Most people agree that we need to improve
our economic system somehow. Yet we’re also often keen to dismiss the ideas of capitalism’s
most famous and ambitious critic, Karl Marx. This isn’t very surprising. In practice, his political and economic ideas have been
used to design disastrously planned economies and nasty dictatorships. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t reject Marx too
quickly. We ought to see him as a guide whose diagnosis of Capitalism’s ills helps us
navigate towards a more promising future. Capitalism is going to have be reformed - and
Marx’s analyse are going to be part of any answer.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, Germany. Soon he became involved with the Communist party, a tiny group of intellectuals advocating
for the overthrow of the class system and the abolition of private property. He worked
as a journalist and had to flee Germany, eventually settling in London. Marx wrote an enormous number of books and
articles, sometimes with his friend Friedrich Engels Mostly, Marx wrote about Capitalism, the type
of economy that dominates the western world. It was, in his day, still getting going, and
Marx was one of its most intelligent and perceptive critics. These were some of the problems he identified
with it: Modern work is “alienated”
One of Marx’s greatest insights is that work can be one of the sources of our greatest
joys. But in order to be fulfilled at work, Marx
wrote that workers need ‘to see themselves in the objects they have created’. Think
of the person who built this chair: it is straightforward, strong, honest and elegant It’s an example of how, at its
best, labour offers us a chance to externalise what’s good inside us. But this is increasingly
rare in the modern world. Part of the problem is that modern work is
incredibly specialised. Specialised jobs make the modern economy highly efficient, but they
also mean that it is seldom possible for any one worker to derive a sense of the genuine
contribution they might be making to the real needs of humanity.
Marx argued that modern work leads to alienation = Entfremdung in other words, a feeling of disconnection
between what you do all day and who you feel you really are and what you think you ideally be able to
contribute to existence. Modern work is insecure
Capitalism makes the human being utterly expendable; just one factor among others in the forces
of production that can ruthlessly be let go the minute that costs rise or savings can
be made through technology. And yet, as Marx knew, deep inside of us, we don’t want to
be arbitrarily let go, we are terrified of being abandoned.
Communism isn’t just an economic theory. Understood emotionally, it expresses a deep-seated
longing that we always have a place in the world’s heart, that we will not be cast
out. Workers get paid little while capitalists
get rich This is perhaps the most obvious qualm Marx
had with Capitalism. In particular, he believed that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers
as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin. He called this
primitive accumulation = ursprüngliche Akkumulation Whereas capitalists see profit as a reward
for ingenuity and technological talent, Marx was far more damning. Profit is simply theft,
and what you are stealing is the talent and hard work of your work force. However much one dresses up the fundamentals,
Marx insists that at its crudest, capitalism means paying a worker one price for doing
something that can be sold for another, much higher one. Profit is a fancy term for exploitation. Capitalism is very unstable Marx proposed that capitalist systems are
characterised by series of crises. Every crisis is dressed up by capitalists as being somehow
freakish and rare and soon to be the last one. Far from it, argued Marx, crises are endemic to capitalism - and they’re
caused by something very odd. The fact that we’re able to produce too much - far more
than anyone needs to consume. Capitalist crises are crises of abundance,
rather than - as in the past - crises of shortage. Our factories and systems are so efficient,
we could give everyone on this planet a car, a house, access to a decent school and hospital. That’s what so enraged Marx and made him
hopeful too. Few of us need to work, because the modern economy is so productive. But rather than seeing this need not to work
as the freedom it is, we complain about it masochistically and describe it by a pejorative
word “unemployment.” We should call it freedom. There’s so much unemployment for a good
and deeply admirable reason: because we’re so good at making things efficiently. We’re
not all needed at the coal face. But in that case, we should - thought Marx