The point is that capitalism prioritizes profit, not the welfare of people. This is only not done anymore because of regulation, not because capitalism was fixed. It can’t be fixed. The target goal of capitalism is wrong. Profit does not optimize for innovation, welfare, happiness, or anything else that could be called good. It will always exploit people as much as it can, and it just happens to not exploit children (in the western world (legally)) because we made it not allowed, and disobeying that law would be less profitable.
shouldn’t we come up with a system where the core values don’t need regulation. it becomes unthinkable to exploit children not because of regulation and enforcement but because the system in itself denies power to exploiters.
Is there any system besides capitalism with regulations we have in developed countries without child labor? Child labor existed in the Soviet Union and in communist China. Historically the idea that children should not perform labor is very recent.
Are there any developed countries that have moved beyond Capitalism yet? Are you genuinely attributing Capitalism to removing child labor, instead of the workers that organized and fought against it? That’s like giving the US government credit for the Civil Rights movement.
If humanity has failed to move beyond Capitalism and child labor, then humanity lost to the climate crisis or nuked itself to death. The idea that Capitalism is sustainable is Utopian and foolish.
i support direct democracy. i think the economical system should be maintained by democracies sustained by a lot more direct democracy processes. even if that economic system is capitalism it should be restrained by a lot more people voting directly on regulation and less on representation.
i hope i answered your question and i’m sorry for the confusion.
Yes and no. Capitalism requires huge amounts of regulation to not destroy itself, and a system with considerably less regulation could exist if the Workers could represent themselves via ownership.
as if human nature is set in stone but i love the reality argument, as if capitalism is somehow a realistic functioning system. for sure a dreamed up notion of capital is 100% real and not the machinations of generations of trial and error(still on going btw).
What if we incentivized the kids to work using tokens on their iPad games? They would do the work basically for free and we could use it as a labor cost saving measure. Like the gig economy but now with a whole new section of laborers to choose from.
What if we could store the children in a kind of acid to leech their life force more efficiently with the added benefit of being able to store their potential energy for longer durations 🧐
Capitalism is insanely efficient in allocating capital and setting prices – two things incredibly difficult to do otherwise. At the same time it has the problem of protecting the weakest. But that can be tackled by regulation – which has been pretty effective in the EU for example.
Capitalism is moderately efficient in allocating Capital and setting prices for the purpose of generating profits. Capitalism is pretty terrible when it comes to actually improving society, and the EU still sees massive problems.
Worker Ownership of the Means of Production is a better alternative, whether that be along the lines of Anarcho-Syndicalism, Market Socialism, Democratic Socialism, Marxism, Council Communism, or so forth.
According to all data we have, the living standard in democratic, capilistic states is significantly higher than in any other market order. If you consider the social capitalism like in Nordic countries, they easily rank the number 1 in all metrics. Meanwhile communist states like the DDR or UDSSR collapsed after their economy was ruined.
This argument always comes up, and it’s such a bad one when actually considered. The US was the largest world power, right? They also influenced all other western and/or capitalist nations, either through cooperation or threat of cutting them off from the market.
OK, so consider which communist/socialist countries failed. Did they fail in a vacuum? No. They failed with the “democratic” (often less democratic than the opposition, but this was their messaging) nations opposing them. For example, in Guatemala they elected a leftist president who introduced a minimum wage, increased democratic participation in elections, and the next president introduced land reforms to redistribute land to give it to the peasants.
Communism “always fails” because the most powerful nations in the world are afraid of it, so they do everything in their power to ensure it fails. The few that have been able to survive are dictatorships, because they can better withstand pressure from the outside. (This isn’t to say dictatorships are good, just that they’re more stable when attacked.) They also generally had or enforced cultural hegemony, for the same reason. It’s survivorship bias.
We have no idea how well a leftist government would do if not attacked, because it’s always attacked out of fear. If it’s destined to fail, why are they afraid of it succeeding?
Maybe communist countries always fail (UDSSR, DDR) or transition to capitalism (China), not because of outside forces, but because its a flawed system?
It could be, but we can’t know as it is now. Marx said the same for capitalism, and he may still be proven right. He said that capitalism will always lead to communism because it’s a flawed system.
Again, if it’s destined to fail, why have capitalist countries had to put so much effort into destroying them? If they actually believed they were destined to fail, like they like to say in propoganda, then they wouldn’t bother with forcing them to fail.
The US has put so much effort into ensuring Cuba fails, yet it’s still doing better than the US on many of the metrics that actually matter to the average person. How can this be true if communism is so fundamentally flawed?
Still, 88 % live in extreme poverty (though it can be argued that it is due to sanctions – which should be abolished). More severe are human right violations – no democracy, no freedom of the press, no independent judges.
And at the same time Cuba is moving towards capitalism since 2010– since it worked so well in China and Vietnam.
-According to all data we have, the living standard in developed countries is higher than in developing countries. Additionally, Capitalism is less democratic than Socialism, as Capitalism is a market of competing mini-dictators, rather than democratically run industry.
-Social Democracies a la the Nordic Countries ruthlessly exploit the third world and see rising disparity as Capitalists erode social safety nets. Mass Unionization slows this process, but Social Democracies serve as a good example of why living standards are higher when Workers have more control, and why Unionization alone isn’t enough, Capitalism itself remains the problem.
-The USSR is not the only form of Socialism, and additionally it collapsed after it liberalized. It wasn’t a Communist state either, as it never achieved Communism, ie it was not a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society.
All in all, very flawed takes on your part. Attributing quality of life to Capitalism, when it was due to development, is false. Additionally, you falsely assume development only comes from Capitalism, which relies on the absurd logic that believes humans are incapable of developing democratically, and goes against this very website itself.
And if you consider that metric capitalism with social guidelines implemented – like in Nordic countries – comes out far ahead of any other known market order.
Businesses in the Midwest US have already been hiring 10-12 year old undocumented kids to work overnight cleaning machine parts at meatpacking plants. I mean… so many different things wrong with that. The psycho fuckers who run these businesses need some real penalties, like jail time and dissolving their company.
Through labor organization. It wasn’t out of the goodness of the hearts of benevolent Capitalists, but through struggles of Workers. The point of this picture isn’t that Capitalism used to be worse, and fixed itself, but that Capitalists will absolutely take advantage of children and subject them to sacrificing their bodies for clean chimneys if it makes a profit.
The takeaway from this is that Capitalists cannot be seen as individual humans with values, but as cogs in the Capitalist machine that will exploit everything and everyone for profit. An individual Capitalist may not be willing to go that far, but inevitably as long as there is profit to be made, someone will fill that gap.
That’s why economic systems need to be looked at at aggregates and not as individual transactions. You miss the forest for the trees.
we just moved child labour to less developed countries. we didn’t get rid of anything. you just don’t see it, but child labour is still going strong in the world. child slavery as well.
It’s 100% a consequence of Capitalism, though. You’re blaming developing nations for the willful exploitation international Corporations commit and you personally benefit from.
That’s just your opinion. The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it, and I reject any personal responsibility for any of that because I have no control over the laws of any country.
It is not my opinion that international corporations brutally exploit the third world, it’s a fact. It is also not my opinion that Capitalism leads to this, the profit motive inevitably leads to it.
You claiming that developing nations should just fight against international corporations brutally exploiting them and absolving yourself of any responsibility you have for it is just sticking your head in the sand. If you aren’t boycotting Nestlé, you’re supporting them.
The “good” news is that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism. You individually cannot do much, except protect, organize, and try your best to support less unethical companies whenever you can. However, to blame developing countries for corporations knowingly brutally exploiting them and offering no alternative is absolutely baffling.
It’s a very complex issue, Western countries do a lot of things to help out less developed nations but we also do selfish things that makes life harder for them - unfortunately this is the reality of humanity, I am fighting my own personal ideological war against capitalism and the greed based system by which we live so I’m not defending it but it also has to be stated that other systems can have these flaws too.
We need a cultural shift to fix these problems, an economic one isn’t enough on its own
But we are sharing knowledge and sending both aid and capital there. A lot of the countries are industrialized to the degree they are with the capital. Nobody acts in a vacuum these days.
We could be doing more for sure but we’re not doing nothing.
The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it.
What a strange take. You’re saying that if I, as a business owner, am fully aware that my production chain relies on slave or child labor in another country, I bear no moral responsibility because “well that country should have stopped it”?
I didn’t say any of that bullshit that you’re trying to imply that I said. Those are your words only.
Comments like yours are a detriment to social media. Don’t try to put words in people’s mouths. That garbage is far too common and you just dumped yours here.
That’s precisely what you said, it’s nobody’s responsibility but that country. I merely pointed out an obvious example where your statement is false. Work on your comprehension skills.
Not sure who the “we” in this situation is, but I’m not demanding anything from them. They’re selling shit and I’m buying. I’m not demanding products from them.
But we already got rid of child chimney sweepers without getting rid of capitalism
The point is that capitalism prioritizes profit, not the welfare of people. This is only not done anymore because of regulation, not because capitalism was fixed. It can’t be fixed. The target goal of capitalism is wrong. Profit does not optimize for innovation, welfare, happiness, or anything else that could be called good. It will always exploit people as much as it can, and it just happens to not exploit children (in the western world (legally)) because we made it not allowed, and disobeying that law would be less profitable.
Seems like regulations are the fix.
Capitalism is unsustainable by design, there is no fix to that
shouldn’t we come up with a system where the core values don’t need regulation. it becomes unthinkable to exploit children not because of regulation and enforcement but because the system in itself denies power to exploiters.
Is there any system besides capitalism with regulations we have in developed countries without child labor? Child labor existed in the Soviet Union and in communist China. Historically the idea that children should not perform labor is very recent.
Are there any developed countries that have moved beyond Capitalism yet? Are you genuinely attributing Capitalism to removing child labor, instead of the workers that organized and fought against it? That’s like giving the US government credit for the Civil Rights movement.
Is your claim that there will be some future utopia without capitalism and without child labor? Sure, that’s something to dream about.
If humanity has failed to move beyond Capitalism and child labor, then humanity lost to the climate crisis or nuked itself to death. The idea that Capitalism is sustainable is Utopian and foolish.
Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
you stated that capitalism is human nature and based on reality. none of those statements are true. my job here is done.
I said no such thing! That’s a ludicrous statement.
i support direct democracy. i think the economical system should be maintained by democracies sustained by a lot more direct democracy processes. even if that economic system is capitalism it should be restrained by a lot more people voting directly on regulation and less on representation.
i hope i answered your question and i’m sorry for the confusion.
Sure would be nice, but such a system seems to be fundamentally incompatible with human nature and reality.
Seems to be? On what grounds? Do you think humans have a built-in mystical flaw that turns them evil if they share tools?
Thinking that there could be a system that doesn’t require regulations that have to be enforced is just very naive.
Yes and no. Capitalism requires huge amounts of regulation to not destroy itself, and a system with considerably less regulation could exist if the Workers could represent themselves via ownership.
as if human nature is set in stone but i love the reality argument, as if capitalism is somehow a realistic functioning system. for sure a dreamed up notion of capital is 100% real and not the machinations of generations of trial and error(still on going btw).
What if we incentivized the kids to work using tokens on their iPad games? They would do the work basically for free and we could use it as a labor cost saving measure. Like the gig economy but now with a whole new section of laborers to choose from.
What if we could store the children in a kind of acid to leech their life force more efficiently with the added benefit of being able to store their potential energy for longer durations 🧐
Now we’re talking.
So… Roblox
Turn kindergartens to bot farms!
Capitalism is insanely efficient in allocating capital and setting prices – two things incredibly difficult to do otherwise. At the same time it has the problem of protecting the weakest. But that can be tackled by regulation – which has been pretty effective in the EU for example.
What kind of system would you prefer?
Capitalism is moderately efficient in allocating Capital and setting prices for the purpose of generating profits. Capitalism is pretty terrible when it comes to actually improving society, and the EU still sees massive problems.
Worker Ownership of the Means of Production is a better alternative, whether that be along the lines of Anarcho-Syndicalism, Market Socialism, Democratic Socialism, Marxism, Council Communism, or so forth.
According to all data we have, the living standard in democratic, capilistic states is significantly higher than in any other market order. If you consider the social capitalism like in Nordic countries, they easily rank the number 1 in all metrics. Meanwhile communist states like the DDR or UDSSR collapsed after their economy was ruined.
This argument always comes up, and it’s such a bad one when actually considered. The US was the largest world power, right? They also influenced all other western and/or capitalist nations, either through cooperation or threat of cutting them off from the market.
OK, so consider which communist/socialist countries failed. Did they fail in a vacuum? No. They failed with the “democratic” (often less democratic than the opposition, but this was their messaging) nations opposing them. For example, in Guatemala they elected a leftist president who introduced a minimum wage, increased democratic participation in elections, and the next president introduced land reforms to redistribute land to give it to the peasants.
Guatemala was being used by the United Fruit Company (Chiquita now) for their banana empire. These changes hurt their ability to exploit the people and create more profits, so they lobbied the US to overthrow their government. This led to the formation of a dictatorship and reversal of labor reforms. The dictatorship went on to genocide the native populace.
Communism “always fails” because the most powerful nations in the world are afraid of it, so they do everything in their power to ensure it fails. The few that have been able to survive are dictatorships, because they can better withstand pressure from the outside. (This isn’t to say dictatorships are good, just that they’re more stable when attacked.) They also generally had or enforced cultural hegemony, for the same reason. It’s survivorship bias.
We have no idea how well a leftist government would do if not attacked, because it’s always attacked out of fear. If it’s destined to fail, why are they afraid of it succeeding?
Maybe communist countries always fail (UDSSR, DDR) or transition to capitalism (China), not because of outside forces, but because its a flawed system?
It could be, but we can’t know as it is now. Marx said the same for capitalism, and he may still be proven right. He said that capitalism will always lead to communism because it’s a flawed system.
Again, if it’s destined to fail, why have capitalist countries had to put so much effort into destroying them? If they actually believed they were destined to fail, like they like to say in propoganda, then they wouldn’t bother with forcing them to fail.
As an example of a moderate success, Cuba has done pretty well for itself despite being entirely cut off from nearly all outside trade. They have a near 100% literacy rate. compared to the US’s 86%. They also have world class Healthcare, again despite being cut off from the rest of the world.
The US has put so much effort into ensuring Cuba fails, yet it’s still doing better than the US on many of the metrics that actually matter to the average person. How can this be true if communism is so fundamentally flawed?
Still, 88 % live in extreme poverty (though it can be argued that it is due to sanctions – which should be abolished). More severe are human right violations – no democracy, no freedom of the press, no independent judges.
And at the same time Cuba is moving towards capitalism since 2010– since it worked so well in China and Vietnam.
I’ll break this down sentence by sentence.
-According to all data we have, the living standard in developed countries is higher than in developing countries. Additionally, Capitalism is less democratic than Socialism, as Capitalism is a market of competing mini-dictators, rather than democratically run industry.
-Social Democracies a la the Nordic Countries ruthlessly exploit the third world and see rising disparity as Capitalists erode social safety nets. Mass Unionization slows this process, but Social Democracies serve as a good example of why living standards are higher when Workers have more control, and why Unionization alone isn’t enough, Capitalism itself remains the problem.
-The USSR is not the only form of Socialism, and additionally it collapsed after it liberalized. It wasn’t a Communist state either, as it never achieved Communism, ie it was not a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society.
All in all, very flawed takes on your part. Attributing quality of life to Capitalism, when it was due to development, is false. Additionally, you falsely assume development only comes from Capitalism, which relies on the absurd logic that believes humans are incapable of developing democratically, and goes against this very website itself.
Capital and price are imaginary. Why are you evaluating a system by random concepts that don’t correspond to anything real?
Maybe use a metric with actual real meaning like fraction of people with basic necessities covered.
And if you consider that metric capitalism with social guidelines implemented – like in Nordic countries – comes out far ahead of any other known market order.
Don’t worry give some states a couple of years and I’m sure we’ll see child chimney sweepers come back 😉
Businesses in the Midwest US have already been hiring 10-12 year old undocumented kids to work overnight cleaning machine parts at meatpacking plants. I mean… so many different things wrong with that. The psycho fuckers who run these businesses need some real penalties, like jail time and dissolving their company.
We just got rid of chimney sweeps in general.
Despite us regulating child labor it seems like profit motives and greed overpower regulatory measures.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules
What about all the places where it has been made illegal and will remain so?
At one point they probably said it would remain illegal in the places they’re trying to legalize it.
Through labor organization. It wasn’t out of the goodness of the hearts of benevolent Capitalists, but through struggles of Workers. The point of this picture isn’t that Capitalism used to be worse, and fixed itself, but that Capitalists will absolutely take advantage of children and subject them to sacrificing their bodies for clean chimneys if it makes a profit.
The takeaway from this is that Capitalists cannot be seen as individual humans with values, but as cogs in the Capitalist machine that will exploit everything and everyone for profit. An individual Capitalist may not be willing to go that far, but inevitably as long as there is profit to be made, someone will fill that gap.
That’s why economic systems need to be looked at at aggregates and not as individual transactions. You miss the forest for the trees.
Now we only have child miners, child slaughter house workers, child assembly line workers, child scrapyard garbage collectors, …
we just moved child labour to less developed countries. we didn’t get rid of anything. you just don’t see it, but child labour is still going strong in the world. child slavery as well.
No WE did not. The people in those countries where it still happens allowed it to still happen.
None of us have any decisionmaking power to control what those countries do, so the burden to fix those problems is on those countries who allow it.
It’s 100% a consequence of Capitalism, though. You’re blaming developing nations for the willful exploitation international Corporations commit and you personally benefit from.
That’s just your opinion. The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it, and I reject any personal responsibility for any of that because I have no control over the laws of any country.
Are you 14? You don’t seem to understand how global trade works
I’m a bit older than that and have actually studied Macroeconomics at the undergraduate level. Have you?
Because a macroeconomics course is obviously going to be honest about this topic… Are you even serious?
It is not my opinion that international corporations brutally exploit the third world, it’s a fact. It is also not my opinion that Capitalism leads to this, the profit motive inevitably leads to it.
You claiming that developing nations should just fight against international corporations brutally exploiting them and absolving yourself of any responsibility you have for it is just sticking your head in the sand. If you aren’t boycotting Nestlé, you’re supporting them.
The “good” news is that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism. You individually cannot do much, except protect, organize, and try your best to support less unethical companies whenever you can. However, to blame developing countries for corporations knowingly brutally exploiting them and offering no alternative is absolutely baffling.
Such an absurd thing to say. I’m sure you’ll win lots of hearts and minds with your absolutist take 🙄
What a way to say absolutely nothing.
If Capitalism is inherently exploitative, then there is no perfectly ethical form of it. Therefore, it should be replaced with a better system.
Do you imagine there is a switch somewhere? Like, right now we’re “doing capitalism” and tomorrow we could flip the switch and do something else?
Everything exists on a spectrum, and you won’t find anything like “pure” capitalism anywhere.
Id also disagree with the premise of it being inherently exploitative, but that’s a different topic.
Yeah those countries just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start being productive members of the world.
I know we could help them out so they don’t have to go through all the hard times alone and without the knowledge we have, but fuck em hahahahahaha
It’s a very complex issue, Western countries do a lot of things to help out less developed nations but we also do selfish things that makes life harder for them - unfortunately this is the reality of humanity, I am fighting my own personal ideological war against capitalism and the greed based system by which we live so I’m not defending it but it also has to be stated that other systems can have these flaws too.
We need a cultural shift to fix these problems, an economic one isn’t enough on its own
But we are sharing knowledge and sending both aid and capital there. A lot of the countries are industrialized to the degree they are with the capital. Nobody acts in a vacuum these days.
We could be doing more for sure but we’re not doing nothing.
That literally has nothing to do with what I was making fun of that guy for. He was arguing we shouldn’t help at all. I was being sarcastic with him.
I agree with what you’ve said
The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it.
What a strange take. You’re saying that if I, as a business owner, am fully aware that my production chain relies on slave or child labor in another country, I bear no moral responsibility because “well that country should have stopped it”?
I didn’t say any of that bullshit that you’re trying to imply that I said. Those are your words only.
Comments like yours are a detriment to social media. Don’t try to put words in people’s mouths. That garbage is far too common and you just dumped yours here.
That’s precisely what you said, it’s nobody’s responsibility but that country. I merely pointed out an obvious example where your statement is false. Work on your comprehension skills.
Uh huh, I bet you definitely have bought something that is connected to child labor. Now, STFU, fool.
For the record, if you’re in the U.S., there are plenty of children being exploited right here.
yes we do. we demand money and offer that the only way they can make it is by exploitation.
Not sure who the “we” in this situation is, but I’m not demanding anything from them. They’re selling shit and I’m buying. I’m not demanding products from them.
consumers are responsible for what they consume. pay and forget doesn’t work
You said “we demand money”, that’s what I’m replying to. I (nor you in the comment I was replying to) didn’t say anything about responsibility.
I can promise you there’s no little kids working as chimney sweeps in my country
Pretty hard to export child chimney sweeps to other countries
Ah yes and there is no other child labour anywhere in the world at all anymore
I think they’re saying that things can improve even within capitalism. And they have. But child labour still exists.
Sure, things can improve. Unfortunately it doesn’t often go that way.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/02/20/meat-packing-plant-child-labor-fines/11304311002/
But we haven’t gotten rid of child labor even in the US