RE: Individualism Is Stupid ( Or Why Libertarianism And Objectivism Is Stupid)
December 3, 2017 at 10:01 pm
(December 3, 2017 at 9:30 pm)shadow Wrote: Definitely - capitalism is a system supported by a host of regulations that enable it. I'd say from a capitalist perspective, though, the ability to incentivize those workers to work for you is the individual aspect. Other people and governments are seen as... almost tools, not an entity that helps one out of the goodness of their hearts. I'd say a capitalist wouldn't expect these things to work in his favor if he hadn't duly coerced (through whatever means) the collective to support him.
I think capitalism's greatest strength is that it is "self-correcting"... think of Smith's invisible hand. If a firm is not producing things efficiently, it will be put out of business by a firm that is. If we put the means of production into public hands, how will a public entity "go out of business" if it is inefficient? The right/libertarians have a valid point here.
The "incentives" argument you made was something that is a weak point in capitalism. Namely, capitalism treats people like commodities. It doesn't matter how hard they work or how valuable their work is to society-- they are paid the going rate for their labor in the marketplace. We're not talking about STEM fields or anything; we're talking about unskilled labor, something that every single society needs more than anything else (like Plato's City of Pigs). The problem is that most members of society need to do manual labor or the society will collapse, but each of these members is replaceable by any other person, thus making their market value low. Left to its own devices, capitalism will enslave 90% of the society (seeing no value in these people except to produce more and more goods).
Marxism values the individual. Marx thought that capitalism would reduce 90% of the population to machines. He believed this 90% could and would be more productive to society, if only society valued them enough to contribute to their development as individuals (instead of reducing them to a cog in the clockwork).
