• kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
    12·
    7 months ago

    Now look at how much the executives are being paid in the US compared to the cost of the vehicles…

    It ain’t the welders and wrench turners who are adding the most to the cost of vehicles.

    • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
      2·
      7 months ago

      As opposed to China where there totally isn’t a massive wealth gap between factory workers and their executives! Not like the CEO of Xpeng is worth 1.4 billion or anything…

      • davel [he/him]@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        7 months ago

        It’s true, China Has Billionaires.

        Income inequality rhetoric ignores that a class can reap the benefits of work via public investment (e.g. a bullet train), even if bosses make more as individuals. Working Chinese people are seeing the fruits of their labour despite billionaires and inequality. To recriminate them for not demanding more is recriminating the virtue of patience.

        In fact, much of what passes for “socialist” idealism in the West turns out to be a mirror image of bog-standard liberal-capitalist entrepreneurship propaganda: “I will be my own boss! I will run my own business!” This idealism appears unaware that the necessity of management is foisted upon us by logistics, not capitalism. Denial of this reality results in fantasies of perfect synchrony between perfectly autonomous anarchists.

        The “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” dream, embraced more by pundits with cushy lives than working people, also reveals a dark truth: western “socialists” have some awareness that a more equal world will mean losing first-world privileges. They cannot conceive of things getting better steadily and slowly, with hard work. And so they are forced to denigrate the Chinese road of self-sacrifice in favour of leisure-driven utopianism. The reality is that the victory of the working class over the capitalist class will usher in an era of hard but rewarding work, as opposed to hard work without reward.

        United Nations, 2019: Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding

        • LaLuzDelSol@lemmy.world
          2·
          7 months ago

          Sure man, I guess the nets on the sides of the factory buildings are there to catch workers who are jumping with joy because their work is so rewarding.

          I don’t deny that China’s economic ascendancy has been remarkable and a big win against poverty, but now that people have gotten past the starvation phase, I don’t think you can use the “high tide raises all boats” analogy. It sounds a lot like tricke-down economics to me, with some hand-waving that things are different in China because the wealthy elites are actually generous patricians.