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Capitalism may be unwell but it is not dead. : Comments
By John Passant, published 30/12/2008Workers can build on capitalism and create a new world where the economic crisis is consigned to a museum and war and want becomes a memory.
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If, for socialist reasons, you make it illegal to employ people at the market rate, it is hardly fair to blame the resulting unemployment on "capitalism".
Australia's three levels of government now expropriate over 50 percent of everything that Australians produce every day, and almost all of it is spent on interventions intended to fix prices of goods and services other than they would be on an unhampered market. Yet John Passant presumes to refer to this state of affairs as "capitalism". No wonder you are able to find fault with it!
This confused jumble of ideas is unable to produce any critique that has explaining power.
To persist with the labour theory of value is laughable. Reality does not reward toil and trouble. If the labour theory of value was correct, General Motors would not have just lost $10 billion. Advocates of the labour theory of value are obstinately and wilfully in the wrong.
As for the garbled theory of class struggle, the reason Marx, after 35 years, never finished the chapter in Capital in which he had intended to explain the entire basis of his theory, is because it cannot withstand critical scrutiny. For example, the main capitalists today are superannuation funds, the main shareholders of which are the masses of workers. Are they 'workers' or 'capitalists'? Marx's theory is rubbish, and persistence in it is religious superstition.
The only theory of class struggle that holds water today is the struggle between the class of taxpayers on the one hand, and tax-eaters on the other.