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When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said tha

When Karl Marx wrote Capital in 1867, he said capitalism would never be able to get rid of credit bubbles, financial crises, high unemployment etc. He said that over time the problems would get worse and worse with greater and greater financial crises. Here we are about a century and a half later and you just have to look at the housing bubble, the bank crisis, TARP and the government bailout, unemployment in the US and Europe and the Arab countries which helped cause the Arab spring to see how prophetic he was in this respect. Marx and Engels wrote that the world has seen five economic systems. Each system collapsed due to internal contradictions. The first system was hunting-gathering, then Babylonian/Greek/etc. style slavery, then feudalism, and then capitalism. They saw the Paris Commune as the harbinger for the next economic system which would replace capitalism. The central contradiction in capitalism Marx spells out clearly in Capital, although its a little too much to explain in a comment. Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. The $40 goes to profit, to get more capital, to make more commodities. But what is happening here - the worker is shorted $40 a day, and what happens with that money is commodities are made. Who are going to buy all these commodities when workers are not getting all the wealth they create? Well credit fixes that in the short term but creates a bigger long term problem. The communist manifesto says "the commercial crises that by their periodic return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on trial, each time more threateningly". I certainly feel this way. So apparently does Stratfor. On this point, the left and right are in agreement.

seiji 14y ago
Please keep writing more around here. We need people like you and comments like this.
- martinced 14y ago
  No we don't. These are poisonous words made by people dreaming of a world made of slaves. Dreaming of a world where the word "freedom" would be forbidden. The last thing we need now in a time of crisis is socialists or communists trying to push their agenda.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    No offense, but aren't you "pushing" an agenda as well? People are entitled to push their agendas in an open forum such as this. I, for one, welcome open and honest discussion in good faith.
  - Fluda3 14y ago
    I find HN to be quite rich, in both content and discussions about said content. I don't post because I usually don't have anything significant to add to the conversation. I have to say though, your comment deeply disturbs me. Those weren't poisonous words. And I highly doubt that his comment, which seems quite informative, comes from his "dreams of a world made of slaves". I can tell you're American. Constantly when I travel to the US, I get spoon fed this bullshit when people find out I'm Canadian. I have literally - on more than one occasion - had people tell me how they couldn't live in a "socialist" country like Canada. They then proceed to educate me (without any indication I want to hear shit about their opinions or beliefs) on the benefits of capitalism, how Obama is enslaving America, how universal health care is freedom lessening crap, and so on. It blows my mind the level of intolerance and subtle hatred. He's just being part of the discussion, providing opposing information and some of his opinions. Chill the fuck out.
    - tolmasky 14y ago
      I assure you that your "burden" of having to "constantly" listen to Americans educate you about socialism is more than outweighed by people like you assuming we are all one homogeneous mass that behaves that way ("I can tell you're American" followed by a lecture about the "blow your mind" level of intolerance and hatred here, as if that is uniquely American) I wonder how you maintain the cognitive dissonance that so many people here seem to hate Obama and Obamacare, yet somehow re-elect him. Must be confusing.
      - ucee054 14y ago
        Sorry no that's an obvious Americanism (American right-ism). Nobody else on the planet says SOCIALISM with the Bill O'Reilly sneer and think that's a debate-ender. Try to imagine a Chinese or a Frenchman saying that. Doesn't work. That's because in other countries "socialism" isn't a swear word.
tsotha 14y ago
Much of Marx's critiques of capitalism make some sense. The problem is nobody has come up with a better system for lifting people out of poverty.
- pjzedalis 14y ago
  Why does capitalism have to lift anyone out of poverty? The opportunity to own assets and control your own production sometimes provides the means to do so. Just because enough impoverished people are not becoming rich per year does not mean capitalism is not working as intended.
  - TruthElixirX 14y ago
    Less people are living in poverty now more than ever: http://www.worldvision.org/news/worldwide-fewer-people-live-extreme-poverty http://www.worldvision.org/news/worldwide-fewer-people-live-... Its just that wealth is being more evenly distributed and the U.S. is feeling some of that pressure.
    - cantankerous 14y ago
      Evenly distributed across the world, you mean. The pressure discussed in this article and probably most of this thread doesn't have to do with that distribution, though. It has to do with the distribution in the US, which has most definitely skewed towards the top. Wealth might be on some trend to level out world-wide, but what's happening here right now and over the past few decades is not that global trend. It's an American trend.
      - tsotha 14y ago
        The trend in the US has nothing to do with capitalism per se. We added ten million Central and South American peasants to the bottom end of the job market over the last twenty years or so. I don't know why anyone would be surprised to see a bifurcation of income strata.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Anyone who thinks that the recent financial crisis is due to a fundamental failing of the free market just has not been paying attention, or has an ideological ax to grind. The latest economic crises are mostly the result of bad government policies and excessive government debt.
- scarmig 14y ago
  Government policies, perhaps, though mostly in the sense that it creates the regulatory environment that finance works in. But government debt? Hardly. It may have been a headwind due to issues in Europe, but the core cause was overleveraged financial firms.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Government policies are what created gargantuan financial firms who were in a position to overleverage themselves because they didn't think there was any risk in it. And low and behold governments bailed their asses out. In a more diversified market the companies that had overleveraged themselves would simply have gone under. More so, in a situation where the government had not put pressure on lenders to give loans to "sub-prime" borrowers, the whole mess would have never gotten so out of hand. Defaults would not have been so high, and real estate valuations would not have been so inflationary. Additionally, we've pretty much gotten over that problem. The problem now is a sovereign debt crisis, especially in Europe, and that has little to do with the market.
    - scarmig 14y ago
      See "Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?" at http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-005.pdf http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-005.pdf Abstract: No.
      - hindsightbias 14y ago
        Don't bother. No amount of evidence can overcome these ideologues biases.
silentmars 14y ago
Bit of a sloppy analysis... The $40 that the worker is "shorted" doesn't disappear into some magic portal that leads to another dimension where rich people secret it away from the economy. It goes to the workers at the bank, or to other businesses that get capital to pay their workers, or perhaps the owners of the company so they an buy a few commodities themselves.
- quanticle 14y ago
  In theory, yes. In practice? Well, so far it's tended to accumulate in the coffers of banks and corporations, to moulder and rot.
scarmig 14y ago
Marx, however, was and is historically inaccurate. Both in his understanding of the past and his predictions of the future. Check out Immanuel Wallerstein or Fernand Braudel for more accurate, careful, and relevant histories that're not just glorifications of the ruling class. Looking at your example, it fails to explain why wages rose for 200 years before the alleged stagnation hit (sure, you can hack some Leninist stuff on about imperialism, but it's mostly unconvincing). Worse, Marx's grand scheme of progress is pretty flawed: even in one lifetime, people readily shift to and from one economic system to another, and each system relies upon and coexists with its predecessors and successors. Wide swaths of life and economic activity aren't subject to what Marx described as capitalism, and as capital increasingly tries to squeeze more and more value out of people, people increasingly shift to using exit as a means of liberation. Look around you, and you can see it: that's what's most marvelous about the era we live in.
- alexqgb 14y ago
  Braudel is a fantastic historian in his own right, but especially important in this context in that he started his career as an overt Marxist who wanted to contribute to Marx's theory by supplying the actual history on which it depended. That is to say, a history told not from the perspective of popes and princes, but one based on material data about the world's great systems; macro-economic factors like weather patterns and the price of grain. This was supposed to be the vantage point from which the nefarious dynamic of capital would reveal itself most clearly, with the underlying data providing an empirical basis for Marx's economic theory, thereby grounding the whole enterprise in reality. As it turned out, materialist history did provide a very revealing perspective, but not the one Braudel anticipated. Quite the opposite. Among its many revelations was the unavoidable fact that Marx's assertions about history simply weren't supported by the facts. Over time, Braudel found his reverence waning. Eventually, his loss of faith turned into outright rejection. That said, were it not for Marx, Braudel's absolutely brilliant history may never have been written. And that would be a shame, since the materialist approach that Braudel pioneered has become more relevant than ever in our own data-driven age. http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Century-Vol/dp/0520081145 http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cent...
pjzedalis 14y ago
What you are describing is Roulette.
martinced 14y ago
Because socialism or communism works so much better right? People are especially envious of the great freedom people in North Korea are enjoying? Same as Cuba? Venezuela? Argentina? (wanna change your currency to another one in Argentina to hedge yourself against a very strong inflation? you can't, because the socialist state won't let you do that) What's next after Karl Marx? That the homophobic racist murderer that was the Che Guevara was correct? The thing that saddens me the most on a forum supposedly made of entrepreneurs trying to create wealth is to see that there are so many people who are still failing for the poisonous words of a corrupt few who would have just loved to rule the earth: be it Kim-Jong Ill or Kim-Karl Marx, it makes me very very scared. The first thing socialists and communists tries to do is to ruin everyone and reinforce the power of the state. I choose freedom. Even if it means bubbles and crises. I prefer that to slavery. "Better dead than red". Thankfully I'm not alone.
- rayiner 14y ago
  You know, a reactionary living in 19th century might have said "because democracy works so much better right? People are so envious of the great freedom people in France are enjoying." With the memory of the French Revolution fresh in their mind, they probably would have been reasonable to say so.
  - maratd 14y ago
    Liberal western-style democracy with open markets has certainly seen its failures. And it has also seen its successes. Pray tell, what successes has communism and radical socialism achieved?
    - scarmig 14y ago
      That's tricky, because it's not so much a question of successes relative to the past (which I assume you'd agree are many) but a question of successes relative to alternative worlds where a capitalist system had developed in those countries. And there's also a question of what counts as communism/radical socialism in your book--China, even now, has far more government involvement in the economy than many Western countries, and even more so under Deng. Does it count? What about Congress-style socialism in India? That said, and emphasizing I have no love of the following countries and think some form of liberal democracy would have worked substantially better... Cuba started from a fairly good baseline, so we shouldn't read too much into it, but it has superior healthcare and education to much of Latin America. The Soviet Union had a couple decades of breakneck economic growth: many economists, perhaps even the majority, expected it to have outgrown the West by the 1980s. This should be discounted somewhat, though, this time because the UK and the USA also rapidly developed at various points in their history. The USSR also excelled at generating a large class of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who contributed a large body of knowledge to the world. And it made some pretty good chess players, too, when it wasn't cheating like crazy.
anigbrowl 14y ago
Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. But workers don't create that much wealth in a day by themselves; they need plant and material to create the product or service that is sold. The buildings they work in, the machinery that they use, the raw material they consume, are equally important inputs to production and it is these which are supplied by the capitalist.
- malandrew 14y ago
  Yes and no. Of the $40 the worker is shorted, a portion goes to the capitalist and a portion goes to the buildings they work in, the machinery they use and the raw material they consume. The benefits of those things accrue to the capitalist even though it was finance with the value created by the labor of the worker. Only the upfront costs to begin a business are attributable to the capitalist. All the growth of that business is attributable to the value created by the work being marshalled by the capitalist.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Agreed. but I would argue that a) the upfront costs to begin the business are significant, b) the benefits also accrue to the workers insofar as a growing business provides ongoing employment, and c) the marshaling of work is itself a form of work. It's not like you just tell 200 workers to turn up somewhere and production/distribution/sales happens automatically.
  - lostlogin 14y ago
    I'm not sure that the $40, as a percentage of wage, would even cover my sick and annual leave, professional indemnity insurance, insurance against accidental injury, professional body costs, registration costs, mileage and expenses claims, clothing costs, immunizations, continuing professional development costs and the other things I guess I have missed. My employer is good.
- kamaal 14y ago
  I think Marx went into over simplification when it came to issues like these. Even in this case, and in most cases. The workers are actually are super fortunate to even have and opportunity to make $200 without taking any risks at all. Everything is built ready, all the investments and risks are born by somebody else. All you do is work(Im not saying that's easy or insignificant, but it is individually insignificant to the larger scenario where somebody has built a big industry- your contribution are small but are compensated), and at that kind of financial security forgoing 1/6th part of your earnings is hardly a problem.
seliopou 14y ago
> The central contradiction in capitalism Marx spells out clearly in Capital, although its a little too much to explain in a comment. Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. The $40 goes to profit, to get more capital, to make more commodities. The labor theory of value just doesn't make sense. The only system in which it does is a communist system. And even then, if somebody values the commodity more than the value of the labor that went into producing it, they'll pay that price to acquire it on the secondary market.
kamaal 14y ago
So to summarize Marx was against growth? Because if you say we should go down to zero profits, then we get nothing to invest further. Needless to mention the enterprise/corporation/etc itself will have no motivation for growth, why should they when there is nothing to gain?
rdtsc 14y ago
That is all well and good. But is there a real world example of an economic and social system that works that is not based on capitalism? And by works here I don't mean just GDP, maybe also life expectancy, crime, health stats, education level, general happiness if available. Basically if I get a free pass and resource to move anywhere, I where do I go find this "better" place that moved beyond Capitalism and is free of these contradictions. I hear North European countries are a pretty good place to be? I've never been there. What makes that better and how far are they both from the current Capitalist system that US has and also how far are they from Marx's ideal?
- adamauckland 14y ago
  North European countries are social democracies with incredibly high income tax (roughly 30%). I don't think you can tax your way into getting societies like these. The world wars gutted large parts of the population and society had to change. The NHS in the UK was set up in response to having fought a war on their own soil, something which the US has not done in a long time.
  - gadders 14y ago
    Sweden not so much any more: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9599/ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9599/
pvdm 14y ago
Marx did not mention the destruction of the environment, which is a natural outcome of capitalism. I agree with everything else he said.

seiji 14y ago

Please keep writing more around here. We need people like you and comments like this.

martinced 14y ago
No we don't. These are poisonous words made by people dreaming of a world made of slaves. Dreaming of a world where the word "freedom" would be forbidden. The last thing we need now in a time of crisis is socialists or communists trying to push their agenda.
- cantankerous 14y ago
  No offense, but aren't you "pushing" an agenda as well? People are entitled to push their agendas in an open forum such as this. I, for one, welcome open and honest discussion in good faith.
- Fluda3 14y ago
  I find HN to be quite rich, in both content and discussions about said content. I don't post because I usually don't have anything significant to add to the conversation. I have to say though, your comment deeply disturbs me. Those weren't poisonous words. And I highly doubt that his comment, which seems quite informative, comes from his "dreams of a world made of slaves". I can tell you're American. Constantly when I travel to the US, I get spoon fed this bullshit when people find out I'm Canadian. I have literally - on more than one occasion - had people tell me how they couldn't live in a "socialist" country like Canada. They then proceed to educate me (without any indication I want to hear shit about their opinions or beliefs) on the benefits of capitalism, how Obama is enslaving America, how universal health care is freedom lessening crap, and so on. It blows my mind the level of intolerance and subtle hatred. He's just being part of the discussion, providing opposing information and some of his opinions. Chill the fuck out.
  - tolmasky 14y ago
    I assure you that your "burden" of having to "constantly" listen to Americans educate you about socialism is more than outweighed by people like you assuming we are all one homogeneous mass that behaves that way ("I can tell you're American" followed by a lecture about the "blow your mind" level of intolerance and hatred here, as if that is uniquely American) I wonder how you maintain the cognitive dissonance that so many people here seem to hate Obama and Obamacare, yet somehow re-elect him. Must be confusing.
    - ucee054 14y ago
      Sorry no that's an obvious Americanism (American right-ism). Nobody else on the planet says SOCIALISM with the Bill O'Reilly sneer and think that's a debate-ender. Try to imagine a Chinese or a Frenchman saying that. Doesn't work. That's because in other countries "socialism" isn't a swear word.

tsotha 14y ago

Much of Marx's critiques of capitalism make some sense. The problem is nobody has come up with a better system for lifting people out of poverty.

pjzedalis 14y ago
Why does capitalism have to lift anyone out of poverty? The opportunity to own assets and control your own production sometimes provides the means to do so. Just because enough impoverished people are not becoming rich per year does not mean capitalism is not working as intended.
- TruthElixirX 14y ago
  Less people are living in poverty now more than ever: http://www.worldvision.org/news/worldwide-fewer-people-live-extreme-poverty http://www.worldvision.org/news/worldwide-fewer-people-live-... Its just that wealth is being more evenly distributed and the U.S. is feeling some of that pressure.
  - cantankerous 14y ago
    Evenly distributed across the world, you mean. The pressure discussed in this article and probably most of this thread doesn't have to do with that distribution, though. It has to do with the distribution in the US, which has most definitely skewed towards the top. Wealth might be on some trend to level out world-wide, but what's happening here right now and over the past few decades is not that global trend. It's an American trend.
    - tsotha 14y ago
      The trend in the US has nothing to do with capitalism per se. We added ten million Central and South American peasants to the bottom end of the job market over the last twenty years or so. I don't know why anyone would be surprised to see a bifurcation of income strata.
- anigbrowl 14y ago

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Anyone who thinks that the recent financial crisis is due to a fundamental failing of the free market just has not been paying attention, or has an ideological ax to grind. The latest economic crises are mostly the result of bad government policies and excessive government debt.

scarmig 14y ago
Government policies, perhaps, though mostly in the sense that it creates the regulatory environment that finance works in. But government debt? Hardly. It may have been a headwind due to issues in Europe, but the core cause was overleveraged financial firms.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Government policies are what created gargantuan financial firms who were in a position to overleverage themselves because they didn't think there was any risk in it. And low and behold governments bailed their asses out. In a more diversified market the companies that had overleveraged themselves would simply have gone under. More so, in a situation where the government had not put pressure on lenders to give loans to "sub-prime" borrowers, the whole mess would have never gotten so out of hand. Defaults would not have been so high, and real estate valuations would not have been so inflationary. Additionally, we've pretty much gotten over that problem. The problem now is a sovereign debt crisis, especially in Europe, and that has little to do with the market.
  - scarmig 14y ago
    See "Did Affordable Housing Legislation Contribute to the Subprime Securities Boom?" at http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-005.pdf http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2012/2012-005.pdf Abstract: No.
    - hindsightbias 14y ago
      Don't bother. No amount of evidence can overcome these ideologues biases.

silentmars 14y ago

Bit of a sloppy analysis... The $40 that the worker is "shorted" doesn't disappear into some magic portal that leads to another dimension where rich people secret it away from the economy. It goes to the workers at the bank, or to other businesses that get capital to pay their workers, or perhaps the owners of the company so they an buy a few commodities themselves.

quanticle 14y ago
In theory, yes. In practice? Well, so far it's tended to accumulate in the coffers of banks and corporations, to moulder and rot.

scarmig 14y ago

Marx, however, was and is historically inaccurate. Both in his understanding of the past and his predictions of the future. Check out Immanuel Wallerstein or Fernand Braudel for more accurate, careful, and relevant histories that're not just glorifications of the ruling class. Looking at your example, it fails to explain why wages rose for 200 years before the alleged stagnation hit (sure, you can hack some Leninist stuff on about imperialism, but it's mostly unconvincing). Worse, Marx's grand scheme of progress is pretty flawed: even in one lifetime, people readily shift to and from one economic system to another, and each system relies upon and coexists with its predecessors and successors. Wide swaths of life and economic activity aren't subject to what Marx described as capitalism, and as capital increasingly tries to squeeze more and more value out of people, people increasingly shift to using exit as a means of liberation. Look around you, and you can see it: that's what's most marvelous about the era we live in.

alexqgb 14y ago
Braudel is a fantastic historian in his own right, but especially important in this context in that he started his career as an overt Marxist who wanted to contribute to Marx's theory by supplying the actual history on which it depended. That is to say, a history told not from the perspective of popes and princes, but one based on material data about the world's great systems; macro-economic factors like weather patterns and the price of grain. This was supposed to be the vantage point from which the nefarious dynamic of capital would reveal itself most clearly, with the underlying data providing an empirical basis for Marx's economic theory, thereby grounding the whole enterprise in reality. As it turned out, materialist history did provide a very revealing perspective, but not the one Braudel anticipated. Quite the opposite. Among its many revelations was the unavoidable fact that Marx's assertions about history simply weren't supported by the facts. Over time, Braudel found his reverence waning. Eventually, his loss of faith turned into outright rejection. That said, were it not for Marx, Braudel's absolutely brilliant history may never have been written. And that would be a shame, since the materialist approach that Braudel pioneered has become more relevant than ever in our own data-driven age. http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Century-Vol/dp/0520081145 http://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cent...

pjzedalis 14y ago

What you are describing is Roulette.

martinced 14y ago

Because socialism or communism works so much better right? People are especially envious of the great freedom people in North Korea are enjoying? Same as Cuba? Venezuela? Argentina? (wanna change your currency to another one in Argentina to hedge yourself against a very strong inflation? you can't, because the socialist state won't let you do that) What's next after Karl Marx? That the homophobic racist murderer that was the Che Guevara was correct? The thing that saddens me the most on a forum supposedly made of entrepreneurs trying to create wealth is to see that there are so many people who are still failing for the poisonous words of a corrupt few who would have just loved to rule the earth: be it Kim-Jong Ill or Kim-Karl Marx, it makes me very very scared. The first thing socialists and communists tries to do is to ruin everyone and reinforce the power of the state. I choose freedom. Even if it means bubbles and crises. I prefer that to slavery. "Better dead than red". Thankfully I'm not alone.

rayiner 14y ago
You know, a reactionary living in 19th century might have said "because democracy works so much better right? People are so envious of the great freedom people in France are enjoying." With the memory of the French Revolution fresh in their mind, they probably would have been reasonable to say so.
- maratd 14y ago
  Liberal western-style democracy with open markets has certainly seen its failures. And it has also seen its successes. Pray tell, what successes has communism and radical socialism achieved?
  - scarmig 14y ago
    That's tricky, because it's not so much a question of successes relative to the past (which I assume you'd agree are many) but a question of successes relative to alternative worlds where a capitalist system had developed in those countries. And there's also a question of what counts as communism/radical socialism in your book--China, even now, has far more government involvement in the economy than many Western countries, and even more so under Deng. Does it count? What about Congress-style socialism in India? That said, and emphasizing I have no love of the following countries and think some form of liberal democracy would have worked substantially better... Cuba started from a fairly good baseline, so we shouldn't read too much into it, but it has superior healthcare and education to much of Latin America. The Soviet Union had a couple decades of breakneck economic growth: many economists, perhaps even the majority, expected it to have outgrown the West by the 1980s. This should be discounted somewhat, though, this time because the UK and the USA also rapidly developed at various points in their history. The USSR also excelled at generating a large class of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, who contributed a large body of knowledge to the world. And it made some pretty good chess players, too, when it wasn't cheating like crazy.

anigbrowl 14y ago

Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. But workers don't create that much wealth in a day by themselves; they need plant and material to create the product or service that is sold. The buildings they work in, the machinery that they use, the raw material they consume, are equally important inputs to production and it is these which are supplied by the capitalist.

malandrew 14y ago
Yes and no. Of the $40 the worker is shorted, a portion goes to the capitalist and a portion goes to the buildings they work in, the machinery they use and the raw material they consume. The benefits of those things accrue to the capitalist even though it was finance with the value created by the labor of the worker. Only the upfront costs to begin a business are attributable to the capitalist. All the growth of that business is attributable to the value created by the work being marshalled by the capitalist.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Agreed. but I would argue that a) the upfront costs to begin the business are significant, b) the benefits also accrue to the workers insofar as a growing business provides ongoing employment, and c) the marshaling of work is itself a form of work. It's not like you just tell 200 workers to turn up somewhere and production/distribution/sales happens automatically.
- lostlogin 14y ago
  I'm not sure that the $40, as a percentage of wage, would even cover my sick and annual leave, professional indemnity insurance, insurance against accidental injury, professional body costs, registration costs, mileage and expenses claims, clothing costs, immunizations, continuing professional development costs and the other things I guess I have missed. My employer is good.
kamaal 14y ago
I think Marx went into over simplification when it came to issues like these. Even in this case, and in most cases. The workers are actually are super fortunate to even have and opportunity to make $200 without taking any risks at all. Everything is built ready, all the investments and risks are born by somebody else. All you do is work(Im not saying that's easy or insignificant, but it is individually insignificant to the larger scenario where somebody has built a big industry- your contribution are small but are compensated), and at that kind of financial security forgoing 1/6th part of your earnings is hardly a problem.

seliopou 14y ago

> The central contradiction in capitalism Marx spells out clearly in Capital, although its a little too much to explain in a comment. Basically workers create $240 of wealth every eight hour work day, but are only paid $200 a day. The $40 goes to profit, to get more capital, to make more commodities. The labor theory of value just doesn't make sense. The only system in which it does is a communist system. And even then, if somebody values the commodity more than the value of the labor that went into producing it, they'll pay that price to acquire it on the secondary market.

kamaal 14y ago

So to summarize Marx was against growth? Because if you say we should go down to zero profits, then we get nothing to invest further. Needless to mention the enterprise/corporation/etc itself will have no motivation for growth, why should they when there is nothing to gain?

rdtsc 14y ago

That is all well and good. But is there a real world example of an economic and social system that works that is not based on capitalism? And by works here I don't mean just GDP, maybe also life expectancy, crime, health stats, education level, general happiness if available. Basically if I get a free pass and resource to move anywhere, I where do I go find this "better" place that moved beyond Capitalism and is free of these contradictions. I hear North European countries are a pretty good place to be? I've never been there. What makes that better and how far are they both from the current Capitalist system that US has and also how far are they from Marx's ideal?

adamauckland 14y ago
North European countries are social democracies with incredibly high income tax (roughly 30%). I don't think you can tax your way into getting societies like these. The world wars gutted large parts of the population and society had to change. The NHS in the UK was set up in response to having fought a war on their own soil, something which the US has not done in a long time.
- gadders 14y ago
  Sweden not so much any more: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9599/ http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9599/

pvdm 14y ago

Marx did not mention the destruction of the environment, which is a natural outcome of capitalism. I agree with everything else he said.