this post was submitted on 29 May 2024
29 points (62.8% liked)
Political Memes
5349 readers
2560 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Industrialization is a big part of marxist thought and many countries around the world still havent industrialized to this day. For example countries in africa and india etc. . So that industrialization even happened is a good thing.
Edit: But to answer your question here are some industrialized countries added to the chart: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?time=1870..latest&country=OWID_WRL~CHN~RUS~USA~GBR
Edit2: Income inequality was drastically reduced after the communist parties came to power: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14o601y/oc_how_well_the_richest_top_1_have_been_doing_the/
Are you talking about the 10-15 years after the revolutions? That chart shows that today China has income inequality similar to that of pre-1900 China, and higher income inequality than France, Sweden, and the UK. Even more interesting, the US only has 3% more income share going to the 1% than China does.
Also "share of income going to the top 1%" doesn't really tell the whole story. I think individual purchasing power would be a much more informative statistic.
For china i am talking until mao died in 1976. For russia income inequality was low until 1991 when the communist party gave up power.
But that first graph pretty much proves my point?
Industrialization does not magically happen. There need to be active policies done to make it happen like tariffs on manufactured goods or state ownership or subsidies for manufacturing etc. . Those policies have not been done enough in todays 3rd world countries and they were done in russia and china when they were backward and they went from backward countries to industrialized countries while having low wealth and income inequality.
Edit: Yes it proves your point but also my point.
no, the industrialization didn't depend on the type of governing body; only resources, opportunities, and localized wealth.
and russia and china didnt have this(only resources, opportunities, and localized wealth.) until the communist parties came to power?
they had this before and during communist parties. They had all 3, but opportunity and resources are time variables which was more governed (pun intended) by the rapid spread of industrialism itself.
why did it spread to south korea only in 1960? and not earlier? Why has it still not spread to africa and india today?
I think there is a lot more going on in those regions than I can account for their lack of industrialism. short answer is I don't know.
longer response is the whole opportunities, resource triad thing can be broken by cultural and other barriers. let's use Amish folks as that example.
the Koreas had a slightly isolationist time during the broader revolutions and since have different outside influences so they have different periods of growth.
Can culture get changed through policy? I think so. The soviet union was very heavily isolationist and still industrialized cause it was in their central plan to do it.
Edit: if you look at the export and import to gdp ratios https://www.reddit.com/user/nerbert123/comments/1czws2d/soviet_union_statistics/#lightbox
adding to this line of thought:
this is why some marxists idealized revolutionary socialism being conducted in already industrialized countries, not necessarily the undeveloped ones it ended up taking root in.