I agree with Doran’s comment here; capitalism is a tool, a very useful tool for many areas of life, but inapropriate for a comparable amount of others. There is no need to adopt a purely socialist mode of government, but a purely capitalist one is equally absurd. Can we not all agree that the implementation of more socially-oriented policies would be healthy for most industrialized nations today? Does increasingly unrestricted corporate activity really benefit anyone except those who are already fantastically wealthy, let alone the common worker? Many socialist ideas are now outdated, but that does not mean we cannot question capitalism’s assumption that many must suffer or be exploited so that a select few may live in vast excess.

It is also clear, I believe, that at least in the United States more and more aspects of our lives are constantly being placed under the domain of “free trade.” Marx’s main problem with capitalism was that it slowly converted people into commodities, and undoubtedly that is happening to us today.

Well now that sounds like you are talking about the inner city poor who have no access to the same quality of public education that is available in the middle class parts of this country; the inner city poor who are in fact locked into a social position that allows for no flexibility to act on a good idea if they had one. There are endless diamonds in the rough that are custodians, cafeteria workers, just plain manual workers because they are not “the average [MIDDLECLASS] person …[in a] country [that] has the open intellectual climate that encourages [MIDDLECLASS] people to think for themselves, and the open political and [MIDDLECLASS] economic climate that allows [MIDDLECLASS] people to act on the insights their minds provide and to keep the fruits of their effort.”

I am an ideal capitalist. What is conspicuously missing in your argument is the urgent and dire PROBLEM with immoral capitalism that this country is facing today. Your argument is speaking to a class of privilege, NOT the “average person.” Do any of the high school graduates that I teach make up part of that group of “average” people who are encouraged by (who? the mainstream? no way. the police? they get stopped on their way to school in the morning and asked where they are going. Teenagers who are humiliated and stripped searched on the street for no cause other than trying to “act on the insights their minds provide and to keep the fruits of their effort” in the face of an officer and being stopped for no reason other than his…skin color? yes. And no “the fruits of their effort” was not a drug deal, but a sculpture for his art class. …encouraged to think for themselves, act on insights, etc..without interference from say, the law? Hardly.

Check out some of your inner city schools, demographics, and the histories of how and why the people there are literally oppressed by a history of a dominant paradigm that has kept them as the brute labor force of this country withOUT those opportunities you mention above. All too much waist of great minds, insights, and intellect that life for the average person in this country could benefit from. Diomonds, buried in the rough.

At this point is is difficult to read or listen to this argument about capitalism and the opportunity it wields. That is just not the truth for the vast populations of peasant disenfranchised by a history of corrupt capitalism. What we have today is practically Facism, wielded with the tool of immoral capitalism………. Enron, Halliburten, the entire oil industry. The real capital is in the mind. Yes, I agree. But corrupt and immoral minds have created the version of capitalism we have today in this country that is spreading its disease called Globalization.

I agree with Kim Scarborough
Respect

I think that marxism is better debated by a biology metaphor. We are a species that needs to respond to changing conditions, whether technological, political, or otherwise. Capitalism provides a way for resources to be flexibly distributed to the most efficient use for society. Socialism means government control of everything with an accompanying beauracracy that will never want to rock the boat. Stasis means no new technologies, and eventually when the environment changes the species that can’t change with it is extinct. The most important characteristic of fitness for any species is always the ability to change, more important than fecundity, strength, etc.

Perhaps engineers and laborers are both important pieces of the machine?