The Immortal Goon wrote:This tends to be how laissez faire works. It has a dialectic character in regard to its material reality (as does everything) in that in trying to create capitalism, it must enforce the opposite to allow capitalism to survive.
I'm sorry. You provided a number of examples in which government forces intervened to maintain oppressive systems in foreign countries. This is an undeniable part of our human history. But it sheds absolutely no light on the
inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Marxists, if I understand correctly, claim that capitalism is inherently unstable due to those internal contradictions.
What are those opposing forces that will inevitably lead to the destruction (or transformation) of capitalist societies?
What makes you confident that a society couldn't preserve the institution of private property (including, in particular, in the means of production) while shedding away the practice of using foreign (or domestic) armed intervention to enforce illegitimate property rights (or to violate legitimate property rights, including, for example, those of slaves in their own bodies)?
But, admittedly, that's still pretty complicated. An actual good place to look is here.
I can understand Marx's words, but not how they relate to the internal contradictions of capitalism. The reference is great at explaining dialectics, but not its relevance to economic systems.
Elsewhere I read:
Wikipedia, describing Marxian criticisms of capitalism wrote:Marxists define capital as "a social, economic relation" between people (rather than between people and things). In this sense they seek to abolish capital. They believe that private ownership of the means of production enriches capitalists (owners of capital) at the expense of workers ("the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer"). In brief, they argue that the owners of the means of production do not work and therefore exploit the workerforce. In Karl Marx's view, the capitalists would eventually accumulate more and more capital impoverishing the working class, creating the social conditions for a revolution that would overthrow the institutions of capitalism.
I highlighted the one substantive statement that would, if correct, indeed lead to inevitable instability.
However, I believe the statement to be both empirically and theoretically wrong.
Empirically, we see significant turnover, with people routinely making their way from working (or middle) class to that of wealth (though, unlike previous centuries, rarely idleness, at least in the first generation). Further, we see an ongoing improvement in the material conditions of the working class, in seeming contradiction to the statement above.
Theoretically, the statement is baseless. It ignores the ease and prevalence of capital aggregation, the pooling together of individually-modest resources to create usable concentrations of resources enabling even people of very modest means to partake in the benefit of capital ownership.
Thus if material circumstances somehow made the returns on an investment of $1,000,000,000 (in percentage terms) greater than the returns on an investment of $1,000, financial entrepreneurs would offer financial products which (1) bring together the investments of many small individuals, (2) invest those at the higher rate available to large investors, and (3) distribute the proceeds amongst investors.
The bottom line is that, subject only to ever-diminishing transaction costs, the return available to investors is virtually independent of their wealth.
Moreover, the total amount of wealth in society isn't fixed. We get wealthier and wealthier. Regardless of initial distribution of property ownership (within reason - assuming no monopoly ownership of vital resources, for example), new wealth tends to flow towards those responsible for generating it - be it entrepreneurs or workers, but NOT idle capitalists!
To demonstrate that last point, assume that a capitalist investor buys company X while leaving its management and day-to-day running to hired managers and workers. Assume that at the time of the purchase, the (risk-adjusted, present value) expected future value of the return from owning the company is $Y. Further assume that the capitalist paid $Y for the company (if he paid more, he is a sucker; if he paid less, the previous owners are suckers). That means that the (risk-adjusted, present value) expected profit from the purchase is $0!
For the capitalist to actually profit from the purchase, one of few things must happen:
1. The actual value turns out to exceed the expected value (sheer luck). That could happen, but is precisely as likely as the opposite event in which a loss will have been created.
2. The capitalists acts to increase the expected value of the company. That is certainly possible, but then the capitalist is no longer perfectly idle. In fact, his actions to increase the expected value of the company are perfectly rewarded by a profit equal to that increase in value.
Idle capitalists tend to waste their inheritance away. With new value being created and going towards those who create it, and inherited wealth gradually withering away, the statement above is clearly wrong.
The logic of capital accumulation isn't that capitalists are enriched at the expense of the workers. It is easy to see that workers wages tend towards their marginal productivity (because of competition between different employers). Capital equipment tends to make workers more productive, and thus tends to increase their wages (which is precisely why workers in America earn so much more than workers in China).
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.