U.S. Government shuts down.

[FireIceTalon]

Who are you more upset with? The person who blindly seeks the best return for their investment, or the government (and their special interest lobbyists) for crafting laws which create unfairness and chaos?

How about both? It really doesn't make sense to be more angry at one over the other. One is the dominant social class, the other is the institutions of managers that protect and organize its affairs. I don't like the state anymore than most libertarians ostensibly do, but I also have a very different view and understanding of what the role of the state is than the libertarian viewpoint, which has the relationship between the state and the individual as the starting point for its framework. For Marxists, the fundamental contradiction that has shaped history's development and human relationships, the class struggle, is our starting point - the state certainly plays a very critical role in this, but for us it is a symptom and not a cause of the class struggle.

There was a time when capitalism was indeed a progressive system. Indeed, it has made and provided things that would have been impossible in any previous point of history. Besides, the capitalist stage of history is almost certainly necessary for a potential democratic socialist system to even be conceivable, much in the same way one must go through their teenage years to become an adult. Pretty much any Marxist will acknowledge this if they worth their salt. The development of capitalism, destructive and violent as it was, was a necessary a thing. The opportunities it created, such as freeing the vast majority of people from having to toil on farmlands for generations, under the thumb of an aristocratic class collecting high taxes from it, are unprecedented. If given the choice to live in Ancient Rome, England during the Middle Ages, or now....the choice is quite obvious.

However, all class systems are an antagonism by their very nature, and such a contradiction can never be sustained forever. Capitalism is no longer progressive, and therefore no longer necessary. In fact, it is become so decadent to the point where it is undesirable - this is the exact same thing that happened to feudalism when its class contradictions were no longer sustainable. Given the technology, knowledge, tools, and power structure of the modern state, it has many more creative ways of maintaining itself than prior modes of production did. But this doesn't mean it can escape its internal contradictions forever, nor does it mean that it is even desirable to want it to. The conditions of capitalism and its decadence have become untenable, in a political, economic, and ecological context - and they have been for a quite a while. The system creates new opportunities and living arrangements in urban settings and more access to resources for large populations. Yet, it also is reliant on an antagonistic and exploitative social relationship, by a constant need (and it this point, a lust) to generate profits, that ends up denying a large amount of people these possibilities. There is also a whole host of other concerns beyond the scope of discussion here really.

So, is capitalism the most superior system we have seen so far? Sure. But is it the most superior system that we could or ever will see for the rest of humankind? Extremely unlikely, and to think otherwise is quite deterministic.