Monday, October 31, 2016

Contradiction and Exploitation

In Dialectical Materialism, Contradiction is Conflict.  Now, Confict is a situation in which there is at least one less good than there are parties that desire it.  In nature, Conflict is usually constituted by Scarcity, and resolved by either the elimination of the excess claimants, or by a distribution of the good among all the claimants.  Artifactual Conflict, e. g. sports competition, is usually resolved in the former manner.  Now, the fundamental target of Marxism, Exploitation, consisting in the enjoyment, by the owner of the means of production, of the product of someone else's labor, can be conceived as a case of Conflict--between those two parties, over the product, resolvable by either exclusive possession or sharing.  However, neither solution in itself addresses the essence of Exploitation--that it is stealing, resolvable, according to Marxism, only by the elimination of private ownership of the means of production.  So, Dialectical Materialism is irrelevant to both the ill that Marxism diagnoses of Capitalism, and its proposed cure.

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