Marxism

Kymlicka lists three primary arguments that Marxists use for the abolition of private property. They are exploitation, needs, and alienation, the last of these seeming to be to be the strongest. Exploitation is a fairly reasonable argument, though there are many valid and sound criticisms of it and furthermore there seems to be a loophole. If private property is equalized, not entirely eradicated like the Marxist would like, then it appears as though exploitation can be avoided. However, this equalization still does not deal with the problem of alienation.

There are three main aspects to the idea of Marxist alienation. First is the alienation of the worker from the product of his labour, second is the alienation of the worker from the act of producing and finally the alienation of the worker from his “species-essence”.

Marx, and later Marxists, believed that the labourer is alienated from the product of his labour because of the disproportionate gain that the capitalist gains from the product as compared to the labourer. The labourer has no input over the design of the product, nor do they have any control over how it is produced. Both the manual labourer—say an assembly line worker, and the intellectual labourer—say an engineer, are controlled by the capitalist and are alienated from the end product of their labour. Labour undergoes a commodification at the hands of the capitalist for the maximization of profit. From this aspect of alienation, coupled with the other two, Marxists derive the idea of alienated labour.

The second aspect of alienation is that of the worker from the act of producing. The worker is offered little psychological satisfaction when generating products that are accomplished with an endless sequence of disc...

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...ere reformulating civilization at the beginning of time, it would be the theory I would have enacted were I in charge. A violent proletariat revolution would have possibly been able to make a Marxist or Communist society viable prior to the industrial revolution, but with that age come and gone, and now in the midst of the technological age, the original formulation of Marxism simply will not fly, especially with the stigma attached to it due to the mutations of Marx’s theory that were put in place in Soviet Russia, Maoist China and Castro’s Cuba. There are some formulations that are worth considering, Post-Colonial Marxism and Marxist Feminism, but they are not taken seriously, unfortunately. Regardless, Marx’s qualms with Capitalism are poignant to me, and I reserve the right to view Marxism as the ideal political philosophy. “Workers of the world…aw, forget it!”