We have been studying Marx in class and we have been looking at his views of communism vs. capitalism. Marx claims that capitalism will lead to communism, because capitalism is based on a fundamental contradiction. Capitalism claims that people get what they earn, but the people who put the most work into making a product get paid less than the people who sit around and supervise. On a base level this may make sense, but it does not seem to look at the amount of work someone has previously put forth to earn their money. People who make more money doing less hands on labor have generally graduated college and put in work at a company to earn their position. And even if they aren't performing hands on labor they are still doing paperwork, supervising or performing more political tasks.
From what i understand Marx would say that Bill Gates does not deserve the money he recieves, because he is not doing the work that everyone who works for microsoft is doing. But i believe Gates earns everything he gets, because he put in years of work to build his company from the ground up and he built an extremely successful business and what he recieves is because he put forth the effort to build the business therefor earning his mooney. Do you agree? or do you feel that he does not deserve the money?
I think you might be conflating capitalist ideals with Marxian ideology. Marx doesn't measure someone's worth by how much money they make. That's a byproduct of a capitalist society. Therefore he wouldn't say, 'Bill Gates isn't worth x dollars. He's worth x-y dollars!' Marx would have objections with the fact that the products originally created by Bill Gates (that itself is a point of contention) are now created by workers in factories for a much lower cost than what Gates himself earns for having built the business of Microsoft, and that, in the capitalist system, those workers are valued as dollar signs and producers of products instead of people.
ReplyDeleteThis is all not to say that Bill Gates is a great person for creating the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest privately-owned charities in existence. I think it might actually be the largest.
I totally agree with you. I think with people of high ranking positions there is an understatement on the amount of work that they had to do generally to get there. I understand that some people were just born with more then others and they didn't have to work for what they have but as for someone like Bill Gates, he had to work really hard mentally to get to where he is now. I think that Marxian philosophy should take into account that physical labor and mental labor are still forms of labor and should be treated equally.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it is evident that alot of people didnt have an equal share of working to the amount of power or possessions that they have. You can see where Marx was going with it and most of the time it is applicable with the modern division of labor, but there are circumstances that he doesn't touch on where there is strenuous mental work put into success. If people thought now that there wasn't work that went into learning then the college recruitment system would be flipped on its head. So just like most well minded people I believe that he does deserve the money, but he may not deserve all of it concidering he does have an insane amount of money now.