From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Mon Nov 27 2006 - 15:13:46 EST
"But the point is really this - even if we note such things as masses of people starving while there is enough to eat for all, this does not necessarily make capitalism irrational. We can say at this point at most that the pursuit of commercial rationality has undesirable results." Reply: But these "undesirable results" are foreseeable, because markets do not allocate goods according to the needs. They allocate goods to those who can afford to buy them. As a result capitalists destroy thousands and thousands of foods. In other words, they produce to sell but they destroy what they produce and cannot sell. Is this not dysfunctional to capitalism? "A social system becomes irrational only when its functioning becomes dysfunctional to itself, i.e. it is in reality unable to reproduce itself anymore. Obviously if people starve, this may in the given case make the system dysfunctional to itself, insofar as it can no longer reproduce itself. But it may also be the case, that the system continues to function quite well, even although masses of people starve." Reply: I am not sure whether I would agree with what you say here. But then even if I accept your thesis I would say that capitalism is dysfunctional to itself. Why? The aim of capitalism is to produce as many wage labourers as possible and put them on employment to exploit. This is the very rerason of the existence of capital. But according to the figures of ILO half of the work force of the world is unemployd. That is to say that though capital wants to exploit them it cannot because it excludes these people from any form of wage labour. Is this not dysfunctional to capitalism? Warm regards Dogan
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