| Time for communism. Communism is usually associated with Karl Marx -- largely because he co-wrote the Communist Manifesto. His more substantial work was Das Capital. This book represents the best external critique of capitalism. In fact, Marx provides the basis for the only systematic external critique of capitalism.
As with Adam Smith, it's important to understand the context Marx was writing in. He was about 100 years after Adam Smith. At this stage, the industrial revolution was well under way. The control over the means of production had moved out of the hands of the aristocracy and into the hands of the capitalists. He studied jurisprudence, but was really interested in philosophy. Philosophically, he was really reacting against Hegel against a backdrop of fairly widespread political instability (although he does like and use Hegel's dialectic fgramework). Basically, this was the end of the old-order of Governance, and the emergence of new political systems. He shifted around Europe quite a bit (for several different reasons: he was expelled from a couple of countries; he had to leave Germany to study political economy; he returned to organise workers in Germany).
Marx's critique of capitalism rests on three major parts: class, alientation, and exploitation. These are understood in the framework of the labour process.
The labour process is the process by which labour and capital combine to manipulate objects. A labour process creates surplus value (the excess after the value of the labour and other inputs is deducted).
Class is a standard sociological analytical devise. Marx suggested there were two classes in capitalist society: the bougoise and the proletariate. The bougoise were owners of capital; the proletariate were the suppliers of labour. It's important to note that Adam Smith didn't really seperate capitalists from labour -- he talked about a man bringing his "industry and capital" to a labour process. Marx observed that the people with the capital were seperated from the people with the labour.
Alienation is a slightly more complex idea -- and one that has many forms. In simple terms, alienation is the separation of value. In particular, the separation of the effort from the value of the labour. If I work for (supply labour to) an employer, they are the ones that receive the intrinsic value for my work. Payment for this effort (extrinsic value) was not a sufficient substitute. Marx basically talked about four types of alienation with respect to work: alienation from the object produced, from the process of production, from himself and from his community. This is an inevitable consequence of the division of labour and the ownership of production by the capitalist. Part of this is the separation of work from the individual. When one labours for another, your work becomes externalised. In his later writing, Marx refers less explicitly to alientation, but the the concept is still present, in things like the fetishism of commodities.
Exploitation occurs where surplus value is created in the labour process and then appropriated by non-labour. The labour has contribued to producing this surplus, but does not share in it. Exploitation does not mean that 1. all wage labour is exploitative; 2. only wage labour is exploitative; or 3. exploitation can only occur with respect to wage labour. In simple terms, not all labour processes produce surplus value. Exploitation only occurs when it does. It should also be noted that Marx did not particularly single out capitalism here. For him, all economic systems were exploitative to some extent.
Because of exploitation, there was a process of capital accumulation. Basically, the surplus value that was exploited from the workers by the capitalist was converted to become more capital. This was the process that produced the class structure in the society. The modern term is that "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer." The capitalist system will create class bariers, so that the proletariate are less able to take control of the means of production.
As a consequence of this, the capitalist society contained the seeds for its own destabilisation. The proletariate would, eventually get sick of being exploited and would take control of the means of production (capital) by force. |