When you think about it, the objection can't really be to profits. I've yet to hear any Democrat, or any other Leftist for that matter, complain when their own personal income is higher than their outlays. In fact they act to maximize this profit. The objection seems to be when other people or corporations have higher profits than they do. I'm not convinced that envy should be the basis of national industrial policy.
Capitalists profit from the surplus value of their workers, paying less than what they produce. They exploit the fact that others don't have the assets or capital to own the means of production
(the facilities and machinery) and then commodify and rent human beings in a "labor market" to work for them, in a totalitarian "state" or productive enterprise, whose only true purpose is to accumulate capital for the capitalist-master.
The relationship between employers and employees is a relationship between an exploiter and an exploitee. It's not much different than the relationship between salve-master and slave, or feudal lord and serf. A better system , without necessarily eliminating markets, would be to require every productive enterprise that requires several workers, to be organized as a worker-owned, democratically-run cooperative. This doesn't imply that there isn't a leadership structure, there is, but all leadership is elected and hence accountable to their subordinates.
There would still be markets and competition under this system, but there would be more democracy and less exploitation. The danger of cooperatives becoming predatory or lobbying the government to serve its vested interests at the expense of the public is still present, especially at a national scale, but its cronyism could be more manageable. Mitigating policies have to be enacted to deal with cronyism, an endemic symptom of capitalism.
Eventually, as automation becomes more advanced, all production can become publicly owned and managed by a democratic state, in collaboration with the cooperatives. The state is dangerous, so the people need to remain armed, and strict controls have to be in place to protect democracy. The people should use a very short leash, with their government. Easier said than done, but it can be done, if people are educated
(well-informed), responsive and vigilant.
Marx and Engels claimed that the state would eventually "wither away", but I find this opinion to be way too optimistic. I believe a state will always be needed, even when production is advanced enough to be fully controlled by the consumer. Even then you don't want an individual or one family, taking that Atomic Precision Manufacturing Machine, or Star Trek replicator and creating a nuclear weapon, destroying the whole space colony. So there has to be a state apparatus to regulate production, assuming that we live in a community with other human beings. Technology will inevitably, assuming it continues to develop, allow for individuals or a family, to live in a large spacecraft in deepspace or on some asteroid somewhere, isolated and away from others. There might be people who prefer to live as high-tech space-hermits.
I want to live in a 1980s theme park - a space colony, with 80s music playing in the background.
When the state misbehaves, you say "bye bye" and you leave and settle somewhere else, maybe a couple of light years away.
www.ralphnaderradiohour.com
What a load of hyperbolic nonsense.
