Most of us have all grown, matured,
and developed in a capitalist nation. For those of us who have not, we have all
subsisted in a world dominated by the system. It cannot be avoided in our life
time. This strange and soon to be shocking fact is due to the sheer magnitude
of power it has allocated to others, due to the extreme class divisions it has
produced, as well as its ability to perpetually recreate itself, a point made
clear to me in our last symposium. Since we have all grown up in capitalism,
the idea that capitalism is the only way to incentivize or to ensure hard work,
production, and innovation has been burned into our minds. As a result of this upbringing, it really is
very hard to know, comprehend, and understand how right Marx is and how
exploitative capitalism is. To this end
I have provided a video below. No doubt, some if not all of you will have
already seen this video. Still, I encourage you to watch it again and remind
yourselves of the truly eye-opening difference between us and the notorious top
1%. Watch the video now:
I merely want to drive Marx’s point
home and make it as clear as possible what Marx is talking about and how DYNAMIC
the situation of capitalism truly is. This is very difficult. Even though we
have been talking about Marx’s views, I think we only know them. That is, we do not truly understand or comprehend them.
Certainly, we do not feel them
otherwise we would not stand for such extreme and exploitative differences.Three-hundred-eighty-two times the amount the average employee makes? Are you
kidding? NO ONE truly has the time or ability to actually be that much more
productive than ANYONE else (so this person must be exploiting others). We only know
Marx's views in the sense that we have
memorized the premises and conclusion, but if we truly understood and comprehended
the system, I think we would never allow it. This is a pretty big IF though and education is not something that is guaranteed
to ensure such comprehension.
I
think one of the big reasons this video can do such a good job of aiding Marx
in reaching us is that it approaches us in terms of value we understand. That
is, monetary value. We are obsessed with it. We are so fixated on it that it
blinds us from what value is more often than not. In this video we can see the
incredible gap between the classes in terms of monetary value. It takes the
average employee a month to earn what the CEO earns in an hour. But for Marx, monetary value is not the only thing
we lose in such a system.
Nor does he think monetary value is the way we should value things (he
actually advocates more for Labor Value Theory). These other things of loss include the following: that we are separated from the product of our
labor, from the creative process of production of the product, from the realization
of our humanity, and from social relationships with others. Marx’s biggest
point is that labor is not just a means of production, but it is essential to
humanity. That is, it helps define who we are, it allows us to obtain
satisfaction, and it is the way we reach our potential as human beings.
So though I am mostly repeating
Marx’s views this week, I think it is something that needs to be done until we
understand what is going on.
Your post and this video both bring light to the fact that capitalism doesn't operate anywhere close to what the "American dream" advocates, that hard work pays off. I think that when one sees that this isn't the way capitalism works, that it reinforces the wealthy to the point where they barely lift a finger and still make more money than those who sacrifice an arm and a leg (sometimes literally), they begin to see fundamental problems with the system. What becomes very frustrating is that you can't just strip the wealthy of what they have because of our sense of private property and that they have "legally" earned their wealth. I agree with you that people (including myself) do not actually understand the scope and effect that capitalism has on the majority of people in this country. Because the wealthy have the most influence over government, the law makers, when Marx says that the proletariat revolution will be especially violent I can do nothing but agree. Not to sound like some kind of doomsday forecaster, but I think the only way to tear away from a capitalist society is through force. The shift from capitalism does not have to be violent. It may happen that we will see a generation of an enlightened upper class that will also desire capitalism to be abolished, however, I see that as highly unlikely.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to how people don't see the full scope of capitalism, I think it is a pretty big risk to remove capitalism without having a system to fall back on. The hard thing, though, is to decide where to go next. Marx says that we are headed to a socialist society, which sounds good in theory, but no system will be perfect and we cannot know the fundamental flaws of a socialist society unless we can observe a true society that operates in this fashion. We have models that I didn't even think about until Dr. J mentioned them (such as the community shared between family or roommates), but on a grand scale that involves hundreds of millions of people, such a system will most likely show more complications than we can see with miniaturized models.
One of the main issues with capitalism is the fact that so many people simply don't care about how they are being exploited by the system, or if they do care, they know they can't do anything about it. The Occupy Wall Street movement that happened recently was a good attempt that brought the class divide to light, but nothing monumental resulted from this minor proletariat revolution. This relative failure of the movement has brought the workers back to square one, and has also disheartened them from trying to overthrow the system again. Capitalism is so rooted into our mind and country that the idea that a change could be successful is simply impossible. The only thing we can do that would possibly cause change, would be to alter the light in which capitalism is taught, but the education system is run by the rich, so this would never happen.
ReplyDeletePierce,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that after this class most of us will just forget about Marx and go back to our daily grind to get-a-good-grade-get-a-good-job-and-get-old-and-die. The video you shared shows that the capitalist system is obviously unfair but we are so drunk on the capitalist “cool-aid” to realize it. Let’s assume that our families are not owners of the means of production; if we work hard to get-a-good-grade-and-get-a-good-job, we will call ourselves happy because we own cars, houses, and families. We will also alienate our labor from ourselves 8 or more hours a day while satisfying mere bodily pleasures the rest of the time. In other words, we become laborers in the middle class.
The curve in the wealth distribution among the middle class is the “cool-aid” that blinds us from seeing how unfair the system actually is. Everyone has been taught that to be rich is a good thing and they can be rich if they work hard; everyone may has even be taught that because they are not the owners of production, they can never be beyond-rich; however, as the video points out, an average American doesn’t even have the concept of how much wealthier the top 1% is in comparison to the rest of us, let alone having the ambition to make the wealth distribution more fair.
To a capitalist, as long as the majority of the population (i.e. middle class) is kept happy, laborers are going to persist the system and feed wealth to the beyond-rich. The overall wealth of the country could keep increasing, but that increase in wealth will only slip quietly into the pockets of the owners of the means of production. Meanwhile, the laborers are all kept in the blind bliss of their capitalist cool-aid which is embodied in the hope for realizing the American dream.
I agree with a lot of the thread of this post so far. The video is an enlightening perspective on how we have the resources for 90% of people to have dramatically more resources (aka wealth) than they currently have. The owners of the means of production have more wealth than we can imagine or they can even ever use. People, because they can live and can be convinced that their lives are improving, believe the system is working for them. Also the failure of communist societies also has contributed to this reluctance, even though most people have no idea how unfair the system is
ReplyDelete