To think that capitalism is shit?

[malificent7]

Just reading about the clothing sweat shops in Leister where sewing machinists are paid as little as 4.50 an hour and packers £3 an hour. Meanwhile the owner of Boohoo is a billionaire. Plus fast fashion is highly polluting.
This is just one industry. How come so many of us are willing to work for rich capitaliats while we scrape by?
Capitalism is shit isn't it?

And it is destroying the planet.

Capitalists...typos

This may show my naivety but I don't understand why it's taken a journo to uncover this. Why has this not been reported by someone before now?

Boohoo allege they didn't know, why don't they have a team checking this?

Next, as a comparison, has a huge team of people designed to check for exactly these scenarios. They go worldwide checking standards in factories. Why didn't Boohoo know?

I feel terrible for any of the workers who thought this was their only choice.

Capitalism is disgusting.

DH has just joined the Communist party, and part of his "initiation" was to read a text called Britain's Road to Socialism. I read it too, and it's such a hopeful breath of fresh air.

We COULD be a socialist country. We almost have been in the past.

@malificent7

Just reading about the clothing sweat shops in Leister where sewing machinists are paid as little as 4.50 an hour and packers £3 an hour. Meanwhile the owner of Boohoo is a billionaire. Plus fast fashion is highly polluting. This is just one industry. How come so many of us are willing to work for rich capitaliats while we scrape by? Capitalism is shit isn't it?

Capitalism doesn't require machinists to be paid £3 an hour, that's just greed. Even Karl Marx said capitalism had done a lot of good, but I think we do need to prepare for an alternative, especially with the rise in automation/internet.

I guess the task is to adapt socialism or the better bits of socialism to the 21st century.

I feel kind of duped growing up in a society that promotes mass consumption and consumerism as if there is no alternative. The alternative just doesn't work for the 1 per cent richest.

Too much of anything is really bad. Too much socialism, too much capitalism, too much liberalism etc etc.

You need a mix of capitalism and socialism. Capitalism ate itself a long time ago.

Companies have grown bigger and more powerful than governments. I still haven't seen any better option
We need a much more managed capitalism with state involvement in more areas but not a wholesale takeover by the state

Nothing to do with customers not wanting to pay proper prices, eh.

Newsflash. If people want dresses for a fiver, obviously the worker's conditions will be shit. Same with a chicken sandwich for a pound 🤷🏻

Customers are in fault in here too.

I wish I could invite all the misty-eyed wannabe communists to my childhood, which actually WAS spent in a communist country. Not a manifesto-communist, a real-life-communist one.

Also it's the lack of regulation that destroyed capitalism. The deregulation that started in the 80s that allowed mega corporations and mergers to create all these billionaires and greed is good.

Human nature will destroy any political movement. We've seen it with socialism and communism where it's been tried and we've seen it with capitalism in the last 30 years.

You're best having a mix. Or a term or two of a more socialist government followed by a term or two of a big capitalist one. We used to have this (Atlee considered one of the greatest PM's and created the NHS) but this changed with New Labour where Thatcherism was embraced.

Capitalism works if people aren’t greedy, pay all their taxes, give to charity and don’t take advantage of the system etc. Socialism works when people work to the best of their abilities and don’t take advantage of that system.
Unfortunately we live in a society where some people are happy to take advantage of whatever system they can and leave others to suffer.

I used to think Capitalism was shit until I lived in a Communist country. Give me Capitalism any day.

I don't believe for a second that boohoo didn't know.

Schrödinger has nailed it. People want to pay next to nothing. If someone isn't willing to pay the actual cost, they're part of the problem.

I would also like to point out that this is not by far the first time this exact headlines have been going on about boohoo.

Only difference is that this thing now affected good old not the poorest and british folk...

@VivienScott

Capitalism works if people aren’t greedy, pay all their taxes, give to charity and don’t take advantage of the system etc. Socialism works when people work to the best of their abilities and don’t take advantage of that system. Unfortunately we live in a society where some people are happy to take advantage of whatever system they can and leave others to suffer.

Which is why you need the right mix of the two.

Pure capitalism doesn't work for the same reason pure socialism or communism doesn't. Human nature.

This has been raised before, the council is controlled by people related to the people who run the sweat shops. Some people don’t want to upset them, exactly the same as grooming gangs issue, where a Labour MP said the abused girls should shut up for the good of community relations.

OP how do you make the leap from one business breaking to law to capitalism is shit? Do have an axe to grind? Do you know or understand what the alternative - socialism does to people, forces them eat zoo animals out of hunger. Extreme example, I know.
Too many people consume too much social media ranting from extreme left to attribute everything that goes wrong to capitalism - businesses breaking the law, individuals breaking the law, the cat getting the flu and so on. It is capitalism that has lifted billions out of poverty in the last 100 years, it is capitalism that creates the environment for free speech. It is capitalism that allows itself to be criticised by those who make a living from it. Unlike the alternative.
By the way it is also capitalism that punishes bad behaviour as you saw all those businesses yesterday pulling the clothing ranges produced by a certain business from their websites.

@corlan

I used to think Capitalism was shit until I lived in a Communist country. Give me Capitalism any day.

This is exactly the point that trendy neo socialists miss. They bite the hand that feeds them despite their limited talents and would not survive a day under socialism.

Boohoo allege they didn't know, why don't they have a team checking this?

I would be very surprised if they didn't know, and if they genuinely didn't, their due diligence is no way near satisfactory enough. Even for contracts where we know exactly where the work will be done and the conditions, we include checks as standard. The options other than capatalism aren't appealing either, but there should be more stringent laws etc that actually get checked.

@firstmentat

I wish I could invite all the misty-eyed wannabe communists to my childhood, which actually WAS spent in a communist country. Not a manifesto-communist, a real-life-communist one.

It would be really good if you started an AMA about that and linked it here.

As an aside, alot of people who are outraged have stayed they will now be buying from x, y or z company, which fairly openly uses labour in other countries in similar conditions and lower relative pay. It is shocking that this was allowed to happen over here, but sadly a lot of people aren't arsed about it happening elsewhere as long as we can get some cheap tat.

I never said that socialism was the answer...i just said that capitalism is shit!
I am made the point about Boohoo as it is a capitalist business model. 1% of the population own the wealth whilst 99% of workers work for rich capitalist as wage slaves ( hopefully on more than 3£ an hour.)
Plus it is wasteful.
Take plastic bottles and other throwaway items. The capitalist driving this economy relies on plastic bottles to have a short life span so that people buy more plastic bottles etc.
Communism sounds shite too tbh but a happy medium would be good.

@annabel85

Also it's the lack of regulation that destroyed capitalism. The deregulation that started in the 80s that allowed mega corporations and mergers to create all these billionaires and greed is good.

Human nature will destroy any political movement. We've seen it with socialism and communism where it's been tried and we've seen it with capitalism in the last 30 years.

You're best having a mix. Or a term or two of a more socialist government followed by a term or two of a big capitalist one. We used to have this (Atlee considered one of the greatest PM's and created the NHS) but this changed with New Labour where Thatcherism was embraced.

^This. New Labour's adoption of Thatcherite policies was a disaster - as a nation we have lurched to the right since the war, and we seem to have accepted the total destruction of the power of almost all ordinary workers to shape their workplaces and the economy.

When Labour tried a leadership that embraced more socially responsible policies, the (small c and large C) forces of conservatism rallied to destroy any hope of us getting a socially progressive government.

Actually, the ideologically driven destruction of public jobs and services by successive Tory governments has made us all (except the super rich) poorer. Imagine if we had enough Police to deal with all the awful driving we see every day. Imagine we had enough HMRC staff to properly deal with the evaders and all the legitimate enquiries from ordinary people. Imagine if we could recruit and train enough people to fill the vacancies in the NHS. But no - we have to pander to the ideology of millionaires.