"Capitalism + Marx = Happiness" ?

As we all learned in class, Capitalism - according to Marx - always leads to unequal distribution of goods and therefore to a clash between the two classes in a society. Before that happens, Capitalism will probably try to survive by all means, for example such as creating social welfare systems, health care and progressive taxes. In Marx‘ logic, these kind of small improvements won‘t avoid the big revolution that is gonna come at the end of Capitalism, but just delaying it.

What I was thinking about was, if it is really necessary for the capitalistic system to end up in a revolution - even if this is still far away - or if there is any way to use the advantages of this well-going system and to combine it with another theory, maybe with Communism. Even though, I know that Dr. J really does not like this kind of combination of theories, because they are mostly contradictory, I would like to think about that in the following passage.

I guess, we can all agree that Capitalism has big merits, such as the omnipresent competition in nearly every field, which leads to better, faster products and a higher efficiency. It also leads to the fact that people work better, but why does it so? Well, the basic reason for that is fear: Fear of not being able to afford the necessary things to survive. Of course, that is Capitalism on the lowest level. On a higher (financial) level, the reason for that is the belief that we need certain goods (advertisement plays a big role here). One could argue that we actually don‘t need the majority of these goods, but in my opinion, humankind never lived on such a high standard of living quality then nowadays. Therefore, progress and development could be considered as intrinsic goods.

The bad sides caused by the omnipresent competition are also well-known, such as poverty, unequal distribution of goods and social injustice. If we take a look at the different kinds of Capitalism in the world, we see that Capitalism has very diverse faces. In Political Sciences, one distinguishes between the so-called LME (Liberal Market Economies) and the CME (Coordinated Marked Economies). The most important LMEs are the USA and the UK, which are famous for their very liberal and market-driven economy, which also means that social welfare-systems don't play a big role. CMEs, such as Germany but even more the Scandinavian countries, have very different preconditions and have built systems, which have a very high rate of happiness in their society, due to very just welfare systems. These examples show us that it is indeed possible to change the hardest liberal Capitalism into some system that generates “the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people”.

Do you think, Capitalism has a chance to survive, if it changes and faces its problems or will it go down, like Marx foresaw?