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by ixtli 497 days ago
Thats because there is no answer. Marx and all of the people who developed his theories after him have exhaustively and scientifically proved this. That's really whats happening: its not that people dont have an answer is that they're not admitting to the exploitative nature of private capital accumulation. The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.

Also, if you havent read the wikipedia article on the luddites you should. It's not as bad a moniker as revisionists would have you think! (Hint: they were protesting labor abuses, not simply opposed to advencement.)

2 comments

> The main internal contradiction of capitalism leads to the system creating large amounts of wealth but also equivalently large amounts of poverty.

No it hasn't, the global poverty rate has been falling for 20+ years. 69% of people globally lived on <$5.50 a day in 2000, that number is down to 47% today.

You can also look at China and Vietnam, countries that have had drastic improvements to standards of living and collapsing poverty rates after abandoned communism. Or you could look at the divide between East Germany and West Germany or North Korea and South Korea. Or the economic collapse in Venezuela. The communist experiment was tried and it failed miserably.

"capitalism solves this problem, just look at all the revolutions communists did that erased more poverty faster than at any time in human history"

i get what you're trying to say but ultimately it just seems like you're pointing at everything positive and saying "capitalism did that" without much effort or investigation. there's too much to cover in an HN thread but one thing thats interesting is that when this ideological sentiment is brought out no one ever seems to want to deal with the backslide in equity that happened across all measurements after the fall of the USSR. i think partially because westerners dont seem to be able to engage with the discussion without immediately whatabout-ing and claiming that doing the analysis is somehow stalin worship.

So communism it’s the answer cuz Marx?
its funny, it seems the point of this kind of response is to imply that my analysis is naive or overly simplistic but there are hundreds of thousands of pages of math and science and philosophy on the topic. im not just making this up, im simply explaining why its happening. these smug responses never seem to actually engage with anything except simplistic propaganda substituted in for the actual argument being made.
How can it be propaganda? It’s a short question based on your comment. The onus on you is to expand.

There is plenty of evidence against the principles and implementation of communism.

This post was about lofi you started about Marx and capitalism not me mate

The answer doesn't seem to be late stage capitalism.
No but some form of socialism mixed with capitalism