I would like to preface by saying I am very sorry if this is the wrong community. This post touches on the core philosophy of Marxism, and I was hoping to get some insight.
My friend claims that the only reason companies produce things is because the working class, regular citizens, are asking for it; he does not get behind the idea of companies subconsciously persuading people to buy the items they sell. He believes that because your regular person wants a new phone, kitchen equipment, clothes, whatever - they are pushing capitalism forward and therefore it is the right / natural system.
How would you reason? I feel conflicted. On one hand, people do want things and there is almost always something to produce it for them, but on the other hand companies are steadily pushing for profit, using various tactics to drive consumerism. I would appreciate what you guys think and what you would answer, because according to him, capitalism only exists because demand exists. Whether that’s true or not, I hope we can discuss. Cheers!
@[email protected] has already given you a good answer.
But just ask your friend if he would (all else being equal) prefer to buy from a co-op where all the workers get a living wage and a fair share of the profits.
No profits siphoned off by idle shareholders, who don’t spend it locally and more likely than not route it via a tax haven to eliminate all the benefits to any economy, least of all the local economy. Because they will use the money they don’t need to buy up all the stuff the rest of us do need, so they can charge us extortionate amounts for access to basic means of survival (while refusing to pay a living wage for the labour that produces their profits).
Now ask him why it is almost always impossible to find a co-op alternative, even if you’re willing to do a lot of (unpaid) work researching the options.
He’ll never get anywhere if he starts from the position that things are the way they are because the broad mass of people want them to be that way. That’s not how it works.
Very true.
That sort of thinking is known as the “is-ought problem”; “because things are this way, I must conclude they ought to be that way”
This is something that my brain has been musing over lately - if we think of managing the economy on a spectrum between perfect planning of every aspect of it one one end to perfect free market and zero planning on the other. Moving from planning towards free market on the spectrum results in shifting planning work done by few to market research work done by everyone. Even if we assume that it works in the theoretical efficient case, the free market doesn’t magically organize the economy without extra cost. The work is still being done, it’s just outsourced to and made the problem of everyone. On a secondary point, anecdotally I don’t think people are particularly keen on doing this work. If given the option of having one vendor of things that supplies what people desire at affordable prices, people are happy to never look for another vendor. And why would they, few people would go do price comparing in their spare time time, after they’ve finished their 8-10 hour workday. Then we’re all surprised Pikachu faced that we always end up with few large corpos in every sector that supply the vast majority of products in that sector. It seems to me that assuming the consumer market research work “just happens” is a major flaw in the pillars of some common economic theory.
I’m not advocating for any particular point on this hypothetical spectrum as being the correct one. I simply used it to explain my thoughts.