Capitalism: For and Against - Assignment Example

BOOK REPORT/REVIEW PHILOSOPHY CAPITALISM: FOR AND AGAINST INTRODUCTION Ann Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom, in their Capitalism, For and Against: A Feminist debate, comes up with fully developed debate about the state of today’s capitalism, and whether or not it is good for women. Both Ann and Holmstrom give their argument about capitalism in different ways and perspectives. The two following their defense on their argument comes up with a book of substantive debate of issues of capitalism that are imagined to be already settled.

MAIN BODYAnn Cudds begins by defending capitalism for being an economic system that is completely and preferably good for women. She claims that it increases the quality of life for everyone by maximizing efficiency in production, innovation, and freedom. She also argues that it is increasing the life expectancy, lowering infant mortality and birth rates. Holmstrom on the other hand, takes the opposing view. She argues that capitalism necessarily creates externalities that the system never fully reckons with.

It increases alienation of the worker from the products of her labor, and increases the gaps between the rich and the poor, which are the outcomes of capitalism itself. According to Cudd who argues through an analysis that capitalism as being an ideal type and contemporary reality, which responds in advance to some of the standard critiques of capitalism as a system based on alienation of workers from the products of their labor and as fundamentally exploitative. She argues that feminism’s ideals of equality and freedom for all people to develop completely as human beings are best met by a capitalist system that rewards people for what they do rather than who they are.

Holmstrom on the other hand bases her argument as well in a critique that she calls “gangster capitalism” that is of continued primitive accumulation that now goes under the guise of Third World debt bondage and sweatshop labor, in which both have particular effects on women. Personal property is an individual property simply for one’s own use, whereas private property is a social aspect of property, which enables one man to subjugate the labor of another. It becomes a property, which is held onto by the capitalists, if the working class indeed had a right to acquire private property they would have nothing by which to make one submit his labor power to them.

Holmstrom believes that relying on preferences ignores the reality of adaptive preferences (the “sour grapes” phenomenon) and gives up all chances of an objective assessment of people’s lives. To show that ‘felt satisfaction’ and ‘objective wellbeing’ are not correlated, Holmstrom uses an example of women living in remote area in the most extreme poverty she had never seen, in complete ignorance of the outside world; in ill health and in total subjugation to all men of their community.

The women are property, breeding machines, whose existence is justified by the utility. Yet as striking as the awful conditions of their lives is the fact that all of the women we meet in the book, they were the only ones who told her they were happy. Holmstrom claims that friedman is connected to the economic regime put into place in the Chile after the overthrow of the Allende government. This is because most free market forms of capitalism existed in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship (which acted under the guidance of followers of Friedman known as the Chicago School of economist) overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Holmstrom explains “the rule by the rich”, she says that the role of ordinary people is a passive one, to enjoy its benefits simply as independent individuals. So as the political freedoms of limited government are certainly very important, just how much actual freedom and power they give to people depends on the social structure of which they are part. In capitalist democracies, their value is distinctly limited.Works citedAnn E. Cudd and Nancy Holmstrom, Capitalism: For and Against (ISBN: 9780521132114).