When you're an empire being supported on the labor of a couple billion people in other parts of the world, yes, life for you and yours can be pretty okay.
Not as okay for the imperial periphery, the sacrifice zones, but they don't really count.
> You can amass a closet full of outfits, in a variety of styles and colors, with no knowledge of the spinning machines, the dyeing vats, the automatic looms, the sewing machines, or the tremendously efficient factory system they are a part of—the system that has turned this kind of product from a luxury for the rich into a commodity available to the average worker.
When I read things like this, I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people. I want to post that angry goose meme: "Who made the outfits, buddy? WHO MADE THE OUTFITS?"
Industrial revolution and automation still makes amenities far more accessible for all. The material conditions of the average factory worker in Thailand is still miles ahead of the condition of someone of that percentile of the worldwide socioeconomic strata in any other period of history.
Its complicated. If you are on the very lowest rung of the industrial structure, you are probably in worst conditions that working on the family farm with the local village. Things will look better monetarily, but the overall life quality will be diminished.
There would be a point that as your wealth grows it does get better but that is depended on there being others to fill the lower rung to support that.
You aren't wrong but there is also additional nuance. Clothes for everyone on the planet is just so simple nowadays due to massive excess for instance.
>I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people.
I think I also see how a surfeit of liberal arts education, with all its absurdly relativizing, simplifying, hand waving fashionable criticism of everything "commercial" that it depends on has crippled your own perspective.
No, the modern world isn't a simplistic black and white case of a tiny rich world being that way only because it lives off the back of a massive toiling class of slaves. The reality is much more complex and mutually transactional. The same market dynamics that make more developed countries even wealthier also heavily contribute to improved living in countries still developing further, and vice versa.
Is there exploitation? Sure. The human world has never been perfect and even while it improves, many injustices remain, but to categorize the socioeconomic structures of today's world so simplistically as your comment does is to make an argument that caricaturizes both the genuinely wealthy and the billions of poor you implicitly claim to sympathize with. They too are looking for and finding their comparative measures of improved wealth specifically by being participants in the market system that they too help build and actively participate in, and which makes the consumer goods they seek more affordable than ever before for an incrementally more comfortable life.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than the vast majority of historical alternatives. If you hate it so much, at least lay out a practical alternative that's actually desirable and realistic enough for billions of people to embrace it in practice as they do largely capitalist markets. Can you?
While you're doing that, why not look at the actual numbers for how more people than ever (in the developing or third world too) live today compared to any time in human history and try calling it all bullshit. It's easy to compare a given situation to our ideal of "how it should be". It's however much more honest to compare it to a previous reality so that the hard increments of improvement can be appreciated.
Not as okay for the imperial periphery, the sacrifice zones, but they don't really count.
> You can amass a closet full of outfits, in a variety of styles and colors, with no knowledge of the spinning machines, the dyeing vats, the automatic looms, the sewing machines, or the tremendously efficient factory system they are a part of—the system that has turned this kind of product from a luxury for the rich into a commodity available to the average worker.
When I read things like this, I really understand how the lack of a liberal arts education has crippled a lot of people. I want to post that angry goose meme: "Who made the outfits, buddy? WHO MADE THE OUTFITS?"