The free market, the capitalist system will not reward me for the huge effort that I expend in writing these essays. That is one reason why I hate the market system.
I am stupid enough to believe that my views and my efforts are valuable and so why shouldn't I hate a system which denies any such value? Why should I like a system that rewards someone for jumping high or kicking a ball or building a car, when I make so much effort and my efforts have no market value?
Here I find myself identifying one of the problems of capitalism. The problem is that you only make money if you do what someone else wants. This is why we are at the bottom of the pile because we only receive a reward if someone else is willing to reward us. Is that fair? Isn't it your responsibility to look after me even if you find me useless? (Hey, who are you calling useless anyway? That really pisses me off. You pay me nothing and then look down on me because you pay me nothing. See, it is all your fault. It is you who doesn't pay me anything so my poverty is your fault. - Isn't logical argument a wonderful thing?)
The problem with the capitalist system is that it doesn't reward effort or intelligence or even utility; it rewards those who do what someone else is willing to pay for. If I struggle for days or even months to understand something and then write a simple explanation of it do I get sent a million dollars? Hah! And why not? Because very few people have any interest in the subject and there is no easy way for me to ask them for a reward and even if I asked their isn't much reason for them to want to pay for my view anyway. That's not fair! (Is it any surprise that Marx said that the value was in the effort when he spent so many hours doing something that was also totally useless? Ah, but Marx had a rich benefactor who allowed Marx to live in middle class comfort and knock-up his servant girl while fully identifying with the down trodden masses.)
I am not sure if it is worse or better for those of us who don't even try. For those of us who are unemployed waiting for someone to thrust a career upon us is it any surprise that we hate the capitalist system? Of course we hate it partly because we were were born as potential workers rather than as capitalists. (Don't tell me that most poor people would prefer to be Marxists than be Millionairists. I doubt there are many unemployed persons who would choose a reasonably paid job over a work-free income. Well if they would prefer a job to an income they really are stupid.) Ah, but that's them not me. Even with a regular work-free income I'd still be trying to understand things and writing moaning essays about them and how unfair the world is, because I'm like that.
So don't write me off as just wanting money for nothing, far from it, I want you to give me money and read my essays too.
I think that the worst thing about the free market system is that you have to do what other people want from you rather than what you want to do. No, I think the really worst thing about the free market system is that other people get to put a value on what you have to offer. No, the really really worst thing is that so many of us don't have anything that anyone else wants while we want so much of what they could give. That's just damn unfair.
So many of us want an interesting career with high pay, good prospects, respect and a bit of fame preferably in television, music or the movies, but what people want from us is to bow and scrape, cook fast food, stack shelves, build machines, repair the machines and politely take their shit when things go wrong. Hell, this free market system could never work! How on earth can such incompatible desires ever be balanced through a free market?
So capitalism is obviously doomed because what we workers are willing to work at simply isn't what we want from workers and so the whole system is built on a contradiction which will inevitably cause it to be replaced by something nicer. So, I am all for the slogan: Let's replace capitalism with something nicer.
Trouble with all these protest slogans is they tell us what we are against, but not much about what we are for. Marx didn't leave us hanging like that. He made it plain that as soon as capitalism built factories to supply so much of everything that no one had to work we could all play at being whatever we wanted to be. Now that sounds like fun doesn't it?