Is Marx's Criticism of Capitalism Relevant Today?

Is Marx's Criticism of Capitalism Relevant Today?

Introduction

Marx made a critique of the capitalist system that seeks the greatest benefit at the lowest cost and will seek to organize the working class to end capitalism, because of all evil. The Marxian theory is an economic theory, based on the analysis of the texts of political economy, not on an analysis of the real capitalist mode of production. The essence of reality lies in the economics of Marx. Marx understood capitalism as a system of oppression. Instead, however, that Marx examined the mechanisms for value-added production and made it clear that the capitalist, by which, inherent in the capitalist system, pressure to overcome the competition, was forced to speak to the accumulation of capital (Eldred, 2000 95). The competition as a system element, not the greed of the capitalists was doing, the economics of continuous innovation. Marx saw the problem of the capitalist system in the anarchy of the market.

Marx critique of capitalism has not only had an impact on the discipline of philosophy and economics, but also an impact upon the globalised world. Marx was critical of economic doctrines of his day, arguing that they confused a particular historical situation for the natural, universal condition of humanity. Marx argued that political economist theories failed as they “assumed the actual fact of capitalist production, rather than seeing it as one particular and historically specific form of production”. Marx idea of capitalism is a historically specific mode of production, in which capital is the means of production (Carson, 2007, 52). For Marx, this production cannot be defined by technology, but in the way production is owned or controlled, and by the social relationships between each individual characterized by the process of this production. This suggests that social and historical development can be explained in means of economic and class factors. In the eyes of Marx economic factors are based on the idea of exchange, and that exchange in capitalism takes the form in the exchange of property.

Private property is an essential feature of capitalism. Marx critiques the capitalist notion that the notion of 'Private Property' is the rational system for Exchange. Marx stresses “private property is only maintained in capitalist societies by an elaborate system of laws supported by the power of the state”. For free market capitalist such as Adam Smith, it is the acquisition of private property that motivates people to produce wealth, but this acquisition will bring about the “breakdown of genuine social relationships” (Ryner, 2000, 190). Why does Marx believe this? The answer Marx gives is a logical one; ones person's ownership of an object denies its benefits to another creating conflict and producing fierce competition over resources. Marx explains that in the case when property is actually the product of another's work, it becomes human alienation. In such a scenario under capitalism, labor is effectively reduced to a mere commodity and work becomes depersonalized.

In this view, workers efforts enrich and empower those ...