12-09-2011, 08:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 12-09-2011, 08:31 AM by FireIceTalon.)
A big problem with the Capitalist system, it is good when a nation is in a manufacturing/developing stage, but it sucks pretty bad when a nation reaches its peak industrially and thus the economy changes from manufacturing to services. The problem is magnified because many of these jobs require substantial experience or a degree of some sort compared to the manufacturing jobs. The inequality and division of labour produced by the capitalist system thus erodes equal opportunity since the lower classes have less means or resources to have access to the higher education required for this dominant service sector. Although of course, access to higher education is still no guarantee of equal opportunity, but it's a start. Ultimately though, the capitalist system can be used as justification to hide discrimination or prejudice toward various groups of people to keep them at their stations, be it based on class antagonisms, ethnocentrism, gender, nepotism, and so on and so forth. For the capitalists, the ends (profit maximization) justifies the means (essentially, anything goes, so long as it isn't blatantly illegal). Then when profit maximization occurs, time to increase them further by opening up shop in China or Indonesia and exploiting the cheap labour there. Repeat, rinse. This system cannot, and will not, sustain itself, and many of Marx's prophecies about global capitalism are coming to pass. So ironic that he fundamentally better understood the flaws and contradictions of capitalism and where it would head 150 years ago, than our economists of today do. The Communist Manifesto is more relevant NOW than it was in 1848, heh.
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"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)
"Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class, made into law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economic conditions of the existence of your class." - Marx (addressing the bourgeois)