On 7/31/06, Barry Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What is capitalism? If wealth was shared could that system be called capitalism? Do those who advocate sharing wealth fit into the magic word, reformer, or is that revolutionary? It depends on who one asks.
To Marx, total equality of the ownership of material wealth (means of production) is not consistent with capitalism, since the producers would not have to work for anyone in order to get access to the means of consumption (subsistence). If commodity (market-oriented) production persisted, it would be "simple commodity production," not capitalism. But this kind of system might be unstable and morph into capitalism.
Wealth or Consumption? Adopting the common-sense meaning of "consumption" to mean the end of an item's useful life, rather tha[n] meaning "use," will eliminate one source of fuzzy economic thinking. Our wealth is approximately all that we ever bought minus all that we ever consumed.
this refers only to material wealth (use-values), not to financial wealth (exchange-values). Given this, it seems reasonable to define consumption as "using up," though definitions are arbitrary.
Wealth is an amount, while income is a rate. They are connected by durability. ...
right. "wealth" of any sort is a stock variable (in econ-lingo) while income is a flow variable.
The blur of meaning between use and consumption has surely retarded understanding of the importance of durability. Extended durability and population stability (decline) will make inheritance the main source of wealth, someday.
it will?? I think John Locke was right when he got around the question of the durability of physical objects of consumption and talked about the durability of money as allowing a wealthy class to exist, persist, and to accumulate. In modern terms, it's the financial system that allows the widening gap between the rich and the poor, since if the rich only accumulated use-values (consumption goods), there would be clear limits. In addition, the capitalist system gives power to those with financial wealth.
This kind of system would have a very high efficiency as defined below. Surplus labor combined with wage dependence means that we must increase consumption [using-up], beyond just filling real needs, to make jobs.
what are "real needs"?
It seems on the TV news that the goal of the economy is to make jobs, but the proper goal of any economy it to increase wealth.
I don't think the capitalist economy aims at producing jobs, but why _should_ it produce physical wealth? Ideally, it should encourage happiness (broadly defined as including individual self-realization as part of a healthy society).
Making the most wealth requires making the least consumption, and that will cut the need for labor.
so the economy should save more? why does this cut the need (demand?) for labor. Our economy is moving toward producing more services, which are labor-intensive (and non-durable) and all else equal increase the demand for labor.
We consider any unused labor to be a waste, but when we produce too much to stay busy we are wasting resources and pushing global warming.
isn't it possible (at least in theory) to be more efficient in production, so that fewer hydrocarbons are spewed into the atmosphere and global warming slows or stops?
Since a small part of the human workforce can provide all the needed labor we need some way to make unemployment acceptable, even desirable. Maybe we should call it leisure.
how about distributing the unemployment more equally (rotating people between jobs)? (Attention Sandwichman!)
We should match the labor we use to the needed jobs, instead of matching the jobs to the maximum available labor, as we do now.
I don't think we do so now.
How do we match the labor to the needed jobs? Since the labor we have available can not be reduced, the only answer is to not use it all. Just as a high-powered car needs a throttle to avoid going too fast, the economy needs a way to adjust the amount produced to the amount really needed, rather than producing as much as possible all the time. One way to do that is to provide a basic guaranteed income, which is adjusted down or up to keep wages from rising or falling.
who is in charge of this process of adjustment?
In a robot-run economy the total of all wages would be zero. All income would go to the owners of the robots and the resources they process for us. Unearned income reflects that we are parasites on the planet. While there is plenty of unpaid work, and the work ethic is important; earning a living is a delusion.
Have you read Karel Capek's RUR? (http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/RUR-Capek-1920.htm) It's about the revolt of the robots.
We can't begin serious conservation so long as people are dependent on wages. Giving people a "free ride" may be unpopular, but if dividends are good why is welfare bad?
Though I agree that dividends and "welfare" payments are similar in many ways, I think a better way to go is toward William Morris' NEWS FROM NOWHERE, where high-tech is used only to abolish really nasty jobs. People do the pleasant, creative, artsy jobs and jobs that are social events (like collective hay-baling).
The best, and defining, feature of capitalism is unearned income.
for Marx, at least, the income was "earned" in the sense that coercion (by the state, by the reserve army of labor, etc.) was needed for capitalists to receive it.
We can't do or respect important unpaid work so long as work is just about money. By taking so much of people's time "full" employment competes with, and often prevents, work in family care, stewardship activities, education, and the leisure needed for a good life.
It's true that capitalism is taking too much of our time these days, at least for the upper part of the wage distribution. But there are also those who would like full-time jobs but can't get them.
Economic efficiency should be defined as use-value/required-consumption, but we seem to define it as actual-consumption/possible-consumption. The consumer economy is very efficient in its ability to waste and pollute. Where is the adult supervision?
this is the problem of (what economists call) external costs. It definitely needs to be fixed. I'm not sure how you want to fix it.
It seems to me that consideration of these ideas might be important. One can find implied solutions to "impossible" problems in these considerations. Barry Brooks http://home.earthlink.net~durable
-- Jim Devine / "These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people." -- Abraham Lincoln
