Free Market Capitalism @ MindSay 
From Freedom and Reason
Is this the Mother of all Dumb Arguments? Could Very Well Be.
I am being criticized for my criticisms of capitalism on the ridiculous grounds that I live in a capitalist society. It's a bizarre criticism, but I have faced it before.The basic argument is that because I buy things I support capitalism. I don't know why those who make this argument do not immediately recognize how completely absurd it is.
True, I support capitalism in a material sense when I buy things, but that's not support in the sense that I promote capitalism or that I have a desire that it succeed. I support capitalism materially because I am forced to. I live in a capitalist society by misfortune of birth. I didn't choose it.
Slaves supported the system of slavery on these grounds, since their labor is what made the system of slavery possible. Slaves accepted food, housing, medicine, indeed everything from the slave owner. They had to. They had no choice. It's called surviving.
Likewise, I have no choice under capitalism but to buy food and medicine, pay rent, and so forth. This reality of the situation is in fact one of the central reason why capitalism and every other exploitative system is wrong.
If I were forced to contribute my labor to a society in which the workers owned and controlled the means of production, that would be one thing. Every society in history has required those who could work to work for the betterment of the community. "From each according to his ability to each according to his need." I would even settle for "From each according to his ability to each according to his contribution," with some social provision for those who cannot produce enough for themselves, of course (you know, children, the disabled, the elderly).
But under capitalism, I am forced to contribute my labor to, and obtain necessary items from a class of non-workers who monopolize the means of production. Capitalism is in essence a system in which people who don't work live of the labor of those who do - and they live even better than the producers do.
Being forced to contribute to such an unjust arrangement is what's wrong with capitalism.
It isn't supporting capitalism to be forced to live in it any more than prisoners support prisons.
Frankly, I would be embarrassed to have made such a stupid argument.
I don't give two shits about your "freedom" embracing bullshit rhetoric about the free market, so don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining. As long as there are people suffering in poverty in this nation, I refuse my support for such a death machine.
Socialism Works!
TL;DR:
The Soviet Union was not a communist society. The deformities of the Soviet Union were for the most part the consequences of Western capitalist action against the Russian revolutionaries.
Communism as a social system has never existed in the modern period, communism as a social system cannot possibly be responsible for the death of a single person. One can never claim that communism doesn't work because (a) it worked for most of human history and (b) it has never been tested in the modern era.
Communism is the moral philosophy that holds that, since most production is inherently social, members of society should benefit, on the basis of need, from the fruits of social activity, and, furthermore, that all members should contribute to that activity on the basis of their abilities. Communism is the ethical value that every person should have a say so in the decisions that affect her life. It is unremarkable, albeit not popularly known, that this form of social existence is the original form of societal ordering. Most of human history has been spent in communities based on communism (there's a reason why the words are so similar). Economically-stratified societies are a historically recent occurrence and its advocates have tragically managed to obliterate almost everywhere the way human beings lived for most of history and prehistory.
The question of what goals an economic system should strive to attain and how its progress should be measured seems not to have been considered by most economic thinkers. It seems that they have all merely accepted that wealth, defined variously, is that goal without ever giving it very much thought, and economic progress has been and continues to be measured in terms of national wealth. The goal of Mercantilism, for example, was for nations to amass as much wealth, defined as precious metals, as possible. It failed as an economic system merely because the amount of precious metals in a monarch’s treasury had no bearing on the welfare of the nation’s people.
Free market Capitalism is somewhat of an improvement, but wealth is still measured by the net wealth of the nation, now defined as the sum of products and services available, and as far as it has a bearing on the nation’s people, it institutionalizes a trickle-down theory. As the nation gets wealthier, some of that wealth will trickle down to the people and better their lots. But the trickle-down has always been a trickle, never a stream, and often almost a dry gulley, and it has never gotten down to all of the people. Isn’t it time that someone began asking whether wealth is the right goal? Strange as it may seem, and no one seems to have ever pointed this out, this economic model commits the fallacy of division and would have been discarded a long time ago by logical thinkers.
Looking at economics from the level of a nation’s people, the nation’s wealth, net GNP, or whatever, has never proved to be adequate. Nobody, not even the people who amass wealth in this kind of economy, really cares what the sum-total of the nation’s wealth is. All they care about is their own wealth. And they care about that only because it determines whether or not they can adequately take care of themselves and those they care about.
But what if we had an economic system that adopted the well being of the nation’s people as its goal? What would that consist of? Something like this, I propose: adequate housing, adequate clothing, adequate food, adequate healthcare, adequate education, adequate security from both human predators and natural disasters, adequate employment, to list just a few. Democratically elected legislators could define the word “adequate” in each of these categories, and goals could be set to be attained over some period of time. We might say, for instance, that in so many years, our goal would be provide these things to some percentage of the population. Then the percentage to be attained could be increased and set as a another goal to be attained in so many more years. In this way, we could measure an economy’s progress over time, and the legislature could restrict any actions that interfered with the attainment of these goals. Such an economic system would make sense, because it would have a guiding intent, in contrast to the current system which is nothing but haphazard at best, lacking any defined social goal.
Nations are merely extents of territory governed by a single entity. A nation, as such, does not constitute a society. We all know what the United States of America is, but it lacks social unity. America is made up of countless groups, but even most of these do not rise to the level of societies. Societies are groups in which people take care of each other; the Amish are a good example, and there may be others. But the United States is not, being instead of a social entity, a place where each person is in competition and conflict with everybody else. And this competition and conflict are a direct result of our flawed economic model. Everyone is familiar with the old saw, “United we stand, divided we fall.” Few realize that a nation whose peoples are in competition and conflict with everybody else is a nation divided and is bound to fall sooner or later. If the world were merely made up of atoms, not ever combining into molecules, it would not amount to much more than nothing. A society-less nation is very much like a world of atoms.
Much of what is happening in America today trends toward a fall much sooner than later and our current economic system is what will bring America down. It cannot be fixed as long as wealth, especially national wealth, rather than welfare is its goal.
©2007 John Kozy, Jr.
