my quality of life is like 10x better than my grandparents’
yeah, fuck all those workers, many children, slaving away for pennies, often dying, in mines and factories and dumpsters to provide me with that life. Not to mention the planet itself that we all live on that is literally being destroyed for the benefit of a handful of people.
I’d argue that’s mostly attributable to liberalised free markets.
because you’re comfortable enough to ignore reality as long as that keeps that comfy-comfy status quo of yours in place.
Congratulations, you are being part of the problem.
Do you think poor wages around the globe is a recent phenomenon? In any event, something like a half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in China since the 70’s when it opened its markets up. There were sure as hell some losers from that process too, but I don’t think the progress on that front is something to overlook.
Saying Marx predicted everything is not at odds with mostly free market economies.
I think most people will say that free markets do provide economic opportunity, generally. The problem is when those free markets are completely unregulated, where those with wealth can create fascist plutocracies, which is the trend we’re seeing now. This is what Marx predicted.
We have two options: 1) reinstate proper regulations and ensure capitalists keep their hands out of government or 2) come up with a better system. To my knowledge, 2 hasn’t happened yet, and I think most people would be quite happy with 1.
Here’s a question in response: would China have seen such a huge reduction in povery if it didn’t offer cheap labour in the first place?
The main draw for foreign investment, capital inflow and trade, I would argue, was: (a) heavy investment in its stock of “hard” capital assets (i.e., great infrastructure); plus (b) an army of people willing to work for wages far lower than the countries making those investments (but generally higher than most of those people were making in agrarian sector).
This is arguably one of the most important (and complex) things for the world to understand well. There are billions more people around the world who haven’t been able to escape poverty whose futures really depend on getting these kinds of policies right.
You know what lifted most of theses people out of poverty, massive infrastructure and social spending by the CCP, the same reason post war South Korea, and post war Germany and Japan were able to climb so fast, massive government investment. It had little to do with open markets simply because without transport/energy infrastructure and an educated workforce this “open market” would’ve been worthless to exploit.
