Las vegas capitalism

You are not free to take any of these goods for your own use. Goods produced for the purpose of exchange are commodities , and capitalism is a system of generalized commodity production. While exchanges have existed for along time and many human societies have produced commodities on a large scale,, the primary goal in these original commodity exchanges was to use the commodity you got in the exchange.

For example, you trade a couple of dollars for a soda, which you enjoy after buying. Under capitalism, there is a constant drive to keep capital in motion and to increase its scale, known as capital accumulation. Capitalist production is organized around making as much money as possible through the production and sale of commodities and using that money to generate increasing profits..

This cycle goes on without end. Profit is king. Beyond this realm of commodities lie real people organized in specific ways. In the workplace, production is carried by workers who work for a capitalist. The capitalist is the owner of the workplace and tools, elegantly known as the means of production , used by the worker to produce commodities. The capitalist, on top of owning the means of production, also owns the commodities produced by the worker.

The worker has no ownership in this arrangement and is only entitled to the wage he earns for selling his labor to the capitalist. Here we see the two main social classes under capitalism socialists should know: the workers and the capitalists. These social classes are defined by their relation to production. The planetary boundaries are a set of boundaries with respect to nine different Earth system processes:. As detailed in the book, the planetary boundary of ocean acidification is determined based on the global mean saturation state of aragonite in surface seawater.

The pre-industrial value was 3. The threshold for this planetary boundary, which must not be crossed by declining, is set at 2. Magdoff and Foster also make note of natural resources and their limits.

Natural resources such as oil, gas, and minerals are limited to the quantity that currently exist, and their exhaustion would prevent future generations from being able to use them. For example, the authors note how overfishing is leading to the rapid depletion of ocean fish, almost to the point of extinction. By priming the reader with these boundaries and limits, Magdoff and Foster make their critique of capitalism much more impactful by exposing a fundamental contradiction between environmental sustainability and capitalism later on.

Production takes the material form of the production of commodities for a market with the aim of generating profit and promoting accumulation. Individuals in this system pursue their self-interest, checked only by their mutual competition and by the impersonal forces of the market. The critique of capitalism throughout the book is focused mainly on how production is organized under capitalism.

A capitalist system produces commodities, where a commodity is defined as a product that is produced for the purpose of exchanging it. The common but incorrect perception of capitalism is a dynamic of C-M-C, where a commodity is exchanged for money to buy another commodity.

C-M-C does not accurately describe capitalism because the end goal of this process is to use the commodity you bought. Under capitalism, the end goal of a transaction is for a capitalist to generate surplus value or profits, and this cycle repeats ad infinitum. Capitalists use capital e. The more capital you have, the more value and profit you can create.

It is a place to be experienced to believe the naysayers like me who do not sing praises about the city. The food is very mediocre. I stayed in a four star hotel which is a tourist haunt for the memorabilia that it holds and was grossly disappointed by the lack of good food choices. I am in good company with Julie Bindel who expressed aghast at the same. They play to escape, period. Problem gamblers provide the casinos with 30 to 60 percent of their profits.

And they are overwhelmingly machine gamblers. Their solitary, continuous, and rapid wagering on digitized gambling machines, with seductive refinements like apparent jackpot near misses, creates a trancelike state in which players became oblivious to anxiety, depression, and boredom.

Digitized machine gambling is as reliable as Valium and faster-acting.