Is there a benefit to racism?

[Dill]

(08-15-2018, 09:24 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: I think you are seeing the disconnect that a lot of people seem to have regarding capitalism. With a free market, there are going to be winners and losers. The winners win at the expense of the losers. This is the entire premise of capitalism and it doesn't work without it. A winner is taking wealth from the loser through business practices, both legal and illegal, to increase their own holdings. Why people try to deny this basic tenant of capitalism is beyond me.

Yes, and I agree with that you say about winners and losers. I would only add:

A capitalist would answer by saying that captialism produces more wealth than any other mode of production. There may be "zero sum" at given moments, such as the entry to recession, but otherwise the process of production is such that it may simultaneaously produce more for both winners and "losers."  Poor people today have much more wealth than poor of 100 years ago, everyone is finally a winner under capitalism. A guy who manufactures a better farm tractor may reduce the profits of, or even bankrupt, another manufacturer, but many farmers and consumers benefit from more efficient farming.  Some losers, sure, but more winners and better products and services overall because of "competition." The less you know about the history of capitalism, the more reasonable and accurate this view seems. In the 19th century people made easy analogies to evolution and "the survival of the fittest" to justify minimal government--losers are "natural" and should not get handouts--except to break unions, to oppose the collective efforts people began undertaking to increase wages, to safeguard workers and their families, and to protect the environment.

I am not a capitalist, though. I agree with Marx: it is a structural requirement of capitalism that there be a mass of wage laborers who have nothing to sell but their labor; this mass, with nothing else to trade, enters into a "contract" with the capitalist to labor for him at the wages he sets--normally as low as the market will bear.  Capitalism produces this mass over time by depriving the many of land and other means of independent subsistence and concentrating these in the hands of a few.   These "losers" then are "free to chose" which employer they will serve.  They are "successfull" when they get good jobs and promotions. Over time, workers tend to adopt the class viewpoint of their employers, defending their rights over workers rights (at least in countries like the US, where there is little to no political left) as if the "contract" between employers and employees were equal, made between equally empowered individuals.

It is also a structural requirement that businesses in this system produce a profit; the livelihood of owners and managers depends upon this. Businesses cannot just maintain equilibrium and survive. They must expand.  And this imperative then drives their policies regarding issues like worker safety and the environment--always a choice between these "goods" and profits. Their horizon becomes increasingly short-term and exceedingly self-interested.