Platzi provided the capital for this video of social interest. . .
It's a heated debate that's confronted friends, families, and social classes. It's turned entire countries upside down. This was the basis for the Cold War in the 20th century that demanded you pick a side: Capitalism, led by the United States, or socialism, led by the Soviet Union?
Even today, Russia has adopted capitalist practices y in the US there's talk about the benefits of socialism, so today we ask ourselves. . .
Capitalism or socialism? In mid-19th century Europe, especially in England, industrialization was in full swing. More was produced than ever before, but at the same time workers were exploited a lot: 14 to 16 hour-long days, miserable wages, child labor with even worse pay, polluted air, and accidents plentiful, and forget about health insurance or vacations!
All this while the factory owners got richer without any toiling. So, a German philosopher named Karl Marx asked himself, "How did we get here? " Marx had read about Hegel, who put forward that everything progresses from a confrontation of contradictions.
Societies, too: each stage of social development carried with it the seed for it's own destruction and it's transformation into what follows. For him, civilization, at at least European civilization, had gone through the following stages: Primitive communism. A period in which goods were scarce, everyone who was able to worked, and every member of the community got according to their needs.
In this period, agriculture and other techniques were developed that allowed goods to be conserved and accumulated, which gave way to the second stage. . .
Slavery. For the first time, social classes are divided: those that work and those that possess the means of production: they also possess the workers. In this period there exists the belief that the wealthy (kings and priests) are wealthy because they count on divine right.
It's also in this period that States appear and slowly give way to the third stage. Feudalism. In this stage, workers aren't slaves anymore, but serfs, and they continue being subjugated by their lords, owners of the land and whoever they need to pay tribute.
At the end of feudalism, a social class of artisans and merchants gains wealth and power that they usually live in towns or "burgs" close to fiefs. Marx called them "bourgeois. " The bourgeois started to go into partnerships with each other and join their money to create companies and fund bigger business deals, like risky voyages.
These companies were known as "partnerships or shares" and the money collected with the goal to increase was called "capital". On the other hand, the ideas of liberty, democracy, and equality were promoted, which was the origin of great revolutions like the French Revolution, where the nobility and clergy lost power (and even their heads) and those who now had authority were the owners of capital: capitalists. Land, before property of the nobility or of the community, became private.
Ideas of the Enlightenment brought a great technological and industrial development: many farmers and peasants were left in poverty and they migrated to cities to work in factories. That's how the fourth stage comes about: capitalism. Capitalism is explained and defended by economists like Adam Smith.
And its main characteristics are: land, tools, and factories, in other words the means of production, are not in the hands of the state or of the communities, but rather they're private property. Cardi B There's a free market: everyone has the right to buy and sell what they desire, including labor, and to negotiate prices according to how it may convene them. Here people talk about the "invisible hand in the market": the idea that individual, economic actions, despite that they may seem egotistical, contribute to the general welfare of the society.
The capitalist ideal is, therefore, when laws and the state intervene in the market as little as possible. Free enterprise. Anyone can start a business, accepting the risks and obtaining the benefits.
This allows for competition and innovation. Explained like this, capitalism sounds ideal, so why was it that what Marx was seeing was happening in European cities? We'll answer that after this.
. . capitalist pause.
. . (PAUSE) One of the main problems of the capitalist system is that of capital gain: in other words, the gain that capitalists expect to get for their investment.
