Do you support sustainability, social responsibility, tech ethics, or trust and safety? Congratulations, you’re an enemy of progress. That’s according to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

  • Gigan@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    0
    ·
    1 year ago

    Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. It’s not perfect, but neither is any other system.

    • Shalakushka@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      0
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

          • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • bioemerl@kbin.social
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              0
              ·
              1 year ago

              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.

              • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                0
                arrow-down
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                There’s not a worker in the world who will vote away their own job.

                The fuck are you talking about? This happens all the time.

                • bioemerl@kbin.social
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  0
                  ·
                  1 year ago

                  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.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          0
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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?

          • kbotc@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            0
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.

            • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              0
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              They literally stole their nuclear tech from the capitalists

              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.

              did not believe in genetics, period

              That’s flatly untrue. And it completely neglects their role in eliminating smallpox during the 1950s.

              created famines from their poor understanding of environmental science and lack of flexibility

              https://www.nytimes.com/1983/01/09/world/cia-says-soviet-can-almost-do-without-imports.html

              the average Soviet citizen consumes about 3,300 calories a day, as against 3,520 for an American. The report showed that the Soviet diet consists of far more grain and potatoes than the American diet, but less fish and meat and less sugar.

              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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      0
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      You’re confusing capitalism with industrialization.

      The development of modern modes of production came about nearly two centuries after the foundation of modern marketplace practices. The Dutch East India Company did not bring people out of poverty. Just the opposite. It served as a means of rapidly conquering and subjugating large indigenous populations, by using the speculative bubbles created during periods of looting to construct large militaries capable of further conquest. The rapid militarization and trans-continental looting/pillaging of the 17th and 18th centuries resulted in the increased spread of contagious disease, the worst genocides committed since at least the Roman era, and the formalization of Colonial Era chattel slavery.

      Industrialization, which was a product of the mathematical and material sciences renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, produced huge surpluses in commercial goods and services. Revolutions in textile manufacturing, fertilization, fossil fuel-based transportation and electrification, materials sciences, and medical innovation brought hundreds of millions of people out of the agricultural economy and brought a functional end to a litany of common causes of death. The industrial era was not specific to the capitalist economic mode, but it was practiced most aggressively early on by capitalist states.

      But the Industrial Revolution had a huge knock-on effect. Mass media and modern communication reoriented traditional class hierarchies and formed new models for social organization. The seed of socialist theories that had been planted in the 17th and 18th centuries blossomed into massive revolutionary labor movements during the 19th and 20th centuries. This, combined with the industrial collapse of the imperial core in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, signaled the beginning of the end of capitalism as a hegemonic economic force.

      By the 1950s, numerous socialist political experiments produced successful industrialized civilizations, some of which even persist into the modern era. Meanwhile, rising standards of living from industrial surpluses in food, fuel, and living space raised living standards globally without regard to one’s economic mode.

      The real test of capitalism as an enterprise has kicked in during the last 50 years. By the 1970s, the era of cheap fossil fuel was coming to an end and various economic models were forced to contend with a declining rate of new surplus goods and services. Forced to choose between economic conservation/improved efficiency and a new wave of imperial aggression, the capitalist states have attempted to backpedal into their old traditional colonial models of business. The end result has been a new generation of major military conflicts - from the Vietnamese Jungle to the Iraqi desert - alongside a number of ugly civil wars and domestic insurrections in former capitalist strongholds.

      Without a continuous industrial surplus to drive profit, modern capitalist economic models are failing. Quality of life in capitalist states is beginning to decline. And capitalist leaders are turning to more militant methods of seizing natural resources, forcing low-wage labor, and wrecklessly disposing of excess waste.

      Capitalism rode the cresting wave of industrialization for a century. But now it is failing. And people in capitalist states - from the UK to Saudi Arabia to the Philippines - are seeing their quality of life erode away at a rapid pace.