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Is that a bad thing? To raise one nation after another into the middle class?

• komali2 4y ago
  I think yes because that's not exactly what happens, local capital class members will leverage political power to do things in nations that try opt out of global capitalism like staging coups or refusing to trade at all. See Venezuela, Cuba, Guatamala, Congo, etc. Furthermore there's no guarantee the locals will actually be "brought into the middle class." It's entirely likely a nation will get simply stuck as a cheap labor force for other nations indefinitely, see India and the Philippines. Finally, the cycle doesn't just end at "nation is done being exploited for cheap labor and instead now had a middle class and imports cheap labor," there's late stage capitalism which is where the usa is at where the inherent contradictions cause systemic collapse. See: the American crises in healthcare, infrastructure, housing, homelessness, individual savings, and rapidly plummeting incomes. Then of course the obvious question: what happens when there's no more cheap labor to exploit? Or the other side of the question: what happens when automation has driven the value of human labor down to pennies? Capitalism doesn't have an answer for these questions because under a capitalist system (and indeed some Marxist ones too), you must justify your existence through labor and labor utility.