Damn, could you imagine a country where people are living in mud huts while the elite live like kings? Under capitalism?
All they have to do is look at photos of anywhere outside of America and the west, where American companies literally employ people living in mud huts at poverty wages.
The difference is that the shores are filled with plastic, the once fertile grounds are being dried up in the ever heating up climate, and the animals are all going extinct. This makes it much harder to just ignore the people living like kings because sometimes you need the medicine to their diseases, but their bureaucracy says you're not this-or-that enough to receive any aid. And God help you if you're living on top of natural resources.
Looking at the way migrant "guest" workers in the agricultural sector (but also everywhere else) are treated:
His imaginary "illiberal left" still knows more about how the economy works than him
What does this person think the living conditions of oh, let's say Congolese cobalt miners are like?
Just ignore the inconvenient stuff, also ignore the frequently stated "proletarianization of the world" thing that's used to describe capitalism.
To people like Eliezer capitalism is what happens to the salaried middle class in the imperial core. They see capitalism as synonymous with development and prosperity and what happens in places like Congo can therefore not be capitalism, but must be something else.
Liberals also see politics as something that happens in national parliaments, thus confining political thought within the nation state. This enables them to compartmentalise global systems like capitalism, thereby absolving American capitalism of the brutal extraction of raw materials and labour in the third world.
To liberals Congo isn't a bad place because of capitalism. The ballsier of them might even claim that Congo needs more capitalism. Instead they provide more or less elaboratel explanations that all boils down to a racist argument about the Congolese being too primitive.
Look capitalism is when I go to my office job and collect my check. The raw materials to make anything around me were materialized mysteriously, unrelated to capitalism. The grocery store where I buy my food harvested by migrant laborers is somehow also unrelated to capitalism.
That's actually a really good point. I never really thought about it, but their examples of "not real capitalism" tend to be underdeveloped countries in the global south.
Marx famously believed that capitalism is actually not at all different from feudalism.
The big distinction between neoliberal capitalism and pre-colonial feudalism tends to revolve around trade/travel liberties. You're always "free to choose" who you buy from and "free to leave" if you don't like your employer. In frontier-era and industrial-era America, this worked out relatively well. Settlers came pouring in from the Old World, driving out the Natives and rapidly funneling into the agricultural and factory economies. As transit costs fell, the rate of migration surged and even the old slave-import system became redundant to the sheer volume of Irish/Eastern Europeans/Asians who "volunteered" to take shit-tier jobs simply to escape the famine and war abroad. In fact, one of the driving oppositional beliefs to slavery stemmed from the theory that black people were artificially constructing the white migrant labor force and denying them economic opportunities.
You could slap "Freedom" on the American billboard and people would buy it simply because it was more appealing to believe we're all here by choice than to recognize that we're all just refugees fleeing one monster by rushing into the cave of another.
In terms of real quality of life, Marx rightly surmised that - over the long term - no material difference could be found. But in terms of propaganda, capitalism is a strictly superior system. The perception of a laisse-faire economy served to reduce the chronic military struggles that ravaged Europe while preserving the aristocracy that benefits from distribution of wealth. Save for the Civil War, we have not seen the kind of Napoleonic/WW-era periods of capital immolation which plagued Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. The durability of the United States as a political unit and the reach of trans-continental corporate bureaucracies seem to form a virtuous (viscous?) cycle.
This is something Marx failed to predict in his initial theories, and one Piketty explores in his more recent works.
I've read a few anthropologists - Yuval Noah Harari comes to mind - that argue the cognitive shift stemming from capitalist accumulation and the anticipation of future Economic growth really did change the game.
Why do people always try to hit Marx with supply&demand as if those are the magic words to make you forget the entire discussion in Capital about exchange value vs. use value vs. Value? I'm also pretty bad at actually getting through the reading but even I picked up on this because it's what virtually the entire first section of the first volume is about.
If you understood Capital you wouldn't criticize it unless you're rich and bad faith.
I definitely forgot what I posted to receive this reply lol
I don't know that line, but I can be pretty confident agreeing with you
eliezer yudkowsky is so cool. he's a public intellectual that's just an open, unabashed crank. just this deranged egg shaped nerd who wants you to give him money so he can make sure skynet doesn't kill us.
Reminder that this guy ran an "AI research institute" for years and all he produced was a shitty Harry Potter fanfic
Haha silly illiberals, capitalists don't harm people because they're greedy! It's more that their desire for maximizing profit results in people getting harmed as a side effect. This is totally different!
Is he looking at reality because that is pretty much exactly what is happening...
I've done some relief work and organizing for Migrant farm workers. They didn't have potable water, they had to get bottles shipped in for drinking, and even that was winding down when I left that area. The water out of their pipes gave the children chemical rashes and stained their clothes when they washed, their trailers were full of mold that the housing authority would only paint over never fix, and they obviously had no medical benefits. Average life expectancy was 53? I think?
Libs are so far removed from commodity production or actual productive work that they literally have no fucking clue how the world works.
So you saw the underside of capitalism with your own eyes but people still think you're the one that's crazy?
"It'S hUMaN NAtuRe"
People will seriously utter whatever garbage comes to mind in order to avoid questioning/changing the world for the better. I have developed a visceral hatred for thought terminating cliches.
Capitalism is human nature. I don't know why it only emerged a few hundred years ago.
"B-b-b-but hierarchy! Someone's gotta be in charge! There will always be people who are better off and worse off. That's why some people have to drop out of school in 7th grade and work for the rest of their lives in 90 degrees plus heat picking fruit and living in deprivation until they die a premature death :) It's the natural order!"
People who argue that line inevitably fall back on essentially "capitalism is eternal and just a natural partof human civilization"... they have to, there's no other way to defend that position without being completely ahistorical
People who say "illiberal left" as if "liberal left" ain't the actual oxymoron is a special type of cute.
Alternate wacky topsy-turvy universe where widespread poverty exists
