In a recent exchange on social media, a self-professed socialist stated, “Capital is most definitely a dictatorship and capital will never be able to regulate away monopolies because they will always have more political power so long as the proletariat permits them to accumulate capital.”

Response by Hugh Gorhill:

For starters the “theory of the division of labor” like most cynical theories out of the new Hegelians is nonsense.

As regards to your asinine assertion about capital, sorry, but “capital” doesn’t send people to gulags because they don’t possess “class A consciousness” or starve entire nations. “Capital” is just a tool, not a moral agent.

And therefore it’s asinine to even argue that it’s supposed to be “capital’s” job to “regulate away monopolies” when capitalism itself doesn’t even argue such a thing to begin with. It’s nothing but a straw man fallacy.

Free market economics is the default state of affairs for any and hall human economic interactions. Its morality is based on that of reciprocity. You either play the game fairly, honestly, and forthrightly and you satisfy your customer’s demands and succeed; or you are dishonest, corrupt, and as such the market will have nothing to do with you and you eventually fail.(That is unless you are a corporation with all the associated government protections from liability, where you can have government bureaucrats concoct ridiculous regulations that either cut out your competition or allows you to swallow them up, that allow you excuses to raise your prices through business taxation, that grant you ridiculous patent protections, etc…., but sure, its “capital’s” fault.  )

Any and all monopolies that have ever existed don’t have “political power”(“political power” itself is something that really doesn’t exist except in the minds of people already preoccupied and obsessed with power to begin with), they derive it from corrupt politicians.

Without corrupt government bureaucrats to interfere in the market and curry favors corrupt corporations have to resort to actually satisfying the demands of the market, or suffer collapse under the top-heavy weight of their own ineptitude.

There’s not a single Socialist or communist country that ever existed where the Socialists didn’t accumulate capital amongst themselves after they monopolized (oh, I’m sorry, “nationalized”) everything in the name of “the people” and then screwed over the people while the Party elites lived in high luxury.

Socialism doesn’t, nor can it EVER, solve the problem of inequality. For starters it doesn’t even know how, and it ADMITS that to even try and assert a positive image of the communist utopia is pointless. So its philosophically incoherent.

Second, inequality is a problem WAAAY deeper than mere economics so socialism was doomed to fail anyways even from a practical standpoint. So it’s ethically a failure.

It’s a moral failure precisely because its greed and lust for power taints any and all “good” intentions it might claim to have.

I get it, Socialists and Socialism have been predicting the failure of “Advanced capitalism” for decades, all of them falling woefully short. Not only has “advanced capitalism” made the proletariat successful and content(how HORRIBLE) but its LITERALLY bringing more and more people out of extreme poverty world wide faster than ever.

When it comes to predictions Karl Marx is to economics what Benny Hinn is to “the Rapture” and eschatology.