Welfare Capitalism- Part One - Theories
Origins of Money - Sapiens 173 to 179
Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations- 1776
(1723-1790)
P320-322 of sapiens
https://youtu.be/ejJRhn53X2M
Adam Smith believed that the free market brought the best ideas to the surface. Companies that didn't improve would fail and businesses that would innovate and improve would win out. It was survival of the fittest but with businesses.
Smith wrote this in the early days of the industrial Revolution and envisioned competition that lead to an improved life for everyone.
He believed that people were naturally self interested. This greed was a good thing because from it would come the best systems. The best employers would pay the best workers which would make applicants train harder. Overall, the invisible hand of business would guide civilization to prosperity.
Don't like your factory? Build a better one.
Don't like your boss? Be a better one
Don't have the money? Share your ideas with those who do and if it's good someone will invest
Adam Smith did, however, have some concerns. He believed that division of labor was the most effective way to build something. If one person did one task and passed it on to the next person, the job would get done quicker that one person doing all jobs. For example, if you're making PB&J sandwiches.
Smith said, the Christian way to make the rich compassionate is through guilt. The liberal answer is forced taxes. Smith believed these can chase away the wealthy.
Smith believed money wasn't the only thing the rich wanted but they want honor. Egos need to be stroked to keep the wealthy happy and generous. Philanthropy comes from coexistence and appreciation.
https://youtu.be/4KWUdliOGuc
Communist Manifesto- 1848
(1818-1883)
Karl Marx lived in the middle of the industrial Revolution. Adam Smith died 28 years before Marx was born. The capitalist economy had been in existence for almost 50 years since Smith published Wealth of Nations to the birth of Marx. There was 107 years between their books.
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
The history of all existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders and of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our age, the age of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. The rich and the poor. The haves and the have-nots.
Exploitation
Marx saw industrialization as just a new type of feudal system of the middle ages. Instead of the land baron owning the land and tools, the modern wealthy owned the factories and machinery. The owners of the resources paid the workers as little as possible. Without the materials to produce their own goods, the workers were stuck in a loop, unable to advance and raise their place in society.
Capitalism treats human beings as expendable materials. Workers do damage to their bodies and once their bodies are too damaged to work any longer, they're discarded like any other material. The company no longer has interest in their wellbeing. Companies expect you to work hard but aren't there to care for people when that hard work costs them their health. For years, factory accidents and mine collapses were just the cost of doing business. The industrialists didn't care about the impact to those families. Even today, damage done on the human body isn't covered by the companies health insurance unless you get hurt while actively on the job.
Marx believed that human wellbeing was more important than personal freedoms. He was disgusted that a few could live in wealth and be ignorant to the sufferings of the many. It's long been a philosophical conundrum throughout history. Is it better to give people as much freedom as possible at the cost of the wellbeing of others? Is it acceptable to take away people's personal freedoms for the sake of everyone's wellbeing? How do we balance these two? Civilization does it all the time with gun control, speed limits, wearing seatbelts and drugs.
Marx believed people's humanity, wellbeing and relationships would be vastly improved if class systems were destroyed. He believed the wellbeing of the many was more important than the financial freedom of the few.
Globalization
Marx wasn't a fan of globalization and believed it was more fair to live off a nations own resources. Marx idealized that we should know the person who makes shoes and that shoemaker should know us. Marx thought people should live in mutually beneficial societies. This would bring greater moral and benevolent communities. This can be seen in our own times. Much of the labor intensive factory work is conducted overseas because the poor people there will settle for lower pay than over here. We hold little or less regard to their pay and safety.
Sapiens 186 - Human communities to 187
Market Crashes
"In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."
Marx was right about this.
Recession, depression & inflation
Since Marx wrote the communist manifesto in 1848 and capitalist economies have proven volatile ever since.
Panic of 1857
Black Friday of 1869
Panic of 1873
Panic of 1893
Panic of 1901
Panic of 1907
Great depression 1929-1939
1970's energy crisis
Early 1980s recession
Black Monday of 1987
Dot-com bubble 2000-2002
2008 Financial Crisis
Each time these crisis in capitalist society has caused poverty, violence and deaths. Marx believed that a communist society would provide more stability or at least offer an immediate safety net to those in need.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
1. They don't recognize or care about nationality, all are invited.
2. They represent the interests of the labor movement as a whole. Communists support separate and individual labor struggles. Communists want what all working class want, a level playing field, the end of corporate dictatorship and the political representation of the working class.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern business-class private property? Those who keep the means of production are the only ones with means of wealth. When hardship hits they solely hold the means of survival. The humanity of the working class is relegated to a lesser value: an expendable class.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that cost of the means of survival which is absolutely required to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer gains by means of his labour, merely satisfies to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves nothing extra to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this oppression, under which the labourer lives merely to make money for the rich, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In capitalism society, workers are but a means to increase production and profits. In Communist society, work is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
The 10 things we're asking for:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents for the general good.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (The more you have the more you put back into society)
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. Money that makes man wealthy merely by birth.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Everyone needs to participate for it to work.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Workers of the world unite!
The End
Capitalism had lead to improvements in technology and commerce. Adam Smith never even lived to see the steam train. In Karl Marx time, steam trains were transporting people all across the country.
However, Marx looked around at the squalid lives of the poor working class. He looked at the great gap between those who had and those who had not. Capitalism had given few, many and many, few.
Because jobs didn't require skill, thanks to Smith's ideas of efficiency, workers were less skilled and all equally as qualified. Therefore equally as expendable.
Adam Smith had believed the wealth of a few would lead to the wealth of everyone. This has proven true but developed slowly. Initially only the rich had electricity in their homes because of the cost. Now everyone in America does. Smith envisioned the highest paying factories would get the best workers and life would be good. However, he failed to consider how a worker might stand out in a job that lacked skill or what if all the employers in a particular industry agreed to pay the same wage. Marx had lived to see monopolies, corruption and inequality.
Marx was disgusted by child labor and slavery, while many capitalists saw children and slaves as a smart business decision. (Marx actually wrote to Lincoln, congratulating him for the emancipation of slaves)
Marx believed that capitalism had been a failure. He argued, what good is profit, technology and wealth, when the majority of people are living in poverty? Exploitation was good for business.
Adam Smith had believed that free market competition would cause employers to bring prosperity to their workers. In reality, the workers needed jobs to survive and had very little bargaining power.
Compared
Smith: Free market will solve it
Marx: Free market doesn't care about ethics
Smith: Government only takes away freedom.
Marx: Government can create freedom
Smith: Division of labor brings efficiency, therefore prosperity to all
Marx: Division of labor brings alienation and exploitation
https://youtu.be/dIuaW9YWqEU - first 7 mins
Look at your clothing labels
Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations- 1776
(1723-1790)
P320-322 of sapiens
https://youtu.be/ejJRhn53X2M
Adam Smith believed that the free market brought the best ideas to the surface. Companies that didn't improve would fail and businesses that would innovate and improve would win out. It was survival of the fittest but with businesses.
Smith wrote this in the early days of the industrial Revolution and envisioned competition that lead to an improved life for everyone.
He believed that people were naturally self interested. This greed was a good thing because from it would come the best systems. The best employers would pay the best workers which would make applicants train harder. Overall, the invisible hand of business would guide civilization to prosperity.
Don't like your factory? Build a better one.
Don't like your boss? Be a better one
Don't have the money? Share your ideas with those who do and if it's good someone will invest
Adam Smith did, however, have some concerns. He believed that division of labor was the most effective way to build something. If one person did one task and passed it on to the next person, the job would get done quicker that one person doing all jobs. For example, if you're making PB&J sandwiches.
Smith said, the Christian way to make the rich compassionate is through guilt. The liberal answer is forced taxes. Smith believed these can chase away the wealthy.
Smith believed money wasn't the only thing the rich wanted but they want honor. Egos need to be stroked to keep the wealthy happy and generous. Philanthropy comes from coexistence and appreciation.
https://youtu.be/4KWUdliOGuc
Communist Manifesto- 1848
(1818-1883)
Karl Marx lived in the middle of the industrial Revolution. Adam Smith died 28 years before Marx was born. The capitalist economy had been in existence for almost 50 years since Smith published Wealth of Nations to the birth of Marx. There was 107 years between their books.
Manifesto of the Communist Party
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
The history of all existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders and of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our age, the age of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. The rich and the poor. The haves and the have-nots.
Exploitation
Marx saw industrialization as just a new type of feudal system of the middle ages. Instead of the land baron owning the land and tools, the modern wealthy owned the factories and machinery. The owners of the resources paid the workers as little as possible. Without the materials to produce their own goods, the workers were stuck in a loop, unable to advance and raise their place in society.
Capitalism treats human beings as expendable materials. Workers do damage to their bodies and once their bodies are too damaged to work any longer, they're discarded like any other material. The company no longer has interest in their wellbeing. Companies expect you to work hard but aren't there to care for people when that hard work costs them their health. For years, factory accidents and mine collapses were just the cost of doing business. The industrialists didn't care about the impact to those families. Even today, damage done on the human body isn't covered by the companies health insurance unless you get hurt while actively on the job.
Marx believed that human wellbeing was more important than personal freedoms. He was disgusted that a few could live in wealth and be ignorant to the sufferings of the many. It's long been a philosophical conundrum throughout history. Is it better to give people as much freedom as possible at the cost of the wellbeing of others? Is it acceptable to take away people's personal freedoms for the sake of everyone's wellbeing? How do we balance these two? Civilization does it all the time with gun control, speed limits, wearing seatbelts and drugs.
Marx believed people's humanity, wellbeing and relationships would be vastly improved if class systems were destroyed. He believed the wellbeing of the many was more important than the financial freedom of the few.
Globalization
Marx wasn't a fan of globalization and believed it was more fair to live off a nations own resources. Marx idealized that we should know the person who makes shoes and that shoemaker should know us. Marx thought people should live in mutually beneficial societies. This would bring greater moral and benevolent communities. This can be seen in our own times. Much of the labor intensive factory work is conducted overseas because the poor people there will settle for lower pay than over here. We hold little or less regard to their pay and safety.
Sapiens 186 - Human communities to 187
Market Crashes
"In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."
Marx was right about this.
Recession, depression & inflation
Since Marx wrote the communist manifesto in 1848 and capitalist economies have proven volatile ever since.
Panic of 1857
Black Friday of 1869
Panic of 1873
Panic of 1893
Panic of 1901
Panic of 1907
Great depression 1929-1939
1970's energy crisis
Early 1980s recession
Black Monday of 1987
Dot-com bubble 2000-2002
2008 Financial Crisis
Each time these crisis in capitalist society has caused poverty, violence and deaths. Marx believed that a communist society would provide more stability or at least offer an immediate safety net to those in need.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
1. They don't recognize or care about nationality, all are invited.
2. They represent the interests of the labor movement as a whole. Communists support separate and individual labor struggles. Communists want what all working class want, a level playing field, the end of corporate dictatorship and the political representation of the working class.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern business-class private property? Those who keep the means of production are the only ones with means of wealth. When hardship hits they solely hold the means of survival. The humanity of the working class is relegated to a lesser value: an expendable class.
The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that cost of the means of survival which is absolutely required to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer gains by means of his labour, merely satisfies to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves nothing extra to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this oppression, under which the labourer lives merely to make money for the rich, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.
In capitalism society, workers are but a means to increase production and profits. In Communist society, work is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.
The 10 things we're asking for:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents for the general good.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (The more you have the more you put back into society)
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. Money that makes man wealthy merely by birth.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Everyone needs to participate for it to work.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Workers of the world unite!
The End
Capitalism had lead to improvements in technology and commerce. Adam Smith never even lived to see the steam train. In Karl Marx time, steam trains were transporting people all across the country.
However, Marx looked around at the squalid lives of the poor working class. He looked at the great gap between those who had and those who had not. Capitalism had given few, many and many, few.
Because jobs didn't require skill, thanks to Smith's ideas of efficiency, workers were less skilled and all equally as qualified. Therefore equally as expendable.
Adam Smith had believed the wealth of a few would lead to the wealth of everyone. This has proven true but developed slowly. Initially only the rich had electricity in their homes because of the cost. Now everyone in America does. Smith envisioned the highest paying factories would get the best workers and life would be good. However, he failed to consider how a worker might stand out in a job that lacked skill or what if all the employers in a particular industry agreed to pay the same wage. Marx had lived to see monopolies, corruption and inequality.
Marx was disgusted by child labor and slavery, while many capitalists saw children and slaves as a smart business decision. (Marx actually wrote to Lincoln, congratulating him for the emancipation of slaves)
Marx believed that capitalism had been a failure. He argued, what good is profit, technology and wealth, when the majority of people are living in poverty? Exploitation was good for business.
Adam Smith had believed that free market competition would cause employers to bring prosperity to their workers. In reality, the workers needed jobs to survive and had very little bargaining power.
Compared
Smith: Free market will solve it
Marx: Free market doesn't care about ethics
Smith: Government only takes away freedom.
Marx: Government can create freedom
Smith: Division of labor brings efficiency, therefore prosperity to all
Marx: Division of labor brings alienation and exploitation
https://youtu.be/dIuaW9YWqEU - first 7 mins
Look at your clothing labels
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