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.
I thought I'd follow up by pointing out that capitalism (optimisation for profits) often shuns developing new technology.
There are hundreds of thousands of similar stories but the origin of the blue LED, something responsible for a large number of child technologies, came from an engineer who basically disobeyed his boss, worked himself down to the bone on the problem including spending many of his own hours.
And when he finally did it, he got absolutely shafted; none of those huge profits for him, barely a thank you.
Capitalism barely provides. It's too concerned with optimising for profit. Any technologies developed are usually an accident/the product of hard work that capitalism has not fully paid for. Research grants are the only true way to do it.
And if capitalism hadn't created a corrupt system where those who are wealthiest barely pay in on tax, then we wouldn't need them in the first place. People could crowd source developing new technologies because they'd actually be getting their fair share, or the government can do it through grant allocation.
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.
1 reply →
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?
2 replies →
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.
Innovation and capitalism are not mutually inclusive.