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,” describes how capitalism reshapes society. It was a real advance on feudalism.

Capitalism used resources far more efficiently than the system it replaced. But it creates its own problems, Marx believed, serious enough to eventually cause its own downfall.

Marxism itself is a conflict perspective. It holds that the working class, the proletariat, is exploited by the capitalist class. This exploitation is not incidental. It predisposes capitalist societies to unjust systems that favor a small ruling-class minority, the bourgeoisie, over the working-class majority.

Karl Marx also asserted that capitalism alienates the masses, leaving workers without control over the goods they produce for the market. Where an artisan once crafted an entire product, industrial workers are now reduced to producing a single component on the production line.

They lose the value their skilled labor once carried.

The Bourgeoisie

In capitalism, the bourgeoisie, sometimes called the capitalists, own the means of production. They hold the capital needed to create goods and services, such as natural resources or machinery.

Their capital lets the bourgeoisie purchase and direct labor. From that labor they extract surplus value, the gap between what a worker’s labor actually produces and the wage the worker is paid (Resnick & Wolff, 2013).

The bourgeoisie accumulate and expand their capital using that surplus. This ownership of the means of production is what sets the bourgeoisie apart from other social elites.

Managers of the state or landlords are not part of the bourgeoisie for this reason. A capitalist must be actively involved in capital accumulation.

This means organizing the means of production, and employing and exploiting labor, to generate still more capital.

Marx believed the bourgeoisie began in medieval Europe with traders, merchants, craftspeople, and industrialists who increased wealth through industry. These individuals employed labor to create capital (Resnick & Wolff, 2013).

The Proletariat

The second major class in Marxism is the proletariat. Proletarians own their own labor but no means of production.

Because these workers have no property of their own, they must find employment to survive. Exploitation by the capitalist then keeps them from ever earning enough to acquire their own means of production.

This traps the proletariat in a continual cycle. Without means of production of their own, workers cannot escape dependence on a capitalist employer (Resnick & Wolff, 2013).

Being confined to a single component of the production process also costs workers skill. It leaves them less versatile, and worth less, when they go looking for other employment (Chiapello, 2013).

Proletariat Revolution

Marxists see capitalism as an unstable system.

It will eventually result in a series of crises, Marx argued, as the proletariat grows more oppressed, degraded, and exploited.

Competition between business owners leads to fewer people owning more and more wealth. Capitalists constantly look for ways to cut costs and make more money.

This drives overproduction.

Too many goods get made, a crisis follows, and businesses that cannot keep up fail, concentrating wealth further still.

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

As capitalism grows, the middle class of shopkeepers and small business owners shrinks. More people join the working class, or proletariat.

These workers live in similar conditions. They work in factories where their individual skills matter little, and earn low wages.

Marx believed this would divide society into just two groups: the capitalists and the proletariat.

In the Communist Manifesto, written in 1848, Marx and Engels proposed that the proletariat revolution was inevitable. It would come. Continued exploitation, they argued, plus increasingly worse conditions and low wages, would eventually push workers to revolt.

Marx thought that workers would fight back once they realized they were being exploited. At first, this might be individual workers against their bosses.

Eventually, though, Marx believed workers would form unions to protect their interests. But he thought unions alone were not enough.

He argued that workers needed a political movement, led by the Communist Party, to fight the capitalists nationally and internationally. Marx believed capitalists would try to delay revolution by changing the system or exploiting other countries.

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

Marx argued that a social revolution would replace the capitalist system with a communist one, ending social classes and private property altogether.

The result: capitalism gives way to a classless society. Private property is replaced with collective ownership, and society becomes communist.

Communism

Communism refers to a political and social arrangement in which the state controls the means of production. A single Communist party holds all political power.

The means of production are publicly owned. Government, not private owners, controls them, in order to meet the people’s needs.

Communism in practice, derived from the work of Marx, meant totalitarian control of society. Its clearest example was the Soviet Union. Socialist states across eastern Europe followed the same path, until their collapse in 1989-90.

Communist parties still govern China, North Korea, Laos, and Cuba today. China is the notable exception.

It has introduced substantial market reforms since 1978, alongside continued one-party rule.

Under capitalism, private owners produce goods and services for an open market. Prices and wages are set by supply, demand, and competition.

Socialism works differently. The means of production are held in common, and government controls part or all of the economy.

Capitalists argue that private ownership is more efficient than government control. On this view, the free market alone should decide who receives profits.

Communists disagree. They argue that private ownership lets a small number of wealthy people control most property, so the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.

A communist society would abolish inherited wealth. Income tax would be steeply graduated, and banking, communication, and transport would come under centralized control.

Public education would be free (Marx & Engels, 1967). Private property would give way to collective ownership, decided by common agreement over the means of production.

There would be no exploitation of others’ labor. Instead, accumulated labor becomes a means of widening and enriching every worker’s existence (Marx & Engels, 1967).