this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Late Stage Capitalism
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I'm impressed that not a single person died from both lack of water & food
"Well I could start a meaningful discussion about the accuracy of the data or I could say something smug that downplays human suffering. Nobody can disprove that I'm a smuglord and I can't be bothered defending my assumptions by looking for alternate data. So this is a no brainer (just like me)"
I don't think I can really start a "meaningful discussion" here, can I? The image didn't even define how does it count a death to be caused by capitalism to start with. It just points to anything happen in the world and says "it's capitalism".
You? Apparently not. But to the best of their ability people answer honest questions here. "If capitalism is so great and a shirt travels the world 5 times before getting to the shop why're there tens of millions without access to sanitation and clean water" is a fair question.
Also, the high estimates of the famines in socialist states are measured exactly in the manmer you decried. If you could read the bottom text, you'd underatand this is intentional.
So in other words, they are both wrong? What is the point of using a measuring method you don't agree with in the first place?
Let’s underestimate the deaths then for the sake of argument.
There are about 9 million annual hunger deaths globally, so a quite conservative estimate for the figure total would easily be 10 million.
The point still stands that even if communism had really been responsible for 100 million deaths (spoiler: it isn’t), capitalism actually hits this every decade.
Er, I still can't understand how everything happens in the world must be caused by Capitalism. So that 10 millions deaths per decade would be 0 if we all abandon Capitalism?
Yes, because capitalism is the means by which these inequalities exist where some people have unfathomable billions and some people can’t even get access to food.
A socialist planet would realize we could make further strides for the mutual benefit of everyone if we weren’t wasting the intellectual potential of millions depriving them of basic human needs and act accordingly.
So inequalities don't exist in socialist countries like China or India?
Whenever you hear about those "the world is getting better and better every day, nearly a billion people have come out of poverty in the last X years" statistics, just know, all of those people were pulled out of poverty in China, by their (kinda) socialist government.
Few people if any come out of poverty in capitalist countries and countries imperialized from the West (rather, as many people fall into poverty as get out of poverty).
Socialism is pulling people out of poverty, feeding them, housing them, give them healthcare, etc. Capitalist nations keep the global south poor in order to exploit cheap labor.
It's about trends and direction. The USSR back in it's growth days pulled 300 million people out of poverty. This is a core feature of communism, to feed, house, and heal, every single person.
Since when did India become a socialist country?
Also, there is a big difference between a socialist planet and a socialist country. China has to tightrope a planet of capitalism that would happily cut them off like it did to North Korea. They have chosen a strategy of improving its society while attracting foreign investment to keep the doors open, and it’s paying off well, as the standard of living for its people increases, and China becomes an essential part of the world economy.
It is listed under "Current socialist states" in wiki?
Just having the word “socialist” appear in the constitution does not make them AES.
The current government is the right-wing NDA coalition.
lol, what is this bullshit? The page says Portugal is socialist.
They do but Socialists are working to make those inequalities smaller whereas Capitalism is working to make the inequalities bigger.
Lack of clean water, not literally dehydration.
Either you drink the dirty water and die from that or you don't and die from dehydration. What's the point of the distinction of lack of water and lack of clean water?
The solutions are different.
?? The solution is to provide clean water. Also we were discussing about the grouping of death causes in the poster. How does the solution affect how you group that? Where is the group for literal dehydration anyway if they're are different group of death causes as you suggested?
In a place where the local river is too polluted to drink, the solution is to either purify the water or solve the pollution at its source.
In a place where there's literally no water, the solution is to truck or pipe water in from far away. That's drastically different?
I think "lack of clean water" combines both causes of death, for simplicity? I'm not really sure why you have such a problem with it.
Yes, I agree. Which is why I said it's impressive that there are no one dying from both lack of food & water in my first comment. It was your reply that says it's "lack of clean water" (instead of lack of clean water + lack of water). Which is a meaningless distinction that we seems to both agree now? Have you changed your mind on that one?
People dying of dehydration probably also die of malnutrition, like you said, but people dying from drinking unclean water are a distinct group that can't just be lumped together with starvation because that's a public sanitation and pollution problem rather than a resource problem. This statistic groups dehydration and waterborne illness and pollution and industrial poisoning together as one group, and then separates that with malnutrition as a completely separate group. You, for some reason, have a problem with that?
Is that how the statistics in this poster work? Firstly, they used different source for lack of water and hunger. Which is already kind of asking for overlapping errors. Secondly, I check the "http://poverty.com" as it mentioned in the poster and the site doesn't even mention how it get the numbers. Actually it doesn't even mention that 8000000 number on that site. Are we supposed to take this seriously?
I don't know what you want to combine lack of water and food so much - general rule of thumb, you can survive 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food. They're just different problems.
Also, I think this is a pretty old image. I seem to remember it back during Occupy? So who even knows where the sources are or how to find them.
Well I don't. I just think the numbers in this image is way too fuzzy to be taken serious from the get-go. And that's why I commented on it like it's a bad joke, which it is.
It references The Black Book of Communism, which is similarly unserious. Makes sense.
The distinction is, to oversimplify it, between living in a parched desert or living next to a toxic river or a contaminated well. In the case of contaminated water, you may not even really know that your water is contaminated with, say, cholera or dysentery on a given day, you just drink it because you must.
I would also venture to guess that most people, even in overexploited nations, have access to water of some sort. So wording it as lack of clean water is probably more accurate than lack of water.
I'm more impressed that only 8 people died from lack of clean water.
Laugh track
when you are so anglo that you can't even read numbers with a different separator.