Comment by robertlagrant
2 years ago
> Do you prefer everyone (of course with some minor exceptions for higher ups) to be equally "not great, but not terrible" or do you prefer some to have amazing lives, but others to suffer?
This isn't the choice. Socialism (actual socialism) repeatedly starves its populations. Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new things are created that make everyone's lives better, and existing things get cheaper and better over time.
I.e. you can't just ignore the opportunity cost of innovation and prioritisation via a decentralised market. An innovation-focused dichotomy is: should we spend lots of effort trying to precisely spread around what we have today, while still having a privileged class based on politics, or should we encourage people to do things that raises the floor and the ceiling for everyone, and have a privileged class based on value they created?
> Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new things are created that make everyone's lives better, and existing things get cheaper and better over time.
> everyone's lives better
> things get cheaper and better over time.
Oh, fuck off with that bullshit. Capitalism may appear to thrive when living in a first-world country, but only does so through exploitation and cutting corners. More to the point, isn't it funny that despite capitalism being pretty much the de facto economic system of the world only a few countries are actually deemed worth living in? No, some abstract 'informed exchange of currency' didn't magically cause things to appear out of thin air. People make things, and they are almost certainly underpaid and overworked. Behind every AI model there are X poorly paid workers around the world that curated the data that it needs to function. Behind every piece of clothing there are Y poorly paid workers in Bangladesh that made it. And behind every rechargeable battery there are Z Congolese kids risking death inside a mine in search for cobalt. We might try to (and often do) look away, pretend that those are the unfortunate results of corporate blunders that seldom happen, but they're not. Invisible exploitation is what makes the kind of lifestyle that is available in first-world countries possible.
Is there no exploitation in communist nations? I should actually phrase that the other way around: is there, or has there ever been, a communist nation that did not exploit people to the max, even killing them if that was the most convenient option?
As for cutting corners, check out some videos on tofu dreg projects, it will enlighten you on corner cutting in a communist system.
> Capitalism may appear to thrive when living in a first-world country, but only does so through exploitation and cutting corners
I think this is a common and really fundamental misunderstanding. It works through signalling demand through pricing, rather than through bureaucrats guessing, giving anyone the chance to take a risk and keep the reward (mostly) if they manage to create value for other people, rather than how much they toe the party line. It definitely doesn't only work "through exploitation and cutting corners". Those things happen everywhere.
Just look at the monumental change in China due to the controlled (too controlled[0]) introduction of capitalism. If you let people create value for each other and get out of their way, you get stupendous results compared to thinking a centralised bureaucracy, slave-owner, monarch, or lord making the decisions.
> No, some abstract 'informed exchange of currency' didn't magically cause things to appear out of thin air
No one would say it did.
> People make things, and they are almost certainly underpaid and overworked. Behind every AI model there are X poorly paid workers around the world that curated the data that it needs to function. Behind every piece of clothing there are Y poorly paid workers in Bangladesh that made it. And behind every rechargeable battery there are Z Congolese kids risking death inside a mine in search for cobalt.
This isn't a capitalism thing. This is a poverty thing. It's lifted unequally globally, but it is lifted. The problem isn't capitalism; the problem is that doing these jobs is currently their best option. Similar or worse conditions were found in Britain under 100 years ago[1]. That's a very short timeframe for capitalism to have lifted the entire world out of poverty; too silly to take seriously as a criticism of an economic process.
> We might try to (and often do) look away, pretend that those are the unfortunate results of corporate blunders that seldom happen, but they're not. Invisible exploitation is what makes the kind of lifestyle that is available in first-world countries possible.
No, not just that. If we replaced those miners with robots we'd still have the lifestyle. Framing everything as exploitation is a dead end.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56448688
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier
> Capitalism repeatedly creates situations where new things are created that make everyone's lives better, and existing things get cheaper and better over time
In theory. In practice, can you really say that existing things are getting cheaper and better, generally? Most of the Western world is seeing unprecedented price increases combined with record profits in multiple industries (so it's not just general inflation) combined with drastic quality and quantity decreases, combined with "enshitification" across multiple industries.
I'd say so. I think phones, bikes, cars, computers, games, glasses, medicines, prosthetics, toys, houses[0], tools, food, holidays, vehicle hire, vehicle type, plane flights, etc etc are a lot better than they were even 20, 50, and 100 years ago.
Price increases are almost always unprecedented, unless they previously went down. They are now going up, but not because of capitalism. Because of Covid spending, fuel price increases, minimum wage increases, etc etc. Macroeconomic effects (that we can debate the goodness of somewhere else), but generally ones related to government rather than business. This is though a very recent view, though. Are car prices, for the same quality of car, really better now than 30 years ago? Or has a pretty relentless competitive market for car manufacturers made cars far better value than they once were?
I don't think there have been drastic quality reductions of any kind in many areas.
"Enshitification" is a very narrow view of I think online platforms, particularly VC-backed ones starting free and looking for a sustainability too late; definitely not generalisable to "capitalism".
[0] maybe not aesthetically