Philosophy: Marx's Capitalism

PHILOSOPHY; MARX’S CAPITALISM
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Marx propounded his economic theory which is referred to as “a Critique of Political Economy” between 1857 and 1867. The theory is a well defined and structured as a logical assortment of original concepts as well as analyses founded on Marx’s opinion of value and surplus-value. Marx considers capitalism as fundamentally distinctive from other production modes. This is mainly so due to market anarchy and partly as a result of capitalist exploitation. Although capitalism is a derivative attribute of market anarchy, it is distinctive by itself. Marx’s writings have attracted the attention of various professionals across the world. His work and life has attracted the attention of trade unionists, social scientists, militants in environmental causes or anti-capitalist as well as many others. Marx was convinced that capitalism is both unjust and historically destined to collapse from its internal contradiction. This analysis has met some criticism from many people and I also don’t agree with his analysis because capitalism is alive and well. This essay is aimed at demonstrating the Marx’s analysis of capitalism as well as the critics of his analysis.
Capitalism refers to an economic system one that is inherently prone to crisis. There are forces that make it unstable, self-destructive and anarchic. Capitalism was of this nature over 150 years ago during the time Karl Marx and his associate Frederick Engels and so is it today. Marx described capitalism as a society which has been involved in conjuring up gigantic ways of achieving production and exchange. In actual sense, the modern world’s wild stock slumps and booms, long term un-employments and recurring layoffs, power blackouts and corporate scandals describe the state of capitalism. Economic crises, depression and recession were part of capitalism during its initiation and despite promises to improve the situation the state of capitalism has remained the same.
Crisis Theory: The Significance
For one to understand Marx’s analysis of capitalism as well as his arguments for the necessity and possibility of evolutionally changes, it is critical to understand the drive behind crisis. Marx argues that presence of poverty or inequality alone is not responsible for making workers reject capitalist system. These challenges have existed in everyday workings in any ‘vibrant’ capitalist economy. Such challenges have direct ideological and social impacts leading to instability, insecurity and ruin associated with economic crises that affects the lives of those people who are working. Marx argued that capitalism dismisses all security and fixity on the side of a laborer through constantly threatening to snatch from him his means of survival making him superfluous. It is evident how the class antagonism vents its anger in the persistent human sacrifices among the working class. This takes place in the most reckless extravagant of labor power as well as in the devastation associated with social anarchy which renders all economic advancements into what is seen as social calamity.
In a nutshell, the presence of crises means that the execution of capitalism system fails to guarantee even the very little amount that goes to the workers. Crises also have some impacts on the fortune of capitalism as well. Crises disintegrates what has been referred by Marx as an operating fraternity belonging to capitalist class and producing determined fight against capitalists as well as the working class. As a result of this, it is evident that economic - crises however minor can result into political instability, ideological perplexity among those in power, intensification of class struggle as well as war. Marx held the notion that crises have such devastating effects in such a way that it can cause bourgeois society to crumble from its very foundation. Therefore, the effect of capitalist crisis leads to the possibility of revolutionary change, however not as an assurance but as a possibility within the power of the working class.
Marx’s Method
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism geared towards discovering the intrinsic propensity of capitalist system, and its interior laws of motion. By so doing, Marx abstained from the easy but not as much convincing means of simply expatiating on its apparent shortcoming. However, Marx ended up erecting the most rigorous and purest imaginable capitalism. Such capitalism was characterized by the lack of the obvious shortcomings of real life. In his analysis, Marx failed to prove that the supreme of all capitalisms was headed for failure. The perfect capitalism is characterized by the absence of monopolies, unions, and absolutely no special advantages for anybody. The world of perfect capitalism requires that every commodity is sold exactly at its proper price. The proper price in this case is that commodity’s value; the amount of labor the commodity has within itself. For instant, if it takes double labor to make a hat as compared to the time taken to make a shoe, then the price of the hat should be double that of the shoe. In this case, the labor need not necessarily be direct manual labor; it could be overhead labor - one that is spread over various commodities. The labor could also be one that once went into producing a machine and now being passed on to the commodities it has shaped. In this perfect system, irrespective of what form a commodity may be, everything is eventually reduced to labor; all commodities are priced depending on the amount of labor (direct or indirect labor) that is contained in them.
In the world of this perfect system, there are two central characters of the capitalism drama and they are namely the worker and the capitalist. The worker is seen as a free bargaining agent who gets into the market to offer the only commodity demanded – labor power. The capitalist takes him as an Considering the capitalist monopoly when it comes to the means of production, wage relation generalization as well as the dispersal of commodity exchanges, the value theory arrives at important conclusions regarding capitalist accumulation’s structure and dynamics which include; class, prices, distribution, conflicts, credit and finance. Such findings give significant guidelines for empirical studies which may be essential in informing policy conclusions. However, some essential aspects of value theory such as fluctuation in the rate of profit, interest bearing capital and crisis theory have not been considered. In addition, several important contributions essential in analyzing value have not been addressed.
According to Karl Marx, capitalism is considered as fundamentally distinctive from other modes of production. This is the case chiefly because of market anarchy and partially due to capital exploitation. He argues that the relation between capital and wage labor shapes the entire nature of capitalist’s mode of production. In his analysis, he not only studied the process exchanging commodities (buying and selling), but went ahead to unearth what happens in the under the surface. This approach is different from that of Adam Smith who argued that free market and capitalism resulted from a tendency in human to exchange/ barter one item for another. Similarly, Lionel Robbins argued that capitalism consists of a sequence of co-dependent relationships between economic goods and men. According to these two economists, what matter is not the economic relationship between various people but what matters is rather the relationship that exists between people and products.
Marx dismisses such points of view pointing out that they conceal what happens at the surface. Marx cites an example where a worker and a millionaire each buy a loaf of bread at the same price. In such a situation, both the worker and the millionaire are seen as participating equally in a capitalist economy. The worker and the millionaire are seen as just simple buyers while the grocer is seen only as a seller. However, Marx brings in the relation between capital and wage labor, as a means of exposing the underlying class contradictions that are present in the system and are ignored by various capitalist economists.
Capitalist relations have also been viewed as the native order of things that arises from inclination in human nature. Consequently, the world market and its conjunctures, industrial and commercial cycles, periods of credit, movements of market-prices and movements of market-prices as well as crisis seems to them as overpowering natural laws that temptingly enforce their will above them and hence confront them as blind requirement. In con...