The slow decay of Venezuela

[Channel72]

Your analysis about suicide rates among slum dwellers might not be as powerful a point as you think. Even in first world nations, like the US, suicide is surprisingly common, especially among youth.

http://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/p ... icide.html

Apparently around 16% of American teenagers considered suicide, and about 13% actually created a plan for carrying it out.

So, that's slightly over half of the percentage of slum dwellers who considered suicide, yet the living conditions in the US are probably much more than twice as good as living in a Jakarta slum.

And of course, I needn't remind you about the suicide "epidemic" in Russia.

The point is, the causes of suicide (especially among youth) are probably too complicated to pin down neatly as part of an overall case about living conditions in modern slums versus rural or Paleolithic conditions.

But your point about slum mortality rates vs. rural conditions is of course significant.

[K. A. Pital]

Your analysis about suicide rates among slum dwellers might not be as powerful a point as you think. Even in first world nations, like the US, suicide is surprisingly common, especially among youth.

USA:

Kampala slum:


Suicide ideation is not something to be taken lightly. If we are in a utopia, why are people considering to lose their life for nothing? Suicide isn't even dying to fix inequality, for which I got ridicule from Simon. It's just dying for nothing. It does look like US females are at a big suicide risk - 11% attempted suicide, but it's twice less than that of slum dwellers, and serious attempts that require medical attention are three times less than in the slums. For males, there's almost a 10-fold disparity in serious suicide attempts. Indeed, if you are a US male, probably no problem (unless you're black, I suspect heavily there's massive racial variation hidden in the graph).

But your point about slum mortality rates vs. rural conditions is of course significant.

I think that it is even more significant - because the impoverishment of rural settlements is an ongoing and active process, that pushes them towards urbanization, and so into the arms of death. In fact, the same people who say "slums are an improvement" are behind the decline of rural wages, decline or stagnation of the rural living standards, liquidation of rural life standard improvements.

I heavily advise reading "Planet of Slums" if you haven't yet.

“The content of the waste is sometimes grisly; in Accra, the Daily Graphic recently described ‘sprawling refuse dumps, full of black plastic bags containing aborted fetal bodies from the wombs of Kayayee [female porters] and teenage girls in Accra. According to Metropolitan Chief Executive, ‘75 percent of the waste of black polythene bags in the metropolis contains human aborted fetuses.’”

So what are the real rates of neonatal death in the slums? I don't think we are going to get a good answer in the near future...

URBANIZATION AT ALL COSTS!

But maybe slums really are enriching the inhabitants? We just dunno? Then read this paper:

Marx, Benjamin, Thomas Stoker, and Tavneet Suri. 2013. "The Economics of Slums in the Developing World."
http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.27.4.187

Significant and negative correlation in income per capita with years after moving to the slum, just 15% of slum residents moving and over 70% of slum dwellers live there for 15 years... What else is needed to convince you? Adult slum mortality vs. rural adult mortality in the Third World?

[hongi]

What is the responsability of a Westerner? What can we do? What should we do?

[Channel72]

@Stas,

Everything you're saying is true - but I don't see you acknowledging that slums are always a feature of the early "birth-pains" of industrialization. New York City used to be filled with slums in the 19th century, as was London and other places which today are considered "first-world".

The major difference is that today's third world slums are absolutely colossal, in terms of population size, compared with the Victorian Era slums in the US and Europe. Huge swathes of Mexico City, for example, are sprawling slum districts which absolutely dwarf the size of the 19th century "first-world" slums.

But the underlying causes are the same - rapid migration of rural dwellers into urban areas looking for work, etc. Also, Simon is correct that things are improving somewhat, in the sense that less people in the 3rd world live in slums today than they did even 10 years ago.

See:

http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/co ... abitat.pdf



So the trend is that less people are living in slums as the third world continues to develop, and living standards improve. I agree we shouldn't try to minimize the unprecedented level of suffering occurring as a result of industrialization and urbanization in the 3rd world - but we should also acknowledge that improvement is possible, and indeed occurring. Acknowledging this is just as important as acknowledging the suffering, because otherwise we may be tempted to give up in hopelessness, instead of participating in helping along with the improvement.

Edit: shrunk the image to make it less obnoxious

[Simon_Jester]

I was effectively unable to post in this for a couple of days, and at this point the sheer volume of dialogue makes it rather prohibitive to respond in detail. I will point out the following:

1) As I have repeatedly observed, if you think the status quo (and the predictable future status quo) of those Third World slums is bad, the results of abolishing technological civilization are even worse. I say this because that almost every human who is alive at the time of the abolition will die horribly, and these deaths will all occur within a few years, with mass conflict and chaos and desperate people resorting to cannibalism to survive as the agriculture that sustains them collapses.

Even given that such-and-such a percentage of people in the slums have attempted suicide, or committed it, I do not think we can infer from this that having 95% or so of the human race die of starvation or plagues or being killed by gangs or eaten by cannibals within the next five years is a preferable alternative to what would otherwise happen in those five years.
______________________

2) Stas is comparing modern slum life to modern rural life. I am comparing modern slum life to Neolithic rural life. At the same level of technology, rural life is in many cases better and more preferable than slum life, because so many human problems get worse with higher population density.

I feel it is more than a little dishonest for him to try and dispute my arguments with anything other than "compare modern slums directly to Neolithic lifestyles." Stas did that in some places, but in others he used modern rural lifestyles as his point of comparison, and I object to that.
___________________________

3) Stas is blaming global capitalism (with the division of labor being the ultimate cause that makes it all possible) for the extremely bad conditions in Third World slums.

The problem is, bluntly, capitalism did not in and of itself create the biggest single factor driving those conditions. The biggest factor in play here is not capitalism, it is overpopulation.

Now, capitalism and the governments it has created are certainly failing to solve this problem, whereas by contrast the only large socialist country I know of which had an overpopulation problem managed to, if not solve the problem, at least mitigate it. But if Stas is truly upset about the fact that by 2050 there may be four out of nine billino humans living in miserable stinking horrific slums...

...Stas' biggest target should be the failure of governments in the affected areas to take basic steps toward widespread contraception. I mean, how insane is it that a country like Nigeria is projected to hit a population of half a billion by some time in the middle of this century? Nigeria does not have nearly enough land to support such populations; they would strip the natural resources of the country dry in short order. They are already in the process of doing so.

It is this massive population boom, which has been going on for decades and which is only very gradually slowing down, that creates horrible slums like the ones Stas is (justly) attacking. There are more people in these countries than their economies can produce goods or even gainful employment for, there are more people than can be housed or policed in an effective manner. The result is chaos.

And while the capitalist world order may be indirectly responsible for the fact that this has come to be, it is in no way a deliberate product of that world order, and it is something that even many of the capitalists would be willing to change if they could. Moreover, it is a problem that will only be solvable through the use of things like contraceptives, mechanized agriculture, and technology to mass-produce the necessities of life. In other words, technological society and division of labor.

[K. A. Pital]

1. Current actions exacerbate poverty:

- collapse of rural investment leads to mass migration into even worse places;
- creation of the persistent mega-slum negates the typical division of labour and urbanization benefits for a massive number of people;
- the shrinking of slum population share is itself questionable: the habitat criteria could have been adjusted to produce said impression (this is exemplified by the difference in estimates of 0,86 billion of UN and a 1 billion estimate I have seen in Lancet). The share may be either falling ir constant, but even if it is falling now, this does not solve the problem for current slum dwellers. They will die impoverished. Benefactors will only shrug.
- slum population is rising in absolute numbers even if the share is falling, so no say "there are less people in slums". We are subjecting to suffering a gigantic population, that exceeds the whole historic population of undeveloped societies. Indeed, we often kill in absolute numbers the previous world population many times over.
- income of slum dwellers is falling after they move to the slum and keeps falling with time: it is impossible to reconcile this with claims of "improvement".

2. Technology is not always good and breakneck speed of producing cheaper and cheaper "tech" is likewise not good. I have already expanded on this with coltan, etc. People shouting "cheaper computers, clothes, etc." are actually accessories to murder. Explain the problem in the next point.

3. All beneficiaries are temporally and spatially different from the casualties and victims of the process: problem is not solved and not "solving itself". Marginal, very small benefits for rich beneficiaries are enough to actively increase (not decrease!) the suffering in both rural and urban poor territories. In this, division of labour and capitalism is to blame and only blindness can prevent you from seeing this. From "one is a farmer, the other engineer" there will come a "one country is rich, another is poor". Finally, you come to "I buy biofuel, and you Third Worlder cannot buy food". Competition! And suffering is unequal, there is no suffering for you to accept less fuel, is it not? Or certainly not the malnutrition level!

4. It is not just capitalism, but class society as a whole that is to blame for point 3. Separation of victim and beneficiary cannot be resolved under capitalism or preceding class societies. i acknowledge London was a slum. The direct result of separation and division of labour and "conpatative advantage" on a transnational scale allowed London to become "non-slum" while literally millions of people had to be murdered and impoverished for this. Literally. It is the same with most non-slum cities. Their welfare is based on blood.

5. I feel the question of "deliberacy" is irrelevant. The British Empire deliberately or undeliberately starved dozens of millions? Even if it did so in a non-deliberate fashion by letting the market adjust prices below subsistence, this is not making it better. Likewise, biofuel malnourishment is not "deliberate" in the sense you do not think you are outbidding the poor for food when you buy it. But it is worse: you do not know that you are, in fact, torturing people with your actions that inequality allows you to commit. For me, this is direct, the resposibility.

6. Contraception is a good idea, except that it makes people "never being born" - which is not an achievent in the eyes of the debators. People do not like never being born, apparently.

7. If there are places with mortality exceeding the Neolithic and forager mortality, this is really abominable. The worst part is that with the division of labour, there is no way to make people care and to somehow make the benefactors live the crushing suffering of victims. Shrugging off the fact that victims want to kill themselves at much greater rates than benefactors is also impossible. Human body compensates misery with hormones, as I said before. This cannot let us be lulled into complacency that people actually WANT something to happen or to be just because for most their hormones will MAKE them persevere through the horror. "Modern rural life" is a misnomer, I compare dslums to rural Third World life in the same countries as the slum. Rural life there is not modern. Besides, it raises the question on whether urbanization is an "absolute good" for these people, as this was implied in the "WELL BUT THEY MOVE TO THE SLUMS".

8. Dying or suffering to fix a "finite" inequality (inequality is always finite) is not insane. People have done this through ages and by ridiculing them as mentally ill nothing is gained.

If anything is to be prioritized, reply to point 3, please: the temporal and spatial separation of benefactors and victims.

[Channel72]

3. All beneficiaries are temporally and spatially different from the casualties and victims of the process: problem is not solved and not "solving itself". Marginal, very small benefits for rich beneficiaries are enough to actively increase (not decrease!) the suffering in both rural and urban poor territories. In this, division of labour and capitalism is to blame and only blindness can prevent you from seeing this. From "one is a farmer, the other engineer" there will come a "one country is rich, another is poor". Finally, you come to "I buy biofuel, and you Third Worlder cannot buy food". Competition! And suffering is unequal, there is no suffering for you to accept less fuel, is it not? Or certainly not the malnutrition level!

Okay, again - the problem I see here is that you're correct - but you leave out the whole picture. I agree, yes, beneficiaries are temporally and spatially separate from the victims. I have a mobile phone, which benefits me, but a child-miner in the Congo helped make it (possibly), and he is not benefitting from the mining process (except for a meager $1 USD a day or whatever).

Again, I agree - this is a problem. But again, you are simplifying this complex problem, reducing it to basically "division of labor + capitalism = suffering". Except there are many other factors here. Let's talk about coltan mining specifically, and let's follow the logical chain of events that ultimately results in mass suffering:

• (1) Consumers in Western countries create a demand for mobile electronics
  (2) Greedy giant powerful corporations rush to fill this demand, in order to profit and benefit their shareholders
  (3) Corrupt Militias and politicians in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda realize they can fill this demand, and exploit it
  (4) The DRC sets up mining crews and networks to mine coltan and sell it to first world corporations
  (5) Rwanda invades, and various DRC/Rwanda factions kill each other for control of the mining
  (6) Rural farmers in the DRC realize they can make more money mining coltan than farming, so they travel to the mines for work

Horrible human rights violations and abuses ensue ...

So who is at fault here? Capitalism? Division of labor? What about the corrupt militias in the DRC and Rwanda who directly (YES, directly) commit the atrocities? Why are they not mentioned - yet only the greedy first world corporations who indirectly conspire to create this situation are factored into the equation here?

It's not like the demand for cheap consumer electronics HAS to result in suffering. It's not some built-in law of physics, or law of economics, that consumer demand for rare earth minerals = suffering. Coltan is also mined in Australia in a mostly entirely ethical way. Certain capitalists, such as Apple(!) even refuse to purchase coltan from DRC sources.

The particular atrocities that occur in the DRC do not HAVE to exist under a capitalist world order. But they do exist because of the complex interaction between consumer demand in the West and "resource curse" in the DRC (an impoverished 3rd world country is "blessed" with a valuable resource, but various factions fighting for control of the resource turns it into a curse).

Again, this cannot all be simplified to a nice, neat package of "division of labor + capitalism = mass suffering". You're not factoring in the DRC/Rwandan factions and militias who are directly responsible for the abuse and suffering. It's not like Apple taskmasters are overseeing the mines here. The demand for coltan, in this case, can be satisfied ethically by, for example, mining it in a first-world place like Australia where miners make upwards of 100K a year and live in first world conditions.

It really goes without saying that any time there is a market for a rare resource, if that resource exists in highly impoverished, unregulated places, there will be massive abuse that ensues. You can blame capitalism for "creating the market" in the first place, or 19th century Western imperialism for initially creating the impoverishment and instability in the DRC, but now you are at a level of indirection which is one step removed from the direct cause of the suffering. It's also debatable whether you can really blame capitalism for "creating markets". Markets are created by human nature - humans want things, and they especially value things that are hard to get. This nature will be manifested in any complex system which involves humans, even in socialist/communist societies, black markets will appear.

It's also questionable whether you can blame technological advancement in general. Yes, with coltan that is the case, but today it's coltan due to consumer electronics, but it's also diamonds or other rare materials that have no relation to technological advancement ... they're just rocks that look pretty and people want them. So a market is created, poor African nations suffer from resource curse, and atrocities ensue - nothing to do with technological advancement per se.

And the spatio-temporal separation of beneficiary from victim is only partially true. Who are the beneficiaries in the whole coltan mining system in the DRC? There's me, average Western consumer, and there's the corrupt militias and DRC politicians who grow rich from controlling the mines and exploiting the endless cheap labor of rural farmers flocking to the mines. The victims are the rural farmers who flock to the mines and die in violent conflict, or poor working conditions. But those victims are not really separated, in terms of time and location, from the corrupt militias who exploit them.

[Channel72]

Also, I'd like to add a general argument here:

In general, you are looking out at the world and observing all sorts of injustices, violence and atrocities. You then blame these injustices and atrocities on a system, (in this case capitalism) and provide reasons and arguments that establish that these atrocities are actually an inherent feature or byproduct of this system.

This is the same thing anti-Communists generally do. They look at Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, and say - massive starvation, authoritarian police states and gulags are an inherent byproduct of any communist system.

But of course that is not true. Massive suffering and death is not necessarily inherent to a capitalist system. You observe the atrocities, and you observe the system, and you make (I admit, compelling) arguments for why these atrocities are an inherent, inevitable feature of the system. But I don't think you have necessarily proved this. At least, I can easily envision a capitalist society that includes division of labor and a free market, but doesn't result in massive suffering and death overseas. I can also easily envision a communist society which doesn't feature gulags and massive starvation.

[K. A. Pital]

Yes, with coltan that is the case, but today it's coltan due to consumer electronics, but it's also diamonds or other rare materials that have no relation to technological advancement ... they're just rocks that look pretty and people want them.

You forgot once again which people. Very simple equations for you so that my point about the separation is not lost arguing on whether the miners are exploited by militias or by corporations.

How much of the world production of coltan and tantalum-derived goods is consumed by the population of Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Brazil and Mozambique? Even discounting the rich-poor gap: how much of this production is consumed locally, even by the local rich? How much of the world production of diamonds is consumed in South Africa and Yakutia? Even discounting the rich-poor gap, how much? How much of the biofuel that is produced in Guatemala driving people hungry is consumed in Guatemala? Even discounting the rich-poor gap: how much of the product is consumed inside the bloody nation? The militias are not beneficiaries; they do not consume 99% of the coltan produced, sorry. They resell it further, so they are only middlemen in the chain. The true beneficiaries are the clients. They are completely removed from risk of death and yet benefit from very tiny welfare benefit: low prices of electronics.

The end beneficiary of cannibalism is the cannibal, is the one who devours and finally consumes.

Please answer the simple questions: how much of the product that literally murders people is consumed at the point of murder. Even more generally, let's take Africa for all African coltan derived goods, and let's take all of Latin America for Latin-American biofuels. How much of that is consumed locally? Let's say we have abolished the international division of labour. Now every nation is developing in "spherical vacuum" and suffering is distributed equally. No one can, broadly, overconsume at the expense of another. Will nations still industrialize? Quite likely. But most likely also that their industrialization will be a "closer to home" one, where the benefits aren't so remote spatially and temporally as they are in the GREAT WORLD ATOMIC TYRANNY where the poor always provide for the fucking rich.

You are making two errors here.

One, application of ideal conditions on a real system. Like libertarian idiots who apply perfect competition to real markets and then suddenly get upset when millions of people starve to death as their "marginal product" is below subsistence. Is it possible that "if everyone was acting nicely", capitalism would produce less suffering in the Third World world (far more expensive electronics, far more expensive clothing, a rate of epression of real wages relative to profits way in excess of what we have now; profits will fall even further, being already bottom-low in developed societies, and it could be that capitalism would simply implode from that - so you have to take that into account, too)? Yes, it is possible theoretically.

No, it is practically impossible (history has proven it time and again), and I gave very good grounds that cost-cutting is not a BUG in capitalism, it's a fucking FEATURE. And costs include people. So dead and suffering people at the point of production are logical. The illogical - people living in good conditions at point of production - is not a product of capitalism but rather the product of a fight against it, the fight of the workers in attempt to seize back control over the means of production. And trying to bridge the "point of production - point of consumption" gap by demanding free access to mass-produced wealth (the ultimate end of these demands: socialism, collectively own everything collectively produced). But this "good product" must be weighed against the "bad product" which is the then-following expansion of capitalism to other places like a rampaging murderer.

The astronomical welfare of London is bought with literally millions of deaths. How do you know if these millions of people were not ruthlessly massacred, exterminated, enslaved in the dozens of millions, hundreds of millions by the British Empire over two and a half centuries - how do you know London wouldn't still have been nothing but a FUCKING SLUM today? Eh?

Two: fallacy of cornucopia and historicism (London was slum in 1750 - London is no slum in 2015 - every city will follow its path). It follows from a false understanding of the "non-slum" urbanization history. [Just ask me here and you won't be dissappointed - I have quite thoroughly researched just how the "Industrial Revolution" just so happened to benefit Britain at the same time as Britain was slaughtering and enslaving colonial populations that you can't really deny that British wealth came from blood]

Non-slum urbanization in the First World was always tied to offloading all the costs of this "nice" urbanziation to the Third World and poorer parts of itself: in the form of direct plunder, direct mass murder, starving, extermination, exploitation. In the form of rapid and total destruction of environments, full depletion of natural resources and the like. In the form of war which exterminated "excess humans" leaving more capital for the remaining. The LIE OF CORNUCOPIA is that "everyone can live a life like the First World rich". In reality, however, humans will simply destroy the Earth trying to do this at the current speed, and the destruction of this habitat, unlike all the prior vices, is most likely going to be irreversible.

This lie of cornucopia, has driven the desperate Third World - which hasn't industrialized because it, being 90% fucking colonies, even never had the chance to, courtesy of the RICH WHITE MASTERS - to finally embark on a quest of industrialization.

But truth is, you can't make something out of nothing. The Third World doesn't have colonies to exploit. So its "industrialization fuel" will be its own people. The Third World countries will then, logically, murder their own people in the quest to try and urbanize. But... will they succeed in turning their slum megacities into non-slums? Logic tells me that most likely they will not, because there simply isn't another world to rob, enslave and pollute, there isn't a second Earth that you can turn into your slave colony and simultaneously waste dump. We are now witnessing a "race to the top" which has the potential not just to result in world domination by White Masters like the Victorian colonial scramble, but the very destruction of our world. The Third World will not stop either, no matter how much misery and murder will be produced in the process; just as the First World didn't stop, just as nobody stopped at sacrificing human lives at the altar of industry.

P.S. Finally, Apple's "non-DRC" coltan purchasing process is a sham; just like most other "fair trade" schemes. DRC coltan is shipped to China via Rwanda (world's "largest" coltan producer) where it is made clean by the simple process of mixing samples. No point in arguing with me here, I know the supply chain.

They look at Stalinist Russia or Maoist China, and say - massive starvation, authoritarian police states and gulags are an inherent byproduct of any communist system. But of course that is not true.

Stalinism and "Third World socialism" does indeed produce massive starvation, because it orders a breakneck industrialization ("100 years in 10 years") which then results in mass murder as incomes of rural poor are adjusted to below-subsistence, like when you apply laissez-faire to colonies, except interally. Basically, industrialization under socialism is the same thing as industrialization under capitalism. It has to do all the same things (and maybe worse things owing to the orders to make it fast, to the culture of violence that follows a civil war, etc.).

You can argue that if you set up a perfect system you could avoid this, but it's simply not so. Anti-communists are closer to the truth here because given the tasks self-set by the "weak nation" communist leaders like Stalin, and the primitive consequentialism of "division of labour will result in abundance!" which communists begrudgingly admitted, it does indeed result in widespread death. It also does result in abundance - which, at least, benefits a wider circle of people in the communist nations. But that's beside the point. Dead peasants are dead forever and see none of this abundance; in that, division of labour has enacted final murder and maximal suffering on the people who produce the most bare necessities, and given the fruits of the labour of the dead to others, who did not die.

In fact, the "communist" movements weren't as much communist (they diverged rapidly from most of Marx's proposals for a First World revolution) as they were the first "Third World industrialization" movement.

And no, the dead peasants did not benefit from a later low level of inequality, low infant mortality and the industrial abundance of the USSR ca. 1960-1980. This simply didn't happen. Peasants were forever dead. They died eternally. Because labour is divided. Because product can be freely alienated from the people who make it. Egal, if it's capitalism or "industrial" socialism. I already outlined that the latter is at least a partial solution, because at some point everyone's equalized and dying workers are actually owning the entire mass of production in society, so they are risking their lives for a product which also they all equally consume.

I have a mobile phone, which benefits me, but a child-miner in the Congo helped make it (possibly), and he is not benefitting from the mining process

It's not even that. You could have still had your mobile phone - maybe 10-20 years later, because technical progress speed in a more just society would be slower, and because the phones would not be as cheap, there would have to be another way to make them cheap than relying on miners dying en mass, with Australia supplying the vast majority of coltan which then, say, is very very expensive because the demand vastly exceeds feasbile supply).

The only benefit for you is the price of your phone and its expendability (people in Elysium change phones every 1-2 years). Not its existence even. And that's how small an improvement in your life is enough to cause war, murder and exploitation. You could've lived without this tiny improvement, could you not? With a pricier and less expendable mobile phone? Or even without it, hell... Still nothing to compare!

What this means? It means capitalism kills people for NOTHING. For zero.

From the standpoint of human suffering, capitalism can simply kill people even if there is no corresponding happiness gain on the other pole. (Let's pretend there is a "happiness exchange" after all and I'm the buyer, you're the remote producer - I don't even know that I killed you, and my happiness improvements are tiny and marginal, while your suffering and death are extremities.)

Why I'm talking about capitalism? Because under capitalism the inequality gap has reached this level, finally. Expropriating food product from a peasant means that you actually need this food for a non-insignificant improvement in life quality (tribal chiefs). If peasants don't give surplus to the chief, he dies. So this surplus generates a dilemma: peasants not giving the food kills the tribal chief. In capitalism, only the producer is the one to risk death, and the benefits his enormous risk gives you are tiny and irrelevant. We can imagine that Africa stops making coltan, or stops exporting it, ordering the West to put production plants INTO Africa. What happens after this re-appropriation of alienated product? You don't starve. Ergo, nothing happens. In fact your quality of life doesn't decrease one tiny bit.

This is a result of whole centuries of mass murder by class society. Class societies have literally exterminated entire civilizations and depopulated continents to appropriate the resources thereof for their benefit. In the darwinian selection, the best class monster was born: capitalism. A gap this wide couldn't just accrue by itself, surely. It is a result of extermination and enslavement by the class society. And now people look at capitalism's "cornucopia" and forget that it was pretty much built on murder and slavery from the start to finish.

And enormous amounts of murder and slavery, too, in both absolute and relative sense.

You may think that Britain didn't buy its wealth with murder that puts "division of labour" to shame but it really did. The life expectancy in India was just 20 years, that in 1920. For 200 years there hasn't been either huge population growth nor significant income growth in India. Indeed, it was "zero-state economy" whose only role was to feed the wealthy countries. The mortality pattern meant an annual death rate of 50 per 1000 (5%!), meaning every two years 10% of the population were decimated. Growing much slower than Britain's own population, India was periodically subjected to famines that killed 10% of the affected population in the timeframe of 1-2 years... Frequency and severity of famine increased; India, thanks to the "division of labour", exported food even during the worst famines, while Britain was under no threat of starvation even had it refused Indian imports...

Is this as bad as the foragers? This concentrated massacre that lasted two centuries and was executed by "enlightened" men of the "industrial age", who should know better than blind forces of nature?

[Simon_Jester]

How much of the world production of coltan and tantalum-derived goods is consumed by the population of Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Brazil and Mozambique? Even discounting the rich-poor gap: how much of this production is consumed locally, even by the local rich? How much of the world production of diamonds is consumed in South Africa and Yakutia? Even discounting the rich-poor gap, how much? How much of the biofuel that is produced in Guatemala driving people hungry is consumed in Guatemala? Even discounting the rich-poor gap: how much of the product is consumed inside the bloody nation? The militias are not beneficiaries; they do not consume 99% of the coltan produced, sorry. They resell it further, so they are only middlemen in the chain.

That's like saying Bill Gates is not a 'beneficiary' of Microsoft because he personally only uses something like one one billionth of the software his corporation sells.

In reality, the middlemen are often reaping far more benefit from a process than the end consumers. If Rwandan militias weren't enslaving their own people to mine coltan for ridiculously low sums, the coltan would still get mined. It would be mined in more lawful countries. Or it would be mined in Rwanda by mining interests who are less cruel and abusive to their people (and are currently prevented from opening their own mines by fear of being shot by militias, I imagine). The coltan might be slightly more expensive- but even if you doubled the price of coltan, the price of consumer electronics would not double.

The people who buy the electronics gain very little from the current system because they have so little to lose if the system changes. It would at most mildly inconvenience them- because the coltan would be mined elsewhere under other, more humane conditions.

But the militias? For them, these coltan operations are huge money-makers relative to the other ways they can extract resources from the low-technology, badly overpopulated, chaotic environment that is Rwanda. If the world stopped buying valuable minerals from their slave mines, the militias might well be completely ruined- while the world's cell phone purchases would frown a little and then go on with their lives.

And if the militias get so much out of the slave mines that the militias would be ruined without the slave mines... then how can you NOT say the militias are beneficiaries?

Maybe that's the problem- your position against the system has gotten so rigid that you don't even see the individual actors involved in the process, they're purely incidental. You see abstractions like The Rich Fucks In The Developed World and The Poor Exploited Bastards.

The actual mechanics of how those poor bastards are exploited are ignored. Even when every remotely plausible way of ending that exploitation would be to attack those mechanics.

No, it is practically impossible (history has proven it time and again), and I gave very good grounds that cost-cutting is not a BUG in capitalism, it's a fucking FEATURE. And costs include people. So dead and suffering people at the point of production are logical. The illogical - people living in good conditions at point of production - is not a product of capitalism but rather the product of a fight against it, the fight of the workers in attempt to seize back control over the means of production.

This I do not have an objection to- but you will note that while I repeatedly defend division of labor, I am not defending capitalism, save to observe that in many cases I do not think it is the ultimate cause of the problems people are experiencing. Because when it comes to terrible livign conditions in the Third World, a large part of the problem is something, that is not really related to capitalism and that capitalists have no real interest in encouraging.

The LIE OF CORNUCOPIA is that "everyone can live a life like the First World rich". In reality, however, humans will simply destroy the Earth trying to do this at the current speed, and the destruction of this habitat, unlike all the prior vices, is most likely going to be irreversible.

The part that makes this a destructive lie is not that you can only make a non-slum by torturing and destroying and exploiting some other place.

It is that you can only sustain an economy, of any kind, if its resources are properly managed by a responsible agent. There are ancient societies which managed to strip-mine and expend irreplaceable resources and fall into collapse and ruin, with no outside intervention whatsoever, after all.

Capitalism has, for the undeveloped nation, a huge cost because it creates powerful outside agents (corporations and imperialist foreign powers) that have an incentive to prevent the nation's government from managing its resources properly. That is the main risk posed by what you consider the "lie of cornucopia-" that governments which are unable to sustainably manage their nations' wealth of natural resources and opportunity will be seduced into selling them off, make a quick profit, and then collapse.

But underlying this is the reality that if you want such a system to stop being a horror-show, you need people to come to their senses, not just blow it all up and kill nearly everyone. Then, you have the prospect of environmentally sane governments creating a sound basis of development for themselves and for other nations. And then we actually could use technology in beneficial ways, as there is much opportunity for that.

So if you target the right parts of the machine, the ones whose evil causes the machine to become destructive, something can be done... but if you simply scream at the whole machine, nothing can be done. At least, not by you.

[K. A. Pital]

I actually agree with you that consumers have a very small gain from the suffering, per se. But let's go to Europe, forget India for a moment, nobody cares bout them anyway.

Britain killed 12,5% of Irelands population for less than 3% of its food imports.

Is it OK to kill a million people for no real reason at all? If so, why? Explain. The underlying cause, specifically, not Nazism or The ideology of deliberate genocide or racial hate by another name, like in Rwanda.

No. It is economics. Export food while dying in droves. But why? To feed your master? But he is already full! It's just a tiny inconvenience for the Masters but pure suffering for the underlings.

You say that division is not the problem. But even Amartya Sen indicated that spatial separation of famine victims vs. food consumers and thus inadequate distribution, not "poor harvest" is mostly the reason for famine. This applies just as much to malnourishment. And it does apply to mining hazards, too - without spatial separation (say, Canada, US, Australian mines) the situation would not be like this in the first place, perhaps.

But how is this separation, such a transoceanic separation possible? ONLY through division of labour. And ONLY through a capitalist or "industrial socialist” division of labour. Otherwise it is infeasible to imagine a whole rich nation of murderous engineers genociding and exterminationg whole continents (Britain and other European empires, for a more recent application see Nazi Germany) and on the other pole a huge "nation" of farmers (the disposessed) who are not only to feed their masters, killers and opressors at rock-bottom prices or even through their blood sacrifice. But this is a reality. Division story replayed on a grander scale, when the first class societies exterminated the foragers and non-class agricultural settlements in tiny darwinian wars.

Hell, to get access to North America's full resources Europe exterminated a whole continent of Natives, basically.

Sure, I said we cannot go back. But looking forward with misplaced optimism... Why?

I agree with you, there are parts of the machine more vile than others. Part one is globalization. It needs to be stopped dead in the tracks, to destroy the "global division of labour" and let people develop a more diversified economy, if it is clear that the "world economy" is not going to stop killing one set of people horribly for the benefit of some other people...

Let people build their own separate economies and we shall see how long the cornucopia lasts!

And none of you so far adressed the fact that benefits for the rich are not just small but transient (short-term), while death of the poor is final... A poor person is not benefitted by the fact that slum, fuel vs. food or some other problem will "resolve itself in a future utopian communist cornucopia", he is benefitted only if there is action against this type of suffering NOW.

But even then, we will ALWAYS be too late to help those who are already dead because of our indifference, violence, and evil, the evil we have done. Their death is final, solves nothing, and is not solved by anything, there is no solution and no solace.

[Purple]

Is it just me or does everything you say boil down to plans that would leave everyone with the power to actually implement them worse off than they are now? How would you than ever plan to actually convince people to go along with this? In fact, I put it to you that your plan is completely unrealistic because if people were so self sacrificing as to enact it than the problems it strives to solve would newer have been created to begin with.

[K. A. Pital]

Objection accepted and acknowledged. You are right, of course. But maybe we should not then ridicule the people that want to somehow solve the problem (I mean socialists by this; they want to keep the division of labour to produce the material and other goods, but at least make it harder or impossible to alienate this collective product, and it is no coincidence socialists have been the most outspoke critics of globalization, "global division of labour" etc.)?

Maybe not just laugh when people suggest equality is the answer, because equality does solve a great many of these problems!

It is a small step to a small, so far tiny possibility that there might be a future where humans are more equal and stop devouring themselves. And there may be a even present, current time, where this happens on a far lesser scale than now.

[His Divine Shadow]

I've also become more critical of globalization as what it means is the western world gave up well paying jobs and a large middle and working class with good purchasing powers, for a race to the bottom in exchange for more profits for the top 1% and it's ravagig western society as we speak, and most don't even see it and the crush in living quality their greed has led them to. So it's gonna be a "told ya so" schandenfreude moment coming in the near future when everyone wonders what the fuck happened, how ome the economy tanked, how come I am poor? How come my nice rural village got depleted and the people had to leave and like shallow pseudo-existences like hamsters in tiny apartments to more efficiently drive the last few dregs of the consumption fest?

OTOH it does seem more people than ever globally speaking have been lifted out of poverty according to sources like the vlog brothers on youtube and things are improving all the time. It's not all negative. And while you say the dead worker is eternally dead, so is the neolithic farmer now, he too is eternally dead and it might have been a painful one and no technological advancement or perfection of medical science will bring back those that have died and suffered to bring us to where we are. We'll never not stand on their corpses.

It's really hard for me, depending on my mood or what topic it is, I might have stances that conflict with each other.

[K. A. Pital]

I also want to underscore a problem that is not resolved by deepening division of labour. Let us say there are two equal agrarian countries.

Both develop. There is suffering, internally, and the countries slowly raise the life level, very slowly. But then one is successful. In what way? It starts making industrial goods, while the other country is left pretty much with what it did before. Country A then goes to make more and more complex goods, which country B cannot make at all.

In the end, A comes and either conquers B to make them buy the non-self produced industrial product, and sell raw unprocessed resources, or A tells B that it is "like apples and oranges" and that the fact A makes all the complex goods leaves no hope for B; the place of B is to forever make apples. It also informs B that it's impossible for B to industrialize because that will wreck the ecology (and it is a truth).

How is this problem "solved" by further deepening division of labour? It is not solved at all. Deepen the division, and you will find nations of shoe-cleaners, nations of prostitutes, nations of farmers pitted against industrial ATOMIC nations.

If you try to flatten the international division of labour, most world nations will be forced to make industrial goods for themselves, not give their product to others and have it fully alienated. The alienation will largely stop on international scale.

So there are good grounds to assault division itself. Deepening it even further does not solve shit. Flattening is the solution. Or equalizing the level of division of labour across societies, at least.

[His Divine Shadow]

I am not sure, aren't countries now, like China, industrializing and slowly taking away what has been the wests power as the workshop of the world? The global capitalist system makes it so that the power appears to be in the wests hands, but it's an illusion, when the time eventually comes to revise the charade that the system is, China wil have the industrial might and we will have Mc Donalds.

[K. A. Pital]

China is the "B" that did not agree with the role given to it, like some other decolonized nations. They openly defied the West, implementing draconian population controls, banning the export of rare earth metals to concentrate production of high-technology goods inside China, stepping into the Heart of Darkness in Africa to take their mineral resources...

And they are, indeed, horribly wrecking the ecology of the world with what they do, just like the Western nations did before. But they are also right in their struggle, because how can a Western person tell them that they cannot live like Westerners do?..

Had the industrialization happened more or less equally (no global trade, lets say), we would have a world of medium-poor industrial nations. Almost everyone would live in something closer to a China level of life. A such high life level as exhibited by the First World would still not be reached.

China's industrialization is a flattening relative to the global division of labour: they struggle to builda complete production chain, so that everything from food to the highest technology is built inside China. this means incomes in the West will adjust downwards. No escape.

And something to ponder on (with a longer timespan):

With percentages instead of absolute numbers


China's rise is not stopping the immiseration of the rest of the developing world. If anything, it looks like China is responsible for all the NET decrease in poverty around the world, so it actually has made the world look better than it does. All this taking into account the things China had to do to achieve this remarkable decrease in poverty.

The rest of the world is on the paying side, as it usually happens when someone industrializes and inequality sharply increases: poverty is rising, entire nations' manufacturing sectors are destroyed by China's manufacturing, and they are forced down the "division of labour ladder" to be the fuel on this new industrial rise...

[Purple]

Objection accepted and acknowledged. You are right, of course. But maybe we should not then ridicule the people that want to somehow solve the problem

I am not against solving the problem nor am I attempting to ridicule you. It's just that I personally feel that our energies would be better served by finding a battle that can be won. And that an achieved victory, no matter how partial is preferable to what I see as a lost cause. Plus, some of your ideas find to be frankly negative. Fundamentally I see any "victory" that is not victorious for my self and leaves me worse off than I was for the sake of someone else as a defeat. Because that is what it is.

It is a small step to a small, so far tiny possibility that there might be a future where humans are more equal and stop devouring themselves. And there may be a even present, current time, where this happens on a far lesser scale than now.

Sadly I am not convinced this can be done without fundamentally altering human nature. And my logic is that, since I see it as impossible I want to "win" the next best way by being the one doing the devouring instead of being devoured.

[hongi]

Fundamentally I see any "victory" that is not victorious for my self and leaves me worse off than I was for the sake of someone else as a defeat.

That's selfish. And selfishness is bad because it only concerns your happiness, here at the expense of the misery and suffering of another. If you don't see that as bad, then there's something deeply wrong with you.

I want to "win" the next best way by being the one doing the devouring instead of being devoured.

You don't win. You lose as well. You're getting devoured as well. You just have the illusion of winning.

[Purple]

That's selfish. And selfishness is bad because it only concerns your happiness, here at the expense of the misery and suffering of another. If you don't see that as bad, then there's something deeply wrong with you.

That may be so. But the current world situation would tend to suggest that most people, or at least all those who matter and have any say in things agree with me.

You don't win. You lose as well. You're getting devoured as well. You just have the illusion of winning.

Sure, but I still end up better off than literally billions of people. Sure, I am destined to live out my life working my years away slavishly so that someone else can get rich of my labor. But at least I will have my cheap clothes, sanitation and electronics. And that still beats doing the same amount of work and more and not having those.

[Simon_Jester]

I actually agree with you that consumers have a very small gain from the suffering, per se. But let's go to Europe, forget India for a moment, nobody cares bout them anyway.

Britain killed 12,5% of Irelands population for less than 3% of its food imports.

Just to be clear what we're debating, I assume you mean the following:

1) It is historical fact that, during the Irish Potato Famine, the British-dominated economic elite in Ireland continued export of grain and other food crops from Ireland.
2) You would appear to be adding to this the observation that the food crops thus exported would have been enough to prevent the starvation of 12.5% of the Irish population.

Is that a correct representation of your argument?

Because I do not want to try to talk about the situation until I'm sure what your argument is.

China is the "B" that did not agree with the role given to it, like some other decolonized nations. They openly defied the West, implementing draconian population controls, banning the export of rare earth metals to concentrate production of high-technology goods inside China, stepping into the Heart of Darkness in Africa to take their mineral resources...

And they are, indeed, horribly wrecking the ecology of the world with what they do, just like the Western nations did before. But they are also right in their struggle, because how can a Western person tell them that they cannot live like Westerners do?..

My own fundamental point here, though, is that the wrecking and ruining of peoples and ecology is not necessary for development. It might accelerate development in some places and ways, but it is not necessary.

However, division of labor is necessary, some means of directing the resources of society into the sectors that generate this massive surge in productivity is necessary.

What is not necessary is private ownership of all means of production.

Nor is there a need for the denigration and disintegration of things which are not privately owned (for a capitalist economy to turn upon and begin dismantling its public schools is an example of this sort of autocannibalism).

Nor is it necessary or wise for national economies to depend solely on the export of a certain resource. Especially not when the conditions of that resource extraction lead to a mass increase in misery for the people (e.g. rubber tapping in the Congo, or the coltan mining in Rwanda that you cite).

And my thought about what you've said is that you're having trouble identifying your targets, because those are the things we can at least conceivably fix and which could result in mass technology and mass human organization being used for good rather than for evil.

Because it is at this point neither desirable nor possible to bring the age of mass technology and mass organization to an end.

[K. A. Pital]

My own fundamental point here, though, is that the wrecking and ruining of peoples and ecology is not necessary for development

If there is no alternative at a given technology level to an environmentally ruinous practice that is perceived as essential to a production process (and god with our "tech tree" there are thousands of such practices), you are stuck with (a) stopping development until you come up with one (b) carrying on with the practice. Nothing illustrates this better than coal mining. It was literally genocide-level murder, especially with the introduction of primitive mechanized tools. Have the people stopped and settled for cutting down forests? No (even though it was theoretically possible, up to ca. 1870, to keep the Industrial Revolution running without coal).

However, division of labor is necessary, some means of directing the resources of society into the sectors that generate this massive surge in productivity is necessary.

Division to what level? Are we going to go all the way to nations of prostitutes, nations of miners, nations of shoe cleaners? Condemning an entire nation to doing just one task in the "global division of labour" in which the rich nations get all the juicy bits? I say flattening is the solution: creating of equally-deep divisions of labour inside countries (to our best possible ability) and thus an equally-industrial world, as opposed to a deeply unequal world where some nations are palaces and other nations are dumps. What? You can't get around this; once you start with "division of labour" on an international level, this means some nations will turn into dumps. Other nations will be mines. Yet another will serve as a whorehouse. And another as a source of fruit. Etc. Is there a space industry in Africa? No. Only by forcefully defying your place in the "international division of labour" can better outcomes be produced.

Nor is it necessary or wise for national economies to depend solely on the export of a certain resource. Especially not when the conditions of that resource extraction lead to a mass increase in misery for the people (e.g. rubber tapping in the Congo, or the coltan mining in Rwanda that you cite).

But, this is the logical consequences of the division of labour on an international level. When division of labour is implemented on a deep level in society, some places become factories while other places become farms, some places become energy plants, and yet some become theaters and cinemas. We spatially separate production and concentrate the production of one type of good in one place; this drives up the efficiency crazy as fuck.

And this also drives human misery up if you're in the wrong place. So that's why I suggest a flattening - which is also what China is doing now, they are challenging the world division of labour, on a scale so massive it may upheave the world itself. Western countries are being outcompeted from their traditional high-tech manufacturing sectors; poverty in the advanced world is rising and middle-incomes are being reduced. China is not content with just being the "dump" of the industrial world.

Because it is at this point neither desirable nor possible to bring the age of mass technology and mass organization to an end.

I think we're clear by now that I don't want to "bring the age of mass technology" to an end. As an interim solution I propose (a) worker ownership of capitals (b) equalizing the role of nations in the world division of labour. If point (a) can be achieved through political action, good. Point (b) also requires political action: antiglobalism. Letting the other nations to become something more than just dumps or mines or farms.

To turn a whole nation into a giant farm or mine is a crime, I don't know if it's a crime against humanity but it certainly is a crime without an expiry date. And, this is not a consequence of industrial division of labour itself, but the consequence of its application on the supranational level.

Otherwise known as globalism, neoliberalism and transnational-corporatism. Goals are clear and targets are set.

[Simon_Jester]

If there is no alternative at a given technology level to an environmentally ruinous practice that is perceived as essential to a production process (and god with our "tech tree" there are thousands of such practices), you are stuck with (a) stopping development until you come up with one (b) carrying on with the practice. Nothing illustrates this better than coal mining. It was literally genocide-level murder, especially with the introduction of primitive mechanized tools. Have the people stopped and settled for cutting down forests? No (even though it was theoretically possible, up to ca. 1870, to keep the Industrial Revolution running without coal).

I think you have partly mis-identified the reason why this is so, but you are not altogether wrong.

To me the key passage in your words here is at a given technology level. We are now at a level where it is really not necessary to have human misery in order to have coal. It is difficult to have coal without ecological destruction, but even that can be mitigated with care and effort- and in any event, we do not need to have more human misery per ton of coal, in order to get less ecological damage.

If there is to be a good future, it will involve efforts to regulate and make orderly and sane the process of harvesting resources from the environment. Globalization has resulted in a halt, or even a decline, in the worldwide trend towards this reduction of global misery and destruction. And I have no objection to your opposition to it- so long as we recognize that it is the global ownership which is making it so uniquely poisonous.

However, division of labor is necessary, some means of directing the resources of society into the sectors that generate this massive surge in productivity is necessary.

Division to what level? Are we going to go all the way to nations of prostitutes, nations of miners, nations of shoe cleaners? Condemning an entire nation to doing just one task in the "global division of labour" in which the rich nations get all the juicy bits? I say flattening is the solution: creating of equally-deep divisions of labour inside countries (to our best possible ability) and thus an equally-industrial world, as opposed to a deeply unequal world where some nations are palaces and other nations are dumps.

I am amenable to this- since to me, 'division of labor' refers to divisions that exist within a given society, not across or between societies except on the smallest scale (it is one thing for a small island nation with a population of ten thousand to become a nation of fishermen, another thing for a large island of a million people to do so).

To expand on this, there is nothing wrong, as such, with having Rwanda export coltan that other nations use. Rwanda has coltan, which others find good and valuable, but which they themselves have no means of using- and will likely not have the means to use for the foreseeable future, even if the better angels of human nature were to prevail in Rwanda and in the rest of the world.

For the Rwandan people collectively to offer some of this coltan in exchange for other good things, would be reasonable. But the Rwandan people should be profiting from it as a whole, the profits should not belong primarily to mining executives or vicious local warlords.

The oil industry is a little better about this (perhaps because there is usually no point in enslaving a local population to produce oil, as efficient oil production requires a highly skilled workforce and a great deal of machinery). Not perfect- there are many places where oil is purchased in blood. But there are also some examples of the oil industry actually choosing to behave respectfully toward the local population, choosing to preserve the local environment, and in general acting like the 'good' sort of middleman.

If corporations could be forced to behave in such ways, their ownership of things would not be such a problem and an obstacle to a good future. But then, it is precisely their ownership that makes it hard to compel their good behavior.

What? You can't get around this; once you start with "division of labour" on an international level, this means some nations will turn into dumps. Other nations will be mines. Yet another will serve as a whorehouse. And another as a source of fruit. Etc. Is there a space industry in Africa? No. Only by forcefully defying your place in the "international division of labour" can better outcomes be produced.

I personally am quite happy to applaud nations that are thus defiant.

But, this is the logical consequences of the division of labour on an international level. When division of labour is implemented on a deep level in society, some places become factories while other places become farms, some places become energy plants, and yet some become theaters and cinemas. We spatially separate production and concentrate the production of one type of good in one place; this drives up the efficiency crazy as fuck.

But with the sole exception of resource extraction, there is no reason for this spatial separation to proceed until things are separated by a thousand kilometers or so.

Resource extraction is an exception to this rule simply because you cannot choose where in the world to mine uranium or tantalum or rare earth elements; these substances do not even exist except in specific locations.

And this also drives human misery up if you're in the wrong place. So that's why I suggest a flattening - which is also what China is doing now, they are challenging the world division of labour, on a scale so massive it may upheave the world itself. Western countries are being outcompeted from their traditional high-tech manufacturing sectors; poverty in the advanced world is rising and middle-incomes are being reduced. China is not content with just being the "dump" of the industrial world.

Very well. Personally, I think it possible for the current advanced nations to preserve much of their lifestyle, with significant changes, despite this upheaval... but this is not something that should happen at the price of forcing other peoples down.

The current problem is that in the advanced nations, the owner-class has found it possible to profit from returning their own people to poverty and enjoying the best advantages of the larger, global market. This is in many ways a mirror of how the global market allows specific groups of quislings in undeveloped nations to become immensely rich by selling out their country's resources and interests.

Global ownership by a class of unaccountable private persons contributes to this rise of misery for everyone not part of (or indispensable to) the owner-class.

I think we're clear by now that I don't want to "bring the age of mass technology" to an end. As an interim solution I propose (a) worker ownership of capitals (b) equalizing the role of nations in the world division of labour. If point (a) can be achieved through political action, good. Point (b) also requires political action: antiglobalism. Letting the other nations to become something more than just dumps or mines or farms.

I am not opposed to this.

To turn a whole nation into a giant farm or mine is a crime, I don't know if it's a crime against humanity but it certainly is a crime without an expiry date. And, this is not a consequence of industrial division of labour itself, but the consequence of its application on the supranational level.

Otherwise known as globalism, neoliberalism and transnational-corporatism. Goals are clear and targets are set.

Well and good; I think we are largely in agreement once more.

[K. A. Pital]

I assume you mean the following:

1) It is historical fact that, during the Irish Potato Famine, the British-dominated economic elite in Ireland continued export of grain and other food crops from Ireland.
2) You would appear to be adding to this the observation that the food crops thus exported would have been enough to prevent the starvation of 12.5% of the Irish population.

Is that a correct representation of your argument?

Pretty much, although the argument is a bit more nuanced. Like I said, turning a nation into a gigantic farm is a crime with no expiry date. The "international division of labour" was playing with people's lives again. Britain imported Irish "money" crops freely (at the time, it was less than 3% of the British consumption). The division of labour (Ireland being "bread basket" and Britain being "the factory") meant that the poor Irish turned to potato as a subsistence crop while wheat, maize, etc. and other types of food were exported to Britain (potato is poorly storable and transportable, but a nutritious and incredibly resilient and cheap type of subsistence crops). Then the blight struck. As Cormac O'Grada, whose studies of the Irish Famine are considered "definite" and basically the best fact-based research out there, pointed out, Ireland was producing and exporting enough grain crops to feed the people, but the grains were "money grops", not food crops, and restrictions were not implemented:

During the famine Ireland switched from being one of Britain's bread-baskets to being a net importer of food-grains. However, in the winter and spring of 1846-7 more was exports still exceeded imports, presumably because the poor in Ireland lacked the purchasing power to buy the wheat and oats that were being shipped out.

There's a more sinister picture than this, though. If you read O'Grada's work, and Death-Dealing Famine, you will undeniably notice the facts that Irelands pauperization preceded the famine: Ireland's population was under the hammer of poverty, because in the new division of labour their place was to grow "money crops" for the Masters and resort to potato to feed their livestock and themselves, to make butter (which was anyway ruthlessly removed during the famine, undeniably putting talk of "alleviation" to rest). In this, you will see that the division of labour between nations is no "absolute good". Indeed, O'Grada mentions the very words of Ricardo spoken about "international division of labour", COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE:

Ireland's moist climate, moreover, gave it a comparative advantage in potato cultivation, and potato yields were high: about fifteen metric tons per hectare.

And the saddest part is that the Irish died for nothing. For no real gain. Exports from Ireland were substantial, when taken in a temporal-dimension, in this precise winter they would've meant the difference between "soft" famine (malnourishment, rising infant mortality) and a "hard" famine with over a million victims. Not all of these exports went to Britain; but as Britain was the colonial administrator, its decision not to close the ports is undeniably a crime no matter where the exported food left the place for. For Britain itself, Irish exports were not a life-or-death question.

[Darmalus]

The situations described really sound like externalized cost problems. The British were able to externalize the costs of bad harvests to the Irish, thus forcing them to "eat" any losses caused by, well, anything (in this case, starvation from the famine). It's the same thing used by Uber, externalizing the cost of being a taxi company to the drivers. It's really easy to externalize costs across borders, since borders allow one to permit benefits through without attendant problems.

So I guess the solution is to expand the "system boundary" and thus internalize the currently external costs. No idea how to do that, short of a world government that obliterates and current international borders and forces a true unified system on everyone. Experiments like the EU seem to indicated half-measures are worse than no measures in this regard.