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?

@bgmama you do realise that communism is dictatorial by nature right? It doesn’t matter how much free speech you have when the government tells you how much food you can have, where you can live, how many pairs of boots you can afford, what kind of furniture you can buy etc. The whole point of communism is to remove proprietary rights from individuals without which individuals can’t be free because they don’t have the means to act on their decisions or the ability to acquire those means.

Capitalism is indeed shit for people who are not keen on getting education and working hard to get more money and improve their lifestyle.
However generally speaking UK caters quite well for people who haven't had a chance/didn't want to participate in a rat race to get more money.. Universal credit top ups, benefits etc. Wouldn't give a luxurious lifestyle but they are not going to starve to death

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.

Blame BooHoo all you want but this is ultimately consumer driven. Supply follows demand in economics. So long as there are consumers who prefer to pay £1 for a T-shirt, and other ridiculously cheap prices for clothes, companies will break laws and use slave labour to supply this cheap, fast fashion. Yes, some consumers are ignorant that even the cloth for a T-shirt costs more than £1 much less the time to sew it on a sewing machine. But most consumers DO know that the items they are buying at these low prices could not possibly have been made without some serious exploitation or slavery involved. Just like people in the 1730s thrilled that sugar is cheap for their tea, todays people are benefitting from and complicit in modern slavery by not boycotting companies that sell products at too cheap prices.

@firstmentat

It would be really good if you started an AMA about that and linked it here. I don't feel mature enough for that, to be honest. I tried arguing with people based on my own experiences before, and I got back statements like "well, poverty in the UK is the worst in the world now, so what do you know" and once a bollocking from a person with a similar origin who alleged that I am lying because she had servants and foreign holidays as a child, so the iron curtain must be a work of fiction (of course, it had later it transpired that her father was a very high ranking diplomat).

Plenty of people have been blind to the awfulness of communism. In the 1930s various bien pensant writers and intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Beatrice and Sidney Webb etc were taken on a tour of Russia and came back eulogising about the incredible success of the regime. Meanwhile in the real world millions were starving or being liquidated by Stalin and his apparatchiks.

The problem with capitalism is exactly the same as the problem with socialism or communism: people.

People can't run any system fairly because it is human nature to want a better situation for yourself. More for yourself means less for others, means fucking other people over. Humans can't be truly selfless. People who give to charity, for example, are doing it more to feel good about themselves rather than to actually help. (If they were truly selfless about it, they would give everything away and live a pauper's life, because it would be for the greater good.)

@HRH2020 - You hit the nail on the head. The talk is always about "socialist eat little children", never about capitalism is really good for the rich...

i agree with you OP. is also so amazing, as you have seen that one cannot criticize capitalism, without immediatly becoming a communist-lover! Sweden is supposedly socialist....not that I care aboiut the labels. They are not eating the animals in the zoo... they do tax everyone, particularly top earners.

Also, its great that more people are becoming billionaires as nearly half that goes back into OUR system to pay for things like NHS and the benefits money people so heavily rely on. no one thinks about that, they just get jealous because they arent making more. The thing is under capitalism they have the opportunity to make as much as they want, skys the limit.

What worries me the most is relying on market forces to fix climate change and ecological disaster... But the time market forces kick in, we're already locked in...

Capitalism is not perfect and leads to unequal wealth whereas socialism leads to mass poverty. For those who long for socialism feel free to move to a socialist country....thought not. Refugees and migrants flee to capitalist countries, there is no flow in the opposite direction. Why?

This.

@Indecisivelurcher Agreed. Climate change is one heck of a market failure.

[quote Lua]@HRH2020 - You hit the nail on the head. The talk is always about "socialist eat little children", never about capitalism is really good for the rich...

i agree with you OP. is also so amazing, as you have seen that one cannot criticize capitalism, without immediatly becoming a communist-lover! Sweden is supposedly socialist....not that I care aboiut the labels. They are not eating the animals in the zoo... they do tax everyone, particularly top earners.[/quote]
Do you know why that is?

Its because things go so bad under socialism in the USSR that the government had to begin putting the equivalent of bus stop advertisements everywhere basically urging people that no matter how bad it got that they should NEVER EAT THEIR OWN CHILDREN!

PEOPLE WERE ACTUALLY DOING THAT! Does that not tell you something?

@malificent7

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.

You obviously don’t know what capitalism is.

You are just conflating issues that exist all over the world, in socialist countries as well as capitalist ones, with your perceived view of what capitalism is meant to be.

@Indecisivelurcher

What worries me the most is relying on market forces to fix climate change and ecological disaster... But the time market forces kick in, we're already locked in...

Were already locked in anyway. Whatever climate change is going to happen will. Emissions are rising and by all predictions will continue to rise. Its not something that we can have a major effect on.

Sweden is not socialist 🤦‍♀️. It’s wealth comes from privately owned enterprise many of which cause a lot of environmental problems.

Sweden spends a lot on welfare and health. It’s a high taxation nation but it is very wealthy. The wealth comes from capitalism

@contrmary

The problem with capitalism is exactly the same as the problem with socialism or communism: people.

People can't run any system fairly because it is human nature to want a better situation for yourself. More for yourself means less for others, means fucking other people over. Humans can't be truly selfless. People who give to charity, for example, are doing it more to feel good about themselves rather than to actually help. (If they were truly selfless about it, they would give everything away and live a pauper's life, because it would be for the greater good.)

I don’t think your last point is logical. How would they know it would really be for the greater good to give everything away and live like a pauper? They’d be adding one more pauper to the system. The money they give away might be squandered or mismanaged. Their own children might develop poverty-related issues they needn’t have experienced.

@daisydukes7576

Yes but we are all helping the cyclw continue. Do you check where your clothes are made? Will you stop buying from primary, Bohol or all the other companies that use capitalism to make profits? If not, then stop complaining.

I personally do not shop in those places due to this very reason but instead of complaining I wish people would put their money where their mouth is and stop buying the shite.

If you don't buy it then fair enough and YANBU

How are you managing to post exactly. Bit hypocritical to be using a device from one of the largest most calitalist companies to ever have been created lol.

@Hopeforall
I am probably overreacting to threads like that because my ex-MIL (British) is exceptionally left wing and constantly campaigning for the communist rule over Britain, trying to gaslight me into how great had Soviet Union been (she's been on a fancy trip to Moscow in the 90s, she certainly knows!). On the other hand, she is very comfortably well-off through the means I as a foreigner cannot quite fully understand, but she insists she lives on very little, as a true communist. Apart from her horses, who must cost a couple grand to run, but that's animal welfare, not capitalist greed. And the mansion house, but that's cultural heritage of the people and anyway her trust pays for it. And her children went to expensive boarding schools, but that's because she had literally no other option as she had to concentrate on her studies for the betterment of the society. Was quite a unique experience for me. On the other hand, she is clearly very well educated and usually a pleasure to debate with - she can maintain a very decent conversation about literally anything in the world, but the evils of capitalism is a massive trigger point for some reason

YABVU. Capitalism isn't perfect, no. People are imperfect, so no economic system will ever be perfect, either, but I'll take capitalism over socialism or communism any day.

The issue here isn’t capitalism.

The issue is crime. The criminals became so big and powerful that nobody in Leicester challenged them paying workers below min wage or being forced to work through lockdown.

And now, hopefully all the customers are on social media and ought to understand that by buying this stuff, they are fuelling crime. Mind, people don’t understand that fact relating to the illegal drug industry so I imagine many will continue to buy this clothing anyway.

I dont think it's entirely fair to put the blame back at the consumer. Paying workers £3 or £4.50 an hour is blatantly illegal and below the minimum wage.
And the argument that there is consumer demand for too-cheap clothes is in a way cyclical because if Primark or boohoo didnt exist or offer the consumer unreasonably priced clothes, they physically couldnt buy them for 50p or £1.
While obviously there is culture of throwaway or fast fashion for some people (which I dont agree with) a lot will be buying at low prices because that is what their budgets dictate. Rents go up, council tax increases by 3-4% per year (our wages don't) food prices go up, people look to make savings where they can.
My teenage DD needed new clothes this summer, I am furloughed , I cant afford to spend £100s on clothes she will wear for a couple of months. (Although she does buy off second hand/vintage sites too)

@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.

Agreed. My friend grew up in east Germany, another in the USSR. Gosh, the fun tales they tell of their idyllic childhoods. Shootings, beatings, rapes, starvation, grinding poverty. Idyllic, I tell you.

There must be somewhere in the middle, surely?

Capitalism and communism aren't the only possibilities.

[quote Loveinatimeofcovid]@bgmama you do realise that communism is dictatorial by nature right? It doesn’t matter how much free speech you have when the government tells you how much food you can have, where you can live, how many pairs of boots you can afford, what kind of furniture you can buy etc. The whole point of communism is to remove proprietary rights from individuals without which individuals can’t be free because they don’t have the means to act on their decisions or the ability to acquire those means.[/quote]
This isn’t what communism is anymore than the some of the definitions of capitalism that are being thrown around.

Well the business owner may well be taking risks ( often with their large wedge of capital) but how much actual hard graft are they doing really?

Well capitalism thrives on consumerism...so often things are not built to last so that we have to buy more shite.