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Comment by PheonixPharts | Hacker News Reader

I’m always a bit surprised that Soviet era Capitalist propaganda remains so effective to this day.

Of course Capitalism looks fantastic from the exploiters’ perspective.

Today more than ever it should be clear that the opulence of America in the 90s is completely unsustainable on a global scale.

That way of live has always been reserved for a global minority, one many of us may find ourselves excluded from in our lifetimes.

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Bananas are a photogenic edge case, not a staple food. Far more representative of America's food-wealth are grains and meat -- which it produces in enormous amounts, and exports to the rest of the world. That doesn't happen by exploiting other countries, because no other countries are involved; it happens because of technology, because of mechanized agriculture and high-yield seeds and synthetic fertilizer and many other under-appreciated pillars of the modern world. And those technologies have been spreading through the world, lifting people out of poverty in vast numbers.

I won't ask you to show appreciation for heroes like Haber and Bosch and Borlaug and all the rest, but they have my thanks.

> Today more than ever it should be clear that the opulence of America in the 90s is completely unsustainable on a global scale.

It isn't clear at all. The material conditions of the 90s has and will be surpassed at higher efficiency using smaller energy budgets.

> opulence of America in the 90s

I can only go "???" to this. America has only gotten more "opulent" since the 90s. The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we've seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.

> The US has not seen any sort of decline since the 90s in fact we’ve seen the boom of one of the biggest industries in the world, that allows us to even discuss this on our computers.

Actually, that happened in not since the 1990s, and we were discussing issues like this on our computers then, too. I know, I was there.

But the opulence of the 1990s wasn’t because it was the height of technology, or average earnings, it was in large part driven by fashion and attitudes and their effect on lifestyle and the marketplace, driven in part by the lingering visible-status-oriented attitudes of the 1980s, in part by the perception of geopolitical and economic invincibility (both the–at that point–longest economic expansion in the modern period plus the fall of the Soviet Union, lopsided military engagements like Panama and the First Gulf War, etc.)

Greater aggregate and even median wealth looks and feels different in the shadow of the Great Recession and the Afghan and Iraq Wars.

Capitalism has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty.

Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.

Unless you have an alternative, your claims of exploration will fall on deaf ears.

“lifting out of poverty” is defined in terms of consumption.

A family living on a farm and providing most of their own needs, living sustainably for generations, is by most definitions “living in poverty” because they consume very little.

Now if you strip that family of their land and force them to work in factories their consumption goes way up since they no longer are able to support themselves.

That family has now been “lifted out of poverty”.

But yes, you are correct, no system has made people more depended on exploitation then Capitialism.

You realize “consumption” includes things like medical care, nutritious food, quality education, better housing? It actually makes up a very large part of consumption in developed nations.

You’re idealizing the crushing poverty of sustenance farming.

Have you ever been to a developing country? Talked to the families who choose to abandon their farming and work in a factory so their kids can get proper healthcare, better schooling and living in a house without a toilet that feeds into the river?

Plenty of them could continue to work as farmers and choose not too. Who are you to claim their choice is wrong?

I’m guessing you’ve lived a comfy life and take all of these things for granted and then sneer at those who want the same.

The poorest countries account for the least amount of trade globally. They don't have factories, but I imagine you would contrive that owning next to nothing and teetering on the edge of extreme poverty is preferable to working in a factory. That type of work is what created the 4 Asian Tigers, seems ridiculous to knock it.

You're romanticizing primitivism.

Lifting out of poverty is also defined in terms of "not starving to death because the winter was too long or cold", "not losing a half a years labor and food because a tornado hit your field", "not having to do manual labor 12 hours a day" and yes "access to material wealth" like indoor plumbing, labor saving devices like washing machines, and the ability to send your children to be educated instead of needing them as additional physical labor when they're old enough. Access to modern medical care and medications. I know some people enjoy farming, and enjoy the rough life. Me personally I'm glad that I don't have to plan months in advance to heat my house for the winter, can obtain literally any food I can imagine within 30 minutes and obtain enough food to feed a family for a month with little more than 40 hours of labor and a 1 hour shipping trip.

I would point out that under capitalism there have been famines even when there has been plenty of surplus food. A lack of famine either acute nor chronic is surely not a defining characteristic of capitalism.

You don't need a famine to starve to death when you're a subsistence farmer, you just need your local area to suffer an unexpected weather event. Too much winter, too much heat, too much rain, too many storms, too many insects. Take your pick of natural disaster. When you and your entire country are subsistence farmers, there's not exactly a lot of surplus or distribution networks to get you replacement food when your local area suffers.

This is pretty uniformly attributed to government policy, not "Capitalism". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

I don’t know… my grandparents were literally sharecroppers and my grandmother said it was ducking miserable. When she was a child most people lost children to disease and still in 1920, sometimes to hunger. But the economy changed and improved and they eventually owned an air conditioned home and two cars. She said the improvement in her life from childhood until I was born were almost unimaginable.

Prey tell, how do you live? How would you in practice have your children and other family members live? If you're even moderately well off, very little if nothing stops you from seeking exactly the life you idealize in your comment. Resources for learning all its hard tricks and labors abound (largely due to the very same capitalist-fed internet of commodified information sharing that you disdain). But by all means, decide for hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers that their lives of toil were preferable to the things generations of them strove for despite "having to" consume more.

Unless you consider the Chinese to be a shining capitalism, the proportional of people in poverty hasn't been decreased by capitalism.

It’s doesn’t have to be “shining” capitalism to be free market reforms.

It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.

That's actually not what it shows. It shows that the free market focused development model which was popular across the entire rest of the world did not, in aggregate, reduce abject poverty.

> It’s pretty clear even “state capitalism” leads to wealth and the elimination of abject poverty.

What even is the difference between such heavy state capitalism and socialism? Socialist economies existed with various level of market involvement and economic freedom, see Lenin's NEP - was the USSR initially a champion of free market reform?

You are mixing up democracy and capitalism. All democracies happens to be capitalist today since people quickly vote away communist leaders when they can, but that doesn't mean that democracy and capitalism are the same thing. China can be capitalist without democratic elections, I'd argue that is where they are today and where they have been since the "Chinese miracle" started.

China is capitalist, they just aren't democratic. They kept the authoritarian regime with sham elections from their communism days but changed everything else into capitalist systems, they are as capitalist as a typical western country today.

Authoritarian regime, control of society, control of economy are basically the definition of fascism. For obvious reasons the only clear difference with canon is the lack of anti-communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism

By the way, elections in China are only at very local levels. Most of what we do elections for in western countries are indirect elections there. The Congress is not directly elected by people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China

However you might want to check the 1929 elections in fascist Italy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Italian_general_election

>Communism, or any other system, can’t make that same claim.

I don't really think communism is a viable economic system, because of, you know, people. However, a couple of points should be made:

- Communism has always had to deal with enmity of world's richest and most influential nations (USA and UK in particular). Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere, whether they like it or not (kind of like some religions). Could this have been otherwise? I don't know.

- Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum, despite having to deal with the massive trauma of World War 2. Also, income inequality decreased. Population went from ~140 million in poverty to ~240 million living, um, not in poverty.

So... it is not quite as simple as you make it out to be.

Between 1922 and 1962, USSR's economy grew at an average of about 9% real per annum

Growing from a bad start and where you can copy a more developed nation makes this easier.

https://bearkunin.medium.com/soviet-union-facts-and-fictions...

>Growing from a bad start and where you can copy a more developed nation makes this easier.

True. But you know what really makes economic growth easier? Foreign aid. Also trade.

The USSR otoh had to deal with sanctions.

https://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Embargoes-and-S...

Yet they weren't alone in the world. They were next to China and other friendlies.

China was friendly with the USSR only briefly, like in the 1950s. It was desperately poor at the time, and received a lot of aid from the USSR.

I don't know what other friendlies you mean. USSR installed communist/socialist governments in the countries it liberated from German occupation after WW2, but those relationships were... complicated.

> Possibly because communism has had this inbuilt idea that it needs to spread to everywhere

Communist countries wanted to export communism, maybe for all the good and bad reasons democratic countries want to export democracy. However there were plenty of people in the west that wanted their country to become communist, especially up to the 80s. So the enmity against all the communist world was also a matter of internal affairs, to contain internal opposition.

That's a fair point.

On reflection, whether communism holds extra appeal in poor countries, or whether it was an accident of history that *rich* capitalist countries faced off against poor communist countries, communism's chances were kind of hamstrung by this enmity. The playing field was uneven.

So which system is truly better at lifting people out of poverty, all other things being equal, remains uncertain.

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