As people lost their ability to sustain themselves directly, they began to have to do so indirectly through the sale of themselves to the new system. That’s the “social relation” part, people (society) had to literally sell themselves into the system in the form of wage labor which took on market pricing mechanisms. Prior to that, people worked for a certain amount and paid dues to the feudal lords, but it wasn’t a market in the modern sense of price making and taking. Capital (and thus capitalism) is the social relation which necessitates and involves the selling of oneself to the market at market value as just another commodity. [/quote]
Yes, Marx… “Social relation,” “selling oneself to the market at market value as just another commodity”… This is from Marx’s Value Theory in “Wage, Labor and Capital” if memory serves, yes? Or was it “Capital”… my memory’s hazy. But the exact phrasing rings a bell from school days. I digress…
Anyhow, there’s no perfect system where humans are involved. All we can hope for is one that’s reasonable (who defines reasonable, of course?) for the largest number possible. Statist/Communist/Stalinest/Whateverist Russia was apparently pretty tough on the masses. Other countries that have followed a similar path haven’t done so well for their citizens either. The U.S. and the social democracies of Western Europe are far from perfect, but as systems have *generally* served a large portion of their populations reasonably well (relative to the others that have been tried). But humans are fickle and hard to please, you see…
