How did really capitalism arise: A reply to von Mises
In response to a lecture by the classical liberal Ludwig von Mises: https://mises.org/library/economic-policy-thoughts-today-and-tomorrow/html/c/46
…And now, again, Mises, that shallow-minded blabbermouth, who also justifies capitalism and whom many sympathizers of capitalism fall for. According to Mises, the kings of chocolate, steel, railroads “do not rule kingdoms.” No, they rule the world, the states, the politicians…
Furthermore, according to Mises, “people who work in factories are also the main consumers of the products they produce”, “there is no difference between consumers and producers”, “the owner of the factory is the producer for the workers in his factory” and countless other shallownesses and superficialities which look learned but explain nothing.
Not only Marx claims that one must not forget that profit is the basic motive for production in capitalist society, but everyday practice proves that capital moves from all those branches where profit is “not enough”. And who does Mises want to lie that the capitalist produces for his workers and that they can and do buy the product they produce!
“It’s disturbing to realize that the people who make our iPhones and iPads not only don’t have iPhones and iPads (because they can’t afford them), but, in some cases, have never even seen one. … A worker broke his arm in a metal machine press at Foxconn. Foxconn did not provide him with medical care. When the worker’s hand healed, he could no longer work with it. So, they fired him. (Fortunately, the worker was able to find a new job, at a sawmill. The hours there are much better, he says, only 70 hours a week.) This worker, by the way, made the metal frames of the iPads at Foxconn. Daisy showed him his iPad. The worker had never seen an iPad before. He held it and played with it. He said it was ‘magical’.”
Only a shallow-minded person can believe such claims of Mises. And the fact that he was confident enough that they are “correct” and that they can be published is only proof that he is not capable of such analyzes as Marx and Engels provided in their works. Mises takes the semblance as reality and tries to justify it, confident that it is only so and in no other way. Well, history itself has given enough evidence that it is not so.
Mises’s hunch is that “without Foxconn and other factories that assemble parts, Chinese workers might still be working in the rice fields, making $50 a month instead of $250 a month. With this money, they can do significantly more than they ever could.”
However, the difference between the semblance of Mises and Mao’s China is longer hours, dizzying class differences, poor welfare and services, and highly unsafe working conditions for workers. Wealth and income inequality under China’s New Economic Policy has never been worse. China’s Gini coefficient, an index of income inequality, according to Sun Liping, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, has risen from 0.30 in 1978, when the Communist Party began opening up the economy to the market, to 0.46. Between 40,000,000 and 60,000,000 farmers have no land to cultivate. The average monthly welfare allowance is only 56 yuan (about $7), which is not enough to buy food, let alone clothes. In a survey of villages in four regions, education costs for families with children in school ranged from 12% to 35% of expenditures. Families borrowed between 29% and 175% of income per head to cover these costs. Health care costs range between 5–14% of families’ income and they borrowed between 48% and 320% of income per capita to cover these costs. Forty-one percent of households — and between 65% and 100% of poor households — had to go into debt when they experienced extreme need, shock or other economic hardship such as an injury to a family member. Only 33% had enough savings to overcome a crisis and only 2.5% received government assistance.
While in Mao’s China the people had a low but reliable standard of living. In rural areas, farmers were members of their communes that guaranteed them the opportunity to earn an income. Health care was provided through a combination of communal and state services of medical personnel, ordinary clinics and a hierarchy of hospitals that were literally free. Education was also literally free. Farmers owned their own homes. Those whose incomes in working time units were not sufficient to cover expenses received from their communes food, shelter, assistance in the form of small payments for education and health care, and burial. Although there was no pension system for farmers, old men were often given small amounts of work-time units in return for household chores they could perform in the village. In the cities, workers and government officials were guaranteed lifetime employment. Enterprises and government services were small welfare systems, providing housing, education and health care at a nominal cost. There was literally no unemployment.
“In today’s capitalist countries there is no significant difference in the supply of basic necessities of life between the upper and lower classes…” says Mises. Yes, and “both have food, clothing, and shelter.” What idiotic claims. How anyone can print this Mises’s nonsense even in the 21st century is beyond comprehension. The statistics itself show that it is not so.
But the common man needs to be convinced that “in the United States today, the difference between the rich and the poor comes down to the fact that some have a Cadillac and others a Chevrolet.” What an idiotic claim! So there are no classes in the US. The Chevrolet rolled as well as the Cadillac. And the private planes and helicopters…
After the brilliant works of Marx-Engels, for one to believe in such childish claims, it would mean allowing a man who is blind, deaf and stupid to infinity to be your leader.
It should be clear to everyone, and this is what Marx claims, that “things are not as they seem. Otherwise, why would science be needed.” As to Mises and the Misesians, it seems the other way around. As to them, everything is as it seems. “Money is a medium of exchange” and since the worker has a wage and the capitalist has a profit, and these are all money, then they are equal. We try to “think” like Mises. And what can the worker buy with his wages?! Well, that doesn’t matter. It is important that he also “equally” participates in the market. And to participate equally in the market, you need to have capital, not a minimum wage. Because of this, only 25 million of the 225 million Americans own significant amounts of financial assets. Shares are very disproportionately distributed among the British population. The Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth in 1975. reported that the bottom 80 percent of the population owned less than 4 percent of stocks. Even now, in a country with a highly developed stock market like Britain, the majority of working-class people do not own shares at all. Those workers who own them will often be worth only a few hundred pounds, so the income from the shares represents an insignificant part of their total earnings. The amount they earn from stocks will be less than the interest on personal debts and loans they have to pay.
In the market, the worker appears only as a buyer, that is, in retail, and that only to reproduce his work ability for the next day. The worker buys only use values, not exchange values, which are the privilege of capital alone. But a person will understand all that only if he reads the writings of Marx-Engels. And if he reads Mises, he will only become more stupid.
“Marx was no friend of the capitalist system,” says Mises. Well, it is not about friendship and enmity, but to understand and explain the essence of capitalist production. And it has only to do with learned conscience and ability, not with friendship and enmity. So, read now Mises served to you by the Misesians. Admittedly, this is a long-known social problem that is talked about even in the Bible. Leaders or sages “lead”, but without thinking of the needs and possibilities of those they lead. And in order not to allow the “led” to fail, they should know how to control the leaders. It would be easy if it was just the “ten commandments of God”. But even in that case, wrong steps and measures appear again. Well, not even Jesus as the messiah can make things right. Let’s clarify. People know the ten commandments, but despite that, they steal, kill, rob and do all kinds of evil… But let’s see where they don’t steal and lie? Only where people have everything to satisfy their life needs. Western sources tell us that the Indians did not know how to lie and steal until they encountered the Western “civilization”, which taught them all that and further destroyed them as a society.
The Indians did not know how to do such stupid things, like Buffalo Bill who killed thousands of bison a day just for fun. They would kill a bison and even thank him, saying, “Thank you brother for letting us kill you and feed ourselves.” (How much this associates with the Christian prayer for “our daily bread.”…) And conclude now who was more humane and more civilized, although he did not live in “well-being” (material). To conclude, it is necessary to know the “spirit” of all those progressive ideas that have become currents of civilization. The spirit of the Bible is to “thy kingdom come; thy will be done; on earth as it is in heaven.” And that cannot be with a commodity economy that “eats society like a worm and divides it into as many nations as there are adults in it.” It is a fact that does not need to be proven.
It has also been shown that socialism is not possible on the basis of categories of political economy (commodity, money, market, profit, interest, rent, capital, wage labor, etc.), even if they are called socialist and self-governing or in the “third phase of communism” (USSR). It is obvious that one must approach that science which will eliminate all the negativity from the spontaneous development of society so far. That science is Marxism, which consists only in the works of Marx-Engels. Now that doesn’t mean that everyone should buy them and sit at home to read them, although that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Marxism, like wisdom (in the Bible), is everywhere. Look at the family. If in it the woman managed to fight for an equal position and not be a “slave of the husband and children” (Engels), it is a real communist organization. How? Well, in it “everyone works according to his abilities and spends according to his needs”. The family does not leave any of its members to be hungry, unprotected and unsecured. Well, that it is daily exposed to all kinds of attacks from bourgeois society, in many cases it is falling apart and there are real prospects of being destroyed — this only proves that civil society should be abolished and replaced by “kingdom of God on earth” (if this expression is more liked by those who do not like communism who identify it with Leninism, let it be).
The foregoing is easily achievable only if people “enlighten” their minds a little by “rationally thinking” about the Bible and an even more rational study of Marxism. Let’s explain. The Bible provides “evidence” of how Joseph provided the Egyptian kingdom with fourteen years of stable development through non-market management. And Marxism opens the eyes of anyone who wants to think for himself, to see who is a liar and who is a robber, even if he dresses in the most solemn clothes and sits in the highest place. As Martin Luther said, “it is not robbers and criminals who lie in prisons and are hanged in the squares, but those who dress in silken garments and sit in high positions” (Marx-Engels Collected Works, Croatian-Serbian edition, vol. 26, pp. 404 and 405). If Jesus says: “Call no one your father on earth, for we have only one father who is in heaven” what can be concluded from that except that we all have to earn our bread “by the sweat of our brow…” Because when “god” cursed Adam with those words, that curse applies to all humanity. And what is the Marxist abolition of the distinction between productive and non-productive labor except that we all live according to “God’s curse” — with productive labor. Let’s explain something here.
Today everyone lives also from productive labor only realizing what Sismondi said: “The Roman proletariat lived at the expense of society, while modern society lives at the expense of the proletariat..” The pope, and the emperor, and the strategist, and the spy, and the prostitute, and the businessman, and the beggar and the thief, not excluding the artists and writers here, all are outside the production, but with the money they participate in the consumption of the production although no one does anything did for this production…
Yes, Misesians can reprint Mises ad infinitum, but that will do nothing to help society find its equilibrium. Everything will continue as before. They are not aware of that. And if they are, where is their conscience!
The time has long come for capitalism to go to a museum, except that Lenin, that idiot who in the pre-revolutionary period created an excellent position for himself to work with Marxism, could not understand from the Marxism that the proletariat, after the victory and socialization of the means of production, abolishes commodity production because that becomes pointless. Meaningless because the worker has nothing to purchase when he produces with his own means of production. Yes, Lenin is the savior of capitalism, not Keynes.
Ah, it’s a pity that there is no “god” to punish everyone for every “excessive word”…
Аuthor: Lazar Gogov
