this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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No way boss, capitalism pushed hundreds of millions of people into poverty. Prior to capitalism, most people in the world, and for the past 10s of thousands of years, have lived collectively or subsistence farmed, and lived well. When capitalism pushed people away from being able to survive in these systems and dependent on money and wages, poverty emerged.
And they didn't transfer laterally the wealth to Europe - they pushed as many people in Europe into poverty too.
wow, thats harsh. I work for a living
Living conditions for the vast majority of pre-modern people were by all measures terrible. We shouldn't prescribe to pastoralist myths about how people's lives were better simy because they didn't live in a capitalist system.
Subsistence farmers lived under an everpresent threat of starvation, in a way that wage labourers in modern and early modern states do not and did not. They lived largely without literacy, access to education and medicine and these conditions left them especially vulnerable to the influence of religion, unjust social hierarchy and widespread accepted violence.
People often go too far in emphasising how poor life was in those systems. It was obviously worth living for most, and tighter, more insular communities resulted in greater social satisfaction than society under capitalism, but don't pretend that poverty emerged from capitalism and the advent of industrialization. Dealing with poverty and the impoverished was a great concern in the majority of medieval and classical societies, and resource scarcity was a driving factor in many of the great injustices of pre-capitalist history.
Check out this interesting write up here by Dr. Jason Hickel Professor of Economics. He (and the research he mentions in this piece) suggest that this view of pre-capitlist poverty is in fact not true, but based on poorly sourced ideas and amplified by capital to provide capitalist savior propaganda.
Really interesting read, and the papers he mentions are also really great too.
An interesting read thanks. We shouldn't conflate poverty and extreme poverty however. The author makes some very good points, and it's true that capitalism creates extremes of human misery not generally seen elsewhere however their own data shows that nearly all the population would be considered in poverty, if not extreme poverty across all of the periods and areas examined.
That's not their graph that they're showing, that's the one produced by the Gates foundation that they are saying it's wrong.
That's not what I was referring to. Extreme poverty is different to poverty.
Dr Hickel does not seem to be disputing that the majority of people in history lived in poverty, only extreme poverty.
I read it that they were disputing the measurement of poverty itself. Like, if you measure poverty by equivalent purchasing power, that does not take into account actual access to food through community and subsistence.
Check this one out as well: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169
While you're right they still do talk about extreme poverty - I believe they define it much better here as the "inability to access essential goods." Which I think is in line with how they are discussing this $1.90/day regular poverty today, actually.
The way I see it, they're suggesting that the living standards which pre-indstrial people generally enjoyed were factually better than what capitalist propaganda tends to suggest.
Basic access to essential goods is the absolute floor of what a society needs to be able to provide for the majority of it's members to survive.
While I agree that pre-indstrial people did generally enjoy access to basic goods, their standard of living was still very poor, and far worse off than the majority of people even in the exploited global south enjoy today.
I would wonder though, is $1.90/day enough to procure "essential goods" even in the exploited south? As I understand it, the bar for the definition of poverty has also been changed. Is someone making $1.90/day under capitalism better off than someone preindustrial? I would argue that they're not better off. At least pre-capitalism people were able to fend for themselves and with a community (and afford housing, food, and comfort for living). But that's the comparison that I think is being made.