Karl Marx is the most read and referenced economist on ‘Communism’ and one of the most influential critics of Capitalism. One of his most prolific works, ‘Das Kapital’, the product of thirty years of work and analysis of the newly industrialised country of Great Britain, aimed to explore the origins, fallacies and instability of Capitalism, as well as its internal contradictions. In the following academic paper, the author has analysed Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 to bring out its significance and presented her views on it.
History
Marx was born in 1818, in the then kingdom of Prussia. As a young man, he became exceedingly interested in the philosophy of Hegel. However what struck him and went on to define his work was Feuerbach’s polemic against religion. Feuerbach had said that humans needed the concept of God to satisfy an emotional need and God did not exist outside of the human mind for this very purpose. Marx applied the property of looking beyond what things seemed to be, to all spheres of life. Over the years, the essence of Marx’s work was to reveal and analyse how capitalism concealed exploitation of the proletariat and a political democracy concentrated power in the hands of a few, and not the masses.
CAPITAL
Marx starts his book with an
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Therefore, production is not done with a view to fulfil the needs of the society, but to maximise gains and personal wealth. Not considering societal capacity to absorb product, the capitalist maximises productive forces, but is unable to realise the surplus value, that is, inability to sell the product. Therefore, capitalism is increasingly prone to crises due to disproportionality between supply and demand and overproduction of commodities. Marx expected there to be cyclical slumps in business every 10 years, earlier if the rate of capital accumulation is
An author’s main focus when writing a nonfiction piece is to persuade its audience of their beliefs, using claims to support them. With the effect of close consideration of claims and fallacies when reading non-fiction, the author is unable to persuade the reader due to inaccurate statements made by the author himself. The fallacies detected by a close reader discredits the author as well as their piece.
The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, a period of political turmoil in Europe. Its meaning in today’s capitalistic world is a very controversial issue. Some people, such as the American government, consider socialism taboo and thus disregard the manifesto. They believe that capitalism, and the world itself, has changed greatly from the one Marx was describing in the Manifesto and, therefore, that Marx’s ideas cannot be used to comprehend today’s economy. Others find that the Manifesto highlights issues that are still problematic today. Marx’s predicative notions in the Communist Manifesto are the key to understanding modern day capitalism.
Karl Marx looks at human societies as a whole, and asks how they reproduce themselves, and as a result, change. For Marx a fundamental question about any society is whether it can produce more than it needs to reproduce itself, that is, a surplus product. Karl Marx believed that the middle class is based upon economic factors and rooted in solely that perspective. Many people have examined his work closely arguing that economic factors could not possibly be the only definition o...
Karl Marx’s was a German philosopher, economist and evolutionary socialist born in Germany on May 5th 1818. His theories mostly consisted of the capitalist economic system. Marx’s attended the University of Bonn and University of Berlin. He is widely recognized for his theory of on the class system which included the concepts of base and super-structure. Marx’s theory of the class system is well exhibited by the documentary film, Class Dismissed: How TV Frames the Working Class.
This paper is intended to assess key ideas of Marxism with observations of the positives and negatives it brought and the reasons why the concepts failed. The word “communism” is generally linked to “Marxism”. Since Marx along with Friedrich Engels published the cutting-edge thesis, The Communist Manifesto in the middle of the 19th century, it conceived the new dimension for both politics and economics. Before turning to the principles of the Manifesto, it is useful to present the brief historical background of the era, and understand why it affected the ideology. Predominantly the Industrial Revolution (IR) and the Great Revolution in France (FR) transformed the society as follows: creation of conditions for capitalism by destroying feudalism.
When one gets down to the roots of capitalism you find that it is a form of government that allows the rich to get richer, the poor, poorer and the middle class to stay the same. Karl Marx wrote a book, Kapital about the what capitalism does to the people in a society, how it takes the humainty out of being and replaces it with x. Not only does it do that but it creates a chain of commodities, fetishisis, and alienation within a society.
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, in Trier, Prussia. A well-known philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary that studied law at the University of Bonn. He then switched to philosophy and continued education at Berlin. Together with Friedrich Engels, Marx produced some of his major works ‘The German Ideology’ (1846), ‘The Communist Manifesto’ (1848), and ‘Das Capital’ (1867). Das Capital remains to be Marx’s greatest achievement, a powerful insight that
Marxism, or Scientific Socialism, is the name given to the assemblage of thoughts initially worked out by Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). In their totality, these thoughts give a completely worked-out hypothetical reason for the battle of the regular workers to accomplish a higher type of human culture - communism. While the originations of Marxism have been in this way created and enhanced by the verifiable experience of the common laborers itself, the crucial thoughts stay unshaken, giving a firm establishment to the Labor Movement today. Neither some time recently, nor since the lifetime of Marx and Engels have any unrivaled, more honest or logical hypotheses been progressed to clarify the development of society
In proving this old proverb, Karl Marx explained some key features of capitalism that remain relevant today. Towards the end of the first chapter of Das Kapital, after having established the validity of the labour theory of value, Marx presents a section on the Fetishism of Commodities.
Marx’s Theory of Crisis encompasses the ideas, values and views of many other key economic theories that have been propounded by world leading and renowned economists over the past few centuries. For instance, in order to understand the essence
In his Manifesto of the Communist Party Karl Marx created a radical theory revolving not around the man made institution of government itself, but around the ever present guiding vice of man that is materialism and the economic classes that stemmed from it. By unfolding the relat...
Communism, socialism, and capitalism are the three basic forms of economical systems, each evident in the world. Although Karl Marx is portrayed as the father of communism, Marx is able to provide a substantial amount of information about the capitalistic world. In his work, “Capital (1867)”, Marx discusses the nature of commodities, wages, and the relationship between a worker and the capitalist economic system. As a result, Marx portrays workers as human beings who have been exploited in order to maximize production and profit in a capitalistic society. Although Karl Marx wrote “Capital (1867)” over a century ago, Marx’s arguments concerning the various uses of human labor, commodities, and values, have remained relevant in the United States
Karl Marx, in the Capital, developed his critique of capitalism by analyzing its characteristics and its development throughout history. The critique contains Marx’s most developed economic analysis and philosophical insight. Although it was written in 1850s, its values still serve an important purpose in the globalized world and maintains extremely relevant in the twenty-first century.
Karl Marx's Theory of Capitalism Marxism like functionalism is concerned with the overall picture of
He is known worldwide for his numerous theories and ideas in regards to society, economics and politics. His outlook on these subjects is known as Marxism. Marxism focuses on the imbalance and struggle between classes and society. Marx’s theories stem from the concept of materialism based society and the implications thereof. These concepts leads to the Marxist theory of the failure of capitalism. Marx had a number of specific reasons for the downfall of capitalism yet capitalism remains very real and successful. Marxism covers a wide range of topics and theories, but an in depth analysis of his criticism to capitalism and how it is not relevant to modern day will be explored.