Comment on History Channel

• deaf_fish@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  You also hate capitalism right?

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  • epicstove@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I dislike both.

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  • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    No. Capitalism is the primary engine for human development. Thanks to capitalism, fewer people now live in extreme poverty than don’t. This means that, starting in the 1970s and accelerating today, less than half the world (and the number continues to decrease) lives in extreme poverty.

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    • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What do you think most younger people not ever being able to afford their own property? Or the fact that grocery costs have been skyrocketing to unaffordable levels even if you make good money? All while billionaires are hoarding unfathomable amounts of wealth? Extreme poverty might not be as high globally but regular poverty is gaining traction at record speeds.

      You might say that the inequality can be fixed with more regulations, but we started with more regulations (in Canada and the US at least) and they’ve been slowly torn apart by the wealthy over time. How do you guard against that when having vast wealth enables you to trick people into voting against their best interests?

      I wouldn’t call myself a communist but capitalism ends in the extreme poverty that you say it solves.

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      • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        What do you think most younger people not ever being able to afford their own property?

        Housing prices are extremely expensive because of government intervention in the market. Local governments have artificially restricted the supply of new housing in order to intentionally make it more expensive. Unironically: the free market would make housing less expensive, like it did when our parents’ generation were buying houses.

        Or the fact that grocery costs have been skyrocketing to unaffordable levels even if you make good money

        Food inflation would not be solved by state intervention. I don’t think there’s any serious economist who will tell you that food inflation is caused by unfettered capitalism.

        All while billionaires are hoarding unfathomable amounts of wealth? Extreme poverty might not be as high globally but regular poverty is gaining traction at record speeds.

        Wealth inequality is gaining traction. The standard of living of the average poor American is better today than it was in the 1960s. What has changed is how we feel about it. Wealth inequality makes us mad, but it has not resulted in worse overall living standards on an absolute scale.

        How do you guard against that when having vast wealth enables you to trick people into voting against their best interests?

        I think we should solve specific problems. Some problems can be solved with more regulation (dismantling monopolies, safeguarding elections) and others can be solved by reducing regulation (taking away authority from local zoning boards, reducing the amount of legal hurdles for building public transportation).

        But none of these problems are caused intrinsically by the existence of private property. Various European liberal democracies manage to provide high quality of life for their people without resorting to socialism

        capitalism ends in the extreme poverty that you say it solves.

        There is no evidence to support your claim. To the contrary, the evidence suggests that since 3rd world countries began liberalizing their markets from the 1970s/80s onward, it has resulted in huge increases in quality of life for their poorest citizens.

        The same cannot be said of socialism, which experienced a worldwide delegitimization from the 70s onward as it collapsed under its own inherent contradictions and failed to provide for the people living under it.

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    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Image

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    • Keeponstalin@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      If one starts from the assumption that extreme poverty is the natural state of humanity, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in extreme poverty today. However, if extreme poverty is a sign of severe social dislocation, relatively rare under normal conditions, then it should concern us that - despite many instances of progress since the middle of the 20th century - such dislocation remains so prevalent under contemporary capitalism. Depending on the subsistence basket one uses to measure poverty, as of 2008, between 200 million and 1.21 billion people live in extreme poverty (Moatsos, 2017, Moatsos, 2021; see also our discussion in Appendix VI).18 While direct comparisons with the wage data are difficult because of the variety of baskets used, this suggests that under contemporary capitalism hundreds of millions of people currently live in conditions comparable to Europe during the Black Death (Figure 4, Figure 5), the catastrophes induced by the American genocides (Figure 7) and the slave trade (Figure 9), or famine-ravaged British India (Figure 11). To the extent there has been progress against extreme poverty in recent decades, it has generally been slow and shallow.

      • Capitalism and extreme poverty: A global analysis of real wages, human height, and mortality since the long 16th century

      Conclusions

      In sum, the narrative that the rise of capitalism drove progress against extreme poverty is not supported by empirical evidence. On the contrary, the rise of capitalism was associated with a notable decline in human welfare, a trend that was only reversed around the twentieth century, when radical and progressive social movements sought to gain some control over production and organize it more around meeting human needs. As for the condition of extreme poverty, it cannot legitimately be used as a benchmark for measuring progress. Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but an effect of dispossession, enclosure, and exploitation. It need not exist anywhere, and certainly should not exist in any just and humane society. It can and must be abolished immediately. If our goal is to achieve substantive improvements in human welfare, progress should be measured against decent living standards and access to modern amenities. Capitalism currently shows no signs of ever meeting this objective, and imperialist dynamics in the world economy seem actively to prevent it. As we have seen, the historical record is clear that public planning and socialist policy can be effective at delivering rapid economic, technological, and social development. Rediscovering the power of this approach will be essential if Global South governments are to increase their economic sovereignty and mobilize production to ensure decent lives for all.48 Achieving this objective requires building political movements of the Southern working classes and peasantries powerful enough to replace governments that currently are captured by political factions aligned with national or international capital; reducing reliance on core creditors, currencies, and imports; and establishing South-South alliances capable of withstanding any retaliation. Progressive formations in the core should be prepared to support and defend these movements.

      • Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism

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      • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Wow, it’s horrible that so many people live in extreme poverty. It’s also fantastic that most people on earth no longer live in extreme poverty, thanks to capitalism and free trade!

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• random_character_a@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Well there’s Marxism, Leninism and whatever monsterous fuck that was circling in Stalins noggin.

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  • _stranger_@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Fascism. It was Fascism.

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    • random_character_a@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      It’s funny how extreme left and extreme right end up in very similar end result. Corrupt elite controlling the flow of information, wealth and industry while purging the undesired.

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      • gabbath@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Stalinism was no extreme left. It was fascism, but with Marxist aesthetics.

        Fascists are con men, and cons work on what’s popular with the masses. You can build an arbitrary dogma and cult of personality around anything, even Marxism.

        I’d argue that Marxism is actually great for that purpose: it gets a lot of stuff right so it’s close to reality, there’s an us vs them dynamic already built in, and it’s just complicated enough to the average person that it makes it easy for an authoritarian con man to disingenuously simplify it, distort it and dogmatize it into basically a state religion. Then it’s just about pointing fingers to identify the enemy, i.e. who is burgeois/reactionary/etc and needs to go.

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      • _stranger_@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        The common denominator is greed.

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  • anachrohack@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The official state religion of the Soviet Union was called “Marxism-Leninism”

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    • random_character_a@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Yes, and ISIS brobably calls themselves islamists, but I wouldn’t wanna define islam by those fuckwits.

      Bolsheviks were the taleban of marxism.

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      • OmegaLemmy@discuss.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Do you also count every Bolshevik, like Trotsky, Bukharin, Lenin and Rykov?

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