To Wonder if it's the same all over the developed world

[Fightyouforthatpie]

Capitalism (in its form over the last 20 years or so) seems to have really shafted us ordinary people - lack of real wage growth, increases in pretty much all costs, destruction of public services.

I've never voted Tory and I do hold them largely responsible, but the overton window seems to have moved very far to right since my youth, so that Labour are very much just Tory lite.

The USA appears very similar in many ways, globalisation has exported a lot of manufacturing jobs like here, wage suppression, wealth inequality, massive acceleration in wealth of the vey richest.

This led me to wonder if there are countries where ordinary workers aren't being shafted, or whether the rich and powerful have been able to enforce this everywhere?

It's the same all over the whole world. In what we would call the developing world, people are being shafted to make in richer countries richer.

There are pockets of places that have pushed back - look at the history of Kerala in Southern India.

But there aren't many places - except for very remote and isolated communities - that haven't been radically changed by capitalism in its present form. The trick is that when you are inside it and being exploited by it, it's so very hard to see how the system all fits together - also when you are working your ass off just to survive, you don't have much time and energy to contemplate these things, which is how people stay stuck and don't complain.

Well how much of the developing world is being paid very little to give us the things that make our life better?

Globalism. Developed countries and developing counties are in a free market. So cheaper places 'win' more business. Fundamentally the developed world has costs that are too high compared to cheaper countries so we are going through a period of levelling up of earning across the world. The decline in developed countries' power is real.

Add in too that some contrives are more ruthless (don't care about the environment, worker rights etc) so they have an advantage in the race to the bottom.

The layer over the top is the rich who invest in property assets so the poorer get shafted as renters.

Fun isn't it? Not sure what the end game will be. When it gets too bad there will be a revolution.

Yeah, it's not a coincidence that Kerala has a much higher rate of literacy and a much lower rate of poverty than most other Indian states is it!

I think pretty much everywhere is affected to some extent or other. You get countries with relatively strong, socialist governments (or those with a long history of socialist governments), such as the Nordic countries or France, that have managed to push for a fairer deal for their people, but capital is so fucking manipulative. Money begets money, and they have ploughed so much into finding out and deploying methods to sway the opinions of the electorate in parliamentary democracies.

For example, if you ask people on Mumsnet threads about cars WHY they feel they need a massive SUV, WHY they don't want an electric car, WHY they don't take public transport more, they will come out with a stack of spurious reasons that don't bear scrutiny.

Of course, it's nothing to do with the fact that SUVs are heavily marketed in a variety of clever ways because car manufacturers get more of a mark up on them, the fossil fuel industry spends billions on lobbyists, getting in with billionaire media moguls who order their journalists in the right wing press to write influential opinion pieces about how shit electric vehicles are using heavily cherry picked data, and lobbyists from both industries have been and still are heavily influencing governments to pour money into roads rather than public transport infrastructure, ensuring that it remains crap and that individual vehicles remain an attractive option.

Oh no no no, it's all their individual choice. Not influenced by anything in the slightest 😡

Apologies for the rant.

The thing is, I don't think it's capitalism or communism that are the problem, I think it's the fact that both systems leave countries open to different forms of corruption and mass manipulation. When you have a free market with marketing, that marketing can manipulate people in very disturbing ways. When you have a communist market with only one or two state-controlled news outlets where people get their information, that is also prone to manipulating people in very disturbing ways. Corruption amongst people in political office is also a global issue that makes politicians easy to manipulate and position and means they frequently act in the best interests of corporations or lobby groups (or they act in the best interests of other more powerful governments who are in turn acting on behalf of corporations or lobby groups) rather than the people they're meant to represent.

Capitalism and communism are effectively another form of marketing and manipulation, because a reasonable amount of people mentally hitch themselves to one "side" and become polarised (it becomes their whole identity, hence the culture wars), stopping them from actually taking a step back and seeing that the corrupt self-serving behaviour is the problem more than the political leanings.

We need to stop fighting each other and blaming successive governments for problems they neither caused nor solved and start scrutinising where the money is flowing and demanding transparency and accountability about the decisions being made by all sides in this shitshow.

This! The developing world is even more unequal, and working for pennies to make stuff for the developed world. Just look at how climate change is playing out. Those who have tiny carbon footprints will drown, while Leo DiCaprio ponces around in his jet.

There is a quote that I feel applies in discussions like this :

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy".

SerendipityJane but history would suggest that dictatorships and absolute monarchies are also subject to falling. (Especially the former)

History is cyclical. Look at the great civilisations that have failed. I wonder if we are at the end of the democratic capitalist era.

pinguins there are other things than capitalism or communism though. It's not either or.

Indeed and I certainly wasn't advocating for communism on say, the North Korean, or even Chinese model.

Of course constant growth isn’t a sustainable model when we have finite resources. There are places with basic income, there are places where residents feel happy, often based around community and spiritual values and there are places such as Bhutan that have shunned Capitalism.

I have to question how happy those living naturally in the Amazonian rainforest are. We were told that having more of everything would make us happier.

Which it hasn’t in a real way. But now, too much money and infrastructure is incested to be able to change easily.

Invested not incested argh

Things have been going wrong since the banking crash in 2008. Bailing out the banks and the massive QE following it was not capitalism, but the opposite. That and the Covid lockdowns has led to the present situation. It is often said that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than anything else and it is true, ordinary people are richer now than at any time in history. However, power has corrupted those at the top (this happens on an even worse scale under Communism).

I read it as describing a circle.

I've heard this trotted out a lot with the implication that lockdowns and bank rescues were somehow a leftist enterprise.
These things were done to protect societies and civilisations as we know them - without the bank rescues there would have been widespread destitution amongst people who had no role in their own downfall and who would presumably need to resort to desperate measures for survival - even right wing governments could see that would be a bad route to take.

No I wasn't saying bailouts were leftist just not capitalist. I don't know what would have happened without them, just that they created moral hazard where the banks could carry on before as knew they'd be rescued. In US those responsible were prosecuted but here just got away with it. And the amount of QE has definitely led to inflation as have lockdowns and spending 0.5 trillion to pay people to stay at home which many said at the time. Many are questioning lockdowns now - we have never done before despite having many much worse pandemics. As usual those at the bottom with few assets will suffer the most.

And the reason we had lockdowns was to preserve a functioning society in the face of an unknown threat. It's really easy to say we overreacted with the benefit of hindsight. The breakdown of our health and food networks because we didn't lock down would have been very serious, so we did it to ensure we could function. Most countries did lock down, a few didn't, with varying results.

It's actually worse in the developing world. The developed world exists for this very reason.

No not with benefit of hindsight, I didn't agree with them at the time. Food networks didn't breakdown because the plebs carried on as usual including in shops and deliveries. It was the laptop classes who were paid to sit at home (including my husband who ironically worked for a supermarket in a middle class occupation) and that's why they were so keen on it. And has contributed largely to the situation we're in now.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jun/30/uk-super-rich-beware-pitchforks-torches-unless-they-do-more