volodya_ilich
We’re not stupid animals, there are plenty of historical examples of societies allocating resources based on need rather than economic capability. We’re just living under the wrong system, and we need to evolve past that system towards something with actual democracy, where the people can decide democratically how the economy works and how the resources are allocated, where the workers aren’t under the orders of a dictatorial power structure 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but instead they collectively make the decisions and take the profits from the companies they own collectively.
He is not taking a Marxist position
Precisely that’s why it’s taken him 80 years longer than Marxists to reach that conclusion.
Not every criticism of Capitalism is an endorsement of Marxism
Which is why non-marxist anti-capitalist movements such as Salvador Allende’s socialism in Chile, or Mosaddegh’s Iran, inevitably fail within a few years due to the lack of understanding of class struggle and the history of capitalism.
You are assuming that a country cannot improve its growth because of past and its success it determined purely by past events
Nothing like that. I’m saying that industrialization is a gradual and long process, and by pure logic, some countries which started to industrialize 100+ years before others, had the advantage.
By the way, this “theory” completely falls apart when you look at Germany. Before they were one state, then divided and after communism fell, they re-united. After the berlin wall fell, eastern part was in a far worse condition.
Far-worse condition by which metric? Sure, it was less developed industrially and economically (see my point about not participating in colonialism, which you don’t seem to care about), but there was no unemployment and there was guaranteed housing for everyone. There were fewer, and worse quality, consumer goods, but is that how you determine the success of a system?
Regarding colonialism and unequal exchange, you don’t seem to understand how important an effect it has. Importing cheap raw materials and exporting high added-value manufactured goods, is the most profitable thing you can do, but it implies unequal exchange, which drains the resources and labour of poorer countries and exploits them. If you’re interested at all in the development of the economies of countries, you really should look into, and try to understand, the concept of unequal exchange. Otherwise, it’s like saying “wow Rome was so powerful in 200BC” while ignoring that like half the workforce were literal slaves.
By the nine divines… Why does it take libs 80 years extra to reach the conclusions that Marxists have already described in detail in the last century…
What you’re saying is at best debatable, and it’s definitely not consensus in academia. Feudalism is substantially and fundamentally different from capitalism. Serfs worked the land not based on free contracts for a wage selling their labour as a commodity, but rather legally bound to their lord’s land. Access to consumer goods wasn’t through purchase as commodities in a free market, but through self-production and barter/debt within small communities. Peasants worked the land with their own means of production and made their own tools with their own means of production, and generally people weren’t hired working other people’s means of production.
Class struggle has existed for millennia, but capitalism is just the current predominant system of class struggle because through industrial development it overpowers preexisting systems that weren’t capitalist.
That’s not necessarily true, many supposedly democratic regimes consistently pass unpopular policy and don’t pass popular policy. E.g. welfare state cuts to expenditure in education, healthcare and pensions in post-2008 EU, or the lack of progressive policy in USA healthcare.
It’s precisely this ignoring of the popular will that turns people to fascism
