Not here to troll, serious question

wouldn't that be the pre-capitalist modes of production they occupied before getting McGlobalized?

Poverty is artificial.

Not only that but some chinese farmer that has been subsistence farming for over a century getting kicked off their land and being forced to go to some city to get a sweatshop job is considered lifting out of poverty.

That's assuming the bourgeois have no choice but to be property owners when they could just as easily jump off a bridge or something. Sure they wouldn't do that but it's their fault their poor are still poor.

There is enough food and housing, yet somehow there is still poverty. Sure the reason why we have those things is capitalism. Wouldn't it be stupid to cling to capitalism because it gave us better material condition? When we can get rid of poverty.

Because in socialist countries is were there has been the biggest improvement of peoples live in History.
You just have to look at Cuba, China or the USSR (were since it become capitalist the conditions of life have become worst)

That wasn't pure capitalism though. It was taking bits from economic Progressivism, and Social Democracy. Also that chart isnt adjusted for deflation and isnt showing the people dying from poverty. It also constantly changes what poverty means. If more people die from poverty less impoverish people exist.

I know a few people are gonna jump on me about "muh gold" but the effect of inflation on worker's and peasant's incomes is probably worse then what even critical economists like Jason Hickel estimate.

🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧Bourg🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧uginon and Morrisson estimate that extreme poverty was 55% of the world population and "poverty" was 72% in the 1950s. Back in that time period the gold-value of the dollar was 35 an ounce whereas today its $1,246.60 an ounce.

If you took that 1/35th of an ounce that a dollar and cashed it out then held onto it and sold it today then that would translate into about $35.61 in today's money. The estimate of just those in poverty previously cited is about 17% of the word population so it turns out that those just in poverty in the 1950s are receiving monetary compensation over 35.61 cents a day. A Latin American worker making about 50 cents about $17 dollars a day if their income from that time held good; an Indian or African peasant making ten cents a day or so would be making about $3.56 a day.

The 28% of the population living above the 2 dollar mark would be those earning more then $71.20 a day.

Commodity baskets are bad way to measure worker's standards of living because it assumes that workers needs everywhere are universal. As Sam Williams points out Bangladeshi workers don't have to buy fur coats or worry about heating their homes through the winter like Siberian workers have to.

Likewise, looking at things historically new unprecedented commodities and needs have been introduced into the worker's consumption basket since the 1950s. The best-way to estimate things is via money-value and not by looking at use-value and the best medium to do that is to look at the money-commodity which is gold.

It's because more human labor went into commodities back then and therefore people needed more money to survive. When you look at commodity prices in gold-term's the overall trend of commodity prices under capitalism is still deflationary. The old game of using the deflation of commodity prices to cut wages familiar in the 19th century is still alive and well in the 20th and 21st centuries. Only this time instead of cutting the value of worker's wages directly governments that are inspired by Keynesian policy cut wages by devaluing the money issued. So commodity prices fall but the real value of the money a worker receives also falls yet by the magic of comparing commodity baskets not much appears to have changed, maybe its even improved because of the falling value of many commodities in gold terms. But the fact is that if the value of the money a worker receives had held good over the decades they'd be living much better then they are now.

Of course, the capitalists would have probably run into a profitability crisis much sooner had that been the case. But I hope this is clear and understandable and shows why I think even the incomes of the poorest people (and not just the workers in the rich countries) in the world have suffered even more greatly then most radical economists suspect.

Conditions have worsened, not improved. Statistics look at numbers, not real life.

No socialist would argue that capitalism didn't allow for enormous progression and development. But, like all socio-economic systems, it reaches its limits, and a better system can be created.

Interesting post user
but would you mind explaining that bit about gold again, it seems a little off

Because a radical stand is needed to fix the issues Capitalism has and has created, because to think it will solve these problems by itself is absolutely ludicrous. It will only continue to destroy the planet's atmosphere, the planet's ecosystem, it will continue to instigate war for profit, and destroying life among the workers of the world to anything but meneal labor while promising them an empty future; this all will make the future generally unpleasant and uninhabitable for all of us.

Think of it this way, when a kid has a messy room, you order him to clean it up. Nobody may enjoy cleaning their room at that age, and they'll work to try to get out of it as much as you can. You just take away the oppurtunities he has that's distracting him, like the computer or that Xbox he really doesn't deserve, what have you, in order to focus on the solutions to the problem at hand. He may kick, he may scream out, he may shout that he hates you and never loved you. But at the end of the day that god damn room is a mess and the kid has to clean it.

It may be a silly metaphor, but we're living in an increasingly silly world where the problems right before us with simple solutions aren't being carried because it might offend the upper class.

A lot of it is this. If you take work people previously were doing within the community, and then get them to do it in a factory, you've "grown the economy" since its' now in the market, but the actual value being produced hasn't changed, and odds are nobody is actually better off.

Sure, under commodity production a money commodity emerges, and Marx holds that this money-commodity is gold. Paper currencies are no longer connected to gold, true, but they are measured up against gold and therefore capitalists are keen to watch the value of the dollar against gold. Likewise, states still hold thousands and thousands of gold in "reserve" despite the fact that gold does not technically back the currency anymore.

The easiest explanation for this is that gold is in fact still the money commodity despite the efforts of Keynesians to rid themselves of this "barbarous relic"–let me be clear under socialism gold will not serve the same purpose as gold does under capitalism. Because gold takes an immense amount of human labor and capital to produce and therefore it embodies abstract labor time in a sense. The gold producer literally makes money, like any capitalist, of course, he must make more money then he puts in but he has no need his commodity for the money-commodity. If he trades his gold for dollars or euros, etc. that rate he takes in exchange reflects the gold-price of the dollar and not the dollar-price of gold as things seem on the surface. If he chooses to he can simply exchange gold for commodities to carry on his business directly.

The point about the gold-value of the dollar is simple enough–if you could cashed a dollar from that time into gold then it you would have 1/35th an ounce of gold. Given that amount of gold at current prices you'd have $35.60 dollars worth of gold at today's prices.

The mistake the bourgeois economists are making is that they aren't distinguishing between use-value and exchange-value, the latter is embodied in the money commodity. When you look at two commodity baskets–one from the 1950s and one from 2017 then your looking at the use-values that a given amount of dollars buys. If you look at that because the trend of commodity prices is still deflationary when its priced in gold then its not surprising that inflation can grow every year and not harm real income "too much" when you simply compare two commodity baskets.

You assume that workers needs are essentially the same across time and across cultures which is untrue as I explained in my post. No one had a need for a cellphone or a PC in the 1950s and even for workers living in different cultures and climate-zones needs are divergent.

Since we're actually not living in the 1950s contrary to what Democrats or Trumpcucks may think then the best way to look at wealth or income from that time is to analyze things from the perspective of the exchange value that workers or capitalists at the time received.

This is completely manageable and easily conceptualized–we see it in the way that family heirlooms made of gold or gold coins etc. are passed down, hold their value, and can be sold on the market today. There are numerous problems with simply comparing commodity baskets here are numerous problems with doing that but the main one we deal with here is that had the value of the dollar held good then the typical worker would have much greater buying power then even an inflation-adjusted estimate would indicate.

While I'm sure there will be plenty of naysayers the focus on gold as the money commodity in Marxist monetary theory is actually essential to Marxist theory as otherwise we simply return to Say's Law in the matter of money. If a great gold discovery or mining technique were discovered it might cause gold to fall against the dollar but this is simply the appreciation of commodity prices against gold as a vast influx of the money-commodity makes its way through the system. We would expect to see a new capitalist long-boom to begin if this were the case; if gold became so abundant that it lost its value we would expect another money-commodity like platform or silver to take its place.

So far neither scenario has happened and doesn't seem to be on the verge of happening. Does that make sense?

a lot to digest for a noob like me.
But thank you Comrade

*no need to exchange his commodity

You're welcome. I just went back and read it and realized there are ton of typos, its kinda been a long-day. Let me know if you have any more questions that I can answer.

You are the kind of people we need in leftypol comrade

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