one of the underlying weirdnesses of the extremely prosperous societies we have built is that it's possible *both* for there to be widespread and horrific injustice and oppression and for the vast majority of people to be doing infinitely better than at any time in history
this always gets me when people (like David Graeber) talk about how awful office jobs are; 95% of the world's population historically would have killed for an office job. Office jobs in imperial societies were viciously fought over.
none of this means we can't do better. We can do so much better. But the streak of leftism that sees modern capitalism as uniquely horrible or oppressive - rather than better than what came before, even as we can do far better in the future - is misguided.
