lmao @ teh 'blindfolds of prejudice' comment
Ok Aldo, time to tear you apart:
Aldi-brain said:
*If there is no capital, there is no workplace there is no need for workers.
*If there are no workers, there can even be no construction of the very workplace there can't be gathered capital to pay for its very construction for its workings, for the workers.
Your first statement in the renunciation of Marx: a declaration that labour cannot exist seperate of capital - that without
capital, man may not create produce, as he is in need to the capital required to make the initial investment!
Anyone with half-a-brain can see the circular logic here. Were this statement correct, mankind wouldn't be here right now. We'd have all starved to death due to lack of capital. Those peasants eking out a subsistence lifestyle in the countryside would have just voluntary lain around 'til they died - unable to prduce wealth without an initial influx of cash.
You make a correct statement later on - wealth already exists. Well, it's almost right; potential wealth already exists in the resources which we have at our disposal. A field (already in existance) gives the potential for crops. Crude oil the potential for petrol. However, without investing human labour into these projects that wealth remains unrealised.
Before capitalism these resources could be used as and when human beings could galvanise and organise themselves around a project enough to do it. Money is a human invention - capital is a human invention. It wasn't just floating around on the wind before any of us arrived on the planet, we made it. And we made it after we'd produced a whole lot of wealth without it. For a long time.
So, you're right:- in a
capitalist society capital investment needs to occur before wealth can be created. In a society where
not all human resources are considered 'private property', and in which the fruits of the earth are owned in common, capital is not needed to make any 'transactions'. You can just get down to business and make that wealth, dawg. In reality, therefore, you are wrong (I added the first sentence for the flow
).
In what way do the owners of the means of production live anything other than a parasitic existence? They are uneccessary - the workers create the wealth, yet recieve marginal benefits from it. In order to employ workers, capitalist must pay them less than the capital value of the labour they give. This is a categorical example of exploitation.
Mouldy-brain said:
Individual relationships are what humans allow or want them to be. Artificial divisions in societies are created to keep societies rolling and developing within more or less controlled/controllable patterns.
You are quite right - ironic that you pertain to be a member of a church - the greatest artificial division of all between the people. But class isn't an artificial division: it distinguishes itself from other forms of social divisions, because it's
real - it's palatable. Tangible. It's not like God, or nationality, 'tradition', culture - it's acutely present in the real, material world. Its physical presence prevents everyday people from accessing the resources of the world - vast areas of land are reserved for the rich in the form of golf resorts, leisure clubs, private dance halls, gentlemen's clubs... These are places and things which most people will never see. They do not have the capital.
In essence, capitalism is a different form of 'class system' in that rather than being based upon the rigid restrictions of birth, inheritance, acceptance into some kind of institution or gender, it's based upon the universal value of money. Moolah. Hey, anyone can get money if they work hard enough, right? Anyone can get rich if they screw over enough people. But no - even under the social leveller that is capitalism, which sweeps before it all that was sacred, all that distinguished the masses from the classes, class becomes entrenched. Elite schools, exam systems, old school tie networks, access to social resources - all these things mean that even the capitalist system developes its own ruling class, and that ruling class sets about preserving itself and inhibiting the entry of new members. Class becomes once again entrenched. You claim that people artificially define themselves according to their class - I'll remember that when I'm next standing in the cold outside the Ritz, looking in. Right before I get arrested for loitering.
Of course we're all just human beings - what levelling ideals and realities there are entwined in the capitalist system (in its destruction of rational perversions such as 'faith', 'knowing your place', etcetera) prove that to us moreso now than under any other economic system. What you're saying, though, is that the system doesn't exist - that next time you walk into a shop and there's a pot of caviar you can't afford to buy, you're mentally deluding yourself if you think you can't just pick it right up off the shelf and walk out the store. You're
actually espousing anarchist sentiments. All Marx is saying is that though you may have the ability to take the caviar, the system forbades you the 'right' and labels your action 'theft' - and will use physical force to suppress you. That is the artificial reality created by society, not a Marxist analysis of it.
Mouldy-Brian said:
Like others before and after him, Marx argued against exploitation of the poor and had in his time and age reason enough to do so, yet this exploitation was not a new element in human society. It only appeared under a shape and form more apparent and directly visible due to the factor “industrialism”.
Wrong: 'industrialism' occurred because of the existance of a new class - the Proletariat. A class of people with no trades, and nothing to live on but their labour. For a modernesque example of this process, you can look at Russia in the latter half of the 1800s (in particular the emancipation of the serfs). In this instance, it was seen that the backwards feudal economy of Russia (in which the vast bulk of the population were peasants, self-sufficient and living as individual units on the land) created a self-fulfilling cycle of backwardness economically. Whilst the peasants were tied to the land (under serfdom they were the legal property of their 'landlord') there was no-one to work in the factories - with no-one to work in the factories there was no production.
If we take Britain as an example, the presence of a mobile, 'homeless' and 'ungrounded' population had been gathering in the towns and cities of England for hundreds of years before the onset of 'industrialisation'. The bulk of the London mob which hounded Parliament and King in the build-up to the Civil War were made up of just such folk - described at the time as the 'meaner' sort of people. 'Vagabonds who would sell their labour to any job going' by another source at the time. Industrialisation and 'capitalism' quite simply did not emerge together as one, unified force. Industrialisation was a by-product of capitalism's innate ability to maximise efficiency and incentivise re-investment in productive technologies and capabilities.
Mouldy-brown said:
Furthermore, there is no comparison possible between the period in which Marx exposed his ideas and the dynamics of current (Western) societies, which makes "class struggle" in this time and age all the more an upbeated artificial.
As dennisr has already (convincingly) pointed out, your specification of 'Western' societies is completely unfounded. The onset of capitalism has recreated the same conditions in all areas of the globe. There's not a single example of a country which has successfully industrialised without creating a modern proletariat and (indeed) a workers' movement (apart from possibly China). As was also pointed out, check the fucking news. Jeez.
Oldy-Braun said:
“Workers” must be able to parasite on the input of the investors to make a living while denying them a living of their own.
Eh? What a joke
...
.
