifteen years was fully fed through domestic agricultural production by the end of the 1960s.
Stalin was so stacked with grain in the 50s that he was bailing out the English colonies throughout India and Bangledish.
Yes, all those wonderful capitalist innovations like minimum wages, the 5-day work week and paid holidays.
Oh wait those are all things capitalists fought tooth and nail against and social movements made happen. You’re assuming that because something good happened under capitalism that it’s because of it, but most of the actual good things that lifted people out of poverty were anticapitalist. Meanwhile all the needless suffering and deaths because of capitalism never seem to get attributed to it despite the fact that wealth hoarding is responsible for creating so many resource scarcity problems that we have the ability to solve.
That is only true if you use capitalist metrics to measure poverty
The way capitalists use capitalist metrics to prove capitalism is good is really annoying. “Look at our per-capita GDP!”
“Yeah but you have one billionaire and everyone else goes bankrupt if they get sick.”
“Yeah, but our per-capita GDP is high so we don’t need to do anything.”
Paul Krugman is an innovator in this field. The other day he had that one about how inflation is under control if you remove, food, energy, used cars, and everything else normal people use. That’s basically all my stuff!
Also, obligatory GDP joke that’s been bouncing around the internet for a while now:
It’s a myth that capitalism alone has lifted people out of poverty. In fact, many nations have fought to implement strong social policies just to try and shield their citizens from its excesses. For every claim of progress, there are countless tales of exploitation, dispossession, and environmental ruin. Saying no system is perfect trivialises the issue. With capitalism, the true cost is often hidden behind the glittering façade of consumerism, at the expense of human dignity, ethics, and our planet’s health.
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What the hell are you talking about. The nordic countries constantly rate as one of the most economically free countries in the world. Capitalism is everywhere in the nordic countries, but it’s also used to support comprehensive welfare state.
And yes, I come from the “happiest country in the world” so I guess I can literally see that we are quite capitalistic.
Edit: it seems that the original comment was edited so my comment looks kinda unnecessary now
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Are these Capitalists in the room right now?
They’re in my government right now.
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Who are these special “capitalists” you are referring to? Majority of Finnish citizens and literally every major political party here?
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No lol. Also the Finnish health care system is already heavily a mix of public and private sectors because of how our social security system and occupational health care system works.
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If we are talking about power hungry people, I’m much more concerned about the authoritarian power hungry leader right next to my country currently at war with another european country than some hypothetical power hungry billionaire who could try to harm our society.
Socialism isn’t necessarily about taking away economic freedom, there are versions of market socialism that may be considered economically free. Socialism is ,theoretically , the transition state between capitalism and communism, so capitalists might still exist in a socialist state, but not a communist state where they are completely abolished. Socialism therefore is about disempowering capitalists and empowering workers until one day the workers hold all the power and cast off the capitalist. This can be done in many ways from a revolution to sieze the means of production to a progressive tax that takes away capitalist wealth.
Most modern socialists in the west realize without a large scale crisis the likes of the great depression, the people won’t support a revolution. The best they can do is to disempower the capitalists with tactics allowed in the current system. These tactics, trade unionism, welfare states, progressive taxes, nationalization of industries are all in heavy use in the Nordic countries, and imo contribute significantly to their happiness.
Socialism is measured by the power of the workers, not the control of the market.
Yes, I don’t disagree with anything you said. The original comment before OP edited it said that the nordic countries don’t have capitalism which was something I found highly misinformative.
I’ve had so many debates with people who say “socialism is a success, it works in Scandinavia”.
And I’m like, when have the Scandinavian and Nordic countries ever been socialist?
Nordic countries are socialist, unless you have a very narrow view of socialism in that it’s basically a synonym for communism. Socialism is the transition state between capitalism and communism, and therefore exists on a large spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is pure capitalism where capitalists have complete control and autonomy over production, and on the other end is pure communism where workers have complete control over production. Socialism stands ambiguously on the communist end of the spectrum, but theirs a large gray area. Government policies and institutions like progressive taxes, trade unions, welfare states, regulations and nationalized industries serve to empower workers and move the system towards the communist side of the spectrum into the socialist territory.
No, they’re social democratic, which is not the same as socialist.
TIL Nordic countries are not capitalist :o
Those countries are capitalist. Research the Nordic Model.
Those studies tend to be heavily Euro-centric.
Some of the happiest countries on earth are in East Asia. Bhutan, in particular, is the happiest country you’ve never heard about. Vietnam and Singapore also tend to rate very high. Bolivia also tends to punch well above its weight class.
But it should be noted that the Nordic states have historically been very far removed from war. With the Ukraine/Russia conflict, Fins are significantly more unhappy than they’ve been in prior generations. I don’t think you can blame that on their domestic policy or their economic model. As more refugees are forced through Europe in an effort to flee conflicts in Armenia and police crackdowns in Hungary and industrial sabotage through the Baltic Sea, happiness in the region is plummeting.
The fact the Nordic countries are rated as the most happy in the world proves that abolishing capitalism is a fucking awful idea. The Nordic countries are all capitalist.
I think most of the happiness comes from the strong unions and long history of worker’s rights movements. Sweden don’t have a law that determines minimum wage for example. It is the unions that determine a fair wage.
You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.
The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.
Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.
But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.
By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.
The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.
Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.
Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.
Downvoted for saying a simple fact.
Am I on Reddit?
You can take the redditor out of reddit, but you can’t take the reddit out of the redditor
The hivemind is strong on lemmy too. Makes sense, considering the name I suppose.