The slow decay of Venezuela

[Simon_Jester]

Part of the solution is the end of colonialism and imperialism- Ireland in 1925, whatever other problems it had, was assured that it would never experience anything like the Potato Famine while food was being exported from the country in any fashion.

Likewise, India continued to experience agricultural crises after 1947, but they did not result in major famines. Because unlike the British Raj government, the Indian national government was accountable to (and only to) its own people. Therefore it would take preserving their lives with anti-famine measures as an absolute priority, and would not willfully export food or hoard it in other parts of the country when the food was urgently needed in a particular region.

[There may be a counterexample to this, but I am not aware of it]
______________________

Once a nation is independent and has a functional government, the worst kinds of international exploitation of labor do not always stop, but they are less likely to occur.

In cases like Rwandan-controlled coltan mines (many of them in the Congo), this condition is not fully met, because the Congo's government is unable to stop armed 'militias' (that is to say, warlords) from operating slave mines on its territory.

So that is yet another point from which to counter the abuses created by international division of labor and globalization in the hands of an elite owner-class: work for independence, democracy, openness, and the rule of law and order, in the countries that are being victimized.

[Note that I am not saying this is the ONLY thing that should be done; I am identifying one issue among many]

[K. A. Pital]

Severely curtailing the power of TNC or nationalizing them is also an option. A transnational corporation has the potential to deal more abuse because it is not bound by national workplace safety legislation, etc. Determine the actors and punish them - what Alyrium suggested.

Except this would take a genuine left-wing government that's willing to go even against its own "welfare agents" (wealthy corporations that are seen as "national prestige", "job creators" and "tax giants" in wealthy countries). But seems like right-wingers triumph as of late: the tale of "cornucopia" for the First World masses and a relentless boot on the face of everyone else works quite well for now.

"Internalizing costs" (world government) is a non-solution. We had that in colonialism. Which did not stop territories from being treated so differently. Spatial separation, cultural separation are enough grounds to make sure that even if we "unite" the world under one capitalist government, it won't follow up on equality and territories would be administered differently, except under a "one" government.

Before such a unification is attempted, the humans must actually be willing to equalize the world's life level. This would mean sacrifices on part of the developed countries and massively increasing the amount of higher technology goods produced by the so-far undeveloped nations. Overall, an increase in the life level of the world, but for the currently developed nations an inevitable downgrade. Severity of impact can be curtailed, but not totally avoided.

P.S. I'm totally exhausted by this debate. It strained me mentally, to have to go through all the horrors again, to have me re-reading Planet of Slums and Late Victorian Holocausts, going through data on miner lung disease, slum mortality... it's just too much for me right now. I'm gonna take a break from this for several days. Being able to look on suffering non-stop is not a natural ability for us; I have to actually force myself to do it, to fight my own ignorance.

[Channel72]

P.S. I'm totally exhausted by this debate. It strained me mentally, to have to go through all the horrors again, to have me re-reading Planet of Slums and Late Victorian Holocausts, going through data on miner lung disease, slum mortality... it's just too much for me right now. I'm gonna take a break from this for several days. Being able to look on suffering non-stop is not a natural ability for us; I have to actually force myself to do it, to fight my own ignorance.

Indeed, it is very depressing. But also very informative. I learned a lot from reading your posts in this thread.

But there seems to be very little "debate" here - at least, the level of agreement in this thread is really atypical for an SD.net N&P thread that isn't about bashing Donald Trump or something. I don't see any fundamental disagreement in this thread: you and Simon are mostly arguing over details, like who deserves more blame, or how feasible certain avenues of rectification may be, or what forces are more responsible for the outcomes we see.

To take a step back from the details:

(1) Going after division of labor is a mistake. It may be interesting to point out how division of labor results in inequality, but it's a dead end line of argumentation. Division of labor is needed to run a technological society, we all know that.

(2) As you say, the current world order is a result, to a very large extent, of multi-national corporations and a disparity between the producer and the consumer. Right-wing thinking prevails in the first world, because it is the path of least resistance to the natural outcomes dictated by human nature and Western democracy. Left-wing thinking - i.e. curtailing multi-national corporations, forcibly imposing a certain degree of equality, and creating separate, isolated economies, would require more of a top-down governmental super-structure which regulates economies. This is very hard to impose in a Democratic system where voters will, by their self-oriented human nature, force politicians to optimize for local priorities - and since a corporation like Apple produces massive wealth locally by offloading the cost of production to remote nations, governments will hesitate to regulate it too much or perhaps face the wrath of voters.

But another major problem, which you don't really mention, or at least gloss over, is that there is also very little push back against this world order from remote actors either - since they also benefit at the expense of local populations around them. You are quick to blame Western consumerism and multi-national corporations for the plight of the coltan miners in the Congo, but they are also being exploited by local interests - local militias, local politicians, etc. And these local exploiters are arguably even more responsible, since they are directly committing atrocities, and also because they are not even really a necessary element of the whole producer/consumer chain that ultimately results in me having a cell phone. By the same token, there is little push back from the PRC government when Apple wants to setup soul-crushing factories in Shanghai, because the PRC elite benefit while the mass of workers suffer from exhaustion and poor working conditions.

(3) Solutions: we all agree the solution at least party involves stronger forms of socialism and way more restrictions on multi-national corporations. A world government may not be the answer, as it will still favor certain provinces - however, a world government would at least have more of a chance of curtailing and regulating the activities of multi-national corporations. Clearly, the free market itself is not anywhere remotely enough of a force to enforce ethical behavior among shareholders and C-level decision makers of multi-national corporations. Drastic changes like shared-ownership of corporate assets among all employees is something I'm heavily in favor of - but I don't see a viable path for implementing that. More practically, I think development of the 3rd world is critical. If living standards rise across the board, there will be "remote producers" to exploit anymore, and corporations will have less options available for unethically exploiting cheap production forces. This is already happening to a certain extent in places like India, where per-capita GDP is steadily rising, and corporations are actually turning to cheaper non-Indian work forces for outsourcing software development. Per-capita GDP in China is rising as well.

Note I am not talking about "cornocupia", or the fantasy that 10 billion people can all have a first-world American lifestyle. Just that there is definitely room for living standards to increase substantially, without collapsing the planet.*

*(Actually, it's quite possible to support 10 billion people with a quasi-first world standard of urban living, if we organize everyone around urban centers, implement wide-spread hyrdroponic agricultural systems, and ultimately develop widespread fusion reactors.)

You act so hopeless, but if development of the 3rd world continues, there will be fewer and fewer producers to exploit. You also gloss over how less and less percent of 3rd world populations are living in slums, by saying that the total number of slum-dwellers continues to increase. But of course, that is a tautological and useless point, since populations are always increasing. The fact that the percent of slum dwellers continues to decrease, even as populations increase, is cause for optimism whether you are in the mood to admit it or not.

Finally, you argue that any future improvements are ultimately of no consequence for the billions now who suffer, or the untold, countless, myriad dead who have suffered in the past. I have never replied to this argument because I don't even see an argument here. You are simpy stating a brute fact - a brute tragedy that we all have to accept. Just like the millions of Paleolithic hunter gatherers who died - who died of trivially treatable injuries - the unknown, nameless hunter-gatherer who sometime around 120,000 BCE fell from a tree and broke his ankle, then suffered for months from infection until he finally died. Or the long-forgotten Australopithecus who, perhaps 2 million years ago, somewhere in what is now modern Nairobi, had his shoulder crushed in a fight with another primate, wallowing in excruciating pain for months before finally dropping dead.

There's no escape from any of this without division of labor, and a mastery over the natural world that comes with it.

[K. A. Pital]

Coming back from the brink...

The problem of a lack of local push-back is something that I'm not glossing over. Indeed, the situation is such that local governments are usually outright subservient to corporations (in case of small countries - because corporations have greater resources than the whole nation) or, in case of giant nations like India, sometimes disregard the human cost of transformation using a balance sheet of purely financial-income indicators. China is an outlier because it is not totally subservient; indeed, its pushback is sometimes beyond expected, like with banning Apple and Cisco products from state use or cutting down rare earth export quotas so that the pollution and strain taken by the environment is at least benefitting the Chinese too, and not the Western nations alone (which is the case with crude-resource extraction in many resource-cursed nations). But more assertive local governments like the Chinese one are not the norm, more like the exception to the norm. China is not doing enough, surely it could do more. But even what China is doing remains an unachievable prospect for many other nations.


Development of the Third World is indeed critical. But we must remember that if we remove China from the equation, poverty reduction within 20 years remains an extremely fragile construct. China has been doing the lion's share of work (some of it also taken up by Vietnam). Also, we shouldn't be shy to admit redistributive solutions do work - Ghana did a colossal 87% reduction in malnourishment while its economic growth was far from stellar. Deepening of the division of labour in the Third World is welcome, as it levels the playing field. What's important is that other nations (not just China, Vietnam, and very lately - also India) experience deepening too and thereby remove the colossal buying power inequalities that have accrued during the latest 200 years, thereby also lowering the possibility of exploitation, purchasing-power based denial of resources and so on.

Finally, the slum-dweller angle. Here you can see that from around 2000 the non-slum population starts growing faster than the slum population, creating a falling share of the slum dwellers. But what else is important is that the trend is easily reversible if the non-slum growth slows down as projected by 2020 - and the bigger graph is horrible to think about. There should be no compromise in the MDG slum population goals. If anything, these goals should be only the basic line above which we are talking about a massive failure to improve the living standards of a ~1 billion people...

Figures on slum populations and projections for 2020 and beyond, UN-HABITAT 2010.


I am also of the opinion we can have "reasonable" living standards for all, as long as we happen to tolerate the equalization that will happen when developing nations reach purchasing power of the developed ones, and as long as we do more basic environmental science and don't screw up horribly by overusing some vital resource and only learn about this post-facto.

[hongi]

Unless I'm reading K. A. Pital wrong, I don't understand where the idea is coming from that he's arguing for a Romantic 'back to the past' fantasy. He doesn't seem to be saying that we should go back to lesser levels of production.

Better production (better does not necessarily more, I mean production for production's sake is one of the reasons why the world is so fucked) is the only way out of this mess. That seems like an eminently good Marxist idea.

[Purple]

It's not about going back to the past. It's about driving our living standards back to the past. He is arguing for a situation where the living standards of the developed world are torn down in order to remove the conditions keeping the rest poor until such a point where all sides reach equilibrium.

[hongi]

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.

If you know you're selfish and your selfishness hurts other people, you have a moral duty to change your ways. There should be no comfort in knowing that others are selfish as well.

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.

Have you ever done anything in your life that you knew would be detrimental to you but beneficial for others?

[Purple]

You people don't get it, do you? Living standards aren't about having the ability to play games on your mobile phone. It's about things such as health care that keep us alive. And it's about keeping our economy going.

The western world relies on our current consumer society to maintain it self. Just imagine what would happen if we say gave up on cheap electronics. Sounds like an easy sacrifice, right? Well, think again. Millions of people would lose their jobs. Entire professions be gutted and devices we take for granted such as medical equipment which use electronics would suddenly become very expensive leading to a massive step back in health care.
Automobiles would become less safe and more expensive leading to more pollution as the modern electronically controlled engines become too expensive and the majority of consumers are forced to use less advanced systems which consume less fuel and pollute less (say goodie to hybrid cars). Oh, and whilst we are at pollution say goodie to solar cells since those need cheap electronics to keep them viable. And of course our economy would grind to a halt as computer prices skyrocket and internet trade turns into a bubble that bursts immediately. People would die, economies collapse and the word economy would get fucked. All because you thought it'd be easy to give up on cheap electronics.

And that's just one example.

---

Bottom line is that we can not or at least should not look at this as something that is easy to fix if only the white man would give up his privilege. Do that and we'll end up in a situation where the rich world is collapsing and the poor world is even worse off as they've lost what little income they had.

[Simon_Jester]

You people don't get it, do you? Living standards aren't about having the ability to play games on your mobile phone. It's about things such as health care that keep us alive. And it's about keeping our economy going.

The thing is, suppose there are two possible worlds.

In one world, a billion people live in a wonderful economy, while the other six billion live in hell, or starve, or die of plagues.

In the other world, seven billion people live adequate lives. Maybe their life expectancy is seventy-five rather than eighty. Maybe they can't afford to replace cell phones every year. Maybe they have to think hard about which foods provide cost-effective, nutritious calories rather than stuffing their faces with whatever they feel like and knowing they'll always be able to afford it. But... everyone gets by. Nobody starves. Everybody lives, no one lives in hell.

I submit that the second world is better than the first one.

The western world relies on our current consumer society to maintain it self. Just imagine what would happen if we say gave up on cheap electronics. Sounds like an easy sacrifice, right? Well, think again. Millions of people would lose their jobs. Entire professions be gutted and devices we take for granted such as medical equipment which use electronics would suddenly become very expensive leading to a massive step back in health care.

Automobiles would become less safe and more expensive leading to more pollution as the modern electronically controlled engines become too expensive and the majority of consumers are forced to use less advanced systems which consume less fuel and pollute less (say goodie to hybrid cars). Oh, and whilst we are at pollution say goodie to solar cells since those need cheap electronics to keep them viable. And of course our economy would grind to a halt as computer prices skyrocket and internet trade turns into a bubble that bursts immediately. People would die, economies collapse and the word economy would get fucked. All because you thought it'd be easy to give up on cheap electronics.

And that's just one example.

Doubling the cost of microchips would not have the effect you describe, especially since microchips grow exponentially more powerful per unit cost over time.

And frankly, fixing the abuses Stas described would NOT double the cost of microchips. It would do less than that. All that is truly required is that people be paid fairly for their labor, and that the civilized world refuse to do business with slavers and madmen and murderers.

[Purple]

I submit that the second world is better than the first one.

Absolutely. However I do not believe that that scenario is plausible. If for no other reason than because (1 + 7) / 2 makes 3 and not 6 (metaphor). More likely I see that his means would lead to a world where the western world gets what you describe whilst the rest of the planet still remains poor and destitute because you just cut off their income source without actually doing anything to fix their internal problems. So instead of having warlords warring over who gets to sell rare ores to the west you get warlords murdering each other over who gets to eat the other ones tribe.

And frankly, fixing the abuses Stas described would NOT double the cost of microchips. It would do less than that.

I remain unconvinced by you simply saying that.

All that is truly required is that people be paid fairly for their labor, and that the civilized world refuse to do business with slavers and madmen and murderers.

So we start by, what refusing to buy Saudi oil? That sounds like a great way not to crash the world economy.

[madd0ct0r]

nah, start by buying fairtrade, by boycotting abusive companies where you can and checking when you don't.

Send a market signal that morality has a value.

[Simon_Jester]

I submit that the second world is better than the first one.

Absolutely. However I do not believe that that scenario is plausible. If for no other reason than because (1 + 7) / 2 makes 3 and not 6 (metaphor). More likely I see that his means would lead to a world where the western world gets what you describe whilst the rest of the planet still remains poor and destitute because you just cut off their income source without actually doing anything to fix their internal problems. So instead of having warlords warring over who gets to sell rare ores to the west you get warlords murdering each other over who gets to eat the other ones tribe.

The majority of the Third World is already not in this state- it consists of orderly, civilized nation-states that simply have problems with varying degrees of corruption and a political structure that is too weak to withstand pressure from First World corporate interests. Warlordism is found in the worst handful of places.

The challenge is, simply, to encourage these nations to develop rational measures that protect their resources and enable them to grow. If this were impossible, people would never buy raw materials produced in the First World at all.

So you can drop the absurd and complacent "we couldn't have an economy without exploitation" nonsense.

And frankly, fixing the abuses Stas described would NOT double the cost of microchips. It would do less than that.

I remain unconvinced by you simply saying that.

The price of the coltan (or other comparable precious ores and gems) that go into such products is a small fraction of the overall price of the product. It's like how doubling the price of iron ore doesn't double the price of a car- because the cost of the ore is only a small fraction of the cost of the steel, let alone of the full, complicated process that turns the steel into a ton or two of precision machinery.