From: Dogan Goecmen (Dogangoecmen@AOL.COM)
Date: Tue Nov 28 2006 - 02:28:45 EST
In einer eMail vom 27.11.2006 22:01:39 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt Martin.Kragh@HHS.SE: Goecmen wrote: "The aim of capitalism is to produce as many wage labourers as possible and put them on employment to exploit." The aim of the capitalist entrepreneur, I believe, is accumulation of capital. Through this tendency, more areas of human society has historically been subsumed in a wagelabour relation over time. Ricardo was one who made the accumulation of capital modus very explicit in his Principles. I don't see that the ratio of wage labourers-population is really as important though. Martin, agreed. This what I mean as well. To accumulate capital requires to put as many wage labourers as possible on emploment, because they are the spring of the accumulation of capital. The "ratio of wage labourers-population" is very important because it determines how much an entrepreneur accumulates. For an entrepreneur this can even be very existential because it determines its position (power) to other competing entrepreneurs. From an entrepreneurs point of view it does not matter whether there is unemployment. For an individu al entrepreneur it is important that the capacity of production fully in action. I think that what one believes to be "dysfunctional" to capitalism depends on what ideals you have; the individual capitalist cannot employ more labourers than what is profitable. In every day discourse, it is tuff luck for those who remain outside the pool of employed. Few see this as dysfuncitonal, rather economists regard it as a natural aspect of everyday market economy life. No, I do not think so. It has nothing to do with ideals. Rather it has to do with inner logic of capital. To answer the challenge you put here I would ask you to answer my question about what the aim of production is. Is the aim of production to make profit or is it meant to satisfy human needs? There is no one single class of economists. And I find those economists who regard unemployment "as a natural aspect of everyday market economy life" in its normative sense very cynical. What is your position on this? One political system which recently collapsed was the USSR. CJ Arthur has made a very challenging claim when he metaphorically wrote that the USSR was a "selfaborting monstrosity", he even tell us that it was not a mode of production. Had this been the case, he writes, the system would have been able to reproduce itself. This is what a stable mode of productions does. Here we see a clear case of "dysfunctionality" in action, and one aspect of this was the full employment of labour aspect. Full employment was not the reason why the system in USSR collapsed. It is more complex than you seem to imply. We can thus learn something about capitalism here I believe; for one, it is obviously much more functional than people give it credit. I think CJ Arthur mentions "the spring", the motor so to speak, when he differentiated western capitalism from the USSR. I personally believe that what we see in this debate is two sides of the same coin, an aspect of capitalism which might be dysfunctional in one way is also functional, the capitalist system creates effects and we evaluate these in contradictory ways, because they are contradictory. How do you think about this contradiction? Is it rational compared to the aims of production? Is it rational compared to the interests of society. Is it just a matter of the view one happens to take or are able to make a more objective evaluation. I might have misunderstood something here though, I am not sure. /Martin ____________________________________ Från: OPE-L genom Dogan Goecmen Skickat: må 2006-11-27 21:13 Till: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU Ämne: Re: [OPE-L] what is irrational in the functioning of capitalism? "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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