• 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.

    • DroneRights [it/its]OP
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      1 year ago

      It’s not liberty for queer chinese people. And liberty on the condition that you have the correct race, gender, and sexuality isn’t liberty, it’s privilege.

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

        liberty on the condition that you have the correct race

        Bullshit to say this about China

        And tell me about the liberty felt by a queer kid in America whose parents disown them and kick them out of the house. Marriage rights are good but not the sin qua non of queer rights like neoliberals would have you believe.

      • janny [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Bullshit to say this about China

        I’m not one of these pro-china people but in it’s current state, China has way more rights for trans people than the U.S. There are informed consent clinics in a number of cities and while I’m sure trans woman are discriminated against there there are no laws directly discriminating against them.

        Meanwhile the U.S basically bans trans people (and sometimes gay people) from existing in half of this country by land mass. Not even going to say that china has a “good” queer rights record or even one that’s worthy of a socialist country but like China and Vietnam have better queer rights than any other countries in Asia (other than maybe japan) and def in the U.S

        There might have been an argument that the U.S was a better place to be queer in like 2018 but we don’t live in 2018 anymore

        • DroneRights [it/its]OP
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          1 year ago

          Interesting. I’m aware that the US is descending into fascism, that’s why I’m trying to help my partner refugee out of there. I don’t think I mentioned the US in my comment, and it’s not like china and america are the only countries. I’d like to hear more about trans rights in china, but first I’d like to hear why you thought the fourth riech was so pertinent to this conversation.

          • janny [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            i mean that is a fair point. i guess its just because for the most part the u.s is considered the measuring stick for democratic rights since it is the self-appointed “leader of the free world”. but yeah ofc places like sweden and most of europe have better queer rights than either china and the u.s

            im not really a “dengist” or someone who believes that china is socialist. that being said one of my comrades is a chinese trans woman who goes to informed consent clinics in china and visits the major cities there quite often and is able to get alone without any discrimination or molestation by the public at large.

            i guess i should bring up some actually sources but i am busy right now, maybe if you poke me ill look at it later.

            generally its better for trans people and gender conforming queer people in china but its pretty bad for gender non-conforming queer people a la their restrictions on “sissy boys” which is pretty bad and generally you won’t see talked about on hexbear