Comment by jpadkins

4 days ago

you left out the part where the system (capitalism) is creating the technology that people use and makes their life better.

Giving people material goods or technology does make them wealthy. Sometimes it even hurts them https://humanprogress.org/agricultural-subsidies-in-wealthy-... You have to understand poverty and what causes it before you are able to solve for it. Your colonial / dependency mindset will not help.

No, labour creates the technology that people use.

The system just decides where the wealth goes.

Under capitalism, it doesn't go to the people who did the labour.

  • "Under capitalism, it doesn't go to the people who did the labour."

    Automation is removing the human labour factor rapidly, so that no longer holds true. Karl Marx's writings never anticipated cybernetics, transhumanism and genetic engineering despite his followers believing he was some kind of infallible prophet.

    The machines will build themselves, repair themselves and run themselves.

    • Even in the 19th century you didn't need to be a prophet to ponder what will happen when machinery finally becomes fully automated, and what the process of arriving to this state might look like.

      Indeed this is the main question of Marx's work.

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    • so wait after you remove the need for manual labor do you go dystopian capitalism where people have no jobs and grow poor, or you distribute "universal high income" and start doing communism with oligarch supreme leaders determining who gets what?

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Was no technology created before capitalism? I once heard someone say it's easier for some people to imagine the end of the world before imagining the end of capitalism.

  • Not "created" I think. There were still inventions, but actively looking for the new new thing in order to create new products is somethign that was introduced with capitalism.