Die Rote Fahne
21st August 2009, 04:39
This is gonna be long, so get a drink, and pull up a comfy chair.
We've had feudalism. Which was followed by a progression into capitalism. Which will be followed by a progression into socialism.
Capitalism is far from successful. If it were successful we wouldn't see it's side effects:
- Poverty and homelessness of hundreds of thousands, even millions, in the richest nation in the world.
- The exploitation of children and women for profit.
- The death's/refusal to treat ill people for the idea of making profit.
- War in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, WW1, etc.
- Global Warming.
- Poverty and Starvation in Africa.
- Unemployment.
- Child Labour/Slavery.
- Jobs leaving your own country to go to others for cheap labour.
- An employee is not paid according to the true worth of his labor but according to what the employer is willing to pay him.
- Great depression and the numerous recessions.
- Inequality in wealth creates crime.
I can go on and on.
Almost the entire world is capitalist. And almost the entire world is poor. There's capitalist Indonesia, capitalist India, capitalist Thailand, Nigeria, El Salvador, Argentina, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria. Privatization, third worldization. Poor. The number of people living in poverty today is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. That is capitalism expansion and prosperity.
Capitalism does not quite work well for people in those countries. However, it is capitalism at it's most successful...for the capitalists of those countries. The capitalists are doing well but the people aren't doing too well.
But it's given the USA a good standard of living right? That I am going to refute now. Let's put aside the mass inequalities. The tens of millions of people who struggle form hand to mouth. The many without economic security, the middle class getting ripped off by being overworked and loss of benefits. Let's put aside the impoverishment of the public sector and the destruction of a livable environment. Let's accept the idea that we live in great material abundance, which many do. But it wasn't capitalism that gave us this standard of living, it was the democratic struggle against capitalism. They didn't give us all these things. Why don't Americans work for 15 cents an hour? Is it because of self respect? No. It's because the democratic class struggle has advanced to a more favourable level. In the 1900s America was a 3rd world country. 50 years before the term was invented. Poverty, 14 hour work days, 10 year olds working in factories, no social services to speak of, typhoid epidemics, TB and other diseases of poverty, very little public education. Advances came not with capitalism, that condition, that's what capitalism gave us. A pure free market undiluted unregulated capitalism in 1900 with massive margins of profit. Massive wealth for the Mellons and the Morgans and the Hartfords and the Rockefellers. What did they want? More and more money. It was the working people who fought and fought for public education, the 8 hour day, decent housing, minimum wage and discrimination. Name one great intellectual and political leader who fought for those things before the people.
Now. To get to Einstein:
Einstein published a Marxist analysis of labor exploitation in capitalist economies in the socialist journal Monthly Review. He denounced "the economic anarchy" and "crippling egotism" of capitalist society and called for "the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system oriented towards social goals." The essay offered the following take on capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth and centralize control of both politics and ideology:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The results of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.... Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
I believe I did a fairly alright job in that.
We've had feudalism. Which was followed by a progression into capitalism. Which will be followed by a progression into socialism.
Capitalism is far from successful. If it were successful we wouldn't see it's side effects:
- Poverty and homelessness of hundreds of thousands, even millions, in the richest nation in the world.
- The exploitation of children and women for profit.
- The death's/refusal to treat ill people for the idea of making profit.
- War in Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, WW1, etc.
- Global Warming.
- Poverty and Starvation in Africa.
- Unemployment.
- Child Labour/Slavery.
- Jobs leaving your own country to go to others for cheap labour.
- An employee is not paid according to the true worth of his labor but according to what the employer is willing to pay him.
- Great depression and the numerous recessions.
- Inequality in wealth creates crime.
I can go on and on.
Almost the entire world is capitalist. And almost the entire world is poor. There's capitalist Indonesia, capitalist India, capitalist Thailand, Nigeria, El Salvador, Argentina, Russia, Poland, Bulgaria. Privatization, third worldization. Poor. The number of people living in poverty today is growing at a faster rate than the world's population. That is capitalism expansion and prosperity.
Capitalism does not quite work well for people in those countries. However, it is capitalism at it's most successful...for the capitalists of those countries. The capitalists are doing well but the people aren't doing too well.
But it's given the USA a good standard of living right? That I am going to refute now. Let's put aside the mass inequalities. The tens of millions of people who struggle form hand to mouth. The many without economic security, the middle class getting ripped off by being overworked and loss of benefits. Let's put aside the impoverishment of the public sector and the destruction of a livable environment. Let's accept the idea that we live in great material abundance, which many do. But it wasn't capitalism that gave us this standard of living, it was the democratic struggle against capitalism. They didn't give us all these things. Why don't Americans work for 15 cents an hour? Is it because of self respect? No. It's because the democratic class struggle has advanced to a more favourable level. In the 1900s America was a 3rd world country. 50 years before the term was invented. Poverty, 14 hour work days, 10 year olds working in factories, no social services to speak of, typhoid epidemics, TB and other diseases of poverty, very little public education. Advances came not with capitalism, that condition, that's what capitalism gave us. A pure free market undiluted unregulated capitalism in 1900 with massive margins of profit. Massive wealth for the Mellons and the Morgans and the Hartfords and the Rockefellers. What did they want? More and more money. It was the working people who fought and fought for public education, the 8 hour day, decent housing, minimum wage and discrimination. Name one great intellectual and political leader who fought for those things before the people.
Now. To get to Einstein:
Einstein published a Marxist analysis of labor exploitation in capitalist economies in the socialist journal Monthly Review. He denounced "the economic anarchy" and "crippling egotism" of capitalist society and called for "the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system oriented towards social goals." The essay offered the following take on capitalism's tendency to concentrate wealth and centralize control of both politics and ideology:
Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The results of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital, the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society.... Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.
I believe I did a fairly alright job in that.