There is more to Marx's critique of capitalism than you sketch. Marx also objects that the private ownership of productive assets coerces workers to work by depriving them of alternatives, that the hierarchical organization of work creates domination that squelches freedom whether or it promotes alienation, and that these inequalities prevent people from determining their own aims either at work or, because the unequalities have political effects, through democractic government. Not these these effects of exploitation are a lot more easily remedied than alienation or waste.
Btw, Marx is certainly correct that capitalism is incredibly wasteful. The critique part of the claim is fine. There is a question about whether planning is a better alternative, but you were asking about the critique, no?
--jks
In a message dated Mon, 1 May 2000 1:44:24 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Brad De Long <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
<< >While the absolute immiseration thesis has turned out largely wrong
>- though the course of Africa over the last 20 years is an important
>and disgraceful exception - relative immiseration, a/k/a
>polarization - certainly hasn't: the gap between rich and poor
>globally and within individual countries (including our own glorious
>land) has never been so wide. Nor has the gap between possibility
>and actuality ever been so wide: there's no reason anyone, anywhere
>should go hungry or die of diarrhea or go blind from vitamin A
>deficiency, but it happens in vast numbers every day.
>
>And as for work, there's plenty of godawful jobs in the world. Even
>"successful" people are often massively bored, stressed, and/or
>alienated. Maybe not professors of economics at prestigious
>universities, but try working as a chicken puller or in a municipal
>recycling facility.
>
>Doug
I'm not saying that people's jobs are bowls of cherries: they are not, and (in my view) the research university professoriate is incredibly lucky--we've managed to expropriate control over the not-for-profit organizations we "work for" and use it to rearrange our jobs to suit ourselves.
The weak points I see are "relative to conscious democratic planning..." and "easy and straightforward to rearrange work..."
>>