Is this inevitable? Is it good? You’re talking about it as if it’s either one or the other. To me, neither seems true.
He didn’t seem to attack you – just pointed out that “fewer suicides” is a pretty fucked up standard for living conditions for your fellow human beings. If you feel attacked by that observation, maybe it’s a sign of a guilty conscience.
Insisting that what we have now is fine is also not constructive.
In my experience, this sort of statement is usually projection – assuming other people have the same thoughts, values, and emotional responses as you do. The only cure is to actually listen to other people and give them the benefit of the doubt, but a lot of people have trouble with that.
They may very well have enjoyed farm work but couldn’t compete with the low food prices created by large-scale industrial agriculture. The assumption always seems to be that people want to leave the farms, but the history of urbanization in the west wasn’t like that at all – small-scale farmers were undercut by large-scale industrial enterprises and in many cases had few options but to sell their farms and move somewhere they could obtain wage labor.
Note that forcing people to do things under threat of privation is not freedom or voluntary uncoerced labor or any of the sorts of things that people defending this state of affairs like to call it.
Why do you have such a problem with people offering criticism without offering solutions in the same breath? They don’t always have to come from the same person at the same time, and good criticism from one person can often trigger good ideas for solutions in another person if they’re allowed to share. On the other hand, shooting down criticism and insisting on “solutions” can come across as being an apologist for a bad state of affairs, which may be connected to why you perceive yourself as being attacked for your statements.
Indeed – he just no idea how far “late stage Capitalism” would go. I personally think we still have another few decades for it to really crash and burn.
Truth. IPhone components are manufactured in over a dozen different countries, and the largest share of them are produced in Germany (~12-14%,) not exactly a low-wage nation…
Well, you could simply stop buying such electronics. Or take @kwhitefoot’s advice, if you decide idealism is a little too expensive for you right now. Everybody has to decide for themselves.
@Mister44 & @sexycyborg, I hope you are both right and that this is merely a step towards a better life for these factory workers. Certainly I admire willingness to work hard to make a better future!
Personally, I pay extra for ethically produced, sustainably engineered products. Not everyone has the ability to do so, therefore I feel morally obliged to.
Please submit a list of all your purchases over the past five years so we can judge this for ourselves – I’m sure the wooden computer you typed that message on was 100% ethically produced, right?
Bad example! I don’t own any computers I’ve paid for, and I salvage dozens every year that would otherwise go to the landfill.
The categories where my laziness and economic limits triumph over my ideals are fuel (I heat with propane, and two of my four vehicles still use gasoline) and clothing.
Like I said, we all have to decide for ourselves; I decided I don’t need a phone or a store-bought computer, and that I’d pay extra for ethically, sustainably produced food, but I have made other concessions; I ain’t no saint.
Fair enough, and admirable. My career does not allow for such decisions (I’m in the media-technology industry), and frankly the Earth is at a point IMHO where change is going to need to mostly occur from the top down. I believe Al Gore has said as much, so hey, I guess that’s something… :-/
Yeah, I agree. My friend Mr. Mike says “people will do what they can.”
I am wearing a sweat-shop shirt right now, not because I want to, but because the confluence of economic events in my life has made it necessary for me to dress in a certain way in order to afford electric vehicles and pricey sustainable foodstuffs. I can’t be like Ghandi and make my own threads without economic consequences.
If there were ethically produced phones and computers available at a price regular people could afford, they would buy!
