The hidden ugliness of Capitalism

Consider the last time you went shopping. Consider how many of those products have labels somewhere bearing markings like "MADE IN CHINA", or Indonesia, Vietnam, any number of less prosperous countries.

Now, think back to the early 1900s. Factory workers are fighting to get a decent wage and safer conditions. Bosses are cutting corners, even at the cost of lives. Thugs are hired to brutalize and often murder protesters. There's mass conflict, but in the end, American workers are guaranteed the right to a living wage and decent working conditions.

Cut back to today. Those jobs that were the main labour force in America, manufacturing and other such industries, they're no longer in America. They're in places where these laws don't exist. That suffering never ended. They moved it to China, to Malaysia, to places where we don't see it and thus where we don't care.

We have exported the suffering of the working class, and what did we buy in exchange?

We bought an economy where the average age of a McDonalds employee is 29. We bought a society where 40 hours a week on minimum wage isn't even enough to pay for a 2 bedroom apartment in any state. We bought a country where, for the most part, we no longer produce; we simply serve. We serve with a smile, even when the customer sees us as less than human. Companies wage advertising wars to convince us that theirs is the product that will make us hate ourselves less.

There was no benefactor to that transaction.

This only serves to benefit the ruling class more. The ruling class are those who own the workplaces. By making the suffering of the American worker more subtle, they've made themselves look better. They still take most of the value you produce, but now they've got you thanking them because you didn't die while doing it. They have you work as a salesman, or as a cashier.

Meanwhile, their factories halfway across the world are the same thing they were in the US in the year 1900, just in a new year and a new location. People toil for next to nothing at the constant threat of death.

Regulating capitalism doesn't make it nicer. It makes it sneakier. The only way to fix this is to abolish capitalism entirely.

 

Even if capitalism somehow managed to bring the most prosperity to the most people for a period of time, it is on extremely shaky ground as a theory. The end-game is always for more and more wealth to be concentrated in the hands of the fewer and fewer.

 

The ugliness of capitalism is not particularly hidden but its doctrine is supported by the two political parties in the USA, the government in England, and quite a few countries. Capitalists also own the media and entertainment industry so alternatives are given no space,

 

I can appreciate how it is supported by everyone even tho the word 'capitalism' does not appear in the Constitution. Somebody sneaked one by us.

I'm also not sure there are better alternatives, just that all systems seem to outlive their intended usefulness after 200 years or so and become self-serving and self-perpetuating until they fall.

 

There's never been any ugliness in Communism. FFS you people crack me up.

 

There's ugliness in all of it after a while. It comes from establishing and clinging, long after things have stopped working. Take America, for example.

 

I challenge this view. Capitalism maximizes everyone's freedom to produce/trade/own property and the degree of prosperity enjoyed (even by the poorest) corresponds to the degree of freedom a country's economy has:
Why Economic Freedom Matters

American Prosperity Requires Capital Freedom

 

Capitalism isn't destroying this country. Crony capatilism and an oppressive government are doing that. Both are derived from liberalism which in the long term isn't much different than communism. Utter failures whenever they've been tried.

 

Crony capitalism is capitalism, my friend. And if you can buy your way into getting the government to play along, that is also capitalism.

 

OK so capitalism is to blame for what happens in Vietnam, North Korea, China, Cuba, etc. Next I suppose you will tell us that Marxism gets credit for the successes of the US economy from the creation of the automobile industry to the creation of the PC, to the creation the of the internet message board.

Yeah right.

 

They are lobbying Congress to allow the continued flooding of America with cheap immigrant labor that works for less money than Americans. Are you standing up against that?

 

Yes, we should abandon capitalism and live on $50 per year like they do in Cuba.

Brilliant.

 

Communism has never been tried.

This is the capitalist line but the unemployed and low-paid workers as well as millionaire bankers and financial spivs know differently.

 

You are confusing capitalism with fascism. We do not have a capitalist system. Go do some research and come back when you know something about what you are talking about.

 

Meh, they will catch up.

Abolishing the only tool that has created the best living conditions on Earth as long as man has populated it is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Abolishing the tool that made it possible for you to type your nonsense is, well nonsense.

[video=youtube_share;w6adVQrSUAc]http://youtu.be/w6adVQrSUAc[/video]

 

Without capitalism, those migrants wouldn't be seeking entrance to America in the first place.

The question is kind of irrelevant to my point of view. You're asking me my take on a problem that only exists because of something I oppose.

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Capitalism is defined by the capitalist mode of production, which is deeply entrenched in American society. Before you criticize me, how about you learn what capitalism even is?

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Feudalism was the tool that drove all of society from the fall of the Roman Empire to somewhere around the time of the French Revolution.

And anyone today can recognize that feudalism is trash.

We have things better than we did before, but we can still improve even more.

 

The only thing that has improved your life is Capitalism. Anything else pales by comparison. What you may not like is the marriage of capitalism and politics which is called crony capitalism and where government picks winners and losers. We cannot improve more by incorporating more central control. That doesn't work and never has.

You might pine for the day we are all more like North Korea, an example of very strong central control, but most of everyone else doesn't.

 

Every economic system can be boiled down to who owns the fruits of labor. Capitalism is nothing more that the person who does the work being the owner of the proceeds. In socialism the owner of the fruits of labor is government. In a feudal system it is a King.

What the US currently has is a Fascist system in which government and corporate interests conspire to keep workers in a slave state.

 

Honestly man, it's just clear that you've done poorly in capitalism and you're bitter about it. You reek of being bitter...I could go into why capitalism is best, but it's a waste of time on you. Rather, I'll just say look to Europe vs. the US and you have the obvious answer.

 

This is actually a good point, I disagree, but 4 stars for making a good point. Unlike the OP you don't sound bitter and whiny about your situation, and then project it onto others. Good work, if the end game truly is that (which I don't think it is) then I absolutely understand your reserves about capitalism.

 

No, crony capitalism is fascist socialism.

 

Maybe not brilliant, but the fact that they can have a decent standard of living for that kind of money is impressive.

Too many people are so fearful of even discussing alternative economic systems. We could learn from other nations that are prosperous. Some are rich because of oil (Kazakstan). Some are rich because they have low unemployment and happy, healthy people (Finland). Some are rich because they focus on commerce (Hong Kong).

I'm not a communist, but as soon as I mention communism to certain people, they viscerally react like they've been punched in the gut. But then, many of these people were alive during the McCarthy days.

 

How can Americans compete with someone else in another country doing the same job for 2 dollars an hour?

Proponents of Free Trade argued it would create more of the good paying jobs, but that didn't happen.
It's not just the low level jobs that are being affected now. Consulting, legal bookwork, accounting, pharmaceutical research, are all being outsourced to India now. And what can't be outsourced is being insourced, with hospitals bringing in nurses on H1B visas from the Philippines or India.

 

There's only one thing worse than competing with $2 per hour labor rates, that's a worldwide trade war with high tariffs. The resulting depression would make the 1930's look like the good old days.

 

You know, except when the USSR went from backwards feudalism and peasantry to being a then-modern industrial superpower with equal rights for women and a higher life expectancy than the US in 20 years.

That's just a teensy little discrepancy.

North Korea is a reactionary monarchist state. They fell into revisionism somewhere around the 80s.

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Do you plan to actually address my points, or are you just going to slap the keyboard some more and hope that someone confuses it for a rebuttal?

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Capitalism is defined by privatization of the means of production. Fascism is petty-bourgeois reaction to radical leftism, defined by corporatist economics.

The point of socialism is for the workers to seize control of the state and make the government into an organ of the people, forcing it to work for rather than against the common man.

The fall of the previous socialist states was due to excessive trust being placed in leaders who increasingly implemented capitalistic reforms and drifted away from the interests of the people.