Uplifting News

Capitalism created more poverty by putting a price tag on the basic necessities of life and making land private. We could have had no poverty if we had free shared access to the means of subsistence/production. We could have lived and worked cooperatively for the benefit of everybody instead of having to compete with each other to be exploited for the major profits of the few.

"..the long rise of capitalism, from 1500 right into the Industrial Revolution, caused dramatic social dislocation everywhere it went. The enclosure movement in Europe, the Indigenous genocides, the Atlantic slave trade, the spread of European colonisation, the Indian famines; all of this took a measurable toll on human welfare around the world. [..] For the vast majority of the history of capitalism, growth didn’t deliver welfare improvements in the lives of ordinary people; in fact, it did exactly the opposite. [..] capitalist expansion relied on the creation of artificial scarcity. Capitalists enclosed the commons – lands, forests, pastures and other resources that people depended on for survival – and ripped up subsistence economies in order to push people into the labour market. The threat of hunger was used as a weapon to enforce competitive productivity. Artificial scarcity quite often caused the livelihoods and welfare of ordinary people to collapse even as GDP grew. It wasn’t until nearly 400 years that life expectancies in Britain finally began to rise [...]. Historians today point out that it began with a startlingly simple intervention[...]: sanitation. In the middle of the 1800s, public health researchers had discovered that health outcomes could be improved by introducing simple sanitation measures, such as separating sewage from drinking water. All it required was a bit of public plumbing. But public plumbing requires public works, and public money. You have to appropriate private land for things like public water pumps and public baths. And you have to be able to dig on private property in order to connect tenements and factories to the system. This is where the problems began. For decades, progress towards the goal of public sanitation was opposed, not enabled, by the capitalist class. Libertarian-minded landowners refused to allow officials to use their property, and refused to pay the taxes required to get it done. The resistance of these elites was broken only once commoners won the right to vote and workers organised into unions. Over the following decades these movements, which in Britain began with the Chartists and the Municipal Socialists, leveraged the state to intervene against the capitalist class. They fought for a new vision: that cities should be managed for the good of everyone, not just for the few. These movements delivered not only public sanitation systems but also, in the years that followed, public healthcare, vaccination coverage, public education, public housing, better wages and safer working conditions. According to research by the historian Simon Szreter, access to these public goods – which were, in a way, a new kind of commons – had a significant positive impact on human health, and spurred soaring life expectancy through the twentieth century. This explanation is now backed up by a strong consensus among public health researchers. Recent data shows that water sanitation measures alone explain 75% of the decline in infant mortality in the United States between 1900 and 1936, and half the total decline in mortality rates. A recent study led by an international team of medical scientists found that, after sanitation, the greatest predictor of improved life expectancy is access to universal healthcare, including child vaccination. And once you have these basic interventions in place, the biggest single driver of continued improvements in life expectancy happens to be education – and particularly women’s education." (from the book "Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World" by Jason Hickel)

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"The long process of removing people from lifeways that allowed for them to survive as communities is the history of the violent imposition of capitalism and the state. There are countless stories of how this was done, from the enclosure of common land, to the gendering of different kinds of work, to the creation of dependence on wage labor to purchase the things necessary for life, to the creation of centralized food systems and monoculture that eliminated people’s ability to grow their own food." (from the book "Practical Anarchism: A Guide For Daily Life" by Shuli Branson)