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Karl Marx: Capitalism
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Although the name of Karl Marx is anathema to most Americans, it belongs to a figure who launched one of the most searching attacks on the theory and practice of capitalism. Marx concluded that injustice and poverty are no mere accidental by-products of the system; they are essential elements within it. The capitalist venture is founded on false premises from the beginning.
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For Marx, this is the natural capacity for a physical activity, but it is intimately tied to the human mind and to human imagination: Marx wrote extensively about this in terms of the problem of "alienation." Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but developed a more materialist conception of this. For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own labour — one's capacity to transform the world — is tantamount to being alienated from one's own nature. Marx described this loss in terms of 'commodity fetishism' in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt. This disguises the fact that the exchange and circulation of commodities really are the product and reflection of social relationships among people. Under capitalism, social relationships of production, such as among workers or between workers and capitalists, are mediated through commodities, including labour, that are bought and sold on the market.
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The systematic reappraisal of materialistic socialism, at which Marx aimed, progressed in fragmented form. In 1859 he published Zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, which contains the seed of his principal work, Das Kapital. Marx himself only published the first volume (1867), but Engels, using Marx's notes and drafts, completed vols. 2 (1885) and 3 (1895). In his theory of production, based on a dialectical triad, his only concession to Hegel, Marx distinguishes between the condition of production (Produktionsverhältnisse) and the efficiency of production (Produktionskräfte). He traces their historical development in Hegelian fashion and speculates on their function in an age of rapid industrialization, in which the ‘material’ threatened to become more important than Man. He sees the beginnings of the expansion of productivity in the slavery of antiquity, and in feudalism he sees the precursor of capitalism.
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Marx ... uses this rhetoric ironically to develop his critique of bourgeois notions of emancipation. Marx points out that the bourgeois notion of freedom is predicated on choice (in politics, through elections; in the economy, through the market), but that this form of freedom is anti-social and alienating. Although Bauer and other liberals believe that emancipation means freedom to choose, Marx argues that this is at best a very narrow notion of freedom. Thus, what Bauer believes would be the emancipation of the Jews is for Marx actually alienation, not emancipation. After explaining that he is not referring to real Jews or to the Jewish religion, Marx appropriates this anti-Semitic rhetoric against itself (in a way that parallels his Hegelian argument that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction) by using "Judaism" ironically as a metaphor for capitalism. In this sense, Marx states, all Europeans are "Jewish."
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Marx argued that this alienation of human work (and resulting commodity fetishism) is precisely the defining feature of capitalism. Prior to capitalism, markets existed in Europe where producers and merchants bought and sold commodities. According to Marx, a capitalist mode of production developed in Europe when labor itself became a commodity — when peasants became free to sell their own labor-power, and needed to do so because they no longer possessed their own land. People sell their labor-power when they accept compensation in return for whatever work they do in a given period of time (in other words, they are not selling the product of their labor, but their capacity to work). In return for selling their labor power they receive money, which allows them to survive. Those who must sell their labor power are "proletarians".
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The real target of Marx's attack... was the system he observed at work in his own time-modem capitalism. Private property, the accumulation of wealth through prof fits by the few elite who owned industry, the paying of wages for labor-these practices constituted the real roadblock to any improvement in the worker's plight. Moreover, they were so wing the seeds of their own destruction. For capitalism operates according to laws as rigorous as those of a machine and grinds out inevitable effects. Wealth puts the entire locus of economic power at the disposal of the owners.. Their power is absolute.
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