It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
More importantly, at the very heart of capitalism lies an incentive that leads to the increase of inequalities. Capitalism is based on the principle of competition, and businesses must compete with one another in order to survive. Each company, therefore, strives to maximize its profits in order to achieve a competitive advantage. For example, they can use extra profits to offset lowering the price of their product, undersell their opponents, and push them out of the market.
But in order to maximize profits, businesses must keep productive costs to a minimum. And a major portion of productive costs includes labor. Consequently, as a general rule, in order for a business to survive, it must push labor costs to a minimum. And that is why, of course, so many businesses migrate from the U.S. and relocate in countries like China, Viet Nam, Mexico, and Bangladesh where wages are a mere pittance.
Who is it that is demonizing poor people or those in need ?
And do not all systems to include Socialism, Communism, our Republic system create the same inequalities ?
There maybe a system out there which does not create the haves and have not's but I don't think we have come up with it yet.
Capitalism is just the one that sucks slightly less.
Hopefully we can find a better system one day but until that time we are stuck with capitalism.
originally posted by: butcherguy
Inequalities exist regardless of the socioeconomic system that is created to say otherwise.
Empire of Cotton explains the industrial take off of Europe and North America as a result of the emergence of peculiar kinds of uniquely powerful states, who built peculiar connections to capital owners who then, jointly, succeeded in integrating distant regions of the world into a European dominated world economy. They did so by engaging in violent trade with Asia, by transporting enslaved workers from Africa to the Americas, and by capturing huge expanses of land from native peoples in many regions of the world. In the story that follows from that account, the countryside matters as much as cities, slave labor as much as wage labor, violence as much as the rule of law, and coercion as much as contracts. The history of the United States is central to the ensuing story, because it was there that most of the cotton for world markets was grown, and, until 1865, almost exclusively grown by slaves. The United States matters to this story because it was one of the earliest examples of successful industrialization—in cotton textiles. And the United States matters because it helped pioneer new relations between industry and agriculture with the emergence of sharecropping regimes in the wake of the American Civil War. Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation’s place in the global economy and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
My first thought, when I learned that Sven’s Empire of Cotton and my book, The Empire of Necessity won the Bancroft Award, was to wonder whether cotton was a necessity or a freedom. And then I thought, of course, they are both, the wealth created from the trade and the labor needed to create the wealth. The two books complement each other well. Where The Empire of Cotton focuses on the material, institutional, and economic foundations and legacies of slavery, state formation, and market expansion, The Empire of Necessity (though describing in detail the labor and environmental processes associated with a range of free and unfree labor) is concerned more with the psychic and imaginative structure of slavery.… Capitalism is, among other things, a massive process of ego formation, the creation of modern selves, the illusion of individual autonomy, the cultivation of distinction and preference, the idea that individuals had their own moral conscience, based on individual reason and virtue. The wealth created by slavery generalized these ideals of self-creation, allowing more and more people, mostly men, to imagine themselves as autonomous and integral beings, with inherent rights and self-interests not subject to the jurisdiction of others. This process of individuation creates a schism between inner and outer, in which self-interest, self-cultivation, and personal moral authority drive a wedge between seeming and being. My point is that slavery was central to capitalist individuation, to the schism between inner and outer, which I believe accounts for the endurance of racism in American society, its quicksilver nature, as well as for its deniability. This is a dinner, not a conference. So I’ll end by cutting to the chase: I think the story at the center of The Empire of Necessity—revolving around the New Englander Amasa Delano’s complete and utter blindness to the social world around him—captures the power of a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.
originally posted by: Bluntone22
There is always someone on top and someone on the bottom. At least with capitalism ypu have a chance to succeed.
originally posted by: Xtrozero
It is impossible to have a system of equality, but what are we really talking about here? What kind of equality do you want? If one person can afford a 60 foot yacht and another can afford a 13 foot dingy is that inequality? If one person lives in a 20,000 sq ft house all by themselves and a family of 4 live in a 2 bedroom flat, is that inequality? If one person works hard and is extremely successful in life with few bad life choices and another person doesn't really do much and has a string of poor life choices is that inequality too?
originally posted by: burdman30ott6
a reply to: Southern Guardian
Can personal responsibility bridge an equality gap for the individuals wanting to elevate themselves? The answer is yes.
originally posted by: seeker1963
It's just a thinly veiled disguise to say they want equality of outcome over equality of opportunity!!!!! Cultural Marxism can be a tricky language to understand at times!