The last statistic I read put it at 20 million deaths per year of poverty. This included lack of food, clean water, vaccines, and a few other resources. As a species we produce much more food than we need to survive, and yet throw massive amounts of it away. We do the same with many other resources that could have gone towards devices to clean water and create vaccines. Many areas of medical research are lacking funding, we could easily be putting more resources there to save even more lives.
The people dying because of poverty are typically from countries termed "underdeveloped" or "third world". The people within these countries do not have access to many resources, not just the essentials for modern life. One of these resources is access to the means of production. This happens in a few different ways. On an individual level location plays a part., you can't produce much when there are no tools near where you live. Police and other government officials play another, even if there are means of production in your area you need their permission first. Since the police often go along with what the capitalist themselves decide, their role is to be an extension of the power of the capitalist over the means of production.
The most common route taken to help alleviate poverty in locations with little means of production is to simply loan or give the resources to build them. More specifically, they give the resources to specific people so that they can then become the ruling class within the local area. Since capitalists cannot exist without control of others they then allow specific others to use the newly built means of production to create resources that area can sell and eventually build up it's means of production with through capital accumulation.
There is one main flaw in this system, we already have too much capital accumulation. There are so many means of production that we don't use anything close to all the resources, and are destroying the environment in producing them, that is one of the largest problems in a for-profit instead of for-need economy. Climate change is destroying our crops, we are running out of rare earth metals in many locations, we are destroying massive amounts of rain forest, and so much more is happening, and so we just create more resources we don't need? Helping ease poverty is one of the most important goals of humanity, but it shouldn't be done at the expense of humanities future. It would take a great effort to shift the people or means of production over such a great distance, but we would be doing the same with resources either way. The solution is not more capitalism, that is the problem.
What do you all think should be done?
Chomsky tells us what we should do (in this video the suggestion starts around 39:02), in short, grassroots organization and mobilization.
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yeah I agree, you doing any interesting stuff related to that?
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I'm not part of any organization at the moment, I do feel a bit guilty about it. I did go to the big climate change march of 2017 and I follow a local climate change action group who do gatherings and protests. But it's not easy when you have to work and live your life too.
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a worker too tired to fight makes for a happy capitalist.
I have some groups on steem you can join in on if you want. In my platform, CI, the users do all of the curation and get most of the rewards. There isn't too much delegation (like 12k SP) but I am working on building more into the platform, and building the community up
Discord link right here if you wanna join in: https://discord.gg/9r4FR5
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haha sad but true, I'll check discord!
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sent a ping
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This post has been rated by the user-run curation platform CI! In this platform users are able to manually curate content. This is done regardless of Steem Power, for both rewards and vote size calculation.
Join in at our site here!
https://collectiveintelligence.red/
Or join us on discord to interact with the community!
https://discord.gg/sx6dYxt
This post was submitted for curation by: @anarchyhasnogods
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There are no easy answers. Education, education, education. Spreading knowledge about how to live responsibly. On how to live content. Striving for ever more profit does not make happier, AND it's destructive.
Apart from that, organize the sane.
Apart from that, no idea. I'm rather pessimistic (but of course, that must not serve as an excuse to do nothing).
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so you think it is the fault of the individual and when they are educated they can just choose to stop wasting so many resources?
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Part of the answer is individual education, yes. A society is the sum of its induviduals. So change at the individual level will - if achieved in sufficient numbers - change a society. That's the basic grassroots concept.
Of course it's not the whole answer, as you would like to understand me. But this at least I can influence, while I alone cannot change a large system.
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if you could educate everyone on one topic, what would it be?
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one topic only? Damn.
Probably: How to find scientific fact without being influenced by politicians and media. Once you know what the problem is, you feel much more compelled to act accordingly.
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science itself is as human as we are, it is simply a tool. We do not find facts with science, we find approximations that we deem good enough to work with. Nobody does this the same way, and teaching them to do it the same way would impede progress more than it would help it imo.
If I were to educate people on one thing myself it would probably be the very basis of economic systems, like how the monopoly of violence, movement of resources, etc, actually operates. From there they would know what needs to be done to stop it. We have so very few years left before climate change devastates us and we already have 20 million people dying of poverty every year, what could the state and capitalists do if the workers figured out why?
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We live in a world where the poor are blamed for being poor even when the resources for production are somehow skewed. Making the means of production accessible to a common man, profit sharing between business owners and their employees and placing a huge tax on accumulated capital will ensure wealth redistribution. I don't even know what I'm saying....
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why do you think the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth?
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Yea, I know it's not going to be easy. Gradually, through orientation and re-orientation, we can get people to buy into our idea. When we have the masses behind us, we can do so much. I agree it's not going to be easy
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how many examples do you have of democracy having more of an impact than rioting?
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so you expect to convince people to ignore the way capitalism punishes you for not being greedy?
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The capitalists use violence to defend the means of production. What would you do if they used all of their violence against you while you tried this method of reform?
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Think about what you (supposedly) need. You'll find out the appartment or house you live in could be a lot smaller and 90% of what is in it you don't 'need'. It is helpful, for pleasure and enjoyment but you don't need it.
You will find very few voices for this 'for-need' who assist you.
despite all the socialist institutions in the world the number of poor people is decreasing since decades
(minute 8) - that concerns your first sentence
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did you know the "red pill" in the matrix movies was actually a pill for HRT for transgender people? The two people who wrote the matrix were both trans and all you right wingers use it without realizing lmao
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oh the red pill as a concept is used widely nowadays
quite imaginable that the warkowski brothers, now sisters used it for transgender people first
funnily I searched for a tom woods video and landed on this right wing channel.
but right is bad anyway, isn't it?
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"despite all the socialist institutions in the world the number of poor people is decreasing since decades"
Socialism is worker control of the means of production, and cannot exist while capitalism exists. You are thinking of social democracy. Link below.
Needs are not the same as bare minimum for survival. Another way to describe that economy is for-use. You are arguing from ignorance, please educate yourself on the basics of political theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
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I don't bother about nomenclature
we can make "despite all the social democratic institutions in the world the number of poor people is decreasing since decades" out of it.
With the video at 8 minutes it illustrated the point that the situation is not so dire and depressing as indicated in your first sentence in your post, rather fewer and fewer people and children are dying early over the past decades.
My main point was that it will be hard to find followers on your way when you name it for-need because a) need is a vague and subjective term and b) it tends to ascetism and only few people like ascetism. Similar it would be difficult if it would be for-wish because wishes are vague and subjective and unlimited.
for-use seems to me equally vague and subjective
as political theory is a broad topic which one could study a lifetime without coming to an end, I see the same problem (hard to find followers on your way) with this:
please educate yourself on the basics of political theory
Imagine: I would come along and ask: What is it what you do, how does it work and how can I get along and you would answer:
First you have to please educate yourself on the basics of political theory and then come back.
I don't think you would find many followers.
This video and some much-liked comments below you may like as well,
for a future guide to people ignorant about social democracy and socialism
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of course there remains the question if you are an anarchist at all
https://steempeak.com/voluntaryis/@larkenrose/oweoepzb
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excuse me what the fuck? Anarchist is literally a left wing term and capitalists stole it and pretended it applied to them
you "ancaps" are literally a fucking joke lmao
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I do know that libertarian has a left-wing as well as a capitalistic history.
I do not see how you wish to achieve a more peaceful and anarchist world with making assumptions out of thin air about people you do not know.
Any person can use the term anarchist.
You might care about free people or
you might just care about labels like 'left-wing term' and your specific intellectual bubble (as we all live to a degree in intellectual bubbles).
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libertarian is only left wing. Anarchy is the destruction of unjust hierarchy. The first self-proclaimed anarchist was strictly against capitalism on every level, so much that he wrote a book with the famous slogan,"property is theft", in this instance by property he meant capital. He based anarchism as literally an opposition to capitalism. You are not anarchist, you are capitalist.
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the difference between us seems to lie in the points outlined in the Larken Video @larkenrose:
you reject hierachy and name this as anarchy
we accept voluntary hierarchies and think of the abolition of property and the forceful destruction of voluntary hierarchy as slavery or statist
or just as logically contradictory and think of the typical proverb: you would have first to crush human nature to achieve a society without hierarchy, thus rendering it impossible and the attempt would be full-blown terror
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