The people who build products for the capitalists are part of capitalism. Way to compartmentalize.

In capitalism you're systematically pitted against your own class and alienated from the products of your labor. That has a massive effect on apathy and how much you will endure. When you're socially connected and can see what you are producing, you're far less likely to be miserable even if the situations are otherwise identical. As humans we don't derive meaning from our situation, as much as we rationalize ourselves into happiness. It's far easier to rationalize ourselves into happiness or at least contentedness when we are able to make decisions and carry them out, and see the results. I.e. farming. When we don't get to make decisions and dont' see the results we're far less likely to feel trapped and miserable.

From the perspective of "dead chickens starve your family", that is the same thing as losing your job under capitalism. Your dead chicken is just a medical issue that stops you from working, or your company downsizing.



Also, when you're a farmer you work for like 8 months a year, and have very little marginal utility. You can't work an extra 40 once your seeds are planted and get an extra 50% crops. You might be working 80 hours a week for 8 months, but then you have almost no work the rest of the year as your harvest is in and stored. In a factory, you will be worked 80 hours a week indefinitely if your boss can get away with it. The trade off from agrarian to industrial is not as much quality of life, as it is marginal utility.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Jul 16 2021 10:02am

latest talking point from the media and lefties: lack of access to capitalism, orange man, and covid are the reason why people are protesting against the regimes in communist cuba

https://thefederalist.com/2021/07/12/cbs-news-blames-trump-not-communism-for-cubas-broken-economy/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9794649/amp/AOC-finally-breaks-silence-Cuba-unrest-blames-Americas-absurdly-cruel-embargoes.html

https://thepostmillennial.com/watch-cnn-reporter-blames-trump-for-cuba-protests-not-the-communist-regime

The American embargo us a major reason Cubans have shitty lives, that predates trump tho.

Obama should have killed it. I don't know why anyone would think a Republican would quit oppressing Cuba lol.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jul 16 2021 10:00am

"necessary evil"

No no, apparently orange man started the embargo. The media and some politicians said so

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barrel_Roll
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Menu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mongoose
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Beleaguer

https://web.archive.org/web/20080418070537/http://www.foia.cia.gov/guatemala.asp

It’s a pretty safe bet that that US military and intelligence services are involved in destabilizing any attempt, however flawed, at communism. You don’t have to be a leftist to accept that the US is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism.

Most, if not all communist states have not followed Marx’s ideals. They cater to Lenin’s horrid assertion that democracy and communism cannot function together, and that only a strong authoritarian government can create a successful communist state (leading to magic christmasland stateless communism)

There have been some pretty terrible people in power under communism. Cambodia, China and the USSR can attest to that. There is yet to be a working system to prevent people like Woodrow Wilson from gaining enough political power to kill millions of people.

communism by nature seeks to bind pockets of people together under one umbrella, capitalism pits them against each other and facilitates trade and creates winners and losers by this process. im not compartmentalizing, i'm recognizing history. people in brazil burning the rain forest are still less poor than they were. the issue isn't that they're more poor, its that the poverty they've shed is well out of proportion with the profits gained from their participation in the capitalist scheme. thus is the case with all raw goods providers in capitalism. they do the most work, create the most environmental impact per person to create those goods, and get the lowest portion of profits. capitalism is least fair to these people, but environment aside, it is the best system for them to claw from poverty until socialism can provide directly for them.



getting a new job in a capitalist society is easier than getting new chickens in an agrarian society by orders of magnitude.

overall tho your take on farming is off, pure crop farmers only exist because of socialist policies backing crop failures (fairly stated pushed by conservatives) making farmers in the center grain belt grow only one thing. farming under capitalism without safety nets requires not only livestock but a broad range of crops grown which eat more hours than a farmer has marginal utility to back. crop and livestock failures are a harsh reality of faming that your post doesnt seem to account for, and really only focusses on pure corn/bean farmers.

edit: and as QoL increases suicide increases, i earnestly believe there's a causal, nor correlated, relationship there.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jul 16 2021 10:22am

The largest and most successful communist state to date was an aggressively imperialist power. The Athenians were imperialist. All of the great mercantilist powers were imperialist. The Roman plunder economy was imperialist. The fact that an ideology can exist in tandem with imperialism does not mean that it is the cause for imperialism. When we say that communism creates poverty, it is because command economies are inherently inefficient and unresponsive, and poverty is the natural result. Imperialism, on the other hand, is a function of the human condition.

Colonialism has its roots in mercantilism, and the most prodigious colonial powers were largely mercantilist. But that's neither here nor there. Capitalism is not prevention for colonialism, and colonialism can exist in symbiotic tandem with capitalism, but the use of state power to create colonies and extract wealth is not a function of capitalism.

Greed and avarice need to be reigned in in any system. It goes without saying that every major capitalist power today recognizes that, and recognizes that capitalism is not a panacea for human evils. Capitalism's only claim to fame is that it is the most effective economic model in the history of our species. The results speak for themselves.

https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty



It is an indictment on communism to say that Cuba is poor because it lacks access to capitalist foreign exchange.

Cubans have shitty lives because they live under an oppressive government adhering to failed economic policies, one which was overly reliant on Soviet aid to the exclusion of pursuing alternative economic development.

This post was edited by bogie160 on Jul 16 2021 10:32am

None of these affect my examples: the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China under Mao, Venezuela under Chavez/Maduro and Argentina during the 90s/2000s.