I have to disagree on this point. It seems to me that capitalism, in it's most basic form, is just natural. If someone has something of value to you, you trade them something of value to them and you both walk away happier than before.
Can you think out of the box: show that Capitalism REQUIRES Socialism :D
- Thread starter harrytrader
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I have to disagree on this point. It seems to me that capitalism, in it's most basic form, is just natural. If someone has something of value to you, you trade them something of value to them and you both walk away happier than before.
Uhm capitalism came from European imprerialist merchants & owners of 1500-1700s. You need to recheck your history and the roots of socialism, which was from theory then used in practice but was spawned from the "laissez faire" controversy due to these big owners & businessmen.
The term CAPITALISM comes from the observation of businessmen & owners that used CAPITAL to acquire MEANS OF PRODUCTION and the use WAGE LABOR to make PROFIT that adds more CAPITAL. They were called CAPITALISTS and the obvious transgression was to use capital to pretty much take away & monopolize means of production and force the masses to turn into wage labor. Without any government intervention, it naturally progressed into monopolies & oligopilies, hence the social problems as these arrangements started to resemble slave labor.
Am I the only one that knows how to use search engines? God, this stuff is actually covered in High School A.P. European history courses, with suprisingly little bias.
P.S. If you use your brain, you can actually make some pretty interesting observations about Industrialization & Urbanization. Look at China now, where the small vilage farmers can no longer sustain themselves on their own production and are forced to move toward becoming wage labor in the cities. This process is not an accident, it's been done through different tactics in 1st world and 2nd world countries.
P.P.S. Before anyone brings the Free Market Competition nonsense, please try to think under "laissez faire" methodology. What capitalist in his right mind wants any competition? Real raw capitalism is not what 95% of the masses are taught to think it is.
You need to wake up from this sort of lefty intoxication.
Capitalism requires mass consumers. Underpaid wage slaves is a contradiction. The more spending power the consumer has, namely wage earners, the better it is for sales by capitalists.
It is also an amoral decision for capitalists to sell more at a lower price if it produces more revenue than selling less at a higher price.
The idea is that if a business charges too high a price it will attract competition from capitalist. This is also a very simple concept.
Viva Capitalism : Child Labor
Just one out of many sites like it. Doesn't Nike have kids making soccer balls in Pakistan?
Just one out of many sites like it. Doesn't Nike have kids making soccer balls in Pakistan?
Of course you are right. I only meant the term "Capitalism" of which the usage grew hand in hand with socialism. In solialist dialectic, you could say that socialism "invented" capitalism as a prop-agit therm.
Before, people considered this the normal state of a free society. It is rather difficult to stick a date on the start of what you call merchant society in the West. You could as well propose from the 11-12th century on with cities like Cahors and Venice.
Thank you for the clarification. "Useful idiots" applied to a subclass able to enthusiastically and faithfully bamboozle the proletariat. I believe this term comes from Lenin himself - whether he applied it specifically to his mules in the West, I don't know.
"Child Labor" is a gimmick of socialist agit-prop.
Harsh Child Labor always existed in subsistence societies.
In the heydays of European Communism, it is arguable whether children were put at work or not. Nominally, no unemployment existed on the books as often five people or more were assigned to do the job of one. This lead to an unbelievable state of misery, much more so in the country side. As reference, you should read the works of Sakharov, Physics Nobel Prize, about the unspeakable misery in the Russian countryside - not during wartime but up to the fall of communism. Child Labor on wretched "home plots" was an indispensable requirement of survival.
Child Labor in Pakistan gives these children probably a less hostile environment than their brethren not employed by Nike.
The same can be said of the earlier industrial societies in the West. People flocked to the cities because life was simply less harsh and brutal than on the countryside. Kids worked in factories in conditions far less harsh than in scraping some crumbs together with subsistence farming.
What would be worse? Having to work as a child or starving to death. A free-market world would not be an Utopia, but at least you wouldn't have other peoples morals forced upon you.