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Leah Magdal 2^nd Installment

Karl Marx part 2

In my previous installment I talked about the reasoning behind why Karl Marx supported communism and how certain communist policies are utilized today. These examples include free healthcare, free education, and other things that are considered necessities for consumers such as food stamps for lower class people. These policies are becoming quite popular in certain countries because of how it can benefit their society. We have seen politians that try to run for office that support socialist policies. Many people get confused about the difference between socialist and communist policies, and that’s understandable because the terms haven’t really been used correctly all the time. In a communist society the workers are supposed to be in charge and own the businesses and people get what they need through there work, but we’ve seen that many countries that have called themselves communist didn’t do this but had more of a very extreme dictatorship like Russia. Then there are countries that allow free education and free healthcare because it’s considered a need for the functioning society, but the government is in charge, so there is a bit of a communist/socialist overlap. So you can see that in a capitalist society you are more likely to also a develop a mix of socialist and communist policies because there is enough money in the economy to allocate money to education and healthcare for people that can’t afford it without assistance, but it is regulated by the government in order to hold businesses accountable of standards they need to meet.

Getting back to politicians, a very popular advocate of socialism is Bernie Sanders, who had many votes during the 2016 presidential primaries from the younger generation because of his support for free education. Among the other things he supports is regulation of corporations, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and to raise taxes of the upper class. All of these policies are to strengthen society as a whole, and not just of the upper class. As a broke full time college student I support these ideas because I have seen how hard the struggle can be for the hard working lower class. Many people are on edge about this new way of doing things, because we are used to living in a society with a very divided class system, and popular stigmas such as: "if you can’t afford something it’s because you don’t work hard enough.” A lot of people are against raising the minimum wage because jobs with minimum wage “are meant to be for high school students”, and “you should go to college if you want a living wage.” The list goes on.  The whole reason the minimum wage was created in the first place was to give people a living wage. This was done by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938 during the depression because he saw how little companies were paying their workers and how much profit the people in charge were getting. Companies are supposed to be held liable for training their workers and paying them a living wage. This has become stigmatized by companies though over the years and many will convince people that they should pay for another business to get their training, and that is college which most people pay massive amounts to go to, in the hope of being accepted to work for companies and being paid a decent wage for their work. Many people think that raising the minimum wage would take money out of the economy, but this has already been tested after Roosevelt passed a law to raise the minimum wage and decrease unemployment and this was called the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. This new law led to fair competition between companies, because companies wanted to be able to offer better wages to be more popular to gain more employees. People were being paid more and therefore spending more, which led to businesses hiring more people to increase productivity. This was a policy that was put in place that was very successful until the price of living and food went up years later due to companies trying to gain more profit.

The point of all of this is that many socialist policies that have proven to be successful are still being stigmatized so people will feel that they deserve less. This is wrong. Both companies and the Government should be held accountable for how they treat people and spend their money so our society can be improved.

Here are some charts to show how minimum wage was increased and unemployment decreased soon after 1938 

https://herb.ashp.cuny.edu/items/show/1510

http://money.cnn.com/interactive/economy/minimum-wage-since-1938/

Other References:

http://www.epi.org/blog/celebrating-75-years-fair-labor-standards/

http://www.differencebetween.net/business/difference-between-socialism-and-communism-2/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/bernie-sanders-believe-candidate-stands-10-issues/

my 1^st installment (more information about Marx and references in comment section):

Final Report Installment 1

Karl Marx

Other installments I have commented on:

Immanuel Kant -- Blog Post #1 (Lucy Haston, Section 8)

#10 Installment 1- Feminist existentialism.