>>> James Baird <jlbaird3 at yahoo.com> 05/01/00 05:50PM >>>
They
> don't include in the category "workers" the billions
> in the Third World who maybe absolutely worse off
> under capitalism than they were under their
> traditional economies.
How? I mean, I'm willing to be proved wrong on this, but It seems to me that, bad as conditions are in the third world today, they are somewhat better than they were before
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CB: First thing you have to establish is "were before" what (?). Capitalism through colonialism, pirating, slavery in the chief momenta to its primitive accumulation, like a vampire sucking its first blood from the whole world, destroyed enormous areas of the traditional economies ( As Marx and Engels said, battered down all Chinese walls). Those traditional economies didn't make as much stuff as capitalism, but capitalism produces as much quality of life destroying stuff (especially its enormous mode and means of destruction) as life enhancing stuff, so it is not at all clear that the lots of "workers", people, in tradtional , untouched-by-European-capitalist Asia, Africa, America, Oceania were not better than their lot in the Third World today. And capitalism is responsible for this likely drop in the lot of people in the Third World from before the horrors done by Europe over the last 500 years.
Perhaps you don't realize that it is not established that the enormous quantity of things produced by capitalism constitutes or creates the best quality of life in the history of humanity. Quality of life is a ratio between wants and fulfillment, not an absolute number of production of stuff . It is an optimum, between the bad and good of experience, between wants/needs and fulfillment of them. Capitalism produces a lot of stuff, but just of much of it lowers the quality of life as raises it.
- or is subsistance agriculture, endemic disease, and locally-based despotism superior to a first world capitalist making a buck?
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CB: Capitalism is responsible for these Third World worsened conditions compared with pre-capitalist conditions. Capitalism has worsened the lot of Third World People compared with their conditions before 500 years ago. There was great abundance in agriculture for thousands of years , not subsistence agriculture in Asia, Africa and America. Even hunting and gatheriing and gardening was done so proficiently , that there were many gardens of eden where there were was not large scale agriculture.
The Europeans in bringing capitalism to the "third world" over the last 500 years brought small pox, syphillus, probably generated AIDS with vaccines or some other monkeying around, fomented malaria in West Africa through introducing an agricultural method that created standing bodies of water nesting mosquitos, and brought many other diseases. "Endemic" diseases have been made pandemic by those crazy capitalists running all over the place willy nilly.
Capitalism rule in its colonies more despotic (not democratic) and fascistic than most traditional polities were and capitalism has hi tech weaponry, CIA scientific torture methods , biological weapons etc. in the machinery of its repressive apparatus. Capitalism has the worse mode of destruction in the history of humanity, and combines it with fascism in ruling its colonies and now neo-colonies in the Third World.
CB