Response to "Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts"

While reading Peter McLaren’s “Critical Pedagogy: A Look at the Major Concepts," I thought about the comment I made in class recently about how capitalism was the worst economic system except for all of the others. The more I read, the more I questioned whether capitalism was really that bad.

I think that capitalism is necessary because, as an increasingly globalized society and world, we have dug ourselves too far into the hole to try to dig out. I'm not advocating for a retreat on labor rights, or hyper-inflated corporate profit margins, but I think that society has to be ordered to exist in any form like that of almost any society we know of.

What would an alternate society would need to survive? Someone would have to grow the wheat and another harvest the grain, someone would have to run the orchard and another pick the fruit, etc. Can a society like anything in the last couple thousand years really function if the labor isn't divided among social classes? Could society support many humans (I think our current popular is unstable and will be brought down drastically by climate change regardless) without capitalism?

I recently took an ethics test (http://selectsmart.com/philosophy/) that identified my ideology as being in line with Bentham & J.S. Mill. I believe that the desire and search for pleasure is intrinsic with humanity, as evidenced by how pleasurable it is to eat when hungry, how pleasurable orgasms are, etc. At the risk of being an asshole, is it necessarily bad that some people are exploited for even more people to gain? If the horse isn't aware of the stick and at least gets to nibble on the carrot a little bit, is it all that bad if horse and rider travel ground? How objective is that ground, how subjective.. what is the value of it to the rider, to the horse? What I am getting at is.. if the farmer or migrant worker experiences pleasure on a semi-regular basis, what does it matter if it is an illusion brought forth through hegemony?

The matter is that a lot of those people may not have chosen to become a farmer and got 'forced' into it. Capitalism at least does an alright job in providing social mobility in the aspect that maybe half of the people in the system can, if dedicated to it, change roles. What I would like to see is a vastly improved capitalist society, where CEO to average employee salaries are less than 10:1, where social mobility is emphasized more, where the people farming or the people picking fruit can be unionized. I would like to see equal representation of peoples (i.e. male and female, white and black, straight or gay) in most fields of labor (the exception being with women in some jobs since males, due to sexual dimorphism, have 30% more muscle mass naturally and would be better suited for physical labor jobs). Such a society may be hard to achieve today, especially since we have so damn many people and, in a society with great social mobility, probably a lot of people don't want to pick fruit and won't. Should government subsidize undesirable jobs that are necessary? How would that affect the capitalist society?

With a society like that I think that the inherent pleasures that dictate life and society - the biological pleasures created by our bodies/minds - would be just as obtainable. However, more people would have more freedom to choose how they secured those pleasures.. which, strangely enough, is an idea I'd associate with capitalism.