Marxism vs. Capitalism

What Was Karl Marx’s View Of Capitalism?

In simple terms, Marx’s ideas are about how capitalism changes society, creates inequality, and leads to conflict between the rich and the poor. He believed this conflict would eventually lead to a revolution where the workers take control.

Karl Marx, in his work “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” talks about how capitalism, the economic system where individuals or companies own businesses, changes society.

He says capitalism was a step up from the old system (feudalism) because it used resources more efficiently. But, just like feudalism, capitalism was creating its own problems that would eventually lead to its downfall.

Marxism is a conflict perspective that argues that the working-class, the proletariat, is exploited by the capitalist class, who profit from their labor.

Karl Marx asserted that capitalism is a system that alienates the masses and that workers do not have control over the goods they produce for the market.

Marism is critical of capitalism because the people who are the laborers behind the goods and services lose their value over time. When once the workers would have crafted the whole product, they may now be reduced to producing one component on the production line.

Capitalism predisposes societies to unjust systems favoring a small group of people, the ruling class bourgeoisie, over the majority, the working class proletariat.

The Bourgeoisie

In capitalism, the bourgeoisie, sometimes called the capitalists, own the means of production. They are the owners of capital and can acquire the means of creating goods and services, such as natural resources or machinery.

With their capital, the bourgeoisie can purchase and exploit labor power, using the surplus value that their employees generate to accumulate or expand their capital (Wolf & Resnick, 2013).

The key differentiation between the bourgeoisie and other social elites is this ownership of the means of production.

Managers of the state or landlords, for example, are not part of the bourgeoisie because capitalists must be actively involved in capital accumulation by using money to organize the means of production and employ and exploit labor to further generate capital.

Marx believed that the bourgeoisie began in medieval Europe with traders, merchants, craftspeople, industrialists, manufacturers, and so on who could increase wealth through industry. These individuals employed labor to create capital (Wolf & Resnick, 2013).

The Proletariat

The second major class in Marxism is the proletariat, which owns their labor but does not have any means of production. Because these workers have no property, they must find employment in order to survive and obtain an income.

The exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalist, however, means that the proletariat is unable to earn enough to acquire his own means of production.

Because he does not own the means of production, he does not have all of the factors of production. This keeps him in a continual cycle of exploitation by capitalists (Wolf & Resnick, 2013).

Being confined to a component means that workers lose value and are potentially less skilled when seeking other employment (Chiapello, 2013).

Proletariat Revolution

Marxists see capitalism as an unstable system that will eventually result in a series of crises. The more that capitalism grows, the more people take advantage of it, and the more oppressed, degraded, and exploited the proletariat will be (Marx, 1873).

Marx explains that competition between business owners would lead to fewer people owning more and more wealth.

These business owners, or capitalists, always look for ways to cut costs and make more money. This would lead to too many goods being produced, causing a crisis. The businesses that couldn’t keep up would fail, increasing wealth concentration.

Eventually, capitalism will result in a revolt by the proletariat, according to Marxists. This will lead to dismantling capitalism to make way for a socialist or communist state.

As capitalism grows, the middle class (like shopkeepers and small business owners) would shrink, and more people would become part of the working class, or proletariat.

These workers would live in similar conditions, work in factories where their skills don’t matter much, and earn low wages. Marx believed this would lead to a society divided into two main groups: the capitalists and the proletariat.

In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx and Engels proposed that the proletariat revolution was inevitable and would be caused by the continued exploitation of the capitalists. The workers will eventually revolt due to increasingly worse working conditions and low wages.

Marx thought that workers would fight back if they realized they were being exploited. At first, this might be individual workers against their bosses, but eventually, workers would form unions to protect their interests.

However, Marx believed that unions were not enough. He argued that workers needed to form a political movement, led by the Communist Party, to fight against the capitalists on a national and even international level.

Marx believed capitalists would try to delay this revolution by changing the system or exploiting other countries.

But he thought that eventually, the workers would rise and overthrow the capitalists. This revolution would be violent because the capitalists would not give up their power easily. They controlled not just the wealth, but also the government, religion, and even the family structure.

Marx argued that a social revolution would mean changing the existing social and political system from a capitalist to a communist society. A communist society means there are no social classes or private property.

The result of the revolution is that capitalism will be replaced by a classless society in which private property will be replaced with collective ownership. This will mean that society will become communist.

Communism

Communism refers to a political and social arrangement in societies characterized by State control of the means of production and a monopoly of political power by the Communist party.

Communism is a system under which the means of production are publicly owned and controlled by the government to meet the people’s needs.

Derived from the work of Marx, the implementation of communism involved totalitarian control of society. The empirical manifestation of communism was in the Soviet Union and the socialist organizations of eastern Europe until their collapse in 1989-90. Communism continues to dominate China (People’s Republic of China), North Korea, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic), and Cuba.

Under capitalism, private owners produce goods and services they can sell in an open market, with prices and wages set by supply, demand, and competition. Under socialism, however, the means of production are commonly owned, and the government controls part or all of the economy.

Capitalists argue that private ownership allows individuals to use resources more efficiently than the government, meaning that the free market decides who receives profits and who does not.

However, communists argue that capitalism’s private ownership allows relatively fewer wealthy people to control most of the properties, meaning that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

A communist society would mean there would be no inherited wealth, there would be steeply graduated income tax, centralized control of the banking, communication, and transport industries, as well as free public education (Marx & Engels, 2019).

Instead, private property will be replaced with collective ownership, meaning that the means of production will come to a common agreement. Under communism, there would be no exploitation of the labor of others. Instead, accumulated labor is a means of widening and enriching the workers’ existence (Marx & Engels, 2019).