• TemporalMembrane [she/her]
    ·
    4 years ago

    From the thread:

    Imagine you're a subsistence farmer.

    This means your job is backbreaking work for 16 hours per day, no weekends off, and your entire family dies if it's a dry season.

    Now, imagine a sweatshop moves into down where it's 14 hours of work per day and your family lives in any season.

    You have not been forced to work at the sweatshop, you choose to work there because its a better option.

    Now, someone from a much richer nation comes in and says you're being exploited and shuts down that factory.

    Fuck, turns out we're the ones shutting down factories not the people that own them and have decided to go to where the labor is even cheaper. How many factories have you shut down today, lads and ladettes and those betwixt?

    And it turns out your only option is subsistence farming or sweatshops because every time colonized people try to start something better, they keep getting bombed and invaded by the US.

    • unperson [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      Why do they think subsistence farming is 'backbreaking work for 16 hours per day, no weekends off'? Between all holidays, festivals, vacations, and plain idle time people in feudal England worked 200 days a year, 12 hours a day, and that's including ~60 days of work in the lord's land. Imagine being in control of your own production and having 5 months worth of holidays on top of that.

      And hunting and gathering is even lazier, as long as imperialism doesn't exist and you have enough land to do it.

    • RandomWords [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      4 years ago

      those fucking lefties inventing things like the concept of exploitation... if they just didn't mention that people were being taken advantage of it wouldn't be wrong.

    • childishpizza [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      4 years ago

      Well I mean they could always adopt a socialist system and nationalize natural resources and the means of production, so workers could eat for a change and actually be their own bosses instead of being enslaved by multinationals? Oh wait I forgot....to quote your favorite Norman Bates-like friend “We coup whoever we want” and man social justice and national afirmation will get you a friendly visit from the CIA faster than they stuck a knife up Gaddafi’s ass. I guess in your bourgeois bootlicker view that’s just the way it is, hey how about you just buy 5x more sweaters so you can help them out because that’s totally how capitalism works?

    • cracksmoke2020 [none/use name]
      ·
      4 years ago

      These people know nothing about history or foreign policy outside of what's heavily propagandized by western sources.

      Poor countries opening their markets to rich countries in ways not directly managed always ends up being worse for these people with limited exceptions (i.e. resource rich but low population countries with strict immigration controls).