THE MARXIST SYSTEM Economic (original) (raw)
Related papers
Capitalism and Inequality Re-Examined
Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics, of whom none was more wide-ranging than Karl Marx. Marx recognized that behind its ideological patina of freedom, capitalism, like the exploitative systems of slavery and feudalism, was a social system in which a small class extracted from the mass of producers practically all output above that necessary for bare subsistence. An elite's ability to do so was grounded in its monopoly ownership of the means of production. However, Marx, and other critics faulted it for more than its exploitation and extreme inequality. Sharing much with romanticism, they believed that its very institutions of private property and markets corrupt society and its members. Nevertheless, Marx in particular recognized that capitalism, unlike earlier exploitative systems, was radically dynamic, producing unprecedented wealth, while transforming not only all it inherited from the past, but also its own nature so as to eventually even empower the producers. Yet his anti-private property and anti-market animus led him to believe that empowered producers would abandon these capitalist institutions. He did not imagine that the dynamism, wealth, and potential freedom that capitalism was delivering might have little chance of flourishing in the absence of these institutions. This article claims that Marx and other critics were wrong to fault capitalism's central institutions for the injustices that accompanied them. These institutions are not the problem. Instead it is the inequality that co-evolved with them and enables them to be used for exploitation. Ever since capitalism came to be recognized as a new economic system, it has had vociferous critics. It has been accused of generating inequality, grinding poverty, debased and alienated work, macroeconomic instability, destruction of community, more egotistic humans, and ecological devastation. For many of its critics, capitalism is not just exploitative but dehumanizing as well. The rejection of capitalism has often meant rejection of its fundamental institutions of markets and private property. However, most of the major faults identified by critics are not due to these institutions, but to the inequality that co-evolved with them and which enables an elite to use them to exploit workers and destroy the environment. Because many critics confuse the instruments with the cause, they advocate rejection of the full institutional order. Inequality has, of course, always characterized capitalism. Capitalism evolved with the rise of two new classes, one owning and controlling the means of production, the other dispossessed of all but its ability to labor. Inequality in income and privilege are the result of this specific form of wealth inequality and serve to reinforce it. It is from this extreme inequality in ownership and control of the means of production that the negative consequences of capitalism flow.
Marx and the critique of capitalism
In this article excerpted from the International relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity, edited by Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith. It examines Marx’s arguments against capitalism. For a summary of ideology opposed to capitalism. Criticism of Capitalism ranges from expressing disagreement with the principles of capitalism in its entirety, to expressing disagreement with particular outcome of capitalism. In discussions of world politics, it is not uncommon for Marxism to be dismissed out of hand as being preoccupied with economics rather than politics, and concerning itself with domestic rather than international social relations. In this article I will suggest to the contrary that Marxist theory aims at a critical understanding of capitalism as an historically particular way of organizing social life, and that this form of social organization entails political, cultural, and economic aspects which need to be understood as a dynamic ensemble of social relations not necessarily contained within the territorial boundaries of nation states. Viewed in this way, Marxism can yield insights into the complex social relationships—on scales from the workplace and the household to the global—through which human beings produce and reproduce their social relations, the natural world, and themselves. Marx was one of the most incisive critics of a peculiarly modern form of social life capitalism. For Marx, capitalism was not to be confused with markets or exchange, which long predated capitalism. Rather, capitalism represented a form of social life in which commodification had proceeded to such a degree that human labour itself was bought and sold on the market. One of Marx’s central insights was that this situation presupposed the development of historically specific class-based relations and powers: the concomitant development of capital—socially necessary means of production reconstituted as the exclusive private property of a few—and wage labour as the compulsory activity of the many. Under the class relations of capitalism, direct producers are not personally tied to their exploiter, as were slaves in bondage to their master or feudal serfs bound to the lord’s estate.
Karl Marx's Theory of Capitalism Exposition, Critique, and Appraisal
This book gives a clear synthesis of Marx’s theory of Capitalism and its relation with economic theory as it evolved over the course of the last 300 years. It places Marx’s though in perspective, comparing it with the main aspects of the economic theories that preceded it, including not only the Classical Adam Smith and David Ricardo but also economists like Cantillon, Turgot, and Ramsay that Marx chose to ignore with respect to the crucial issue of entrepreneurship because it was incompatible with his Theory of Surplus Value. But the book also contrasts Marx’s theory with Walras’, the Neoclassical economist whose influence on contemporary mainstream economic theory was most lasting. The analytical aspects of Marx’s theory are rigorously expressed by means of the technique of Input-Output Analysis, which is explained from the most elementary level in order to make the book self-contained. Each of the multiple topics of Marx’s complex and refined theory is explained in detail, including his theory of money, the heterogeneity in kinds of labor and in productive techniques, the turnover of capital, Simple and Extended Reproduction, his theory of the economic cycle, his theory of ground rent, his theory of productive and unproductive labor, and his view of the main tendencies of capitalist society. The book is structured in accordance with the development process of Marx’s thought. Hence, it begins with the life project he generated in his youth and drove him from the study of history and philosophy to that of Political Economy, on the one hand, and political praxis, on the other. Hence, Parts I, II, and IV of the book respectively address A) the philosophical-methodological foundations of his scientific endeavor (his Historical Materialism); B) his scientific theory of capitalist society as expressed in Capital; and C) his political thought and praxis, which had enormous effects over the course of the 20th century. Part III of the book addresses our critique of Marx’s theory of Capitalism. Beyond our criticisms, however, the book shows that Marx made important contributions to the comprehension of the functioning of Capitalism in the more conventional part of his theory, which we denominate ‘exoteric’ in order to contrast it with his ‘esoteric’ Theory of Surplus Value which was the foundation of his view of the exploitation of wage labor in Capitalism.
Karl Marx (1818 -1883) was a German philosopher who endorsed the idea that socialism, and eventually communism, would succeed capitalism as the ultimate economic system. Throughout his academic career, Marx's Capital (1873) provides one of the most comprehensive sets of criticisms against capitalism. Marx argues that capitalism involves not only the exchange of commodities, but also the advancement and transformation of capital, in order to generate profit. Marx uses the labor theory of value to criticize the way capitalism makes profit through the exploitation of workers, which method is criticized by many economists for neglecting the importance of capital ownership. Marx also criticizes capitalism of alienating workers and taking away their power of self -actualization. This essay attempts to re -examine and justify both criticisms.
Applying Marx’s Critique of Political Economy to his Critique of Capitalism
Conference Paper, 2024
In this paper, I argue that Marx's critique of capitalism is vulnerable to his critique of 'bourgeois' political economy: not least, because it presumes a naturalistic conception of productiveness-centred on labour-taken from political economy. In contrast, Marx's critique of the latter presumes a historically variable social conception of productiveness, which condemns political economy for naturalizing the productiveness of capital Marx could have avoided this inconsistency by acknowledging the historically specific social reality of capital's productiveness and grounding his critique of it in a historically specific social(ist) alternative. Instead, he resorts to a naturalistic conception of labour's productive powers, which falsifies capital's self-valorizing ones. As such, Marx's mature economic writings contain two incompatible theories of value. On the one hand, a labour theory of value (LTV) grounded in labour's material and transhistorical productiveness, which forms the basis for his critique of capitalism and, on the other, a capital theory of value (CTV) grounded in capital's historically specific social productiveness, which forms the basis for his critique of political economy. I shall begin with the latter, less well-known of the two. Marx's (social and historical) critique of political economy In the Grundrisse, Marx critiques political economy for presenting production '… as encased in eternal natural laws independent of history, at which opportunity bourgeois relations are then quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded' (Marx 1973: 87). Above all, he critiques his economic predecessors for equating capital with produced means of production-to the point of treating early-human hunting-tools as capital (Marx 1976: 291). In opposition to which, he