Great Economical Thinkers: Karl Marx

Great Economical Thinkers: Karl Marx 

Karl Marx [8] was (1818 – 1883) a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist. He died in London in 1883. He is the creator of the “conflict theory”, stating that society is in conflict with each other, and Marxism claim that this conflict is between the rich and the poor. A danger is associating Marx’s views with what is known as communism, and the politics and the pressures of the Soviet Union. Marx never saw communism in this way. He saw it as a liberation and a way of creating a fairer society, and as a way of getting the best out of all people, not just those with money and power. To understand Marxism we need to understand Capitalism. Capitalism represents today’s society. In Marx’s terms, it is an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production. This means that our societies are based on a few people who own factories, businesses, shops and other corporations. These corporations are owned by a few people who work for them, or jointly by the employees and the owners, or by the owners only. Marx formulated his theories during the industrial revolution, a time when Britain and other countries where going through very dramatic change. The old feudal system, when lords of the manner own the land, meant that the ordinary people had freedom and rights to all lands. When the government passed a number of enclosure acts in the 1700s and 1800s, ordinary people no longer had the right to live on this land, and many of them were forced to move to towns and cities, which were beginning to grow due to the increase of factories and textile mills. Were as previously people where free to keep their own animals and keep their own crops and common land, once they reach the cities they had to find work in the factories, and the employments of the factory owners. The work was hard and dangerous and the pay was poor. Many factory owners did not want to pay high wages, because this would mean less profit for them. Children were often used as cheap labour. The industrial revolution promoted a capitalistic way of thinking, what we call a capitalist ideology, and also created distinctive groups of people: “the bourgeoise” who were the factory owners, and the workers, or working class, “the proletarian”. Marx was on the side of the proletariat, because he saw them as treated unfairly by the factory owners. He considered that the system ensured that the poor stayed poor and the rich stayed richer. Society is in conflict: the proletarian, vs. the bourgeoise. Marx considered that the working class had the power to change things, through education and personal development some members of the proletarian would begin to understand the system better, and device ways of changing it. Marx believed that kind of change could only come about through Revolution, when the workers rise up and overthrow those who would treat them unfairly. In place of capitalism a new system would be established, in which all people were treated equally, and all the factories and business would be owned by everyone. Marx called this system: Communism. Karl Marx also wrote a lot about alienation, he believed that work at it’s best is what makes us human. It fulfils our species essence. Work allows us to live, to be creative, to flourish. However, the reality un 19th Century Europe was that work destroyed workers, particularly those who have nothing to sell but their labour. The worker had no choice but to toil hours for a pitiful wage, what was worse, their labour alienated them. Alienation is a disorienting sense of exclusion and separation. Factory labour under capitalism alienated the workers from the product to their labour. They made stuff they couldn’t afford to buy, which disappeared to shops in far of places, to make money for people who paid them, next to nothing. The factory production line split jobs into meaningless tasks, and made the hours at work tedious, empty and bleak. Workers lived for the few hours at home when they could eat, sleep and relax. The rest of the time they weren’t fully alive. This work also alienated them from each other. The only way out of this according to Marx was to organize and revolt. They needed to seize the means of production, leading to his famous rallying cry “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose, but your chains”. Marx never proposed a “Centrally Planned Economy”, which is an economic system in which economic decisions are made by the state or government rather than by the interaction between consumers and business. This was a system applied by the Soviet Union to keep the population under control, waving the flag of “marxism” as a way to commit and engage the workers. In a Centrally Planned Economy, the eye of the “Big Brother” controls everything, as we will discuss later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx