At this stage, Marx saw capitalism as playing a largely progressive role in eradicating feudalism [the dominant social system in medieval Europe], and raising the prospect of popular sovereignty, though limited by bourgeois rule.
There were many varieties of Marxism on offer by the early 20th century, the most prominent of which was associated with the leading working-class party in Europe, the Social Democrats Party SPD in Germany.
Instead, the SPD thought, the system might be reformed gradually and peacefully through the ballot. The Bolsheviks were a tiny party in Russia led by Vladimir Lenin, whose goal was to overthrow the Provisional Government and set up a government for the proletariat workforce. Lenin insisted that a dedicated conspiratorial group could attain political power. But in order to maintain it, authority would need to remain within the hands of a small group within the party, and then possibly even in the hands of one dictator.
During the s, while holding the position of secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin set about purging Russia of anyone he considered a threat. The total number of those who died is not known, but it is thought it may have exceeded 20 million. Marx was, as much as anything else, a prophet and visionary who gave hope to millions that a life of endless, exhausting, exploited toil was not the inevitable lot of most of humanity.
He was essentially a utopian thinker though he disliked the term who posited the ideal of a future good life, and then demanded that humanity seek this end. Today, Karl Marx remains the most prominent of all modern thinkers to suggest that capitalism is a historically-limited phase of development, and to contend that a vastly more humane system of production and distribution might replace it.
This theory stated that the value of a produced economic good can be measured objectively by the average number of labor hours required to produce it. In other words, if a table takes twice as long to make as a chair, then the table should be considered twice as valuable. Marx understood the labor theory better than his predecessors even Adam Smith and contemporaries, and presented a devastating intellectual challenge to laissez-faire economists in Das Kapital : If goods and services tend to be sold at their true objective labor values as measured in labor hours, how do any capitalists enjoy profits?
It must mean, Marx concluded, that capitalists were underpaying or overworking, and thereby exploiting, laborers to drive down the cost of production. While Marx's answer was eventually proved incorrect and later economists adopted the subjective theory of value , his simple assertion was enough to show the weakness of the labor theory's logic and assumptions; Marx unintentionally helped fuel a revolution in economic thinking.
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong, professor of economics at UC-Berkeley, wrote in that Marx's "primary contribution" to economic science actually came in a paragraph stretch of The Communist Manifesto , in which he describes how economic growth causes shifts among social classes, often leading to a struggle for political power. This underlies an often unappreciated aspect of economics: the emotions and political activity of the actors involved.
A corollary of this argument was later made by French economist Thomas Piketty, who proposed that while nothing was wrong with income inequality in an economic sense, it could create blowback against capitalism among the people. Thus, there is a moral and anthropological consideration of any economic system. The idea that societal structure and transformations from one order to the next can be the result of technological change in how things are produced in an economy is known as historical materialism.
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Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Economics Behavioral Economics. Table of Contents Expand. Who Was Karl Marx? Marx's Inspiration. Marx's Social Economic Systems. Marx's Historical Materialism. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service.
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Skip to content. Image Soldiers Marching in Beijing China is one of just five proclaimed communist nations left. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. His explanation is in terms of the labour input required to produce the commodity, or rather, the socially necessary labour, which is labour exerted at the average level of intensity and productivity for that branch of activity within the economy.
Thus the labour theory of value asserts that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time required to produce it. Marx provides a two-stage argument for the labour theory of value.
As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must, Marx argues, be a third thing that they have in common.
Both steps of the argument are, of course, highly contestable. Capitalism can be distinguished from other forms of commodity exchange, Marx argues, in that it involves not merely the exchange of commodities, but the advancement of capital, in the form of money, with the purpose of generating profit through the purchase of commodities and their transformation into other commodities which can command a higher price, and thus yield a profit. Marx claims that no previous theorist has been able adequately to explain how capitalism as a whole can make a profit.
The cost of this commodity is determined in the same way as the cost of every other; that is, in terms of the amount of socially necessary labour power required to produce it. Suppose that such commodities take four hours to produce. Accordingly the first four hours of the working day is spent on producing value equivalent to the value of the wages the worker will be paid.
This is known as necessary labour. Any work the worker does above this is known as surplus labour, producing surplus value for the capitalist. Surplus value, according to Marx, is the source of all profit. Other commodities simply pass their value on to the finished commodities, but do not create any extra value. They are known as constant capital.
Profit, then, is the result of the labour performed by the worker beyond that necessary to create the value of his or her wages.
This is the surplus value theory of profit. It appears to follow from this analysis that as industry becomes more mechanised, using more constant capital and less variable capital, the rate of profit ought to fall. For as a proportion less capital will be advanced on labour, and only labour can create value. In Capital Volume 3 Marx does indeed make the prediction that the rate of profit will fall over time, and this is one of the factors which leads to the downfall of capitalism.
A further consequence of this analysis is a difficulty for the theory that Marx did recognise, and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to meet also in the manuscripts that make up Capital Volume 3. It follows from the analysis so far that labour-intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour.
Not only is this empirically false, it is theoretically unacceptable. Accordingly, Marx argued that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. If it is thought that the labour theory of value was initially motivated as an intuitively plausible theory of price then when the connection between price and value is rendered as indirect as it is in the final theory, the intuitive motivation of the theory drains away.
Others consider this to be a superficial reading of Marx, and that his general approach allows us to see through the appearances of capitalism to understand its underlying basis, which need not coincide with appearances.
Any commodity can be picked to play a similar role. Consequently, with equal justification one could set out a corn theory of value, arguing that corn has the unique power of creating more value than it costs.
Formally this would be identical to the labour theory of value Roemer Nevertheless, the claims that somehow labour is responsible for the creation of value, and that profit is the consequence of exploitation, remain intuitively powerful, even if they are difficult to establish in detail. However, even if the labour theory of value is considered discredited, there are elements of his theory that remain of worth.
Both provide a salutary corrective to aspects of orthodox economic theory. However, the question arises of whether the basic idea of exploitation should be so dependent on a particular theory of value. Others have felt that it is possible to restore the intuitive core of a Marxist theory of exploitation independent of the labour theory of value cf.
Cohen , Wolff , Vrousalis John Roemer, to take one leading case, states:. Marxian exploitation is defined as the unequal exchange of labor for goods: the exchange is unequal when the amount of labor embodied in the goods which the worker can purchase with his income … is less than the amount of labor he expended to earn that income.
Roemer Suppose I work eight hours to earn my wages. With this perhaps the best thing I can buy is a coat. But imagine that the coat took only a total of four hours to make. The definition requires some refinement. For example, if I am taxed for the benefit of those unable to work, I will be exploited by the above definition, but this is not what the definition of exploitation was intended to capture.
Worse still, if there is one person exploited much more gravely than anyone else in the economy, then it may turn out that no-one else is exploited. Nevertheless, it should not be difficult to adjust the definition to take account of these difficulties, and as noted several other accounts of Marx-inspired accounts of exploitation have been offered that are independent of the labour theory of value. Many of these alternative definitions add a notion of unfreedom or domination to unequal exchange of labour and goods Vrousalis The exploited person is forced to accept a situation in which he or she just never gets back what they put into the labour process.
Now there may be, in particular cases, a great deal to be said about why this is perfectly acceptable from a moral point of view. However, on the face of it such exploitation appears to be unjust. Nevertheless, we will see in the next section why attributing such a position to Marx himself is fraught with difficulty.
The issue of Marx and morality poses a conundrum. Yet the terms of this antipathy and endorsement are far from clear. Despite expectations, Marx never directly says that capitalism is unjust. Neither does he directly say that communism would be a just form of society.
In fact he frequently takes pains to distance himself from those who engage in a discourse of justice, and makes a conscious attempt to exclude direct moral commentary in his own works. The puzzle is why this should be, given the weight of indirect moral commentary one also finds in his writings. There are also separate questions concerning his attitude to ideas of justice, and to ideas of morality more broadly concerned.
This, then, generates four questions: a Did Marx think capitalism unjust? These are some of the questions we consider in this section. The initial argument that Marx must have thought that capitalism is unjust is based on the observation that Marx argued that all capitalist profit is ultimately derived from the exploitation of the worker. How could this fail to be unjust? Allen Wood is perhaps the leading advocate of the view that Marx did not believe that capitalism is unjust.
Wood argues that Marx takes this approach because his general theoretical approach excludes any trans-epochal standpoint from which one can comment on the justice of an economic system. Even though it is acceptable to criticise particular behaviour from within an economic structure as unjust and theft under capitalism would be an example it is not possible to criticise capitalism as a whole.
Marx claims that juridical institutions are part of the superstructure, and that ideas of justice are ideological. Accordingly, the role of both the superstructure and ideology, in the functionalist reading of historical materialism adopted here, is to stabilise the economic structure. Consequently, to state that something is just under capitalism is simply a judgement that it will tend to have the effect of advancing capitalism. According to Marx, in any society the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class; the core of the theory of ideology.
Ziyad Husami however, argues that Wood is mistaken, ignoring the fact that for Marx ideas undergo a double determination. We need to differentiate not just by economic system, but also by economic class within the system. Therefore the ideas of the non-ruling class may be very different from those of the ruling class.
Of course, it is the ideas of the ruling class that receive attention and implementation, but this does not mean that other ideas do not exist. Husami goes as far as to argue that members of the proletariat under capitalism have an account of justice that matches communism. First, it cannot explain why Marx never explicitly described capitalism as unjust, and second, it overlooks the distance Marx wanted to place between his own scientific socialism, and that of other socialists who argued for the injustice of capitalism.
Nevertheless, this leaves us with a puzzle. Arguably, the only satisfactory way of understanding this issue is, once more, from G.
Cohen, who proposes that Marx believed that capitalism was unjust, but did not believe that he believed it was unjust Cohen In other words, Marx, like so many of us, did not have perfect knowledge of his own mind. In his explicit reflections on the justice of capitalism he was able to maintain his official view. But in less guarded moments his real view slips out, even if never in explicit language.
Such an interpretation is bound to be controversial, but it makes good sense of the texts. Whatever one concludes on the question of whether Marx thought capitalism unjust, it is, nevertheless, obvious that Marx thought that capitalism was not the best way for human beings to live.
Points made in his early writings remain present throughout his writings, if no longer connected to an explicit theory of alienation. The worker finds work a torment, suffers poverty, overwork and lack of fulfilment and freedom. People do not relate to each other as humans should.
Does this amount to a moral criticism of capitalism or not? Capitalism impedes human flourishing. It is hard to disagree with the judgement that Marx. Roberts Marx, though, once more refrained from making this explicit; he seemed to show no interest in locating his criticism of capitalism in any of the traditions of moral philosophy, or explaining how he was generating a new tradition.
There may have been two reasons for his caution. The first was that while there were bad things about capitalism, there is, from a world historical point of view, much good about it too. For without capitalism, communism would not be possible. Capitalism is to be transcended, not abolished, and this may be difficult to convey in the terms of moral philosophy.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, we need to return to the contrast between Marxian and other forms of socialism. Many non-Marxian socialists appealed to universal ideas of truth and justice to defend their proposed schemes, and their theory of transition was based on the idea that appealing to moral sensibilities would be the best, perhaps only, way of bringing about the new chosen society.
Marx wanted to distance himself from these other socialist traditions, and a key point of distinction was to argue that the route to understanding the possibilities of human emancipation lay in the analysis of historical and social forces, not in morality.
Hence, for Marx, any appeal to morality was theoretically a backward step. Would communism be a just society? Communism is described by Marx, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme , as a society in which each person should contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need. This certainly sounds like a theory of justice, and could be adopted as such Gilabert If we start with the idea that the point of ideas of justice is to resolve disputes, then a society without disputes would have no need or place for justice.
We can see this by reflecting upon the idea of the circumstances of justice in the work of David Hume — But Hume also suggested that justice would not be needed in other circumstances; if there were complete fellow-feeling between all human beings, there would be no conflict and no need for justice. Of course, one can argue whether either material abundance or human fellow-feeling to this degree would be possible, but the point is that both arguments give a clear sense in which communism transcends justice.
Nevertheless, we remain with the question of whether Marx thought that communism could be commended on other moral grounds. On a broad understanding, in which morality, or perhaps better to say ethics, is concerned with the idea of living well, it seems that communism can be assessed favourably in this light.
But beyond this we can be brief in that the considerations adduced in Section 2 above apply again. Quite possibly his determination to retain this point of difference between himself and other socialists led him to disparage the importance of morality to a degree that goes beyond the call of theoretical necessity. There are, of course, some famous quotations, not least from The German Ideology manuscripts. The point should not be exaggerated, but these striking images notwithstanding, there is no clear and sustained discussion of ideology in the Marxian corpus.
Many commentators maintain that the search for a single model of ideology in his work has to be given up. Marx does not view ideology as a feature of all societies, and, in particular, suggests that it will not be a feature of a future communist society.
This stability is not permanent, but it can last for extended historical periods. This stability appears puzzling to Marx because class-divided societies are flawed in ways which not only frustrate human flourishing, but also work to the material advantage of the ruling minority. Why do the subordinate classes, who form a majority, tolerate these flaws, when resistance and rebellion of various kinds might be in their objective interests?
Such societies might often involve the direct repression or the threat of it of one group by another, but Marx does not think that this is the whole story.
There are also non-repressive sources of social stability, and ideology is usually, and plausibly, considered one of these.
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