CONSEQUENCES OF BEING BROKE UNDER CAPITOLISM

Income inequality happens by design. We can't fix it by tweaking capitalism

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Politicians today promise to create jobs — or more opportunities to be exploited by capital — not to take over the means of production. Capitalism could achieve this transformation because the reorganization of production allowed for an unprecedented increase in productivity. The division of labor within and across firms, which Adam Smith had already envisioned in as the engine of growth, allowed for a division of knowhow among individuals that permitted the whole to know more than the parts and form ever-growing networks of exchange and collaboration.

A modern corporation has experts in production, design, marketing, sales, finance, accounting, human resource management, logistics, taxes, contracts, and so on. Modern production is not just an accumulation of buildings and equipment owned by Das Kapital and operated mechanically by fungible workers. Instead, it is a coordinated network of people that possess different types of Das Human-Kapital. In the developed world, capitalism did transform almost everyone into a wage laborer, but it also lifted them out of poverty and made them more prosperous than Marx could have imagined.

That was not the only thing Marx got wrong. More surprisingly, the capitalist reorganization of production petered out in the developing world, leaving the vast majority of the labor force outside its control. The numbers are astounding. While only one in nine people in the United States are self-employed, the proportion in India is 19 out of Fewer than one-fifth of workers in Peru are employed by the kind of private businesses that Marx had in mind. In Mexico, about one in three are. Even within countries, measures of wellbeing are strongly related to the proportion of the labor force employed in capitalist production.

See that poor guy above pushing a wheelbarrow full of money to pay for basic things? The economics are very, very simple. Americans face a situation of eudaimonic hyperinflation. I put in pompous italic because I want to make a point. In Venezuela, prices have risen by thousands or millions of percent, for consumer goods.

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Perhaps you think I exaggerate. Healthcare has risen by two thousand percen t. Those are all conservative estimate, too, from what I reckon. You can add to that list as you see fit.

All the basics of life have skyrocketed in price in a kind of epic way that the world has never really seen before, outside of hyperinflationary episodes, like the Weimar Republic. Do you see what I mean by eudaimonic hyperinflation? How can that be? A whole nation, more or less, is one emergency, illness, or unforeseen expenditure away from ruin.

And ruin in this case means genuine ruin: Americans are broke, my friends. Bill Moyers , for example, gave a speech at Brennan Center for Justice in December which was titled "The Great American Class War," referring to the current struggle between democracy and plutocracy in the U.

And I think that can only go on for so long without there being more and more outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare. The typical example of class conflict described is class conflict within capitalism. This class conflict is seen to occur primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat , and takes the form of conflict over hours of work, value of wages, division of profits, cost of consumer goods, the culture at work, control over parliament or bureaucracy , and economic inequality.

The particular implementation of government programs which may seem purely humanitarian, such as disaster relief, can actually be a form of class conflict. Although Thomas Jefferson — led the United States as president from — and is considered one of the founding fathers, he died with immense amounts of debt.

Regarding the interaction between social classes, he wrote,. I am convinced that those societies as the Indians which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe.

Class conflict

Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

The investor, and billionaire , and philanthropist Warren Buffett , one of the 10 wealthiest persons in the world , [12] voiced in and once more in his view that his class — the "rich class" — is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In Buffet said to CNN: Noam Chomsky , American linguist , philosopher , and political activist has criticized class war in the United States:.

The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run society, more so than others. Occasionally this is recognized The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look at CEO salaries Max Weber — agrees with the fundamental ideas of Karl Marx about the economy causing class conflict, but claims that class conflict can also stem from prestige and power. Different locations can largely affect one's class by their education and the people they associate with.

How Hidden Hyperinflation Left Americans Broke, and What to do About It

This prestige is based upon the social status of one's parents. Prestige is an attributed value and many times cannot be changed. Weber states that power differences led to the formation of political parties. While Marx believes that groups are similar due to their economic status, Weber argues that classes are largely formed by social status.

Numerous factors have culminated in what's known as the Arab Spring. Agenda behind the civil unrest, and the ultimate overthrow of authoritarian governments throughout the Middle-East included issues such as dictatorship or absolute monarchy , human rights violations, government corruption demonstrated by Wikileaks diplomatic cables , [19] economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors, [20] such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the population.

Karl Marx — was a German born philosopher who lived the majority of his adult life in London, England. In The Communist Manifesto , Karl Marx argued that a class is formed when its members achieve class consciousness and solidarity. A class will then realize their shared interests and a common identity. According to Marx, a class will then take action against those that are exploiting the lower classes. What Marx points out is that members of each of the two main classes have interests in common. These class or collective interests are in conflict with those of the other class as a whole.

This in turn leads to conflict between individual members of different classes. Not all class struggle is violent or necessarily radical, as with strikes and lockouts. Class antagonism may instead be expressed as low worker morale, minor sabotage and pilferage, and individual workers' abuse of petty authority and hoarding of information. It may also be expressed on a larger scale by support for socialist or populist parties.

On the employers' side, the use of union busting legal firms and the lobbying for anti-union laws are forms of class struggle. Not all class struggle is a threat to capitalism, or even to the authority of an individual capitalist. A narrow struggle for higher wages by a small sector of the working-class, what is often called "economism", hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, by applying the craft-union tactics of excluding other workers from skilled trades, an economistic struggle may even weaken the working class as a whole by dividing it.

Class struggle becomes more important in the historical process as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather than crafts, as workers' class consciousness rises, and as they self-organize away from political parties. Marx referred to this as the progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself", a position in the social structure, to being one "for itself",an active and conscious force that could change the world. Marx largely focuses on the capital industrialist society as the source of social stratification , which ultimately results in class conflict.

The proletariat, is separated from the bourgeoisie because production becomes a social enterprise. Contributing to their separation is the technology that is in factories. Technology de-skills and alienates workers as they are no longer viewed as having a specialized skill.

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