If anything, the fact that most of the world’s people don’t have qualitative access to the fruits of education and technology works in capitalism’s favor. If all people had a sufficient education in this day and age, and archaic conceptions of intellectual property were abolished, we’d see constant creative booms in STEM and the arts. This would mean that sustainable technologies and labor-saving automation could be improved upon nigh-exponentially. In turn, a scenario like that would lay capitalist contradictions more visible for the lower classes of the world to see, and the system’s longevity would be put in jeopardy. Capitalism benefits from having a dispossessed, impoverished workforce that will accept whatever wage on offer, alongside the “unlimited” extraction process of capital accumulation that needs a society of dependent consumers; capitalism is not in the business of making itself obsolete.
It’s kind of funny how much effort the Powers That Be put into restricting access to information. It’s not a finite resource and it’s not prone to devaluation. A PhD in chemical engineering doesn’t become less valuable if you double the number of chemical engineering doctorates. It doesn’t do less or apply less. Information and education can be reproduced nearly infinitely nearly effortlessly.
Imagine how easy it would be for every textbook to be released as a pdf and for every college professor to post all of their lectures as a youtube series. We would allow everyone to reach their desired level of education for free with no boundaries.
But, nobody would make any money off of this. It would involve giving away for free what could be rationed out for dear. And so despite the fact that it would instantly and unequivocally make the world a universally better place, it doesn’t happen because nobody makes enough profit to make it happen.
This is also why we see people coming up with cures for diseases all the time but never see the treatments in action. They stand to make more money if they keep you sick and on medication. They give you a band-aid solution which leaves you coming back for a new band-aid again and again. Same thing with phones and other personal technology. They have the tools to make the perfect phone and they know exactly what the people want from their devices based on reviews and complaints. From a capitalist perspective, it makes more sense to make subtle changes every year and keep increasing the price. One of the most effective ways to increase profits is to impede progress.
but when they DO find a way to get the treatments in action, the FDA gives them special protections to have a monopoy on the product so the pharm companies buy up all these patents then sell their medicine at extremely high prices since they have a monopoly on the medicine.
Um, no. The reason why we see “people coming up with cures all the time” and ‘never see them in action’ is because most of the things you see in the media reported as cures are not, in fact, cures for human diseases, or are treatments with very narrow application. When the media reports ‘Scientists discover new drug which cures rumblytummikens’, what has usually happened is this:
In other words, you, the researcher, conduct a study which finds that hanging upside down for twelve hours a day, for two weeks, prolonged the lives if your test subjects. Which were twenty mice, genetically engineered to manifest rumblytummikens. And by prolonged, you mean that of your twenty test mice, fifteen where still alive two months after your treatment regime, whereas only five in your control group – twenty mice genetically engineered to manifest rumblytummikens but not subjected to the hanging upside down treatment regime – were still alive.
You write a paper saying that something about being hung upside down may provide some benefit to mice with rumblytummikens. A swift game of telephone follows, and next thing you know, some naturopath is telling frightened parents that the cure for their kid’s life-threatening case of rumblytummikens is hanging upside down from the monkeybars twice a day.
