I’m the chimney sweep now!
While there were indeed child chimney sweeps, this particular image isn’t from the 1800s, nor is it an actual child chimney sweep.
That’s a great bit of research. What an awesome website.
Interesting and informative site. Thanks
But we already got rid of child chimney sweepers without getting rid of capitalism
The point is that capitalism prioritizes profit, not the welfare of people. This is only not done anymore because of regulation, not because capitalism was fixed. It can’t be fixed. The target goal of capitalism is wrong. Profit does not optimize for innovation, welfare, happiness, or anything else that could be called good. It will always exploit people as much as it can, and it just happens to not exploit children (in the western world (legally)) because we made it not allowed, and disobeying that law would be less profitable.
Seems like regulations are the fix.
Capitalism is unsustainable by design, there is no fix to that
shouldn’t we come up with a system where the core values don’t need regulation. it becomes unthinkable to exploit children not because of regulation and enforcement but because the system in itself denies power to exploiters.
Is there any system besides capitalism with regulations we have in developed countries without child labor? Child labor existed in the Soviet Union and in communist China. Historically the idea that children should not perform labor is very recent.
Are there any developed countries that have moved beyond Capitalism yet? Are you genuinely attributing Capitalism to removing child labor, instead of the workers that organized and fought against it? That’s like giving the US government credit for the Civil Rights movement.
Is your claim that there will be some future utopia without capitalism and without child labor? Sure, that’s something to dream about.
If humanity has failed to move beyond Capitalism and child labor, then humanity lost to the climate crisis or nuked itself to death. The idea that Capitalism is sustainable is Utopian and foolish.
you stated that capitalism is human nature and based on reality. none of those statements are true. my job here is done.
I said no such thing! That’s a ludicrous statement.
i support direct democracy. i think the economical system should be maintained by democracies sustained by a lot more direct democracy processes. even if that economic system is capitalism it should be restrained by a lot more people voting directly on regulation and less on representation.
i hope i answered your question and i’m sorry for the confusion.
Sure would be nice, but such a system seems to be fundamentally incompatible with human nature and reality.
as if human nature is set in stone but i love the reality argument, as if capitalism is somehow a realistic functioning system. for sure a dreamed up notion of capital is 100% real and not the machinations of generations of trial and error(still on going btw).
Seems to be? On what grounds? Do you think humans have a built-in mystical flaw that turns them evil if they share tools?
Thinking that there could be a system that doesn’t require regulations that have to be enforced is just very naive.
Yes and no. Capitalism requires huge amounts of regulation to not destroy itself, and a system with considerably less regulation could exist if the Workers could represent themselves via ownership.
Profit motive and greed are stronger. https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules
Capitalism is insanely efficient in allocating capital and setting prices – two things incredibly difficult to do otherwise. At the same time it has the problem of protecting the weakest. But that can be tackled by regulation – which has been pretty effective in the EU for example.
What kind of system would you prefer?
Capitalism is moderately efficient in allocating Capital and setting prices for the purpose of generating profits. Capitalism is pretty terrible when it comes to actually improving society, and the EU still sees massive problems.
Worker Ownership of the Means of Production is a better alternative, whether that be along the lines of Anarcho-Syndicalism, Market Socialism, Democratic Socialism, Marxism, Council Communism, or so forth.
the EU still sees massive problems.
I think these sort of things need to be taken in context of the rest of the world. Massive problems, but also, not sure who else is doing better.
According to all data we have, the living standard in democratic, capilistic states is significantly higher than in any other market order. If you consider the social capitalism like in Nordic countries, they easily rank the number 1 in all metrics. Meanwhile communist states like the DDR or UDSSR collapsed after their economy was ruined.
This argument always comes up, and it’s such a bad one when actually considered. The US was the largest world power, right? They also influenced all other western and/or capitalist nations, either through cooperation or threat of cutting them off from the market.
OK, so consider which communist/socialist countries failed. Did they fail in a vacuum? No. They failed with the “democratic” (often less democratic than the opposition, but this was their messaging) nations opposing them. For example, in Guatemala they elected a leftist president who introduced a minimum wage, increased democratic participation in elections, and the next president introduced land reforms to redistribute land to give it to the peasants.
Communism “always fails” because the most powerful nations in the world are afraid of it, so they do everything in their power to ensure it fails. The few that have been able to survive are dictatorships, because they can better withstand pressure from the outside. (This isn’t to say dictatorships are good, just that they’re more stable when attacked.) They also generally had or enforced cultural hegemony, for the same reason. It’s survivorship bias.
We have no idea how well a leftist government would do if not attacked, because it’s always attacked out of fear. If it’s destined to fail, why are they afraid of it succeeding?
Maybe communist countries always fail (UDSSR, DDR) or transition to capitalism (China), not because of outside forces, but because its a flawed system?
It could be, but we can’t know as it is now. Marx said the same for capitalism, and he may still be proven right. He said that capitalism will always lead to communism because it’s a flawed system.
Again, if it’s destined to fail, why have capitalist countries had to put so much effort into destroying them? If they actually believed they were destined to fail, like they like to say in propoganda, then they wouldn’t bother with forcing them to fail.
As an example of a moderate success, Cuba has done pretty well for itself despite being entirely cut off from nearly all outside trade. They have a near 100% literacy rate. compared to the US’s 86%. They also have world class Healthcare, again despite being cut off from the rest of the world.
The US has put so much effort into ensuring Cuba fails, yet it’s still doing better than the US on many of the metrics that actually matter to the average person. How can this be true if communism is so fundamentally flawed?
I’ll break this down sentence by sentence.
-According to all data we have, the living standard in developed countries is higher than in developing countries. Additionally, Capitalism is less democratic than Socialism, as Capitalism is a market of competing mini-dictators, rather than democratically run industry.
-Social Democracies a la the Nordic Countries ruthlessly exploit the third world and see rising disparity as Capitalists erode social safety nets. Mass Unionization slows this process, but Social Democracies serve as a good example of why living standards are higher when Workers have more control, and why Unionization alone isn’t enough, Capitalism itself remains the problem.
-The USSR is not the only form of Socialism, and additionally it collapsed after it liberalized. It wasn’t a Communist state either, as it never achieved Communism, ie it was not a Stateless, Classless, Moneyless society.
All in all, very flawed takes on your part. Attributing quality of life to Capitalism, when it was due to development, is false. Additionally, you falsely assume development only comes from Capitalism, which relies on the absurd logic that believes humans are incapable of developing democratically, and goes against this very website itself.
Capital and price are imaginary. Why are you evaluating a system by random concepts that don’t correspond to anything real?
Maybe use a metric with actual real meaning like fraction of people with basic necessities covered.
And if you consider that metric capitalism with social guidelines implemented – like in Nordic countries – comes out far ahead of any other known market order.
What if we incentivized the kids to work using tokens on their iPad games? They would do the work basically for free and we could use it as a labor cost saving measure. Like the gig economy but now with a whole new section of laborers to choose from.
What if we could store the children in a kind of acid to leech their life force more efficiently with the added benefit of being able to store their potential energy for longer durations 🧐
Now we’re talking.
So… Roblox
Turn kindergartens to bot farms!
Don’t worry give some states a couple of years and I’m sure we’ll see child chimney sweepers come back 😉
Businesses in the Midwest US have already been hiring 10-12 year old undocumented kids to work overnight cleaning machine parts at meatpacking plants. I mean… so many different things wrong with that. The psycho fuckers who run these businesses need some real penalties, like jail time and dissolving their company.
We just got rid of chimney sweeps in general.
Despite us regulating child labor it seems like profit motives and greed overpower regulatory measures.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1157368469/child-labor-violations-increase-states-loosen-rules
What about all the places where it has been made illegal and will remain so?
At one point they probably said it would remain illegal in the places they’re trying to legalize it.
Through labor organization. It wasn’t out of the goodness of the hearts of benevolent Capitalists, but through struggles of Workers. The point of this picture isn’t that Capitalism used to be worse, and fixed itself, but that Capitalists will absolutely take advantage of children and subject them to sacrificing their bodies for clean chimneys if it makes a profit.
The takeaway from this is that Capitalists cannot be seen as individual humans with values, but as cogs in the Capitalist machine that will exploit everything and everyone for profit. An individual Capitalist may not be willing to go that far, but inevitably as long as there is profit to be made, someone will fill that gap.
That’s why economic systems need to be looked at at aggregates and not as individual transactions. You miss the forest for the trees.
Now we only have child miners, child slaughter house workers, child assembly line workers, child scrapyard garbage collectors, …
we just moved child labour to less developed countries. we didn’t get rid of anything. you just don’t see it, but child labour is still going strong in the world. child slavery as well.
No WE did not. The people in those countries where it still happens allowed it to still happen.
None of us have any decisionmaking power to control what those countries do, so the burden to fix those problems is on those countries who allow it.
It’s 100% a consequence of Capitalism, though. You’re blaming developing nations for the willful exploitation international Corporations commit and you personally benefit from.
That’s just your opinion. The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it, and I reject any personal responsibility for any of that because I have no control over the laws of any country.
It is not my opinion that international corporations brutally exploit the third world, it’s a fact. It is also not my opinion that Capitalism leads to this, the profit motive inevitably leads to it.
You claiming that developing nations should just fight against international corporations brutally exploiting them and absolving yourself of any responsibility you have for it is just sticking your head in the sand. If you aren’t boycotting Nestlé, you’re supporting them.
The “good” news is that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism. You individually cannot do much, except protect, organize, and try your best to support less unethical companies whenever you can. However, to blame developing countries for corporations knowingly brutally exploiting them and offering no alternative is absolutely baffling.
The “good” news is that there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism.
Such an absurd thing to say. I’m sure you’ll win lots of hearts and minds with your absolutist take 🙄
What a way to say absolutely nothing.
If Capitalism is inherently exploitative, then there is no perfectly ethical form of it. Therefore, it should be replaced with a better system.
Seriously! I mean, what if we only exploit a little bit of others’ labor? Isn’t that ok?
Are you 14? You don’t seem to understand how global trade works
I’m a bit older than that and have actually studied Macroeconomics at the undergraduate level. Have you?
Because a macroeconomics course is obviously going to be honest about this topic… Are you even serious?
We get it, you’re white… relax
Interesting take to assume developed = white and developing = not white.
I was referring to the rejecting any personal responsibility spiel. lol. I love how far off you were though
Yeah those countries just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and start being productive members of the world.
I know we could help them out so they don’t have to go through all the hard times alone and without the knowledge we have, but fuck em hahahahahaha
But we are sharing knowledge and sending both aid and capital there. A lot of the countries are industrialized to the degree they are with the capital. Nobody acts in a vacuum these days.
We could be doing more for sure but we’re not doing nothing.
That literally has nothing to do with what I was making fun of that guy for. He was arguing we shouldn’t help at all. I was being sarcastic with him.
I agree with what you’ve said
It’s a very complex issue, Western countries do a lot of things to help out less developed nations but we also do selfish things that makes life harder for them - unfortunately this is the reality of humanity, I am fighting my own personal ideological war against capitalism and the greed based system by which we live so I’m not defending it but it also has to be stated that other systems can have these flaws too.
We need a cultural shift to fix these problems, an economic one isn’t enough on its own
The fact is that those developing nations should have child labor laws in place, and proper enforcement of those laws to prevent children from being exploited. The blame belongs squarely on those who allow it.
What a strange take. You’re saying that if I, as a business owner, am fully aware that my production chain relies on slave or child labor in another country, I bear no moral responsibility because “well that country should have stopped it”?
I didn’t say any of that bullshit that you’re trying to imply that I said. Those are your words only.
Comments like yours are a detriment to social media. Don’t try to put words in people’s mouths. That garbage is far too common and you just dumped yours here.
That’s precisely what you said, it’s nobody’s responsibility but that country. I merely pointed out an obvious example where your statement is false. Work on your comprehension skills.
Uh huh, I bet you definitely have bought something that is connected to child labor. Now, STFU, fool.
For the record, if you’re in the U.S., there are plenty of children being exploited right here.
No you can shut the fuck up. You are getting a block shortly after you read this. You know it costs nothing to be polite instead of throwing around insults to people you disagree with.
Don’t be a piece of shit. It’s not that hard.
How dare someone point out things I’m ignorant of and don’t understand as I make ridiculous claims about economic/foreign policy! Ohers have no right to criticize my unfounded, poorly-thought-out statements!!
Seriously though, you’re totally not a fool. Imperialism and colonization are just buzzwords; they don’t actually mean anything, so you have nothing to worry about
yes we do. we demand money and offer that the only way they can make it is by exploitation.
Not sure who the “we” in this situation is, but I’m not demanding anything from them. They’re selling shit and I’m buying. I’m not demanding products from them.
I’m buying
consumers are responsible for what they consume. pay and forget doesn’t work
You said “we demand money”, that’s what I’m replying to. I (nor you in the comment I was replying to) didn’t say anything about responsibility.
we demand money and offer that the only way they can make it is by exploitation.
This is the opposite of outsourcing labor.
lets say america finds the cure for cancer, they only accept dollars. you have to get those dollars. welcome to the global trade.
None of this has anything to do with outsourcing labor other than that you’ll have way more dollars than if you were a subsistence farmer.
outsourcing labor
if americans are using their time to find the cure for cancer someone has to produce food, someone has to mine the copper, someone has to etc… exploitation, the outsourcing of exploitation is a given in a capitalist system. if you are a subsistence farmer no cure for cancer for you in a capitalist system.
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Pretty hard to export child chimney sweeps to other countries
Ah yes and there is no other child labour anywhere in the world at all anymore
I think they’re saying that things can improve even within capitalism. And they have. But child labour still exists.
Sure, things can improve. Unfortunately it doesn’t often go that way.
But we haven’t gotten rid of child labor even in the US
Alright, let’s not pretend that today is somehow just as bad or worse than this when it comes to developed countries, but we still need to make changes.
What’s bad is that even with the preponderance of historical evidence, there are still people who would absolutely return to these practices if the government let them. In many cases they do it anyway.
Child immigrants have been dying in meat plants left and right lol.
While they aren’t as young as this stunted 10 year old, there are absolutely kids crawling through little spaces for family business or shoveling cow shit all over.
We’re already doing it in the US. Republicans are pushing to repeal child labor laws. At the same time, multiple meat suppliers have been found using migrant children (as young as 11 IIRC) in dangerous jobs in their factories. This is at the same time that the greedy fucks are hiking prices on your groceries.
And those are just the known, publicized cases.
This brings up one of the questions I have in regards to capitalism criticism. I understand that child labor is bad I would prefer labor be done safely and with respect. In a capitalist society undereducated and vulnerable people get the short end and often do these jobs. In a communist system dangerous and dirty work still needs to be done. How would labor be allotted that would cause a more egalitarian outcome. Personal example of my family were migrant farm workers. Uncle fucking hated doing field work he saved capital, went to community college, got a good paying job, is now paying my cousins way through cal poly. If the system is set up so that work is done by those who can then realistically he could still be a field hand and my cousin would probably follow him. How does a non capitalist system deter formation and unintentional enforcement of caste systems.
Leftist organization, regardless of Tendency, proposes numerous solutions. Lower working times for dirty jobs, focusing on automating undesirable jobs as quickly as possible, and rotating who does those jobs are all proposed solutions.
I suggest reading leftist theory.
The left is primarily not concerned with the wealth disparity caused by different wages between jobs. What drives inequality, which makes our society less democratic and just, is the private ownership of capital (meaning means of production in this context). It would be totally fair in a socialist society to add bonuses for harder or more dangerous work. What is not compatible is private ownership, not personal ownership of stuff.
You’re on Lemmy. Every ill of the world is caused by capitalism, cars, and any operating system other than Linux. Occasionally they leak out of their echo chambers like this post here. You’re best bet is to block the creator and move on.
Things get a lot more enjoyable here when you block the problematic posters, communities, and instances.
Linux is too unstable to use outside of a virtual machine. Windows 11 is preferable to Linux in many cases.
There are many valid criticisms and potential criticisms of Linux, both as a desktop OS and in general.
Stability is absolutely not one of them.
There are all kinds of weird bugs that happen when I try to run certain Linux distros. There are some that will work fine, mostly, but it’s not stable enough for mainstream desktop use.
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Some might be wondering what the issue is since he probably grew this one from a little thing.
So not unlike the chocolate industry today, to just mention one.
And yes, it’s predominantly owned/funded by western corporations.
Haha, nice try, but Wonka had too many work precautions & safety measures, his chocolate contained barely any children …
Ha, then explain that to me:
Misleading product advertising, testing showed it was mostly (non kinder) Oompa-Loompa meat, it was a whole thing, they settled out of court.
At the time Wonka blamed it on management board, fired them, & replaced them with random ppl chosen by chocolate-raffle method, but later some emails surfaced that showed managers basically had no choice in the matter.
All he needs to do for good public relations is a lame contest with, let’s say, a golden ticket to his factory and nobody asks questions about missing children or Oompa-Loompas anymore.
What if there is accidentally more than one gold ticket? Battle royale, last customer alive wins?
The good old days.
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“Look At Me. I’m The Captain Now.” is a quote from the 2013 movie Captain Phillips, in which an American cargo ship is hijacked by Somali pirates.
Capitalism is idolatry.
This is a perfect meme because Marxists still believe it’s the 19th century
Just go anywhere in the third world and you’ll see worse than this everywhere. That’s also where all your consumer products come from btw
All the more reason to give them better paying jobs and enable them to build strong institutions.
Capitalism bad, as evidenced by a photo from a couple centuries ago…
Do you think Capitalists fixed this, or do you understand that child labor was stopped by Worker struggles?
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Repealing child labor laws is a mainstream conservative position in the US.
Numerous, and yes. The US is re-introducing it in many Republican states, as a quick example, and Nestlé is in a lawsuit for employing child laborers in the Ivory Coast, also Capitalist. It’s unfortunately far too common in developing countries for international corporations to take advantage of them and exploit them mercilessly.
The US does.
I’m more interested how people in USSR had their chimneys cleaned.
ok Advocatus Diaboli, what are some good things capitalism has done?
It’s important to remember that even under a Marxist reading of history that capitalism was good/progressive for its time and that it was an essential stage of human development. Iirc he wrote specifically how it had a much better ability to unleash productive forces than feudalism and also allowed for more freedom than feudalism.
This isn’t to say it doesn’t have contradictions and drawbacks, of course, or even that it shouldn’t be replaced currently. It’s just to say that hostile responses like “what are some good things capitalism has done?” are ahistorical/unproductive even under a Marxist lense.
Thanks for the tempered reason. It is sorely lacking in online spaces.
isn’t that subject to the same criticism in the post I replied to, that a snapshot of something from history being a net benefit is not a justification of its current worth?
That’s exactly what I’m saying though. In my humble opinion it has greatly outlived its worth, but the fact it had worth in the first place means statements like “what good has it ever done” are wrong, because even under a critical lense where it’s no longer needed, it has done good in the past.
its not “wrong” to ask a question polemically — I was expecting an answer like “made iPhones” and I could respond with how the expansion of technology has always been firstly a socialistic act, followed by captialism enshittifying it, from running water indoors to the steam engine to pharmaceuticals to electricity to the internet and infact patent expiration is usually tied to an explosion in technological innovation.
That’s fair. It just never helps to be hyperbolic around the pedantic assholes that capitalist apologists can be. There are certainly good things that came from capitalism, and if a Marxist can see that, then the apologist certainly can too, and that’ll just make them feel as if they can write off whatever you say.
It’s true, I did write off what he said!
I very smart I incapable of seeing the good shit that we have improved and instead of using it as a sign we can keep improving I use it as a? Whatever tf that is
We can absolutely keep improving! Labor organization fixed this problem, maybe it can fix a lot more? We should explore that possibility!
Are you under the mistaken assumption that Capitalism got rid of chimney sweeps?
Are you under the mistaken impressions that Labor isn’t part of capitalism? Seems odd to claim these problems “can’t” be solved under capitalism when they literally were. Chimney sweeps didn’t end because we overthrew the means of production…
Chimney sweeps ended because of violent worker organizing and striking. It wasn’t because Capitalists felt bad. Unions and threat of mass worker revolutions have won every concession Capitalists have given.
Unions and strikes exist under capitalism, it’s dishonest to claim they are separate. Nobody implied “capitalists” are somehow noble or generous.
They exist in opposition to the forces of Capitalism. That’s like giving the US government credit for the Civil Rights Movement, completely absurd. It was Capitalism that created child chimney sweeps, and the blood, sweat, and tears of Workers fighting against the Capitalists that ended them.
Well they exist in the system that we have today, so what your statement implies is that our system has already have moved beyond capitalism. Yay us!
No, that’s not what I said. Again, you’re giving credit for the Civil Rights Movement to the US government.
If a Movement goes against the system itself, you can’t credit the system for conceding as though it was the origin of the Movement.
Wow, ok let’s see capitalism has it’s advantages and disadvantages. Disadvantages that can be solved by social movements. But the way you interpreted what I said is mind blowing.
You might be able to read but does that mean you understood what I said?
The disadvantages of Capitalism cannot be solved in social movements, and can only be solved via economic restructuring. Having many mini-dictators control industry, rather than democratic control via the Workers, will always lead to instability and exploitation no matter the level of social progress.
Economic and social progress must go hand in hand.
I understood what you said, I just think it’s impossible to band-aid Capitalism into being a good system.
You seem to be choosing to ignore all the advantages that It brings. I hope that in the future (if we survive the next decade) technology will be advanced enough to allow for ways of govern we cannot afford to speculate about.
Ones with universal income and more equal standing for all. But unfortunately we can’t stop or we’ll die out, right now whatever we do or we find a way that can compete with other countries or we die out.
Or we find some way to unite the hole world willingly under one flag. Or someone in another country is going to keep doing what we are doing maybe variations of it but still the same thing. 3rd world countries will still be explored and keeped poor to ensure a steady supply of resources.
So right now or we keep doing what we are doing( improving within this systems, yes there will be setbacks) or someone else will perhaps with less hart. Yes we are not perfect, but we have had more equal standing benfore under our current systems.
I believe we can achieve them again thought unions, active participation in politics, and passing legislation that will actually help people. Tbh I think the church and the state should be as separate as corporations and the state. Stoping money flow to government except for taxarion.
Unfortunately this is the position we find ourselves in.
Sorry for typos and long text (I’m European some of these things might not represent the American situation)
I’m not ignoring anything. Tech is already advanced enough for Worker Ownership. Worker co-ops are already more stable.
You haven’t listed a single advantage, only taken a defeatist tone and claimed nothing can be done with no ground to stand on.
Unions are a great step towards Worker Ownership, see Syndicalism.
All in all, you haven’t really made a point. You’ve said I shouldn’t advocate for abandoning Capitalism because it has advantages, but listed absolutely none. You’ve said we can’t move beyond Capitalism, without explaining why. You’ve done a lot of posturing and offered no reasons why you actually disagree with me.
