Karl Marx kicks Adam Smith's a$$

omg I love how ppl who have never read Marx or any other marxist based readings try to explain theory; you cant even comprehend were the philosophy comes from without understanding dialectical materialism i suggest yall should read an article by Albert Einstein called "why socialism". There can never be progress in a society that is profit based.

Somalia . That is a free market . I do not want to live there .

Adams got PWNED!

I think a lot of people could kick Adam Smith's ass. Am I right? Am I right?

(Handicap Joke)

bonne soir from Paris, no seriously I'm literally sitting in socialist hell drinking a coffee and eating some pain au chocolate in a cafe full of french commie bastards, i can feel the evil laziness in the air (or that might be more smoke, not sure). They work 35 hours a week and have free healthcare that doesn't rely on the free market to handle it's problems, no wonder they drink and smoke here, and have so much sex, utter depression I figure.....

Seriously though, the free market can't exist at all, unless there is strong regulation, otherwise it is impossible. People wont chose the best product, they'll chose the most affordable. Look at our food for example, food prices have gone down over the last 50 years, but at a very high cost...The free market has produced mcdonalds and with it increased obesity because mcky d's competed for bargain dollars, they save money by using unhealthy ingredients to make bad addictive food, its no accident obesity is a side effect of the boom of the fast food industry. The free market ruined our farmed foods, gmo's were invented because capitalistic companies wanted to make more money from their produce and cut cost of food that ripens to fast (damn you mother nature) hence an odd increase in our mental retardation and various types of cancer in our species. We should praise these people for their brilliance of course since this is the religion of capitalism.
My point is the free market puts an incentive for those who control the means of production to do it on the cheap, so you the consumer can consume more poor quality products and only until the cancer diagnosis kicks in, or the product explodes, or the asbestos makes you cough blood do you make that supposed "intelligent choice" a person is supposed to make in a free market, but after of course shopping around for an affordable doctor since its regulated by the free market also.
I could go on further that the reason you wear seat-belts is because of regulation, trust me ford motors didn't want to install them until a guy named ralph nader came along in the 60's to lobby the government. So I guess you need some socialism.

I'm rambling on because of the wine and that girl across me, I can't focus.

Anyway I say if you want to have a market economy then we need what europe has, not total socialism but the modern form which is referred to "democratic socialism". A regulated free market with some control given to government on behalf of the public via elected officials, and at the same time maintaining the social tenants of socialism geared to make the public capable of enforcing their democratic power. This is achieved by ensuring the basic needs to create a healthy, educated public who can keep the society in check. This isn't the best system but to keep things in context thats the best possible.

Ha, free marketeers are very unhappy about this turn of events. They won't be happy till child labor laws are abolished, forced work camps and a lower minimum wage. Sounds kind of like the Nazi's doesn't it.

Many (if not all) Republicans prefer capitalism over socialism or communism because they believe it is the fairest way to allocate scare resources.

You see this logic repeatedly when they discuss healthcare.

They make the argument that there isn’t enough healthcare resources to provide them to everyone that needs them, so therefore the fairest way to allocate that scare resource is by income.

The wealthiest people (in the Republican’s mind) are obviously wealthy because they “earned it” and provide the most to society.

Subsequently the poor (again in the typical Republican’s mind) are poor because they are stupid, lazy and generally provide little value to society.

So therefore it only makes sense that the rich should get first dibs on scare resources!

Except….how the hell is Paris Hilton a more “valuable” member of our society compared to a father of 3 who works 3rd shift in a factory earning $40,000 a year?

This is where Republican logic (and their childlike faith in capitalism) breaks down. People in this country are often not wealthy because they are “smart” or “productive” – a whole helluva lot of it is inherited wealth (see: Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as examples of bullshit artists who didn’t do shit in life, but are first in line for scarce resources such as healthcare)

And look at the CEO’s (all 174 of them) who “earn” $250 million a year in salary….but have presided of the total bankruptcy of their own companies.

How is the CEO of Citibank more entitled to access to healthcare than 10,000 ordinary factory workers only earning $40,000 a year?

Republicans are generally left sputtering when they try to explain how someone in a factory who actually BUILDS things isn’t as “worthy” of access to healthcare as the CEO of Citibank who personally drove this country into the worst Recession in 50 years.

Karl Marx saw these exact same problems happening in Europe and tried to figure out a way to correct these problems.

Republicans from 2001-2009 see these exact same problems occurring under capitalism and applaud them!

Also, people make the mistake of assuming that ALL services benefit from competition.

Not so.

How can a police dept "compete" with another police dept? Can they have After labor Day sales on rape kits? "Come in THIS SATURDAY and get 50 PERCENT OFF all rape investigation! Sale ends Sunday so hurry!"

Same thing with utilities. Roads. Water sanitation.

And healthcare.

Some things thrive under regulated capitalism: the iphone competes with the other smartphones and ALL of them get faster, better and cheaper.

Some things CANNOT thrive under capitalism: utilities, public safety, public HEALTH

The problem with our modern economy is that for 8 years we were ruled by politicans (none of whom have degrees in economics) who stupidly thought that "rules" and "oversight" made things worse...so they got rid of all the rules and regulations.

Instead of things getting cheaper, better and creating more jobs....all it did was bankrupt the country.

Marx may not have been 100 percent right in his solution to the problems of capitalism...but he was obviously right in noting that PROBLEMS DID EXIST.

Republicans...are you paying attention? Totally unregulated markets are a fucking disaster for everyone. Even the CEO's are going broke in this storm.

"Communism fails because people like to own stuff?"

A blanket statement that fails to account for OTHER economic activity.

Do I want to “own” a fire truck or would I prefer to pay a small portion in taxes to support a Fire Dept that supports the entire community?

Do I want to personally own a fleet of police cars and have personal Detective on salary….or is it more desirable (and CHEAPER!) for me to pay a small portion in taxes to create a Police Dept that supports the entire community?

And we can apply this same logic to healthcare.

Would I rather pay $12,000 in deductibles to “own” my personal health insurance plan (from which I can still be denied any and all services at the whims of the CEO) or would it be smarter, easier and CHEAPER to pay a small portion in taxes to support a community medical health services system?

I can either pay $175,000 (in cash!) to get 3 rounds of chemotherapy or I can have 1 percent of my $50,000 yearly paycheck taxed to create a public option.

Which is more desirable: paying $175,000 in cash to “own” the chemotherapy treatment or paying $500 a year to achieve the exact same result?

Would I rather “own” the bus that takes me to work or would it make more sense to simply pay a small fee for each trip?

A city bus costs several hundreds of thousands of dollars to service, operate and maintain every year.

So it is more desirable for me (and cheaper!) to pay $2.00 per trip as opposed to shelling out $300,000 a year.

So, in short, it’s bullshit to say that Communism fails because people would much rather own stuff.

Would I rather own an Xbox? Yes! Would I rather own my own chemotherapy machine or fleet of police cars? No.

Adam Smith was talking about small agrarian economies, and he HATED corporations, and he HATED financial institutions and their crazy mathmatical magic that invented money from thin air.

Adam Smith's version of capitalism has nothing to do with this casino capitalism on wall street today.

Derivatives my ass.

That said, Karl Marx's analysis of the creation of value in economies is spot on, though it still forgets to account for the finite limits that the earth has to provide resources, and while he talks about pollution in the Communist Manifesto, he offers no economic theories to put it on the 'balance sheet' of the economy.

. . . However, with that freedom or power DOES come responsibility. To ourselves, our families, our fellow human and the planet that supports us. Hence, my pie in the sky hopes for a system that allows the full potential of both self and society. I guess I just have it in my stupid little head that once everyone has enough information, they will arrive at a similar conclusion, and therefore one day humanity will consent to growing the f*** up.

I am very pleased to see such a rousing discussion because it truly is the way to human progress, not blind allegiance to a stance, but i digress.

First, let me begin with the fact that Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff. This is true if you accept that ownership is a universal concept, which one should not. Let me assure you that it is a very human concept, that was created by very ignorant people seeking to control the will of others. The rest of the universe, from stars to atoms are oblivious to these terms and seeing as how those constructs are far more normal than say human life and human thought, I would have to agree that they take precedence. (You are all now asking, "what the f*** is he talking about, but please stay with me, there is a point to this...I hope) Think of it this way, the Earth and her resources were here for us to use, all of us, and the notion that just because one group of people "got there first" and therefore owns it, is somewhat absurd. You can't own something that you never paid for, we call that stealing. Now of course, its far too late for any practical usage of this idea, but i am trying to make a point, not undo the past. Communism can not work with so many people for all aspects of life because we all want different things, but the root of communism, community would work very nicely for the things that we need, food, shelter, energy. And that does not mean that we all get rations or shacks, it means that we work together to build communities and different regions barter their lands resources, be it food or construction materials for those of different regions, without a profit motive. The idea of profit was not created until money was created, and without writing a treatise on the evils of money, I will end the reason pure communism doesn't work by retreating to the fact that there are indeed desires beyond our needs, and no collective construct could ever meet everyone's expectations.

Secondly, I am happy to agree that we currently have no true free market, nor do we have even a fair market. I think we can all agree that the so called "Elite" (let us ignore for the moment the specifics of their form and existence, though I am willing to talk about that in a different forum) has a fascist hold of most of the worlds' economies. All one needs to do is look at the board members of every transnational corporation who like Kings and Queens of old,along with the World Bank and IMF etc, contract in incestuous relationships in order to consolidate their ownership. They have systematically held the virtual free trade gun to the figurative head of almost every country in the world with very similarly detrimental results. (Read Shock Doctrine, it does a great job of detailing the events) However, consider now that these constructs in holding debt over the heads of countries, including the US, also instill their interests into each respective government, and in doing so create fascist (merging of corporate and government) regimes. These interests then destroy any social institutions and regulations that would otherwise stand in their way. In doing so they quite literally rape each region they touch of resources and prosperity, and turn it into profits. Just look at the income gap between the rich and poor in the US alone, it has grown exponentially since the inception of so called Reaganomics. (Though it could be argued the changes began as early as the Johnson administration

Now, where the hell did my point go?

Every system is prone to corruption as long as WE leave it to OTHER people to make decisions. The absolutely best possible solution to all of the above, that includes everyone's comments, really, the solution to human life in general, is KNOWLEDGE! The more people realize how screwed they are being, the less likely they are to concede their God/Universe/Self (Not even going to start arguing who or what) given freedom to pursue our own definition of happiness. . .

sorry NOT False. The labor movement, along with the land grants, created the middle-class in this country.

Unions may have failed at other things, but so did corporate execs fail to renovate the auto industry, the steel industry before that. Now banks, pharma, healthcare are failing for the same reasons of not responding to change, and there are no unions.

I agree large entities of any kind and piles of money like unions attract egomaniacs and sociopaths who swirl and manipulate themselves into the top jobs.

But that goes for corporations, political jobs, and media too!

They are all the same. The failure of the corporations in this country is complex (did you ever work in one at a high level of management?). And, blaming it all on unions is overly simplistic, just like the myth of the Invisible Hand, and Ferguson's constant apologetics for banking institutions and oligopolists.

Beautiful what you're saying about 1800s-1900s, cause it is completely true! That is what provoked Marx to write his thing, and also led to all those wars destroying Europe.

The democracy in this country didn't change those conditions, neither did the Supreme Court, just like it was inadequate to abolish slavery.

It was labor movement and unions that did! And that was what these Conservatives waged war against first as soon as they could with Reagan.

Now the people are screwed cause we don't have the same balance of power embedded in the democracy like they do in Europe between shareholders and wage earners. We are headed for social breakdown and violence, which they had to get through too in order for real change.

So right that in 1800s this country was full of orphans and street urchins...there have never been favorable conditions for families except mid- 20th Century.

We don't have capitalism. We haven’t been capitalistic in long time. Anytime the government uses tax money to prop up bad banks and make the citizenry owners of an Auto company, it’s that not capitalism. We need to return to real capitalism where bad business fail, and the government subsidies nothing,

As far as people being afraid of 1900's sweatshops coming if we return to capitalism, unlike the 1900's we have labor laws now.

robo marx approves!

The Venus Project

Why are people complaining that we don't have totally free markets in 2009? Don't they remember their history?

We DID have free markets -- all over the world with ZERO government regulations -- at one time. The 1800's through the early 1900's.

And guess what?

Totally "free markets" reduced 90 percent of the population into virtual slaves. Coughing, diseased, starving slaves that worked 19hrs a day in horrid conditions with no hope of ever getting enough money to a) get an education b) retire c) see a doctor etc etc.

Remember the robber barons?

Do the people shitting on Karl Marx even remember WHY Marx tried to come up with an alternative to pure/totally unregulated capitalism?

Because he looked at people working 19hrs a day and eating rotten food (no FDA back then) and literally DYING on the job because there were ZERO safety standards and said, "There has got to be a better way than to this!"

Sad that some people on Current seem to have totally forgotten that totally "free" markets didn't create a utopian paradise, but rather created a Dickensian nightmare of child labor, robber barons, diseased food and massive poverty.

Karl's ultimate solution may not be workable, but the reality of how shitty totally unregulated capitalism is cannot be disputed at this point in history, can it?

Well, unless your a Bush Republican.

blar

anybody that thinks we have a true "free market" system has their head up their ass.

yes yes yes. Our system is centrally planned too by a bunch of secretive Oligarchs!

The Fed, IMF, World Bank. WTO, et al are just devices to make the rest of the world line up with their paradigm of doing business. There is no competition for ideas and new solutions with these guys and their banks dominating. They even built universities to promulgate the ideas that support them like Allopathy, and teach us the skills they needed in their businesses like engineering and ahem "economics". What a dumb religion!

The Biggest Distortion is the US military and CIA subsidizing oil and petrochemicals. The taxpayers don't even know about it, but they need to add those taxes to the pump price to find out exactly what this stuff is costing them when they compare it to wind, solar or fuel cells. Now rising to almost $1T a year in subsidies to the industry!

Oh. That would mean there is no freedom of information and therefore no efficient markets by the way Niall!

HAHA, these idiots think we have had freedom?!?!?

Are they serious?!?!?!?

You need free markets for capitalism, what we have been given is a mixture between Marx and Mussolini....corporate fascism...anybody who denies this is lying to themselves and their family. Everything we have had has been central planned for decades, not hands off laissez-faire.....the only one who failed was you for believing in Marx and the League of Men (the rich group of business men who wanted protectionist efforts from government who used Marx, a lower classman, to fuel this message of big government corporatism) that actually wrote the Communist Manifesto.....

You know how you can tell a communist? They have read Marx. How can you tell an anti-communist? They understand Marx.......

"Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff."

Frank Zappa

The problem with economists is that they do not live in reality, they live in their theory. No system will ever work perfectly and rigidly when given such a diverse number of variables, namely humans. We require a system that allows for the basic human needs of everyoneto be met, not as a matter of charity or welfare but that of mutual dignity and prosperity. However where our needs bring us together it is our desires that make us individuals and as such they ought to be considered as well. Consider a world where we help one another provide a standard of living, through cooperation and yes, a socialist approach, in order that every human being gains a true notion of freedom. Capitalism and the so called free market (which is a myth by the way, due to the unequal distribution of both human and natural resources and discrepancies among rules and regulations) are doomed to fail because they ignore the fact that competing against one another means having a loser which is not condusive to the general well being of the population. Communism can not work because it ignores our differences by making round pegs of us to be put into square holes. They are both similar in that either is prone to corruption and as such I believe it in my heart that the two must be fused into something greater than the sum of it's parts. A system that allows us to use our identical needs to help raise the standard of living for all life on Earth while retaining our natural born right to be free in how we choose to live our lives. They are not conflicting ideas, Capitalism and Communism, they are both useful tools in the progression of humanity as a whole.

The worldwide economy today is neither Marx nor Adam Smith, but if it had to be any of the two, it would be Adam Smith. Marx's economies are all about the rejection of profit because profit is based on the exploitation of the worker.

Workers make products that are worth more than what they are paid. The one who controls the means of production then sells their product for a higher value than what they paid the worker for. The margin between what you pay the worker and what you charge for the good is called Profit. According to Marx, this was exploitation.

All of today's free market economies are based on the principle of profit. Furthermore, Marx's predictions that the workers would one day revolt against this and overthrow the system was flawed because he failed to predict the rise of labor unions in the capitalistic societies.

Even today, with all the government intervention we see, the most powerful and successful economies are mostly mixed or free market economies, and never command economies.

On the other hand, Smith hasn't exactly been disproven because when it comes right down to it, there has never been a market that has been completely free of at least a little government intervention. Adam Smith's idea of a completely unfettered free market is more of a guiding principle than it actually is an attainable goal.

In any case, its Hayek or Keynes who we should really be talking about!

Marx said some interesting things about the failings of capitalism, but his proposed solutions were even worse.

The "invisible hand" theory has been proved wrong many many times in the past anyways.

What the hell is Niall Ferguson talking about? The modern American "free market system" has no correlation to Adam Smith's theories on economics. Since the creation of the Fed, as well as other western central banking instruments, all theories on the free market are rendered moot. There cannot be both a free market, as explained by Adam Smith, as well as a private entity which can create "legal tender" without introducing additional labor or any commodity of intrinsic value into the market. This article is nearly saved by the paragraph explaining his caveat. That being said, Mr. Ferguson probably should have only written that paragraph.