Thursday 20 October 2011

Contradictions in capitalism : part 2 market increasing competition ?

In this second part of my series on marxists view taht capitailism is a unfair and a system rooted with deep contradictions i will look at the theory taht capitalists will try to tell you to convince you that the market is the best way forward. The arguement they say is that the more we let the market in the more competition there will be leading to greater choice and a cheaper price for the consumer.

I look at the facts behind this and the deep contradiction this is.

Marx assumed that the competitive processes of a capitalist market society would lead to a concentration of capital ownership in fewer and fewer hands. Marx built this claim on the assumption, which he holds in common with laissez faire economics, that a competitive economy must lead inevitably to the elimination of some producers by others, there must be winners and losers and the winners would grow increasingly large. Capitalism, Marx argued, contrary to the general assumption of laissez faire economics, had an inherent tendency towards concentration of capital in oligopolies and monopolies. The concentration of capital involved, first of all, the displacement of the handworker and the craftsworker and increasing domination of factory-based technology. An industrial proletariat of wage workers emerged, and grew larger, as independent producers were eliminated by factory-based competition. Capitalist corporations grew more concentrated and larger, the number of individuals owning the means of production became fewer. The class structure becomes polarized and the economic and social conditions of the two opposed main classes more strongly contrasted, leading to political activation of the working class and prolonged conflict with the dominant bourgeois class through political and industrial organisation.
It is this development of social polarization that provides the unsolveable social or relational contradiction of capitalist society. The social organization of a capitalist society also presented an inherent structural contradiction in the economic dynamics of capitalism. While capitalism revolutionized the means of production by promoting the greatest economic development in human history, its class structure focused the capacity to consume in a tiny minority of the population. The mass social scale of production could not remain compatible with the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
The fact that leading the market do as it pleases will bring us stabilitya nd fair competition benifiting us all is a lie to be honest. As the markets develop and under cut each other Marx was right by saying in capitalist society there will be winners and loosers. The more winners thre are will eventually swamp out the loosers and as Marx rightly pointed out the competition will be concentrated between a few big multinationals who dominate the market.

You can see this in practise in the computer market where Microsoft and Windows dominate still the office based computer market and the likes of Apple are squeezed out. Is this the competition and choice the capitalists talk of ?

This would be completely different to socialism where a nationalised industry run by workers for workers on the basis of need not profit. There would be choice but not 100's of choices which lead to waste and poor quality products.

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