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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

>that part of the rest of the world that has been fully integrated into global capitalism for quite a long time and is still very poor because they are in the _wrong_ side of capitalism

Sorry mate, but capitalism and integration into the world economy has lifted million(billions?) out of poverty even from the countries on the wrong side of capitalism (the ones being exploited by the richer ones).

Look at present day South Korea vs North Korea. Post-WW2 South Korea was poorer than the North, but after the sixties the South economically skyrocketed while the North stil wallows in absolute poverty.

A lot of Asia post-WW2(Japan, Taiwan, Korea, India, etc) became the sweatshop of the west/US, or "on the wrong side of capitalism" to quote you, and look at them now. Would they have been better off today without that phase? That's what you have to look at.

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Science and technology lifted them from poverty, not capitalism. The state in those countries played a huge role

Science and technology has progresses thanks to cash injections from capitalists, not just from governments of broke countries.

The Taiwanese government paid to buy technology transfers on semiconductor manufacturing tech from the US in the sixties and seventies, but for that to happen, RCA in the US had to spend "hella' stacks" in R&D to invent that tech in the first place and iterate on it at scale until it got cheaper for mass production and affordable for other less wealthy countries to buy it too.

The semiconductor industry is an interesting example because even if the transistor was invented by Bell labs, it all comes from wartime technology, obviously very heavily publicly subsidized. And actually, it was only profitable for the first 10 years becuse they had military applications so they had the gouvernment as client…

Fine, then let's pick other industries not related to the defense industry.

Like industrial automation robots, those came way after WW2, by the desire of capitalists to speed up production and reduce costs of products to the point capitalist economies had much more successful exports, like steel, due to superior technology and automation despite the ultra low costs and wages in communist economies but which were behind on tech and mostly just produced low quality stuff for the local markets as they were uncompetitive abroad.

Or farming technology. Communist countries often struggled to feed their people, but that wasn't really an issue in the capitalist economies where the west had an abundant amount of calories thanks to the free market supply and demand pushing production and innovation in farming automation.

So despite the communist system being focused on the working class (on paper) and the capitalist system on greed and enriching the shareholders, ultimately the workers under capitalism had it better.

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