New York Times Op-Ed columnist, writing in today's issue:
"...[G]iven that one in six Americans qualifies for food stamps, it’s clear that there isn’t enough good work to go around... NONE of this is short term, but neither are the robots taking over tomorrow, and it’s safe to say that nearly all the humans on Earth 20 years from now would prefer an economic system that would guarantee a decent life, whether their 'rulers' are heartless robots or merely gazillionaires...[P]erhaps there’s time to reimagine society...It’s not as if this question hasn’t been well considered. There was Karl Marx, whose analysis was largely correct but whose reputation was soiled by the alternatives developed in his name."
http://nyti.ms/1FNuRW7
Socrates
Verona, N.J. YesterdayRussell Rockwell
New York City Yesterday
Marx wrote of a post-capitalist society in the Grundrisse, a work not published until the second half of the last century. In a disarmingly simple climax to a long technical argument about how capitalism prepares the ground for the good society of which previous generations could only dream, he merely quotes an anonymous pamphlet, published in 1821, which appeared as a critique of the classical economist Ricardos’s notion of surplus produce, which is actually “surplus labor”: “Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labor time…but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society”.
According to Marx, a major flaw in capitalism is the problem of surplus labor whereby the bourgeoisie property owners profit not by selling their product at a price above the cost of materials plus labor, but rather by paying the worker less than the value of their labor. This ability of the bourgeoisie to manipulate workers allows them to devalue labor, thereby creating profit for themselves by lowering the price of labor.
Marx said “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole... ”
Or more simply, 350:1 CEO:worker pay ratios exist for no other reason besides psychopathic greed and exploitation
Or if you prefer a much sunnier view, read the words of scholar Garikai Chengu:
"Capitalism is like cancer. Once it enters a host country's economy, it will spread and devour labor, the environment, and any other impediment to the growth of profit. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. However, the world cannot continue to get richer as the earth becomes poorer. Just as the only inevitability in life is death, the only inevitability about our capitalist way of life, is the death of our planet and our civilization."
Dystopia, indeed.