Abstract
If capitalists are to survive in a truly competitive free market they must maximize productivity or efficiency, which is to say the ratio of output to input. Consequently, wages must be minimized, while any health care, education, housing, and other social benefits, insofar as they do not substantially boost productivity, being therefore at the expense of efficiency, are necessarily precluded. Furthermore, turning from capitalism’s moral dilemma to its ontological dilemma, increased efficiency or productivity, necessary if it is to remain competitive, in driving down wages and benefits, and driving up production, inevitably precipitates a crisis of overproduction in that the economic demand for goods and services is overwhelmed by the supply, thereby threatening profitability. A dialectical contradiction between competitiveness and profitability portending capitalism’s inevitable collapse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Thus following John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarians are Teleologists which is to say those who judge acts to be moral or immoral on the basis of their consequences, which in the case of Utilitarians is specifically to the degree to which they add to, or subtract from, the “sum total of human happiness,” while Deontologists such as Immanuel Kant, to give but one example, regards certain acts as intrinsically moral or immoral regardless of their consequences or outcome.
- 2.
Such as the ability of each to produce goods of the same or equivalent sort or/and quality .
- 3.
See Chapter 4, footnote 1.
- 4.
A standard refutation of Smith’s view is, of course, among others, Garrett Harding’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” (Science, Vol. 162, No 3859, Dec. 1968) although a perhaps more immediately obvious example would be the competitive fishing of diminishing stocks of fish. Thus, aware of the diminution of stocks of fish due to overfishing, it would, in a competitive (economic) system be in my individual self-interest to catch as many fish as quickly as possible, before they all disappeared, as so too would it be in everybody else’s individual competitive self-interest to do the same. This then would result, if not in the extinction, then at least in the severe and precipitous reduction, of the stocks of fish, to the mutual disadvantage of all. Although alternatively, recognizing the holistic logic of social/economic interactions, we may each declined to act in this competitive manner, but rather agreed to cooperate by taking only a limited quota in an attempt to enable the stocks to replenish themselves, to the mutual benefit of all. An argument that, by analogy, clearly extends to capitalist competition, in that if each enterprise competes against all others this puts downward pressure on aggregated wages, and thus on aggregate demand, thereby threatening the profitability, not to mention the survival, of all. While if alternatively, again in recognition the holistic logic of social interactions, we abandoned such individualistic, capitalist, competition in favor of mutual or communal, social or socialistic cooperation , then we would be in a position to ensure that each worker was sufficiently well paid, that in aggregate they could afford the goods that they produced. However, in effectively thereby giving the workers “the full value of their productive labor”—including, of course the intellectual labor of technological innovation, and production management and so on—necessary if they were to be able to purchase all the goods they produced, we would, in doing so, concomitantly be abolishing profits, and thus capitalism, in favor of socialism, or even communism.
- 5.
Of which more later.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Glynn, S. (2020). Capitalism’s Moral and Ontological Dilemmas: Competition, the Inevitably Exploitative Response, and the Crisis of Overproduction. In: The Economic Logic of Late Capitalism and the Inevitable Triumph of Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52667-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-52666-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-52667-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)