Julian658 wrote:Sure, capitalism is very flawed. IN fact Marx was 100% correct in pointing out the flaws of capitalism and hence remains very popular among the young in every generation. His ideas are incredibly appealing and attractive. The problem is that the prescription to fix capitalism has not worked. In other words the cure has been worse than the disease.
At some level the self interest of the business owner motivates him or her to provide a better product at a cheaper price. However, I will admit there is something called crony capitalism which is basically corruption. There is also marketing to the masses that spend money on items that are not needed. And lastly there is also exploitation of workers.
Slavey is not capitalism.
Julian658 wrote:Sure, capitalism is very flawed. IN fact Marx was 100% correct in pointing out the flaws of capitalism and hence remains very popular among the young in every generation. His ideas are incredibly appealing and attractive. The problem is that the prescription to fix capitalism has not worked. In other words the cure has been worse than the disease.
At some level the self interest of the business owner motivates him or her to provide a better product at a cheaper price. However, I will admit there is something called crony capitalism which is basically corruption. There is also marketing to the masses that spend money on items that are not needed. And lastly there is also exploitation of workers.
Slavey is not capitalism.
This feels somewhat nonsequitor to the pursuit of one's narrow self interest overlaps with the overall good.
But I get the feeling this first paragraph is a rhetorical flourish to concede vaguely to Marx's criticism of capitalism but to reject the conclusion, because if one was so convinced then one would likely be a communist interest in the acutalization of the full potential of individuals by the overturn of capitalist production. Although the prescription he lays out is a very general and unfinished one that he wasn't going to imagine he could foresee but only posit the outlines of.
But on the face of it, I'm not convinced that the idea that communism as an end is dead in it's tracks because of the past failures in that such ideas are born from the same conditions of private property and that there are analogous similarities in the development of capitalism itself as it didn't emerge globally in one foul swoop. A lot of liberal revolutions had to go underway and get support, many attempts were crushed until the capitalist class was powerful and organized enough. We see in the 20th century some revolutions winning out in rather backwards countries that still had to go through industrialization and a right counter-revolution (Fascism) across Europe that largely doomed what was necessary for the backwards countries.
And the profit motive indeed is what leads to a drop in profit as one invests in more efficient means of production (machines.automation) but because of its efficiency, the average time to produce the same product is less and the value tends to drop. So in competition between one another, the capitalists rapidly develop products to the point that the commodity is no longer worth as much as it once was. The real scarcity isn't just in materials but in actual time able to devote to the many ends of labour/work.
There are many products now quite affordable because they can be produced on such as mass scale with greater ease than they ever once were.
And crony capitalism seems a weak qualifier to an ideal of what I was arguing earlier, is probably an illegitimate view of capitalist production based in abstract equality of individuals in a market but largely ignoring the structural relations of production that actually determine class. Although I would grant the issue of corruption is a problem for hierarchies and power in general but I don't see the basis for seeing a tendency away from virtue but in spite of the profit motive that objectively exists as part of capitalist production. Something which undermines the capacity against corruption as the interest is often quite counter to the human interest. Because exchange values do not perfectly coincide with use values such that there is great need and desire of things that aren't recognized by markets without adequate purchasing power.
But i'll leave this at an assertion, but one based in sceptism of the assertion or implicit view that capitalism is somehow different from what we simply recognize as capitalsm. It seems an abstract attempt to not explain the nature of capitalism but weakly distinguish it by a qualifier by suggesting that things can and often are better than we currently experience. But that requires an articulated defense as to how the lobbying we see in our countries from major business and even from foreign firms (china lobbies a lot of governments, both parties simultaneously in pursuit of economic interests) is somehow an oddity that exists in spite of the tendency against it. Seems practically legalized in many respects.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics