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Smith tells us that a society of which the greater part suffers is not happy. [Adam Smith; op cit; Book I, p. 70] But, since even the most prosperous state of society leads to suffering for the majority, and since the economic system [Nationalokonomie], which is a society based on private interests, brings about such a state of prosperity, it follows that society's distress is the goal of the economic system. We should further note in connection with the relationship between worker and capitalist that the latter is more than compensated for wage rises by a reduction in the amount of labor time, and that wage rises and increases in the interest on capital act on commodity prices like simple and compound interest respectively.


Marxist socialism is not a cure for the modern industrial (post-Industrial?) economy's inequities. Nor is the other extreme of free market, laissez faire capitalism. Anyone who is not a hidebound ideologue has realized that simple fact by now. Extreme solutions almost never work in real life, although they are popular because of their simplicity and lack of nuance, i.e., you don't have to think much.


Later, Marx writes of the dangers to the worker's psyche that he sees in the push for ever greater production. (Marx, op. cit.; p. 50)


Let us now take a closer look at objectification, at the production of the worker, and the estrangement, the loss of [the worker's connection with] the object, of his product, [and] what this entails.


The workers can create nothing without nature, without the sensuous external world. It is the material in which his labor realizes itself, in which it is active and from which, and by means of which, it produces.


But just as nature provides labor with the means of life, in the sense of labor cannot live without objects on which to exercise itself, so also it provides the means of life in the narrower sense, namely the means of physical subsistence of the worker.


The object in this case is not the item being produced, but the act of creating the item. Separating the worker from all creative input in production leads to the feelings of alienation that the worker has towards his job, as well as his employer.


The more the worker appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, through his labor, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: firstly, the sensuous external world becomes less and less an object belonging to his labor, a means of life of his labor; and, secondly, it becomes less and less a means of life in the immediate sense, a means for the physical subsistence of the worker.


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Richard Girard is a polymath and autodidact whose greatest desire in life is to be his generations' Thomas Paine. He is an FDR Democrat, which probably puts him with U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the current political spectrum. His answer to (more...)
 

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