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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Industrialization lifts people out of poverty, capitalism sinks them into poverty by stealing the value of their labor as profit.
Also what's with the phrase "lifted out of poverty?" The fuck does that mean? Why is this same phrase repeated anytime some criticizes capitalism? It's like a stock phrase or talking point that makes you sound like a robot.
Are you sure about that, because last I checked the Soviets industrialized and their people still stayed poor as hell.
What's your definition of poor? Because by the 70s most Soviet citizens had access to modern necessities like food, water, electricity, housing and healthcare, things which some Americans still don't have. Their standard of living was significantly higher than it was in the early 1900s and better than actual poor countries in the global south. They weren't as rich as the western nations, but those countries had a 50-100 year headstart on development so that's to be expected.
People will often compare the Soviet Union to the United States and point to how much less they have and blame it on communism, but that's not a fair comparison. A fair comparison would be to a mexico that also had everything north of Mexico city bombed out in the 1940s. With that in mind the soviets don't seem so poor.
Food, the modern necessity
This little comparison should be enough to get you laughed out of the room.
Industrialization happened because of capitalism.
Industrialization happened because of individual efforts to make the lives of workers close to them easier.
Lol, no steam engines without stealing from the worker, got it. 🙄
I mean, around that time, I'm pretty sure steam engines were literally considered 'stealing from the worker'.
The same with many other forms of mechanisation.
It's not that the luddites were wrong, just that they were easily beaten, because humans can't compete.
There are critics and cynics, but the same is happening now around AI.
There's not a worker in the world who will vote away their own job.
Unchecked control of the workers for industry will harm us all. We don't need socialism we need strong unions.
The fuck are you talking about? This happens all the time.
No it doesn't, historically people have literally burned down factories and assaulted those who were replacing their jobs.
There's not a factory in the world with any significant number of workers that find some new innovation that makes all those workers obsolete where the workers go "oh yeah, let's do that"
There are absolutely zero incentives for a worker too to support such a thing. If you think they're going to somehow magically vote against their own interest and act in favor of the common good no matter the situation....
Well that's very socialist thinking from you.
Literally every Red state in the US is a a group of people voting away their own jobs.
Have you missed the Republican opposition to climate change? Have you missed Republican opposition to globalization in recent years?
Those didn't come out of thin air. They come out of many towns across the country whose entire economy once relied on things like mining coal and heavy dirty industry which was all shipped out to China. They are 100% voting in favor of their jobs still.
Also remember that under socialism we are not talking about country level decisions, we are talking about factory level decisions which will largely be decided by the workers. Unless an issue becomes important enough that it becomes a nationwide issue that gets a vote for the larger popular vote, 90% of technologies are going to get trashed.
bro lemmy.ml is that way ->
Do you think I'm a Communist for some reason?
Because capitalism doesn't provide a safety net for when you job is gone.....damn you are fucking stupid
Specifically metallurgy allowing steam engines that don’t explode
That's pretty amazing considering Adam Smith didn't write The Wealth of Nations until well after steam engines were in use in Britain.
Capitalism must be so powerful it can time travel!
Modern Capitalism is more a product of the Dutch East India company, chartered in the early 17th century, than Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations which was written as a critique of the subsequent 200 years of capitalist practices.
do you think Smith invented capitalism?
The BBC sure seems to think so
Steam engines - primitive ones - were first used in 1712, and The Wealth of Nations was written in 1776. Based on that timing I'd say industrialization caused capitalism, not the other way around.
Tell me you never read beyond cherry-picking a headline without telling me. Often regarded as the founder of the field of Economist, Adam Smith was a philosopher who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was the culmination of decades of studying the relationships between labor, capital, and markets (among other things.) This was during the early days of the industrial revolution.
Claiming he invented capitalism is like saying clouds bring rain. I am no historian, so I don't claim one caused the other and I don't really care all that much. But I DO know things are rarely so black and white as to have a single cause. And I know for damn sure Smith didn't invent capitalism. Capitalism had to already exist for him to write a book studying it.
Trade and markets have existed for a long time, but prior to Hume and Smith the dominant economic model was mercantilism which asserted that there was a finite amount of money in the world and you could only get richer at the expense of others.
They looked at this and re-interpreted it, subverting the dominant paradigm. That sounds like invention to me.
Much ink has been spilled by historians on the roots of capitalism, and while there isn't a true consensus on precisely where or when capitalism properly emerged, there is a consensus that capitalism existed long before Adam Smith, before the Industrial Revolution, before the field of economics existed, and before the rise of industrial capitalism which you seem to have conflated with capitalism more broadly.
Industrialization may or may not have been "caused" by capitalism, better minds than I will have to answer that. That said, if you can't understand how capitalism and the cost of labor were likely factors in the rise of automation and industrialization, then I guess we have nothing more to say to one another.
Industrialization in the USSR didn't happen? Damn. Where did all those nuclear power plants come from, then? What about that massive agricultural surplus? How did they develop their own computer technologies?
I’m amazed that you chose the three worst things you could have picked from the USSR. They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists, did not believe in genetics, period, and created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility (Gigantic centralized serf farms are bad if the local weather isn’t ideal! , and their computers were trinary garbage that barely functioned.
Soviets had a hydrogen bomb before their Western peers.
What's more the world's first nuclear power station at Obninsk was connected to the Moscow grid in June of 1954. The Soviets outpaced their American peers in nuclear power, rocketry, and advanced electronics well into the 1970s.
That's flatly untrue. And it completely neglects their role in eliminating smallpox during the 1950s.
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/09/world/cia-says-soviet-can-almost-do-without-imports.html
They ended famine in Asia. A continent that suffered mass famine every ten to fifteen years was fully fed through domestic agricultural production by the end of the 1960s.
Stalin was so stacked with grain in the 50s that he was bailing out the English colonies throughout India and Bangledish.