Karl Marx: It's Exploitation!
"The proletariat has nothing to lose but their chains"
Karl Marx, a German economist and political scientist who lived from 1818 to 1883, looked at capitalism from a more pessimistic and revolutionary viewpoint. Where Adam Smith saw harmony and growth, Marx saw instability, struggle, and decline. Marx believed that once the capitalist (the guy with the money and the organizational skills to build a factory) has set up the means of production, all value is created by the labor involved in producing whatever is being produced. In Marx's view, presented in his 1867 tome Das Kapital (Capital), a capitalist's profits come from exploiting labor—that is, from underpaying workers for the value that they are actually creating. For this reason, Marx couldn't abide the notion of a profit-oriented organization.
This situation of management exploiting labor underlies the class struggle that Marx saw at the heart of capitalism, and he predicted that that struggle would ultimately destroy capitalism. To Marx, class struggle is not only inherent in the system, because of the tension between capitalists and workers, but also intensifies over time. The struggle intensifies as businesses eventually become larger and larger, due to the inherent efficiency of large outfits and their ability to withstand the cyclical crises that plague the system. Ultimately, in Marx's view, society moves to a two-class system of a few wealthy capitalists and a mass of underpaid, underprivileged workers. |
Marx predicted the fall of capitalism and movement of society toward communism, in which “the people” (that is, the workers) own the means of production and thus have no need to exploit labor for profit. Clearly, Marx's thinking had a tremendous impact on many societies, particularly on the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) in the twentieth century.
In practice, however, two events have undermined Marx's theories. First, in socialist, centrally planned economies have proven far less efficient at producing and delivering goods and services—that is, at creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people—than capitalist systems. Second, workers' incomes have actually risen over time, which undercuts the theory that labor is exploited in the name of profit. If workers' incomes are rising, they are clearly sharing in the growth of the economy. In a very real sense, they are sharing in the profits. While Marx's theories have been discredited, they are fascinating and worth knowing. |
This is important to our unit because of Karl Marx's influence of economics at the time. He is considered to be one of the greatest philosophers of all time along with Adam Smith.