Essay on Analysis of the Film Plant Money T-Shirt Project

“Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains” (Engels and Marx). Peter Georgescu, author and chairman of Young & Rubicam wrote the article “Capitalists, Arise”. Capitalism is a political system famously known for letting individuals own things such as businesses and property instead of the government. In his article, Georgescu tries to inform the readers about the widening wage gap. He also explores the idea that big businesses need to improve wages for workers so that the standard of living can improve for everyone in capitalist America. He does this through tone, diction, and rhetorical devices.

Since the time we are born we are fed the lies of capitalism. We are taught that capitalism hurts no one and that capitalism is the only way. Johnson and Robbins have some very influential ideas about capitalism. Johnson writes about the complexity of privilege. He also addresses why some privileged people do not feel privileged through the matrix of capitalist domination. Robbins gives us a background on how privilege became what it is today. He addresses the anatomy of the working class by drawing attention to how they were mobile, divided, powerless, and anxious for a revolution. Through Johnson and Robbins’ eyes we can begin to see how the world is not the one we were taught it was.

Capitalism fosters greed that when left unchecked can push people to their moral and physical limits in order to make a profit from others. This led to many people entering a cycle where they could not leave the factories and cities because they had no way to support themselves besides working in terrible conditions. This is illustrated in real life instances and in The Jungle. “Many Americans feared that the great industrialists were reducing ‘freemen’ to ‘wage slaves’”(Rise of Unions). This quote exemplifies that even though the workers of the factories were not slaves they were

The socioeconomic status' of nations is created by working individuals. However, it seems as though an economy is characterized by the nature of the interactions in the workforce. Many times these interactions are built upon unequal systemic operations that work to further disadvantage the large majority of citizens (known as the middle class) as well as simultaneously sustain the rich. This paper will reveal the effects of Capitalism and Inequality in American and Canadian economies today as well the solutions to improve both the society and quality of life. The first piece is a 90-minute documentary released in Fall 2013 titled Inequality for All directed by Jacob Kornbluth and produced by Jen Chaiken and Sebastian Dungan at 72 Productions.

“The population of unemployed and underemployed explodes. There is a vicious circle here. Because so many seek work, wages are very low. Because one wage cannot support even a small family, more and more family members must seek employment. This move adds to the pool of labor and further depresses wages.” (Syracuse U. Press) Further, if wages begin to rise in one country, other countries seize the opportunity and lower their wages even further. With this cycle of falling wages and more and more people needing jobs, poverty increases drastically. With wages so low, the owners of these large companies get richer and richer—the vast majority of wealth in a country becomes concentrated in one small group of people. While this is good for those few, the vast majority of citizens are shorthanded. Capitalism is an excellent system for the elite and for increasing efficiency, but as far as providing for the needs of all of its citizens, it falls short. Thus, capitalism is a system that causes and perpetuates poverty, and exploits its lower class.

Capitalism started up as a system of investing and sharing money in order to increase the value of resources in the future. Capitalism was just an economic system, but then soon turned into a complex system of ethical practices. Harari defines capitalism as, “a set of teachings about how people should behave, educate their children and even think” (Harari 314). This economic system evolved along with the people that were endorsing it. Capitalism enables the rich to get richer, while the poor continue to get poorer. There are many benefits to capitalism, but there are downfalls as well, and these downfalls tend to be masked because of the rapid speed capitalists grow at. Harari first presents a definition for capitalism, and soon goes into great detail on why capitalism, while fast paced and unforgiving, is able to stand unwavered while other productions fail.

The division of labour ensures that each worker only does one job, and the labour market decides which job any particular worker will do. During labour, the worker uses capital not under his own control. The capital available determines the nature of the work. On top of all this, the worker has no choice but to work, as wages are needed to provide the worker's means to life. Work is seen to be 'not voluntary, but forced' (3). This shows that in a capitalist society, the worker is separated from the decisions of whether or not to work, what the work will be, and what form the work will take. This alienation of labour is the separation of man from his life-activity.

For Karl Marx, human are social beings that interact with other humans and the environment (Ritzier 2011). Capitalism violates human nature and disrupts human relationship between with other humans and environment, in which workers become alienated from nature, other workers, and the task itself through capitalism (Calhoun 2012, p.153). Through capitalism, one can analyze Marx concepts to explain the impact of globalization. Particularly, in Mexico, where

Marx explains that commodity remains simple as long as it is tied to its use value. When a piece of fabric is sewn together as the cover for a mattress through human labor, the use value is clear and the mattress cover remains tied to its material use. However, as soon as the mattress emerges as a commodity in the case of Kluft Mattress where consumers in New York City demand from Bloomingdale’s a mattress that’s worth $30,000 or more, it transcends into a thing that “transcends sensuousness”. The connection to actual hands is severed when the mattress is tied to money as the universal equivalent for exchange. In capitalist societies, people then begin to treat commodities as if value is embedded in the product itself rather than the actual amount of labor that went into production. In this way the worker is alienated from his product. They become alienated because their own relation to production assumes a material shape independent of their control and their conscious individual action. (187) Under capitalism, the division of labor happens for the sake of efficiency in some ways stupefying the worker with routine tasks designed to make the worker produce products faster, like the seamstress in China sewing jeans that don’t even fit her. Human beings are desensitized to the products of their labor. The capitalists’ totem of affinity is more money rather than mutual contribution to society. In feudalist times, the craftsman traded according to the value of his labor.

Firstly, a brief explanation of some of the terms I will be using. Capitalism is an economic system where businesses and the means of production are owned by private individuals for profit. In a socialist economy, the means of production are owned by the community as a whole and individuals get rewarded for their work based on the following principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his contribution. In communism, items are divided up based on, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Finally, I will use the terms proletariat and bourgeoisie.

In Capital, Karl Marx reveals the ugly truth that capitalism lays on the foundation of class exploitation. Without such exploitation, there is no profit to be made and capitalism will cease to exist. Capitalism, which relies on the reproduction of capital, creates and concentrates wealth to a small portion of society’s population while reproducing poverty and widening the size of inequality.

Primitive accumulation is a term interpreted to various degrees by different political economists. According to Marx, primitive accumulation in communities served as an inevitable harbinger to capitalism, where it is described as a manoeuvre by which capital is accumulated by a small section of the community by deploying violence. “The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realise their labour.” Involved here is “a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage labourers.” This “historical process...appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital...” (Capital, Volume I, Part VIII, Progress Publishers, p 668). Adam Smith in the Wealth of the Nations set forth this concept in a different perspective as in capitalism was the result of the natural process of division of labor where some became experts in producing a particular item and others mastered the act of marketing and selling those produce which eventually gave way to capitalism. Different views have been made by different analysts to the same concept of the emergence of capitalism. Capitalism can be considered similar to a biological entity with the ability to reproduce. Offsprings with different characters are produced and they continue to evolve. The Concept of accumulation by dispossession

In fact, the exploitation of capitalism relies on the maintenance of labor divisions and inequality at all levels of the globe. Maria Mies used a metaphor of iceberg to explained the function of capitalism, which many invisible parts of the iceberg are under the water, and yet they constitute the base of whole. From my research, the iceberg of globe economic

By definition, Capitalism is an economic system controlled chiefly by individuals and private companies instead of by the government. In this system, individuals and companies own and direct most of the resources used to produce goods and services, including land and other natural resources labor, and “capital”. “Capital” includes factories and equipment and sometimes the money used in businesses (Friedman, 5).

This paper seeks to indubitably forward that the expansion of capitalism has hindered ‘the developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America’, therefore contributing to poverty: The state of being extremely poor’. Capitalism is an economic system, dependent solely on capital: the force that increases the productivity of labour, creating ‘wealth of nations.’ Adam Smith expressed capitalism’s exclusivity, driven by the ‘invisible hand’ mechanism, exclusive to developed countries and capable of causing such poverty. The British Empire, competitive pricing and globalisation reflect this. Postmodern scholar, Ricardo Hausman challenges my analysis, arguing that capitalism has not spread enough.