[lbo-talk] pain & development

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Mon Nov 3 05:46:04 PST 2003



>What do you do with the fact that there is increased immiseration in
>the human population as whole ? There are more poor people under
>capitalism now than in Marx's day.

Huh? You mean people lived longer and fewer women died in childbirth 150 years ago? You learn something new every day!

Doug

^^^^^^^

CB: Hasn't the human population doubled in 150 years ? What is the absolute number of poor people today compared with 150 years ago ?

Are you equating longevity with non-poverty ? Yes, lets take all the women who died in childbirth then and call them poor. I bet that number is less than the number of women in poverty today .

Then lets really analyse it. What is poverty/immiseration ? There are plenty of people who have more today , but they are poor; because poverty is a relationship between what you have and what is the norm to have, not an absolute amount of goods.

Otherwise, Marx's statement was non-sense when he made it. I mean the workers under capitalism weren't "poorer" than the peasants around the world at the time, were they ? So, capitalism has never done much immiserating at all, right ?



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