• uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    European colonialism brought hundreds of millions out of poverty. I don’t personally think chinese socialism has been nearly as damaging, but bringing people out of poverty is not, to my mind, a sufficient metric.

      • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Thats quite true. As mentioned, the harm of colonialism far outstrips the harm of comnunism in china.

        Are you suggesting weavers in China today are rich, compared to weavers in Europe today?

      • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        The colonialist powers in Europe, North America, and East Asia have a population in the hundreds of millions and general access to wealth and utilities greater than most of the world. Even in the worst parts of the US, clean water is more accessible than in much of the world.

        Like, the global capital machine works on a three part extraction:

        • extract wealth from colonies (de facto or dejure) through resource transfer
        • extract raw wealth from labor through manufactor of goods out of resources
        • re-extract wealth from from both parties through sales of manufactured goods

        if we are looking purely at distribution of stuff and money, I feel its not terribley controversial to suggest that a representative person in the colonial core has more than one in a colony.

        Now, at what level does having more stuff rise to “not being in poverty” is a topic that I would find a lot more debatable, but even the UN’s self congradulatory and pitiful “2 dollars a day” shows more people hitting that in the imperial core than outside it

        Edit to note: I’m not saying “CHINA BAD” here, I’m saying “lifted out of poverty” is not a good metric. Its an inherently capitalist metric. Measuring if people have enough stuff is a losing game against capitalist wealth extraction. Measure instead how good a life is.

          • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Its uneven, but its uneven in china also. One of the core contradictions the party recognizes in China today is balancing the need for continued need for economic development with the growing demand for more stuff amongst the wealthier people.

            In some ways, although through very different mechanisms, the same pattern has developed internally in China. There are plces where resources are extracted from and people have less, and places where goods are manufectured and people have more. At least the party recognizes that this happens and is a problem, so I’ll give props to that.

            But “lifting out of poverty” is a bad metric because it is, as you say, often just moving the poverty around. Historically, the people on the most extracted end do trend better (access to water has been improving globally, for example), but its more a side effect.

            and even if it weren’t unreliable, its still not great because it still gives in to capitalist realism. A well paid person who works 100 hours a week as more stuff but probably less freedom than a person who can keep shelter, food, and health on 20 hours a week.

        • OgdenTO [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          No way boss, capitalism pushed hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Prior to capitalism, most people in the world, and for the past 10s of thousands of years, have lived collectively or subsistence farmed, and lived well. When capitalism pushed people away from being able to survive in these systems and dependent on money and wages, poverty emerged.

          And they didn’t transfer laterally the wealth to Europe - they pushed as many people in Europe into poverty too.

          • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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            1 year ago

            Living conditions for the vast majority of pre-modern people were by all measures terrible. We shouldn’t prescribe to pastoralist myths about how people’s lives were better simy because they didn’t live in a capitalist system.

            Subsistence farmers lived under an everpresent threat of starvation, in a way that wage labourers in modern and early modern states do not and did not. They lived largely without literacy, access to education and medicine and these conditions left them especially vulnerable to the influence of religion, unjust social hierarchy and widespread accepted violence.

            People often go too far in emphasising how poor life was in those systems. It was obviously worth living for most, and tighter, more insular communities resulted in greater social satisfaction than society under capitalism, but don’t pretend that poverty emerged from capitalism and the advent of industrialization. Dealing with poverty and the impoverished was a great concern in the majority of medieval and classical societies, and resource scarcity was a driving factor in many of the great injustices of pre-capitalist history.

            • OgdenTO [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              Check out this interesting write up here by Dr. Jason Hickel Professor of Economics. He (and the research he mentions in this piece) suggest that this view of pre-capitlist poverty is in fact not true, but based on poorly sourced ideas and amplified by capital to provide capitalist savior propaganda.

              Really interesting read, and the papers he mentions are also really great too.

              • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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                1 year ago

                An interesting read thanks. We shouldn’t conflate poverty and extreme poverty however. The author makes some very good points, and it’s true that capitalism creates extremes of human misery not generally seen elsewhere however their own data shows that nearly all the population would be considered in poverty, if not extreme poverty across all of the periods and areas examined.

                • OgdenTO [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                  1 year ago

                  That’s not their graph that they’re showing, that’s the one produced by the Gates foundation that they are saying it’s wrong.

                  • Harrison [He/Him]@ttrpg.network
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                    1 year ago

                    That’s not what I was referring to. Extreme poverty is different to poverty.

                    Dr Hickel does not seem to be disputing that the majority of people in history lived in poverty, only extreme poverty.