Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Highlights
id535477912
there is economic growth, technological innovation, increasing productivity and a downward diffusion of consumer goods, but along with capitalist economic growth comes destitution for many whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the advance of capitalism, precariousness for those at the bottom of the capitalist labor market, and alienating and tedious work for the majority.
id535478625
the term capitalism to designate both the idea of capitalism as a market economy and the idea that it is organized through a particular kind of class structure. One way of thinking about this combination is that the market dimension identifies the basic mechanism of coordination of economic activities in an economic system—coordination through decentralized voluntary exchanges, supply and demand, and prices—and the class structure identifies the central power relations within the economic system—between private owners of capital and workers.
id535478634
the distinctive feature of a capitalist market economy is the ways in which private owners of capital wield power both within firms and within the economic system as a whole.
id535502299
many things have been done to mitigate the antidemocratic effects of capitalism: public constraints can be imposed on private investment in all sorts of ways to erode the rigid boundary between the public and private; a strong public sector and active forms of public investment can weaken the threat of capital mobility; restrictions on the use of private wealth in elections and various forms of public financing in political campaigns can reduce the privileged access of the wealthy to political power; labor law can both strengthen the collective power of workers through unions and create stronger workers’ rights within the workplace, including the requirement that there be workers’ councils with a role in workplace governance; and a wide variety of welfare-state policies can increase the real freedom of those without access to private wealth. The antidemocratic and freedom-impeding features of capitalism can, if political conditions are right, be partially tamed even if they cannot be eliminated
id535502694
“The immediate motive to productive activity in a market society is … typically some mixture of greed and fear.” In greed, other people are “seen as possible sources of enrichment, and [in fear they are seen] as threats to one’s success. These are horrible ways of seeing other people, however much we have become habituated and inured to them, as a result of centuries of capitalist civilization.”
id535502943
capitalist cultures generally affirm two clusters of broadly shared values that are in tension with community and solidarity: competitive individualism and privatized consumerism.