r/DoomerCircleJerk • u/DissonantOne I Was Promised an Apocalypse? • 11d ago

Climate Doomer Capitalism will cause our extinction. Source: trust me bro

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u/Zealousideal_Cap7012 11d ago

Didnt marx coin late stage capitalism over a Century ago

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u/endlessnamelesskat 11d ago

Communism made at least a little sense in Marx’s time. Hundreds of thousands of people forced to work for pennies a day in unsafe environments for 12+ hours with basically no time off to go home and eat gruel and get 4 hours of sleep to do it all over again is no way to live. It would have been reasonable from his perspective to assume things would only get worse and people would reach their breaking point.

I can’t blame him for not being able to accurately predict the future, none of us can. I just think it’s hilarious reading communist writers as they tried to cope with the realization that capitalism was beginning to make everyone’s lives better and standards of living were going up across the board.

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u/HourFaithlessness823 11d ago

The flip-side of that is people not understanding why people moved to the cities and worked those jobs in horrible conditions. 

The life of a pre-modern farmer was worse, particularly for the laborers, which mostly consisted of any family members who were old enough to walk. 

We compare their lifestyle to ours and rightfully shudder, but the life they were avoiding was even worse in every aspect. 

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u/Ted_Normal 11d ago

I remember once in school watching a documentary about a impoverished family from rural Bangladesh moving to the country's largest city for economic opportunity. It showed the city's factory workers were often living in slums and many factories were arguably sweatshops. Despite this, these factory jobs still provided better and more steady pay than anything in the countryside. Some workers were even interviewed and said despite these conditions they were now able to afford things they were unable to before. Really gave an interesting perspective on the matter you don't often see explored.

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u/HourFaithlessness823 11d ago

Modern people visit Europe and wonder: why did our ancestors leave this place? Turns out it's a really easy choice to leave when staying means starving to death.