Leah Magdal 2nd
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
Other References:
my 1st installment
(more information about Marx and references in comment section):
Final Report
Installment 1
Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Other installments I have
commented on:
Immanuel Kant -- Blog Post #1 (Lucy Haston,
Section 8)
#10 Installment 1-
Feminist existentialism.
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