Quote:
Originally Posted by Isbjørn
^ This.
The capitalist system can be glossed over, but in the end, it's unsustainable. Private ownership of the means of production means that society is largely divided into two classes - those who work, and those who buy labor. The vast majority belongs to the former group - they cook our meals, they make our shoes, they clean our floors, they flip our burgers, they drive our buses etc. The goods and services (commodities) they create have value because they require labor, but under capitalism, the workers constantly receive wages worth less than the value of their labor. The rest goes to the owners as profit - and this is why Stefan Persson is the 17th richest person in the world while H&M employees in Southeast Asia barely receive half of what they need to meet their basic needs. The harder the exploitation, the bigger the profit.
Under capitalism, commodities are produced to generate profits, and not to meet needs. This is why, annually, 3 times as much money is spent on researching Viagra than what's spent on researching HIV/AIDS medicines - it's obvious that the latter is more necessary, but most AIDS victims can't afford to pay for medicines. And capitalism requires constant growth. In the free market, a business must always produce more and generate more profits than its competitors - the status quo means you lose in the competition. Constant economic growth, on micro- and macro-level, may sound nice, but in a world with limited resources, it's an impossibility. Nature sets the limits.
I should be mentioning many other things, like imperialism, crises of overproduction, the deliberately low quality of commodities like iPhones, unemployment, but I need to eat now, and there are others who can explain this much better than I can. The point is that capitalism is inherently at odds with nature and the interests and needs of the vast majority of people, and trying to make it ethical is futile.
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I'm going to elaborate on the underlined in the paragraph, briefly:
(a)
-labor is divided on an international scale
--this leads to a division within the proletariat, principally between those in the "imperialist" nations and those in the "exploited" nations (note: this can occur within national borders)
---the proletariat in the first world is best termed the labour aristocracy because they benefit from the superexploitation of the colonies
(b)
-a genuine redistribution of resources would result in a greatly reduced standard of living for the labour aristocracy
--there would be a similar reduction in cultural capital
---there would a similar reduction in political power
(c)
-faced with the decision between less and more, the labour aristocracy chooses more
--hence why there have been no meaningful attempts at revolution imperialist countries
---hence why "socialist theory" in the imperialist countries is dominated by ideologies that either deny outright the existence of the labour aristocracy (such as left-anarchism) and those who think it's a good thing (see trotskyism)
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Anyways, if you want to read about futurism and marxism I'd recommend cyber-marx by dyer-witheford. It's autonomist-marxist bull****, but if you like bull****.....