Here’s another one: Capitalists want to pay their workers as little as they can get away with. But they want workers to spend as much money on their products as possible.

So any given capitalist will underpay their own workers for short-term profit and expect workers to spend extra money on their products. But those workers’ employers do the same thing, so those workers don’t have enough spending money left over to buy their products. At a large scale, this is not a sustainable system.

[–] HornyOnMain@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

here's a relevant summary of Marx's thoughts on the matter:

Business Cycles and the Tendency toward Recession. Marx noted that something more than greed is involved in the capitalist's relentless pursuit of profit. Given the pressures of competition and rising wages, capitalists must make technological innovations to increase their productivity and diminish their labor costs. This creates problems of its own. The more capital goods (such as machinery, plants, technologies, fuels) needed for production, the higher the fixed costs and the greater the pressure to increase productivity to maintain profit margins.^(2)

Since workers are not paid enough to buy back the goods and services they produce, Marx noted, there is always the problem of a disparity between mass production and aggregate demand. If demand slackens, owners cut back on production and investment. Even when there is ample demand, they are tempted to downsize the workforce and intensify the rate of exploitation of the remaining employees, seizing any opportunity to reduce benefits and wages. The ensuing drop in the workforce's buying power leads to a further decline in demand and to business recessions that inflict the greatest pain on those with the least assets.

Marx foresaw this tendency for profits to fall and for protracted recessions and economic instability. As the economist Robert Heilbroner noted, this was an extraordinary prediction, for in Marx's day economists did not recognize boom-and-bust business cycles as inherent to the capitalist system. But today we know that recessions are a chronic condition and — as Marx also predicted — they have become international in scope.

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(^2) As an industry becomes more capital intensive, proportionately more money must be invested to generate a given number of jobs. But business is not dedicated to creating jobs. In fact, capitalists are constantly devising ways to downsize the workforce. From 1980 to 1990, the net number of jobs created by the biggest corporations in the United States, the "Fortune 500," was zero. The new jobs of that period came mostly from less capital-intensive smaller firms, light industry, service industry, and the public sector

[–] Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 1 year ago

This is about whenever contradiction show up in a system what the general responses would be, but if you want a specific example by me.

I posit that privatized healthcare is a contradiction, base capitalism relies on supply and demand and healthcare will always have infinite demand. So profit motive =/= health motive.

According to the chart, the lefist would suggest getting rid of privatized healthcare in favor of universal healthcare funded by the government without patent gatekeeping.

The conservative would simply not acknowledge any flaw or contradiction.

The centrist would keep the system and implement bandaid half solutions, like state insurance or Obamacare.

[–] v0idbit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago

Another example would be the stated goal of reducing crime, but then building a huge for-profit prison system with no goal of reducing recidivism.

[–] awesomesauce309@midwest.social 4 points 1 year ago

In America at least, wealth mobility has been terrible historically. ie. If you were born poor you’re more likely to die poor. Born rich and you’re not likely to lose it. Despite all the data against it, poor people are still sold the American dream. This is a contradiction.

Leftists would see the poor as powerless against a system and society that set them up to fail, and aim to change the aspects of society that forces them to be poor, while others profited and thrived off of their labor.

Conservatives would (if you could read their minds at least, they know their thoughts are awful enough to keep to themselves) see the poor as powerless in the sense that they couldn’t help themselves and are therefore somehow not worthy of a dignified life.

And the fence sitters will allow half assed bandaids like welfare, Medicaid, and food stamps. And when the conservatives say they need to cut taxes for the rich, centerists will happily axe the bandaids, because they didn’t solve the core problems forcing people to be poor (and they were never designed to.)