I recently came across this video, which explained Marxism more concisely. I was either indifferent (or a little cautious) of Marx's philosophies before, just from the prejudice that surrounds communist countries and their reputation -- but now I see that his ideas are greatly needed.
Your thoughts?
Or, how would you approach building an ideal social structure?
Alienation and dis-empowerment in the workplace is something that has always bothered me greatly. Every time I've worked a job I'm always haunted by the fact that I'm usually not part of a product that really helps people. Fast food is just calories attached to poison. A lot of retail is made redundant by smart purchasing decisions, amazon, and the internet.
Occasionally I feel like some of the more local efforts at business have value. For example, there's a jewish bakery up north that is owned locally, and I don't think I would feel ... bad... about working at a place like this. Really, I feel like it's a lack of democracy that haunts our spirits wherever we are. It's that feeling when your social circle ignores your input about where to go tonight. It's the feeling when you upsell a product to a customer that you think is only eroding their willpower and steadily destroying their life. It's not pleasant. I'm not at all surprised that entertainment and drugs has such a hold on our population.
His critique was mostly correct, though, trying to bind value directly to the workers wasn't necessarily true. The moment a business can lower its bottom line via automation is the moment that the idea that workers having an inherent value is proven false. People really do underestimate the soullessness of the machine.
People would be better off if they realized how void of ethics business is. Maybe we would use democracy and community to try and bring ethics into our life. I don't see anything coded in the system that will make it happen magically with business.
On the topic of ideal structures. I think it's one where the policies passed reflect the desires of the majority like a democracy should. It will lead to some bad policies, but at least we'll know who's responsible. I hear a lot of people preach about how everyone should look in the mirror, but that falls on deaf ears when policies don't even reflect the will of the people. Hard to blame yourself when your input didn't even matter. In the end I think we will have to stick with a lot of the models that free trade brought us for distributing goods and that will have to be modulated by good collective decisions to create a good harmony. I'm almost with the libertarians when it comes to the idea that voluntary trade between individuals brings about a lot more progress. Seriously, there is such a diversity that we don't see in our current system.
I think the role of collective decision making is vastly underestimated in that school of thought, however. People need a way to implement their ethics into the system and it has to be done universally since competition makes it so that any change to one business could be used to disadvantage or advantage it. There is a lot to be said about how local decision making can reshape the landscape through thousands of little choices.
Either way, I think that the empowerment that comes with being part of a collective decision making process is important.
Finally, I have mixed feelings about the profit motive being driven by the stock market. A ferocious critique of Marx was that the ownership itself caused the strife, and I certainly see a lot of poison coming from that direction. Still... I don't know what's to be done about it.
/End Rant
Last Edit: May 16, 2016 12:48:02 GMT -5 by rualani
People would be better off if they realized how void of ethics business is. Maybe we would use democracy and community to try and bring ethics into our life. I don't see anything coded in the system that will make it happen magically with business.
Hmmm. What if culture can decide if ethics and business are interrelated? For example, in old Japanese culture doing business was largely connected to the societal reputation of the family or business. If they were well respected ("honored") socially, they'd have more opportunities for trade/etc.
Imagine a culture in which any amoral company receives a strike... Where the population (and thus the overall politics) is more actively involved in prohibiting certain socially harmful marketing trends.
I feel like it's a society's ideology that disallows certain things to be plausible in their ecosystem. In something like the USA, which has kept the capitalistic "American dream" embedded in its culture for so many decades, it's hard to imagine a switch in values happening. Greed isn't really shunned in Western ethics.
As the vid said, "profit" is a fancy word for exploitation, but culturally there's a belief that profiting big is the way to go -- without realizing what it means to profit big (i.e. taking from others in large sums while you do comparatively far less work to achieve that revenue). If this was frowned upon, and thus regulated by the gov because of the cultural shunning and laws they'd want to pass, then economics would be different. (or so says my inner idealist )
If my salad has tomatoes and mushrooms, but I hate tomatoes, and my wife has the same salad but hates mushrooms, we can trade. My salad has twice as many mushrooms and no tomatoes (score!) and my wife has the opposite.
Neither one of us exploited the other, but we both profited from the situation because we have different values. Exploitation results in profit, sure, but ethical profit is about finding unevenly valued resources and connecting them to the right people.
To say that profit is always exploitative is to assume that resources have inherent value that is or isn't paid, which really isn't true. Those tomatoes and mushrooms would rot without anyone there to value and eat them.
I valued that salad more than the three dollars I spent on it, the company valued my money more than their salad, and the workers valued their one dollar's worth of time spent making it more than the salad or the free time combined.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that "exploitation" is a really negative term that implies non-consentual exchange. Exploitation is real and it happens in a lot of situations (Wal-Mart manufacturing in China and then using that artificially low baseline to edge out other businesses is pretty shady) but that's not a native feature of profiting because my profit isn't mutually exclusive of my customers'.
Interesting. Well, Marx had a quite historicist view of social organisations. This is probably his biggest mistake as he could not see another horizon than working class leading other classes through radical revolution, and he could not predict the rise of mixed ideologies like social-democracy or modern liberalism. But he provided a lot of precious work describing why the working class was not profiting from capitalism in his time.
Imagine a culture in which any amoral company receives a strike... Where the population (and thus the overall politics) is more actively involved in prohibiting certain socially harmful marketing trends.
Prohibiting and popular/political involvment are always valued within economical progressive opinion, and those are surely needed at some degree because freedom needs a conscious process. However, these methods always shows their limits when the market economy rather works using people seduction and fatality of systematic rules of the market, not political involvment so much. So, what I mean is, an economical progressive ideal would benefit from including more economical stimulations and psychological elements within. Not the amoral ones, but let say the "ethical and seductive-stimulating" ones. If not, I guess the majority of people efficiently rises only when in very hard conditions of living and never really persevere through conscious involvment as economical stimulations of the market are omnipresent thus stronger. Considering history and the way progressive initiatives have been often considering market in a very dualistic struggle, this more immanent approach may be a way to not overstimate people endurance in struggle and instead provides an economical system basis for efficient social progressive policies like healthcare, more economical power for employees, free education, etc. I guess the solution lies within what the most elemental exchange in market is. For now, money is not created for both customer and trader during an exchange. One becomes richer and the other becomes poorer, one wins economical power while the other loses it and becomes more dependant of people like one. Actually, if this paradox was resolved then, I'm sure liberalism itself would get more sense and meaning because there would be a real initial freedom of people, an ability to exchange, and not just one of leaders and bosses over all, and thus a more emergent economy.
Zweilous
If my salad has tomatoes and mushrooms, but I hate tomatoes, and my wife has the same salad but hates mushrooms, we can trade. My salad has twice as many mushrooms and no tomatoes (score!) and my wife has the opposite.
Neither one of us exploited the other, but we both profited from the situation because we have different values.
You mean a kind of barter. Thus, it works except if one has not the economical power to exchange, which is symbolized by money possession. And I don't think eating means only a different value. I mean, If one do not eat, then he/she dies, and if he/shes do not keep an initial power to exchange then, he/shes can't buy whether it is what he/she needs or what like, thus dies. I guess what you say supposes that the two of you and your wife have the economical power to propose a deal, to not be only the subordinated one agreeing the rules of the other (not subordinated like a moneyless employee), and not one being in dependency from the other like having to absurdly and endlessly going to work for another person in order to make money before doing the deal that was supposed to happens. There must be an initial principle in money creation and in the exchange so that one can invest and not just getting poorer and poorer while the other get richer and richer. Also, the rules and consequences of market are a bit different when one speak about small trade and when one speak about industries and big societies. Well, of course I do not speak especialy about that easy kind of salad exchange but, the whole kind of exchange that can be made in this world.
You're talking about systemic poverty, not profit. As I went on to say, certain types of profit are exploitative, but that's not native to the concept of profitable exchange.
Purchasing with money is the same thing. I can't eat money, so when I'm hungry, the salad is worth more to me than three dollars. I can't choose to not be hungry, so in one sense they are taking advantage of my need, but they aren't taking it from me because I have something they value that I'm giving them.
If I don't have any money and can't eat, that's not the fault of "profit" but other systemic societal issues and the personal choices of either myself or certain business owners. Blaming the mechanics of the system for the unethical choices of individuals is not reasonable, nor is it helpful for addressing real systemic discrimination against the poor.
I agree Zwei, but I think your going off in a direction no one was really going... The critique against profit is the scenario in which a owner takes the profit that a worker generates. Even on that critique there is a lot to be said about how exploitation matters in degree and kind. I'm sure an argument would be made that it was actually an improvement depending on that balance. In the scenarios that you brought up where people barter or trade, they are profiting from services/goods that THEY created. Such is not the case in the critique of Marx.
Auburn Yeah, that's something I really need to look into. After I had typed that out my brain started filling in all the exceptions to the business and ethics dichotomy I had built up. When you bring up businesses being regulated by the culture my immediate thought is of the strength of the said culture.
One of the things I railed against in my rant was fast food places. There are plenty of *earnest* consumers who aren't exactly proud of their decision. Food can be just like an addiction and the treatment is remarkably similar. One important factor when it comes to dealing with addiction is social support. This combined with the notion that people can unify to strike against a business brings about a strange paradox in my mind. If people were socially cohesive and had the values to strike against say... McDonalds, then wouldn't they have already not been eating there?
I kind of think that poverty and social disintegration just cycles with low wages from the places that sell addictive products creating a rot(slowly, gently, this is how a life is taken!)
I say this knowing full well how many times I've succumbed to McDonalds.
Interesting, so capitalism has the power to bypass (in some cases) the 'ethical' subject by producing products which are appealing on a more instinctual level to people. Thus, people get hooked and like the idea of keeping the business going (or even if they don't like the idea, they unconsciously do it anyway). Slowly the culture comes to accept the consumeristic lifestyle where values take a back seat to immediate gratification. 0.o
I suppose that is one area where capitalism/consumerism kinda has culture and ethics by the tail. I agree with the assessment that as a whole, few societies are so strong willed in that way.
But as a counter to this, we have seen successful campaigns against smoking in the 80s and 90s -- due to a combination of cultural and scientific concern. And cigs are an example of one of those really addictive things that capitalism was benefiting from. So this makes me think that if it really matters, culture indeed can shun something instinctually attractive. But the motivation has to be strong enough, and needs to be combined with social education programs and actual gov. regulations.
If science brought forth more strong evidence and studies (for example) of why "Work-related stress has been shown to shorten lifespan, and a 4 day work week is optimal for a person's health", maybe that's the sort of thing that could gain traction, and shift the culture away from the ratrace or carrot-chasing mentality?
Interesting video. Really changes what I think of when I hear the word Marxist or Marxism. I didn't really know what it was, but I knew it had a negative connotation associated with it in many circles.
I think the reason why Marxism currently seems so appealing to me is because the society in which I reside is so gruesomely involved in Capitalism and if the situation were to be swapped I would feel the reverse. The grass always seems greener on the other side...