I’m just really over this nonsense where you’re not allowed to look at what is objectively the richest big society in history and say “hey this seems pretty decent in terms of material conditions for most”
can we make it fairer? yes of course. can we help people who are left behind? yes of course. have we abolished all suffering? no of course not.
but people are sitting around miserable, longing for the good old days of… when, exactly? it doesn’t make any friggin sense to me
it seems like it’s a social necessity to grouse over how bad things are and thus it’s intellectually convenient to gesture vaguely at some undefined time when things WEREN’T bad. because otherwise the logical conclusion is that things are eternally bad, which sounds suspiciously like depression
Okay, except it's... real? Material conditions (e.g. The extent to which workers are receiving a share of society's wealth) is really changing for the worse, substantially and rapidly.
www.mckinsey.com/featured-ins...
He'll point out the workers at a lower income share still have superior TVs to anything in the past, missing the point entirely.
Stancil seems to suffer from a congenital deficit of empathy; the real world with real people lose out to the perfect system he's imagined in his mind.
Relatedly, social atomization is often downstream of material conditions, e.g. moving for work, rent costs for social spaces, cutting labor costs by mediating transactions through apps, even the commodification of attention through social media. Late career Neil Postman filed it under “Technocracy.”
Yeah, if we think of material conditions more expansively, it helps get beyond "line go up, why people no happy." Du Bois got at this when he wrote about the "wages" of whiteness and there are parallels to e.g. the Bread and Roses strike. We are not economic homunculi, we live in a society, etc.
I understand fearing the impulse to think things being relatively good means they are as good as it can get. But once that is explicitly cleared up, a person still insisting economic circumstances are generally terrible right now, even in relative terms, is wrong and it's interesting to know why.
mostly, "when I was 13 and instead of hating my mom for being a shitlib I still thought the sun and stars revolved around her because she brought me snackies and made me dinner", as far as I can tell
Yeah man it's almost like we got our ill-gotten gains from conquering the world and making it bend to our whims. Like. What's your metrics here? Infant mortality? Life expectancy? Food insecurity? Plenty of countries match or approach America's numbers
The thing is, there have been times in the history of capitalism when it was less exploitative (the post-war boom and the ubiquity of trade unionism is the period I'm thinking of), but that period was still dominated by unsustainable waste and consumerism.
In the face of climate change, that's not really something we can afford anymore.
I do believe that we can transition peacefully from modern capitalism to a more sustainable system without drastically reducing anyone's standard of living. But there comes a point where that isn't capitalism anymore.
