Say no to authoritarianism, say yes to socialism. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 Everyone deserves Human Rights

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  • 98 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: August 18th, 2023
  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Thoughts on Liam O'Hanna being charged with terrorism offences for brandishing a Hezbollah flag?
    2·
    2 months ago

    You might find this interesting as it goes into the hypocrisy of the situation.

    You’ll probably be better off asking this sort of question in one of the Palestine comms, where you have a more nuanced discussion about how Hezbollah was created, their militant actions against Zionism, part of the Lebanese Parliament, and what the flag can mean to different groups; instead of the thought terminating cliché of ‘they are considered a terrorist organization by the government and therefore any support of them in supporting terrorism.’ Despite the unconditional support these governments have for Israel, who by any definition of terrorism has done far far more magnitudes of such than any resistance organization created as a by product of the violent settler colonialism of Zionism. Plus, western governments have historically brandished any resistance against colonialism as terrorists, including the IRA, Vietcong, FLN, ANC (Nelson Mandala), and many more.

    Hezbollah’s actions in Syria are definitely unacceptable, their actions against Israel is another matter entirely

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    8·
    2 months ago

    ScienceDirect is ‘an independent socialist magazine’? Lmao, that’s hilarious. That’s where those latest quotes were from. Monthly Review publishes articles from many credited economists, sociologists, and historians. You’re reactionary (lack of) understanding of what socialism is doesn’t change that reality. You’re responses make you seem incapable of reading more than a single sentence, missing the rest of the entire paragraph, let alone paper.

    Dylan Sullivan is an Adjunct Fellow and PhD candidate in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Macquarie University, where he teaches politics, sociology, and anthropology.

    Jason Hickel is an author and Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science & Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is also a Visiting Professor at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Rodney Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.

    Richard Wolff, another economist, explains socialism in a very clear and comprehensive way. If you’re not intellectually curious enough to entertain Richard Wolff, I’m done responding. On the other hand, I’m happy to engage with someone interested in learning and discussion.

    Economic Update: 3 Basic Kinds of Socialism

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    8·
    2 months ago

    Given these issues, it is clear that the standard public narrative about the history of extreme poverty needs reassessment. In this paper we assess this narrative against three indicators of welfare (real wages, human height, and mortality) for five world regions (Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and China) from roughly the 16th century onward. These datasets point to three conclusions:

    First, it is unlikely that 90% of the global population lived in extreme poverty prior to the rise of capitalism. Historically, unskilled urban labourers in all regions tended to have wages high enough to support a family of four above the poverty line by working 250 days or 12 months a year. Extreme poverty seems to arise predominantly in periods of severe social and economic distress, like famines, wars and institutionalized dispossession, particularly under colonialism. Rather than being the natural condition of humanity, extreme poverty is a symptom of social dislocation and displacement. It is important to emphasize that the data here focuses on extreme poverty, as it is defined in the relevant literature, not the higher consumption thresholds that are required to achieve “decent living” today (e.g., Edward, 2006, Kikstra et al., 2021).

    The second conclusion is that the rise of capitalism coincided with a deterioration in human welfare. In every region studied here, incorporation into the capitalist world-system was associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and a marked upturn in premature mortality. In parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia, key welfare metrics have still not recovered.

    Our third conclusion is that in those regions where progress has occurred (as opposed to recovery from an earlier period of immiseration), it began much later than the Ravallion/Pinker graph suggests. In the core regions of Northwest Europe, welfare standards began to improve in the 1880s, four centuries after the emergence of capitalism. In the periphery and semi-periphery, progress began in the mid-20th century. Further research is needed to establish the causal drivers of these improvements, but existing data indicates that progress was achieved with the rise of organized labour, the anti-colonial movement, and other progressive social movements, which organized production around meeting human needs, redistributed wealth, and invested in public provisioning systems

  • Keeponstalin@lemmy.worldtoLemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world•History Channel
    14·
    2 months ago

    If one starts from the assumption that extreme poverty is the natural state of humanity, then it may appear as good news that only a fraction of the global population lives in extreme poverty today. However, if extreme poverty is a sign of severe social dislocation, relatively rare under normal conditions, then it should concern us that - despite many instances of progress since the middle of the 20th century - such dislocation remains so prevalent under contemporary capitalism. Depending on the subsistence basket one uses to measure poverty, as of 2008, between 200 million and 1.21 billion people live in extreme poverty (Moatsos, 2017, Moatsos, 2021; see also our discussion in Appendix VI).18 While direct comparisons with the wage data are difficult because of the variety of baskets used, this suggests that under contemporary capitalism hundreds of millions of people currently live in conditions comparable to Europe during the Black Death (Figure 4, Figure 5), the catastrophes induced by the American genocides (Figure 7) and the slave trade (Figure 9), or famine-ravaged British India (Figure 11). To the extent there has been progress against extreme poverty in recent decades, it has generally been slow and shallow.

    Conclusions

    In sum, the narrative that the rise of capitalism drove progress against extreme poverty is not supported by empirical evidence. On the contrary, the rise of capitalism was associated with a notable decline in human welfare, a trend that was only reversed around the twentieth century, when radical and progressive social movements sought to gain some control over production and organize it more around meeting human needs.

    As for the condition of extreme poverty, it cannot legitimately be used as a benchmark for measuring progress. Extreme poverty is not a natural condition, but an effect of dispossession, enclosure, and exploitation. It need not exist anywhere, and certainly should not exist in any just and humane society. It can and must be abolished immediately.

    If our goal is to achieve substantive improvements in human welfare, progress should be measured against decent living standards and access to modern amenities. Capitalism currently shows no signs of ever meeting this objective, and imperialist dynamics in the world economy seem actively to prevent it.

    As we have seen, the historical record is clear that public planning and socialist policy can be effective at delivering rapid economic, technological, and social development. Rediscovering the power of this approach will be essential if Global South governments are to increase their economic sovereignty and mobilize production to ensure decent lives for all.48 Achieving this objective requires building political movements of the Southern working classes and peasantries powerful enough to replace governments that currently are captured by political factions aligned with national or international capital; reducing reliance on core creditors, currencies, and imports; and establishing South-South alliances capable of withstanding any retaliation. Progressive formations in the core should be prepared to support and defend these movements.