School of Life did a pretty good video explaining Karl Marx’s ideas; as someone with an economics background, I do have a different take on some of the points made…. And before you ask, no I’m not a Communist. Nor am I a “Commie-Lover”… just watch the video.
Communism has failed, and spectacularly so, causing mass loss of life by:
Poorly allocating capital, causing famines.
Dictatorial rule and corruption, causing a loss of freedoms and mass executions.
However, the failure of communism does not make its criticisms of capitalism any less true. While capitalists argue that the growing wealth of the 0.01% is a result of crony capitalism, and that our malaise would be solved if legislation was swiftly enacted, Marx would warn that crony capitalism is the ultimate end goal of capitalism.
1) Alienation
The first point made by Marx, would be that work could be the source of our greatest joy; however, fulfillment can only come about if workers “see themselves in the objects they have created.”
Capitalism, however, is all about maximum efficiency- and therefore maximum profits. This means that workers are rarely given the opportunity to build something or do something entirely on their own; specialization essentially forces employees to serve as cogs in a larger machine, never seeing the whole product. As a result, workers are often unable to see their value or themselves in the creation itself. This was the problem of factory workers at the time (and today) and the problem any cubical worker understands very well.
2) Modern Work Is Insecure
Indeed, you would not be wrong to believe that your contributions are ultimately meaningless; as a cog in the machine, you can be easily replaced with any other cog… and made redundant as soon as your employer decides to cut costs or a new technology makes you obsolete.
On a fundamental level, we don’t like to feel this… easily replaced. We want to feel like the world has a place for us, a destiny; but capitalism means that we get rejected as soon as a new toy gets invented- this happens all the time; half of all jobs will be made obsolete in 11 years time. For those of you who insist that new jobs will arise: The statistics show that technology destroys more jobs than it creates.
3) Workers Stay Poor; Capitalists Get Rich
Where capitalists believe that the money they skim from the labor of others is a reward for hard work, Marx sees this as theft.
At a basic level, capitalism merely means paying a worker an amount that is less than what their labor is really worth, and pocketing the substantial difference.
4) Capitalism Is Unstable
Crisis is fundamental to capitalism; capitalism tends to bring about the over-production of useless products that nobody needs. This is called the misallocation of capital. A crisis occurs when the market (or the capitalists) realize that they’ve “invested” too much in producing over-priced products.
(The crisis is seen as a correction, a sudden shortage of stupidity, according to economists of the Austrian school of thought.
Mainstream Keynesian economists want stupidity to continue endlessly because it is the wealthiest institution that stands to lose the most.
Crony capitalism, in particular, would have their losses repaid with tax-payer money, hence the banker bailouts causing our crisis.)
The curse is also a blessing; the machines and technology which allow us to produce too much crap, should reduce the working hours of the common worker. If only we could allocate capital appropriately- and to do that we have distribute the profits among the people, rather than allow it to get absorbed by corporations.
5) Capitalism Is Bad For Capitalists
The capitalist system forces everyone, and particularly capitalists themselves, to put money before everything else. Rather than being free to focus on relationships and more relaxing pursuits, our ability to create more crap has forced people to neglect the most fulfilling parts of life.
Where feminism was supposed to “free” women and allow them to work just like their male counterparts, Marx argues that true freedom would have meant that neither sex had to work; that women should not glorify being “free” to enslave themselves ( in economics, this sort of logic explains why some societies are forced to use child labor; of course there are other motivations for women to be independent from men, but the competition for jobs shrinks the wage a male would earn, partly explaining why, in most instances, both parents must work when supporting a family).
Marx’s Ideal Society
In Marx’s ideal society, there would be no private property, a steeply graduated income tax, and a government/ other strong authority that completely controls banking, communication and transport industries and free public education (which, as we know, ends rather poorly). People would work for leisure, would be able to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
Although his predictions have been alarmingly accurate, he simply had no idea how capitalism could be improved. However, understanding the problem is a step in the right direction, at least.
Sources: School of Life, Daily Mail
This Article (Learn Marxism In 10 Minutes) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author(CoNN) and AnonHQ.com.
I have often said that the problem with socialism (marxism) is that the people executing the philosophies are not Charles Marx himself. They follow his words and his philosophy but they are not the man himself. They literally do not have the same ideals as this man lived his life with and this is why attempts at Marxism has failed in the past as people almost always surely ended up getting greedy. Same can be argued of Capitalism in USA today I suppose.
The greatest thing about Charles Marx philosophies is the fact that he can explain his ideas of living in a perfect society. Jesus would describe it as paradise on earth, a capitalist would not give or share his/her power and you would equally decline to share what belonged to you. It’s a dog eat dog world, survival of the fittest and it controls the problems of over population, take a look at China over crowded and polluted. Super powers are now fighting for Land and outer space as they believe “sky’s the limit” and they do not have boundaries.
shut up
“Where feminism was supposed to “free” women and allow them to work just like their male counterparts . . .”
Academic, that is, non-pop-culture Feminism critiques this claim. Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir herself, being a woman cannot be defined by the cultural tropes perpetuated within our patriarchal society. Yes, we all gotta eat. Yet Feminist Philosophy goes deeper into the issues of identity than the much ballyhooed, superficial masks of society.