The Western Capitalist Record

We've lifted more people out of poverty in the last fifteen years than in the entire course of human history.

This claim is one of the most common defenses of capitalism. And as you might expect, it is deliberately a misdirection. I I mean, even if we can see, just for the sake of argument, if we can see that capitalism has saved hundreds of millions of people from poverty, which is actually something that they've only started to say recently because they want to give capitalism credit for what China has done, for how many people China has lifted out of poverty. They wanna give the credit for that to capitalism. So even if we concede that, it's nothing but a deflection from the literal billions of victims of capitalism because capitalism was a driving force in colonization, in slavery, modern slavery, famine, ecological disaster, deadly working conditions, on and on.

So for example, European colonization is estimated to have caused fifty million deaths. Just British colonialist rule in India killed 1,800,000,000 Indians. Capitalist driven wars have resulted in a hundred and sixty million deaths. Upwards of 20,000,000 Africans died in the Transatlantic slave trade. This is all from cap the the the impact of capitalism.

Take credit for that too. And that's just in the in the history, that's just in the past. But if you're talking about today, where at least eight million people die every year because they can't afford medicine, that's capitalism. About nine million people die every year because they can't afford food. Half of those are children under the age of five, well, that's capitalism.

Three million people die every year because of unsafe working conditions, that's capitalism. So that's about twenty million people per year or about 500,000,000, half a billion people since the year 2000. And that's just talking specifically about deaths, we're not talking about general suffering because if we talk about that, well, there's at least 50,000,000 people living in conditions of modern slavery right now. Around 15,000,000 people are forcibly displaced for large economic projects, development, and so on every year. That's capitalism.

A billion people are living in extreme poverty right now. That's extreme poverty. That means it's below, the official World Bank poverty threshold of $2 a day. So if you make $3 a day, that doesn't include you. Eight hundred and fifty four million people are undernourished today because food prices are too high, that's capitalism.

Over 2,000,000,000 people lack access to essential medicines due to high costs, that's capitalism. I mean, I could go on. And like I said, the World Bank set the, the international poverty line at around $2 a day, and anyone earning, anything above that is technically considered to have been lifted out of poverty. So yes, if you make just $2.50 per day, capitalism has rescued you. It's a deliberately low standard designed to make the numbers look better.

It doesn't reflect any meaningful improvement in their lives. It simply changes the way that poverty is measured just to try to make capitalism look like it's doing more than it is and helping more than it is. You eliminate poverty by redefining it as not poverty.