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but a case can be made with the "too big to fail" realities of our own times, that Marx knew what he was talking about.
Marx's only had a part of the big picture. Capital is not merely stored labor. If it was, then Marx would be right and communism might work.
But capital is also stored ideas, stored risk, stored effort, stored talent, and stored luck. Marx doesn't account for ANY of that. And that's why Marxism has failed everywhere it has been tried. Society rewards artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and even lottery winners (stored luck really is a thing). Everything fits together. Marx can't just look at labor and decide that's that.
Marxism is about as fiscally immature as Grover Norquist's tax pledge. They're dumb for exactly the same reason. They don't look at a market like a big ecosystem.
Costaexpress: The one thing that Marx scuffed at most was "utopian." It's the very antithesis of his hopes for the proletariat. You've given your views considerable thought, but I still detect in your conclusions that you condemned the idea before styding it objectively.
As for not looking down the road far enough, I think YOU need to look even further yet. After labor upheavals, your predictions come through, but a case can be made with the "too big to fail" realities of our own times, that Marx knew what he was talking about.
No. you say I need to look even further and yet you fail to support your argument. i don't care what Marx himself scuffed at. He is not the justification of his theory. You seem to assume that people just can't be critical in marxism. If they are, they havent studied it objectively. There seems to be one single way, correct way of interpreting marxism. But I disagree with that view.
Whatever Marx was trying to do, people don't necessarily share those goals. You aren't arguing based on shared goals. Many amercians do not value that kind of equal society. So arguing how to get there is pointless. A person can study marxism all they want, but they still don't have to decide to adopt it even if they think it makes sense.
Many liberals seem to confuse knowledge with decisions. They are two entirely different things. The left isn't policing knowledge or ignorance. It is policing decision making and personality.
The way capitalism does? Is that why the US is going down the drain and so many jobs have been shipped abroad? How is that "adaptation" supposed to help capitalism? Seems it's only hastening it's death.
Yet economically the US is doing the best of the developed world right now. The US is less reliant on foreign oil then has been in years due to the oil boom. It's moving more freight cheaper than ever before using rail even with the rail system receiving bubkus. It came out of recession faster then most other countries during the financial crisis. Hell some European countries like Greece went into a depression and have stayed there since. As far as jobs going overseas go quite a few of them have been coming back like the textile industry in the United States. Overall the US is actually doing pretty good compared to everyone else at the moment.
And China could easily be called CINO -- communist in name only. There's not much command economy left there anymore. It's less socialist than Scandinavia, these days. Governments will eventually come to reflect their people.
I would argue that it's going in the opposite direction in China with the "great firewall" censoring what the communist party doesn't approve of.
Capitalism alone doesn't work either. Every wealthy country in the world is capitalist *and* socialist for good reason, and nearly all of them are considerably more socialist than the US.
It's not that Capitalism doesn't work. It's that it hasn't been tried. What passes for Capitalism is actually Cronyism or Cartel-ism masquerading as the real thing.
Marx's only had a part of the big picture. Capital is not merely stored labor. If it was, then Marx would be right and communism might work.
But capital is also stored ideas, stored risk, stored effort, stored talent, and stored luck. Marx doesn't account for ANY of that. And that's why Marxism has failed everywhere it has been tried. Society rewards artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and even lottery winners (stored luck really is a thing). Everything fits together. Marx can't just look at labor and decide that's that.
Marxism is about as fiscally immature as Grover Norquist's tax pledge. They're dumb for exactly the same reason. They don't look at a market like a big ecosystem.
Would you mind explaining why Marx's theories would not apply to non-material values? Don't forget that creative labor is labor too.
Would you mind explaining why Marx's theories would not apply to non-material values? Don't forget that creative labor is labor too.
Marx's theories completely fall apart when it comes to things like patents. The capital generated from a patent is not stored labor. It is stored innovation. Manufacturing the product takes labor, yes. But the innovation itself is never compensated under Marxism.
And then there is capital investment -- basically stored risk. This is why capitalism is the best system we have yet devised. It amounts to economic Darwinism. The companies that are able to adapt, thrive. (But we still need regulations in place to keep runaway Capitalism from devolving into feudalism.)
Marx's theories completely fall apart when it comes to things like patents. The capital generated from a patent is not stored labor. It is stored innovation. Manufacturing the product takes labor, yes. But the innovation itself is never compensated under Marxism.
And then there is capital investment -- basically stored risk. This is why capitalism is the best system we have yet devised. It amounts to economic Darwinism. The companies that are able to adapt, thrive. (But we still need regulations in place to keep runaway Capitalism from devolving into feudalism.)
Patents are a legal construct designed to reduce the incentive to keep trade secrets and thus to spread knowledge.
The innovation could be compensated in Marxism. We could also examine the American compensation of innovation and ask interesting questions about theindividual's incentive to innovate. Americans who work for corporations and invent something in the course of their work are usually contractually obligated to assign ownership of their patent to the corporation. Some companies offer a (usually) one-time bonus for having a patent granted. In fact, the top 300 patent owners are all corporations. In 2013, IBM was assigned 6,788 patents--each of those patents represents technology developed by its employees, but IBM has control over how all of those patents are used and/or licensed. For the employees who contributed to those inventions, the innovations they achieved generate value for someone else--IBM shareholders, namely. Perhaps those IBM engineers are, in the Marxist tradition, well-paid, but ultimately exploited, laborers (or, I suppose, petite bourgeoisie waiting for the other shoe to drop).
Capital investment is not stored risk. It is the investment of existing capital in ventures in exchange for owning a share of those ventures.
You seem to assume that the United States is fundamentally a capitalist society (taking, as you do, patents and capital investment in opposition to Marxist economics). How do you explain, then, government spending (federal, state, and local) of $6 trillion annually when the nation's GDP is only ~$15.5 trillion? Could it be that the free market is not so free? China's GDP is ~$13.8 trillion, but its government spending is more like $3.5 trillion. Is it, in fact, more capitalist than the United States?
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