Paul Belanger refers to "unchallenged economic growth", suggesting that there it's little effective social regulation or coordination of the growth of the accumulation process in Canada. 23 Instead, as Friere points out, the important economic decisions--e.g. what is to be produced, how, by whom, where, in what quantity, etc.--are firmly in the hands of the, capitalist class, and according to the logic of the capitalist economic system, which individual members of this class violate on pain of their own extinction qua capitalists, their primary goal must be the maximization of private profit and not what Freire terms the "development of the collectivity" or the "collective good".24 Freire counterposes to this the model of a socialist economic structure, in which the surplus produced by the working class is directed toward the collective advancement of the society, and not to the private enrichment of the capitalist class:

If production is governed by the well-being of the total society, rather than by the capitalist..., then the accumulation of capital --indispensable to development--has a totally different significance and goal. The part of the accumulated capital that is not paid to the worker (i.e. surplus value--H.A.) is not taken from him but is his quota toward the development of the collectivity. And what is to be produced with this quota are not goods defined as necessarily saleable, but goods that are socially necessary 25

Competition

In a capitalist economy, the pursuit of profit pits industrialists and businessmen against one another in a competitive struggle which Marx in several passages likens to a military campaign (e.g. "the battle of competition*, and "the industrial war of capitalists among themselves*). 26 The immediate casualties are their workers, for owing the nature of competition, capitalists are driven to hold production costs to a minimum; this means they must reduce the size of their workforces as much as feasible, and pay those who remain as little as possible. 27

Concerning the drive to reduce the size of their workforces, Marx says:

This war has the peculiarity that the battles in it are won less by recruiting than by discharging the army of workers. The generals (the capitalists) vie with one another as to who can discharge the greatest number of industrial soldiers 28

They do this in large part through the introduction of labour-saving technological innovations. Instead of using technology to make the lives of their workers easier, or to increase the control of workers over the labour process, capitalists are compelled by competitive pressures to employ it to replace more skilled with less skilled workers, to squeeze the maximum output, from every minute of the workers' time, and above all, to get rid of workers. This is one of the principal reasons why unemployment is an endemic feature of capitalist economies, even during periods of relative prosperity. 29 In the decade of the 1970's and into the 1980's, the officially recorded unemployment rate has hovered between 5 and 8 per cent of the workforce in Canada, and recently has gone even higher. 30