/liberty/ here. What "inherent contradictions" are there in capitalism that are supposed to make it collapse? Workers in the 19th century lived under significantly worse conditions than they do now but capitalism survived nonetheless, for centuries? Even in places where there has been a violent uprising against property owners, like Russia and Cuba, only went through a temporary phase of the government owning everything before returning to the free market.
/liberty/ here. What "inherent contradictions" are there in capitalism that are supposed to make it collapse...
Christian Martin
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Jace Carter
tippest of the toppest of keks
Hudson Johnson
id suggest reading marx just because i don't think people are going to respond in good faith
Isaiah Mitchell
The third world sweatshop workers, which are basically todays 19th century Industrial Revolution worker, live and work in some pretty horrid conditions, no?
American imperialist intervention and global capitalist pressure prevents Stalinist concepts of socialism in one country from working. And the state owning everything isn't socialism, that's probably more like fascism/corporatism.
Jordan Mitchell
Most workers then were poorly educated and not far removed generationally from peasants, and at the same time they did not have the kind of technology that we have today that would make even the dumbest worker realize that such suffering is plainly useless. That's why there was a class struggle against capitalism all over the planet, to varying degrees of militancy, once people began to realize that and leave behind their peasant-based worldview.
In the case of the USSR it lasted about 75 years was a global super-power for a good portion of that time. So hardly what I'd call "temporary" the British Republic that helped ring in the rise of capitalism didn't last nearly as long and was far less effective at its goals but it nonetheless left a lasting effect on British history, culture, statecraft, economics etc.
Jose Walker
because capitalism outsources that kind of misery to underdeveloped countries
thanks, CIA.
Elijah Diaz
Employers want to pay as little for the labor that they buy as possible. Workers want to make as much for their labor as possible. Pro-capitalists like to handwave this away by saying that market forces will bring both to a desirable equilibrium, but they ignore how these market forces are driven entirely by the irrational drive for endless and constantly rising profits.
As long as the owner/worker dichotomy exists, capitalism will be threatened.
Matthew Hernandez
Matthew Nelson
What is the 2008 financial crisis? If it wasn't for the tax payer's money bailing out the banks there would no more capitalism nowdays. Capitalism only breeds corruption.
And i know what you're going to say "we libertarians an ancaps were against that. I was too…because your "real capitalism" would last less than a decade without central governments and taxation.
Oliver Adams
You guys still bother to post?
Benjamin Rodriguez
It has nothing to do with the workers at all really, or not workers rights anyway, it's about the fact that production becomes so monopolised into few hands and wages so low that the workers can't afford to buy anything. At the same time, they are being replaced by new labour saving technology which ultimately hurts the bottom line of the capitalist because eventually everyone will have the technology and you can't create value (which comes from the difference between what a commodity would actually cost to produce and what the worker is paid for producing it, IE wages) with technology. Capitalism requires exponential growth forever to sustain itself, which is why historically capitalism has had to create new markets to exploit (IE the scramble for Africa, neocolonialism in the third world). However, the world is all mapped now and furthermore the world's resources are finite, and rapidly being depleted. Can useless junk be produced forever from a diminishing stock of resources to be sold to a populace that are less and less and to afford it? Of course not. And so we have the collapse of capitalism.
Jason Scott
The biggest is that the drive for greater profits will cause the bourgeoisie to impoverish the proletariat to the point that the proletariat can no longer consume enough to support the engine of capitalism and it all comes tumbling down.
Because of proletarian revolutions scared Western Porky enough that he agreed to fund big welfare states. All that is being undone now and Burgerland has already gone back to industrial revolution status, with Europe not far behind.
First, socialism isn't the government owning everything.
Second, social development usually doesn't happen all at once. The Englush Civil War and French Revolution failed and slipped back into monarchy. That didn't change the fact that there was a historical trend towards liberalization and republicanism.
Zachary Cooper
Diminishing profits, excess production and overwhelming exponentially increasing population of useless laborers who will demand more and more taxing social programs and benefits and will expect higher standards of living which the lack of profits will not permit. This combined with billionaires and trillionaires appetites for being idiots with other people's money as we saw with the idiot mortgage crisis leads to a casino built on quick-sand where Central Banks (the house) constantly have to let the customers win so they don't lose all their business at once (and have a gigantic bank run). Its really fucking hilarious. The fact that you and other NRx dorks can't understand that Capital is going to collapse is something that will seal all our fates, as it is true that Libertarians and right wing billionaires will have a bigger impact on civilization development than the Left (which is dying) will. The only thing that can bail Capitalism out is Techno-Military expansion which is where all the """"""innovation"""" is headed. The super mega ultra giga surveillance state is the solution to all of this.
Jayden Wright
Yeh bro but like… Diseconomies of scale totally have more effect than economies of scale and totally mean monopolies don't happen, only states make monopolies bro, praxelology lmao
Mason Phillips
this shit eats itself
Bentley Long
the number of likes this has worries me
Cameron Nguyen
?
Jose Roberts
And let's not forget private prison de facto slave labor as well.
Blake King
Smiley is that you?
Lincoln Flores
/r/NeoLiberalism
Jacob Johnson
Yeah it's a total PR front, like most subreddits these days.
Adam Wright
One of the main contradictions I have yet to hear a pro-capitalist actually try to deal with is having a system predicated on endless growth (capitalism) within a finite system (the earth).
Jaxon Sullivan
elon is going to take us to brave new worlds to exploit
Jayden Scott
dude technology will fix it lmao
Kevin White
falling rate of profit
exchange and use value
class interests
just to name a few ;)
Asher Collins
you have to go back
Jordan Evans
Marx already wrote all this down. Now all people need to do is bother to read it.
Carter Myers
it was ironic, now you go back
Ryder Foster
The main contradiction Marx refers to is the socialization of labour vs the privatization of the product of labour. Basically it boils down to the fact that industrial labour is a highly social process, involving many people working co-operatively for long hours in close quarters. This combines with the fact that the product of this labour is appropriated from the highly socialized workers by what is effectively an external entity in the form of an absentee capitalist to produce resentment between the two classes. Marx predicts that this, combined with other factors like crises of overproduction, will ultimately cause capitalism to collapse.
Well like less than two centuries, which when compared to how long slavery or feudalism were around, isn't very long. As for the conditions of workers in the past there are two points that need to be made.
A) Most of the workers around the world are still living under those conditions.
B) Marx failed to predict the success of moderate reformist movements that wanted to implement pro-worker policies without abolishing capitalism altogether. These policies and these alone saved capitalism. It's a safe bet that without the New Deal and similar policies, the Great Depression would have boiled over into revolution (porkies of the day were so convinced that revolution was imminent that they attempted to stage a coup, the so called "business plot"). Actually there was hardly any industrialized country in the 20s and 30s that wasn't under such a threat. Germany had a failed revolution in 1919, and nearly elected the communists in the 1933 election. In Italy workers seized factories and cities before being crushed by fascist paramilitaries, communists were also poised to win the postwar elections but were suppressed by the OSS. In France the communist party was near to electoral victory before the war broke out, and after the war nearly won elections before being repressed by the Americans. In Spain and Finland a civil war broke out after workers seized factories. In Canada workers organized by the communist party boarded trains and tried to occupy parliament. The world was quite literally bubbling with revolution, but was interrupted by the war which, combined with the Keynesian policies of the postwar consensus and imperialism helped to bring the developed world out of the Great Depression.