We’ve been talking about communism here and there on the blog, so I thought it was a good time to reprint this. It first ran on Splice Today.
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My seven-year-old saw me reading Terry Eagleton’s new book, Why Marx Was Right. Said son has just started reading himself (he loves Jeff Smith’s Bone) and has become perhaps overly inquisitive about any books in reach.
“What’s that?” he demanded. “What’s it about?”
I resorted to that phrase well known to fathers everywhere. “Um….”
“What is it about?”
So what the hey, I figured. I’ve explained dinosaurs and gravity and sex. I can explain Marxism. “It’s about somebody named Karl Marx,” I said. “It’s talking about why he was right.”
“Right about what?”
“About not liking capitalism. He didn’t like capitalism.” Blank stare. “Do you know what capitalism is?”
“No.”
“Okay, you know how everybody buys and sells everything?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s capitalism. And Marx didn’t like it.”
An expression halfway between incredulity and boredom. “Why didn’t he like it?”
“Well, with the system where everybody buys and sells and tries to make as much money as they can, you end up with some people who have a lot of money who own the factories, and then some people have only a little money and work in the factories. And Marx thought that was unfair. He said that the people who work in the factories should own the factories.”
“Oh.” Pause for consideration. “That makes sense.”
“Yes,” I said. “But some people really don’t like that idea.”
Then his eyes lit up. “The factory owners don’t like it, I bet!”
So there you have it. Marx’s ideas are intuitive enough that even a seven-year old can understand them. Terry Eagleton would approve.
Why Marx Was Right isn’t quite aimed at the Under 8s, but it is (in a fine old Marxist tradition) a populist polemic. As Eagleton notes, Marx has taken a beating in the last quarter century or so. The Soviet Union has collapsed, China has embraced the almighty yen, and hordes of post-everythingists have laid siege to the university, taunting the academic Marxists for culpable white maleness and general untrendy belief in revolution, sweat, and the physical universe.
Eagleton, however, is undaunted. Marx, he insists, has been buried neither by the corpses of Pol Pot nor by the tomes of cultural studies professors. And certainly neither post-structuralism nor Stalin can boast many apologists with as felicitous a prose style as Eagleton. The books breezes through ten common objections to Marxism, with Eagleton acidly and efficiently dispatching each in turn. To the charge that Marx is a utopian, Eagleton observes:
A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed notion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding scar-faced and sinisterly soft-spoken in underground bunkers like James Bond villains. They are to be seen dining at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.
To the claim that Marx is a simplistic materialist, Eagleton responds in part:
For Marx, our thought takes shape in the process of working on the world, and this is a material necessity determined by our bodily needs. One might claim, then, that thinking itself is a material necessity. Thinking and our bodily drives are closely related…. Consciousness is the result of an interaction between ourselves and our material surroundings.
And so on throughout the book; Marx was a democrat, not a totalitarian; an individualist not a collectivist; a believer in reform and, when that failed, in a revolution that was as little violent as possible. Marxism was feminist before feminism; post-colonialist before post-colonialism, and pro-ecology before most ecologists had befouled their washable diapers.
For those, like me, who haven’t read a lot of Marx, the book is a welcome corrective that goes down surprisingly easily. Sometimes, indeed, too easily. There’s a sense throughout that Eagleton isn’t really engaging Marx’s strongest critics. Instead, the book prefers to incinerate a series of straw men. Thus, Eagleton mentions that Edward Said was anti-Marxist, but he doesn’t quote him, preferring instead to knock down more generalized postcolonialist arguments. Similarly, Eagleton breezily dismisses pacifism with a would-you-use-violence-to-prevent-children-being-shot scenario; some vague references to (never specifically named) just war theory, and a blanket declaration that “In any strict sense of the word, pacifism is grossly immoral.” If you didn’t know anything about debates around pacifism, this might seem like a knockdown effort on Eagleton’s part. Otherwise…well, let’s be kind and say that Eagleton’s discussion is not nearly as convincing as he seems to think it is.
The fact that Eagleton is weak on the thing I happen to know about could just be a coincidence. Somehow I doubt it though. He’s popularizing — which means that this book is less Why Marx Was Right than it is Everything You Thought You Knew About Marx Was Wrong. As such, it’s not likely to bring the revolution, but it might get some undergrads and/or aging reviewers to check out Das Kapital. Who knows? It might even sway the odd seven-year-old.
Marx is an extremely helpful thinker. My feeling is that everything goes catastrophically wrong with his idea of false consciousness, linked to historical inevitability and class struggle as not merely fundamental but primary. But then at least someone said that capitalism should be vigorously thought about from a morally complex oppositional point of view.
Even by tenured literary critics.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Well, with the system where everybody buys and sells and tries to make as much money as they can, you end up with some people who have a lot of money who own the factories, and then some people have only a little money and work in the factories. And Marx thought that was unfair. He said that the people who work in the factories should own the factories.”
“Oh.” Pause for consideration. “That makes sense.”
“Yes,” I said. “But some people really don’t like that idea.”
Then his eyes lit up. “The factory owners don’t like it, I bet!”
So there you have it. Marx’s ideas are intuitive enough that even a seven-year old can understand them…
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So, if somebody comes up with a new invention, moves heaven and earth to obtain financing and overcome logistical problems, gets the permits and and pays to build a factory, then the workers who come along to run the place at the very end are the ones who OWN the factory.
With the inventor who made it all possible, the investors who risked hefty bundles of cash, getting at best the same proportion of “ownership” as any assembly-line worker or janitor.
Which, I guess, accounts for the thriving, healthy economies that prevailed in Communist countries.
And does the fact an idea may be simple enough for a kid to understand, make it any more valid?
The Right has deployed The Domino Theory (if we don’t spread Communism in Vietnam, it will take over all of SE Asia!), Trickle-Down Economics (don’t tax the rich, and their wealth will automatically wander down to us poorer folks), the Star Wars anti-missile “umbrella in space,” the Welfare Queen, and other vivid, simplistic myths with great success, for instance.
…Ran across a nice line (about an inventor/innovator, but it can apply elsewhere) in the fascinating “Creation Myth –Xerox PARC, Apple, and the truth about innovation” article in the latest “New Yorker”*:
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He was the visionary… But visionaries are limited by their visions.
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* Sorry, only this abstract is online: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/16/110516fa_fact_gladwell . Though a PARC commentary on the article may be read at http://tinyurl.com/42yjgxs .
From anarchistnews.org:
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Marxism was probably as defined by its opposition to anarchism as by its opposition to capitalism. Indeed, Marx’s authorship was to an almost absurd extent driven by his attacks on anarchism…
…let me say that, first of all, Karl Marx was a vastly better thinker than any of his anarchist opponents. Marx’s philosophy and economics are entirely indispensable in the history of ideas. His historical materialism, for example the idea that intellectual or aesthetic or religious products of a society reflect its material arrangements and conditions of production, is not an idea we can do without, even if it is also an oversimplification. Marx made many contributions without which the contemporary intellectual and political landscapes are incomprehensible. He was intensely and astonishingly systematic, learned, original, and radical as a thinker.
The anarchists, on the other hand, are a big old mess… a philosophical mediocrity – at least until Kropotkin’s more useful version, but even then. Maybe we should expect no better from anarchists, whose theory is apparently as chaotic as their proposed future. But I think this has to do more with the fact that intellectuals of Marx’s caliber are extremely rare; few social movements have one.
Indeed, the communist anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman, owed a vast debt to Marx, which was acknowledged. For all these figures, history was the history of class struggle. The enemy was capitalism. The revolutionary class was the industrial proletariat. All of them gladly aligned themselves with Marxists in order to push forward the revolution.
But here’s the problem: Marx was a totalitarian. This evening, I am the most recent in a long line of anarchists who have been saying that since the 1840s. But I say it flatly. Marx was a totalitarian. Marx was a totalitarian. Marx was a totalitarian. My view is that such administrations as Stalin’s or Mao’s – which among other things were murderous on the scale of tens of millions – were as true as they could be, given their conditions, to Marx’s ideology. They were perfectly sincere expressions of Marxism, and pretty accurate expressions to boot.
Now if Joe McCarthy or John D. Rockefeller or Ronald Reagan said Marx was a totalitarian, you’d be suspicious: they’re only serving their own interests; they are reactionary capitalist pigs, etc. But when Bakunin or Kropotkin or Emma Goldman says Marx is a totalitarian…that is a different matter. They are anti-capitalist revolutionaries. Each one of them called him/herself a communist…
It is revealing that, in response to Bakunin and many other anarchists’ assertion that Marx was an “authoritarian socialist,” Marx himself responded not that that was false, but that authority was necessary. You can’t have large-scale industrial production without authority, said Marx, and Marx loved large-scale industrial production. You can’t have a revolution without authority. You can’t have a political situation without authority. Indeed, you can’t have successful human life without authority. In other words, in response to the charge that he was an enthusiast about authority, Marx enthused about authority. “A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon – authoritarian means, is such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in reactionaries”…
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Much more at http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/12346
Mike, an investor risking money is significantly less impressive than factory workers coming in every day for their entire lives, in many cases risking their health and even in some cases their lives. So, yeah, the people who do the work should get the benefit. I think that’s an intuitively equitable arrangement. And while intuition isn’t always right, sometimes it is.
Oh, and of course if it was just *any* 7-year old it wouldn’t prove anything. *My* 7-year old, however, is uniquely insightful.
Besides which, Marx himself acknowledged the necessity of capitalism as a condition of industrialisation– a convenient excuse for China’s ruling Communist Party!
Marx was not not a totalitarian, that’s fair. It’s the issue about Lacanian psychoanalysis as clinical practice again– there’s just no significant insight on the impact of modern economics on culture, society, and even individual subjectivity that I can think of that doesn’t owe its major impact to Marx.
“Owe most of its articulation to Marx.” I can’t multitask. It’s capitalism’s fault.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, an investor risking money is significantly less impressive than factory workers coming in every day for their entire lives, in many cases risking their health and even in some cases their lives…
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Where it’s a precondition for an investor to risk losing a routinely-substantial amount of cash, factory workers are assured of making money.
And, who says factory workers usually come “in every day for their entire lives, in many cases risking their health and even in some cases their lives”? In some non-unionized Third World sweatshop, but that’s far from the case in most factories. Where to the worker, it’s only a job, which they can leave any time something better comes along.
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So, yeah, the people who do the work should get the benefit. I think that’s an intuitively equitable arrangement. And while intuition isn’t always right, sometimes it is.
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And the people who made the work possible don’t deserve anything extra? Do those who print a book deserve to share the profits equally with its author?
I’m emphatically against the grotesque income imbalance* which only continues to accelerate, where a factory owner makes tens of thousands of times as much money as the workers. The workers definitely deserve far more, the owners far less.
But, taking things to the opposite “everybody earns the same” extreme is absurdly unjust, and economically suicidal.
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Oh, and of course if it was just *any* 7-year old it wouldn’t prove anything. *My* 7-year old, however, is uniquely insightful.
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That goes without saying!
* As if we needed proof, from the excellent “Mother Jones” magazine:
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It’s the Inequality, Stupid
A huge share of the nation’s economic growth over the past 30 years has gone to the top one-hundredth of one percent, who now make an average of $27 million per household. The average income for the bottom 90 percent of us? $31,244.
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More details and infuriating charts at http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph
More info and charts from the folks at the not-exactly-Leftist “Business Insider”:
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15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America
The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.
If you’re in that top 1%, life is grand…
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http://www.businessinsider.com/15-charts-about-wealth-and-inequality-in-america-2010-4
Well, the standard communist bit isn’t actually that everyone gets the same. It’s “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” right?
If income were equitably distributed in the ideal communist society, the need to have mega-wealthy investors bankroll everything would presumably not exist.
And the reason that factory workers get a better shake in the first world has a lot to do with the unionization movement…which is not unrelated to socialist ideals.
I think Marx, as the article quoted above suggests, really shook the cranks out of radical political philosophy, to an extent at least. Nobody has to agree with Marx, but, yeah, pretty much all viable alternatives to capitalism are borrowing from the Marxist playbook, or reacting to it. I myself like isolationism, financial regulation, and unions, but also getting the government out of propping up industries like agribusiness and finance. But it’s not as bold and complex a vision as Marx’s.
Or as false.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Well, the standard communist bit isn’t actually that everyone gets the same. It’s “from each according to ability, to each according to need,” right?
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Which, I guess, explained how the high-up Communist Party officials somehow happened to get the dachas and chauffeur-driven Zils; they had a greater NEED!
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And the reason that factory workers get a better shake in the first world has a lot to do with the unionization movement…which is not unrelated to socialist ideals.
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Hooray for all that unions accomplished. How strange with all the far-leftist, biased “liberal media,” that “Public Opinion of Unions Remains Near Quarter-Century Low”: http://www.dailyfinance.com/2011/02/17/public-opinion-of-unions-remains-near-quarter-century-low/ .
But, many Communist countries banned unions. What gives?
In the news:
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Maine governor Paul LePage has ordered the state’s Labor Department to remove a mural he says is too pro-labor. [ http://www.sunjournal.com/state/story/1004031 ] He has also declared several of the building’s conference room names to have “one-sided decor.” This was reportedly at the behest of anonymous businesses who complained of a pro-labor bias…
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http://www.metafilter.com/101811/Reality-has-a-wellknown-liberal-bias
Gee, as mentioned at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/us/24lepage.html , it turns out LePage is a Republican. Who’d have guessed?
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Bert Stabler says:
…I myself like isolationism, financial regulation, and unions, but also getting the government out of propping up industries like agribusiness and finance.
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Hey, I’d vote for that. “Stablerism for a Stable America!”
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But it’s not as bold and complex a vision as Marx’s…
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And wouldn’t lead to these results: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/khmer_rouge.jpg
Alas, everything goes catastrophically wrong when you try to bring Marxism into reality.
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Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked…
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http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
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[In the stages toward development of a Communist state] When the revolution is successful, the majority of the bourgeois class remains. In the words of Karl Marx, they must be “swept out of the way and made impossible.” If this is not done, they will form the environment in which a substantial segment of the population is nurtured and will thus destroy the prospect of a perfect society.
The liquidation of the bourgeoisie is an essential step of the path to Communism. This is why Communism must kill…
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http://www.schwarzreport.org/resources/essays/why-communism-kills
The Communist regimes didn’t ban unions– they banned INDEPENDENT unions!
Did you ever read Marx’s mini-comics from when he was a teenager? Shit was INCREDIBLE.
Whatever man. EVERYONE knows that Engels did all the work, then Marx stole the original artwork and claimed all the credit.
Aw, you guys have the next Victorian “The Wire” book deal in the bag! Maybe like a Henry and Glen thing, but with Marx and… not Engels… maybe Otto von Bismarck?
But seriously folks, there were some other mass murderers in the 20th century. And other centuries. I don’t hear the capitalism-boosters crying about slaves and Indians.
I want a translation of this: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/japan/article5175853.ece
“all viable alternatives to capitalism are borrowing from the Marxist playbook, or reacting to it”
Well, yes, because all those theories are built on the idea of commodities and capital, they share the same assumptions. So when you look at a scale of economics, you see capitalism at one end and marxism at the other, and everything inbetween is defined by its relation to those two.
But the idea that Marxism was a revolution in economics is maybe an overstatement? Its a powerful alternative to capitalism, but its still a reaction to capitalism. In Kuhnian terms it works within the same paradigm, there’s no real paradigm shift in economic thinking caused by Marx. He simply shifts the drive for the accumulation of capital from the individual level to the societal level. Well, not so simply.
It brings to ming Zizek’s argument (thank you Noah!) that the portrayal of Hitler as having ‘balls’ is, amusingly, bollocks as “he did not really act, all his actions being fundamentally reactions”.
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Ben says:
I want a translation of this: http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/markets/japan/article5175853.ece
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Wonder where my “Marx for Beginners” ( http://www.amazon.com/Marx-Beginners-Rius/dp/0679725121 ) copy is stashed?
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But the idea that Marxism was a revolution in economics is maybe an overstatement? Its a powerful alternative to capitalism, but its still a reaction to capitalism. In Kuhnian terms it works within the same paradigm, there’s no real paradigm shift in economic thinking caused by Marx…
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Yes, and much is “of its time”; the worship of industrialization (leading to Communists countries ravaging the environment even more heedlessly than capitalist ones do), dubious “scientific” arguments…
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It brings to ming Zizek’s argument (thank you Noah!) that the portrayal of Hitler as having ‘balls’ is, amusingly, bollocks as “he did not really act, all his actions being fundamentally reactions”.
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Lord, yes. Goebbels’ diaries tell again and again of meeting with Hitler, trying to get him to do something about the gross incompetence of various Nazi bigwigs (Goering above all), Der Fuehrer agreeing about their faults, yet vacillating, indecisive; usually electing to do nothing.
I was surprised to learn that some historians considered Hitler to be a “weak dictator”, but there’s a case to be made.
Read ‘Inside the Third Reich’ by Albert Speer. Speer was in charge of industry, and he laments again and again about how trying to organise a structured wartime economy was frustrated by powerful industrialists.
He was astonished, after the war, to see the level of efficient organisation put in effect in the economies of Britain and the USA, those decadent democracies.
Having somebody who is insane in charge probably isn’t the best path to efficiency, overall.
Has anyone heard of Distributism? The Catholic quasi-private socialist concept?
Anyhow, I wonder if you all think that there was a real theory of economics, a nuanced philosophical approach to economics before Marx. There were terms and techniques in economics, but no vision of reality– that’s re: the paradigm shift issue.
There’s plenty of philosophical speculation in Adam Smith.
http://libertarianpapers.org/articles/2011/lp-3-11.pdf
Debunk this.
Jake, I’m fascinated by your apparent belief that a bunch of arts critics and comics folk will be interested in debating Marx on economics terms, or really willing (or able) to do so – and with a libertarian no less. We’re not economists. Marx was not just an economist; he was a social theorist, which is why we’re discussing him. Had you not noticed any of that? Doesn’t it seem dishonest to ask humanities people to debate in econ (not political economy, but econ) terms about someone who was only partially concerned with economics per se, and on a humanities site?
You’re trolling, regardless of whether you recognize it as such or not.
I don’t think he’s trolling! I’m at least somewhat interested in that article. Economics is only a fake science anyway; it’s basically social theory with pretensions.
And, for that matter, Bert has a degree in economics. So we’re not all unfamiliar!
For instance, for a start:
“the impossibility of rational economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth”
That’s the first objection…and it seems to assume that you can have rational economic calculation under capitalism. But Marx’s whole point is that what bourgeois capitalism thinks of as “rational” is not “rational” at all, but soaked in ideology and class interest. Claiming this is an error on Marx’s part isn’t refuting him; it’s buttressing his argument insofar as it does exactly what he says capitalist tools do — that is, attempting to naturalize ideology as objective fact.
Ha! This is just funny:
“Meanwhile, at every step along the way to economic freedom in each productive nation, capitalism pronounced its benefits in increased production, leaps in individual freedom, surfeits of marketable goods, technological innovation, improvements in medicine, and the spread of material wealth throughout the world.”
Marx is capitalism’s biggest booster! He wouldn’t be surprised at any of that.
Second…a lot of that has serious downsides and caveats. As just one example, has China’s free market moves resulted in leaps in individual freedom exactly? Has the U.S., bastion of the free market, really increased individual freedoms recently? Has the restriction on those freedoms had anything to do with the logic of an ever-expanding capitalist economy, in particular, perhaps, on a need for oil?
Ha! This is funny:
“the proletariat’s desire for an equal division of “profit”…is itself responsible for massive unemployment due to the
proletariat’s advocacy of State-imposed minimum wage restrictions”
That’s such bullshit. I just finished doing a bunch of research on minimum wage. The idea that minimum wage restrictions cause massive unemployment is a constantly reiterated and as far as I can tell largely nonsensical claim. In any case, the research is extremely unclear. I don’t think minimum wage prevents poverty either; it seems to mostly be an ideological argument on both sides.
…and he whines about the minimum wage. I just finished doing a bunch of research on the minimum wage. The claim that it causes unemployment to rise is really controversial and not especially true as far as I can tell. Minimum wage doesn’t seem to do a ton for poverty either; both sides seem to want to talk about it more for ideological reasons than practical ones…..
I have to go do other things….maybe I’ll get back to it….
Oh, and I love this:
“If Eagleton had the typically soft-spoken Milton Friedman in mind, he forgot to add the
blistering epithets “brilliant,” “logical,” and “Nobel Prize-winning economist” into the mix.”
Say what you will of Mr. Friedman, but he didn’t win a Nobel Prize. There is no Nobel Prize in economics. A minor point maybe…but I think it’s a fairly telling indication of how the accumulation of capital can distort supposedly neutral criteria such as “brilliant” and “logical.”
Uh, Noah:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_prize_economics
Friedman won it in 1976.
Uh, robert, that’s not really a Nobel Prize, its a Bankster prize with “Nobel” in the name.
“In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank instituted an award that is often associated with the Nobel prizes, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The first such prize was awarded in 1969. Although it is not an official Nobel Prize, its announcements and presentations are made along with the other prizes.”
cf. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/416856/Nobel-Prize
Well, the Nobel committee needs to take more active pains to dissassociate themselves from it. Just about everyone views it as part of the Nobel awards program, and the economics prize is administered along with the others.
Also, I don’t mean to pick nits, but I really don’t think the bankster types would give prizes to Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, regardless of how much they may value some of these economists’ work.
People do view it as part of the Nobel prize. The point is that Mr. Nobel himself did not believe that economics was on a par as a worthy object of promotion with peace, literature, and the sciences. But this is capitalism, so a bunch of bankers were able to modify Nobel’s intentions. It was a public relations coup, and has helped economics solidify its reputation as a scientific discipline.
That’s ideological consolidation in the interest of the haves. I don’t think Marx would be surprised.
The Nobel committee works happily with banks. I’m sure they don’t have any great desire to disassociate themselves from the economics prize.
Yes, it was a public relations coup, to advance the neoliberal mainstream approach to economics that elevates use of a blinkered mathematical modeling toolkit over the demands of the problem domain of economics.
It’s the end of history! Neoliberalism will march, march on, spreading through the world, like a liquid that changes shape to match the container it is in, until the world is dissolved and everyone has been turned into the Thing, from John Carpenter’s movie, The Thing
dfdf, that’s very funny, and I am a sucker for Thing references…but if you’re going to comment here, I need you to pick a name and stick with it. Aliases are okay, but your interlocutors need to know that they’re talking to the same person. Okay?
Darn it…what I mean is, you’re welcome to use an alias, but it needs to be the same one consistently.
Marx is a scum bag and im glad he’s dead
Well, given that he lived in the nineteenth century it would be uncanny if he were still alive. It’s hilarious to find someone in 2015 gloating over the death of Karl Marx.
Hello,
This is a lovely story about a father and a son sharing an intimate moment. However, for some reason, you’ve left out the facts.
Marxism left countries devastated and in ruin! More unequal than ever before, although admittedly this is not what Marx had in mind, but his theory did cause nothing but destruction.
Did you mention to your son that thanks to Capitalism your son could have the opportunity to own a factory?
Realistically if we lived in a Marx’s world, everyone would be equal and there would be no aspiration. However, thanks to handy Capitalism we have an aspirational society who can and have achieved more than every before.
Check your facts!
Thank God capitalism has never caused horror or destruction by, for example (just as an abstract exercise) enslaving generations of people or encouraging imperial depredations. Then things might be complicated….