Marx As The Development Of Capitalism example essay topic

In this essay, I intend to address how Marx's ideas were formulated, after which I will move onto an outline of his theory of historical materialism which in turn relates to his theory of history, the focus of this work, starting with the idea of feudalism then moving onto the change to capitalism (and a critique thereof) and eventually the future move towards communism. Karl Marx, son of lawyer Heinrich, was born and educated in Prussia, Germany. He was educated at the University of Bonn where he studied Law, later moving on to the University of Berlin, upon the request of his father. It was in Berlin, that Marx became involved with a group known as the 'Young Hegelians' and Bruno Bauer under who's influence, Marx "seized on orthodox religion as the chief illusion standing in the way of human self-understanding". From this, Marx and the other Young Hegelians formed a critique of religion based on Hegel's ideas in the 'Phenomenology', although they came to somewhat more radical conclusions, "to criticise religion and show human beings that God is their own creation, thus ending the subordination of humanity to God and the alienation of human beings from their own true nature".

This critique was seen as an attempt to combat organised religion and to liberate humanity. 1841 saw the publication of 'The Essence of Christianity', a work by Ludwig Feuerbach who argued that God is the creation of man (the essence of the human species) and that God's qualities including wisdom, love and benevolence are in fact, attributes of humanity, yet we attribute them to God. So by creating God in our image, humanity had alienated itself from itself, (leaving humanity as a lower, lesser version of the image of God) what we believe of God is really true of ourselves and humanity can regain what religion has forced out of us. It was Feuerbach's later works, particularly his critique of Hegel, that interested Marx the most, "Hegel had taken Mind as the moving force in history, and humans as manifestations of Mind. This locates the essence of humanity outside human beings and thus, like religion, serves to alienate humanity from itself". Marx's earlier work focused on human freedom and alienation but concerning Marx's account of social and political change in history, it is not possible to cite one source as "Marx never spelt out his theory in full", it was implied however in a number of his works, including the preface of 'A Critique of Political Economy' (1859) and 'The German Ideology'.

(1846) Rejecting Hegel's idea that we live in a world of appearances, with true reality only an ideal, Marx took on board this idea and suggested that rather than the material world hiding us from the 'real' world of the ideal, that "historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing the material conditions of their lives clearly". According to Marx, "we human beings differ from animals in that we act upon nature to produce the things we want and need", that is to say, we control the development of the means of production. But these productive powers appear alien and hostile to man and are therefore hinder, rather than serve human beings. This statement is backed up by the following "The materialist conception of history tells us that human beings are totally subject to forces they do not understand and cannot control". Marx states "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness".

Marx made the claim that society is divided into three elements, productive forces, relations of production and economic structure. These three in turn, contribute to the development of a superstructure, the cultural and institutional features of a society. "the productive forces give rise to relations of production, and it is these relations -not the forces themselves- which constitute the economic structure of society". Specifically, productive forces are the things used to produce including labour power or for example "a miller uses a hand mill to grind wheat into flour, the hand mill is a productive force". The relations of production refers to the relationships between persons and / or between people and things. Offering a similar view, Wolff argues that "at the most basic, providing society's foundations, are the 'productive forces'; what we have so far called human productive power. At the next level up we have the economic structure, and, above that, the legal and political superstructure".

This historical materialism does not however, offer any details concerning Marx's theory of history, and it is this that I will focus the next part of the essay on. Marx argues that the relationship between the productive forces and the relations of production creates the foundation of the ideals that become the structure of society. For example, the creation of a feudal society depends on the productive forces being developed to the stage of manual power where the relations of production are that of 'lord and serf', this in turn, creates the superstructure that goes with it, "an authoritarian religion, and a morality based on concepts of loyalty, obedience and fulfilling the duties of one's station in life". The feudal system came about at this particular time because of the technology of the productive forces (e.g. Hand mill) but this is an ongoing process and are constantly being developed as is seen with the creation of the steam mill, an invention that revolutionized society.

The feudal system can only work on the basis of the lord and serf, that is the minority lord and a number of serfs, tied down to the land, with the steam mill however, we see a trend towards large factories that involve a number of concentrated labourers, a complete contradiction of the feudal way of life. This supports the notion that the economic structures (ie. feudalism) are relative and only relevant "as they further or impede human productive power" suggesting again that they are inevitably susceptible to change and this is indeed inherent in them because at some point, the economic structure will fall behind human capability and begin to hinder production. The steam mill has broken down the relations of production between lord and serf and is to be replaced with the notion of capitalist and employee, beautifully summed up by Marx in this statement "The hand mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist". So with these new productive forces (the steam mill) and relations of production (the capitalist and employee) comes social change, constituting an economic change in society, "on which a capitalist legal and political superstructure rises, with its own religion and morality: freedom of religious conscience, freedom of contract, a right to disposable property, egoism and competitiveness", capitalism in a nutshell. Of this change, Wolff wrote " (it) included not only new methods of production, but new authority structures and expectations".

Marx's 'mission in life' it would seem, was to bring about an end to capitalism by liberating the proletariat (working classes) by showing them their role in history and making them aware of how capitalism exploited them. Marx believed that capitalism would bring about its own downfall, the nature of capitalism means that workers sell their labour to the capitalists, who use this labour to make more money, further increasing their hold over the worker. The capitalists become more rich and wages are driven down to the point where they are only enough to keep the worker alive, it is at this point, Marx believed, when the proletariat has been moved to such a degraded position, that capitalism would ultimately fail. For Marx, labour is "the workers own life activity, the manifestation of his own life", moreover, man's labour and his ability to 'work the world' is what makes him human. Under capitalism however, this labour has become a commodity which the worker has to sell in order to survive, his life act iv ity has become a means to an end, "not part of his life, but a sacrifice of his life". Since labour is a commodity, and commodities are exchanged for their value, capitalists who buy a day's labour should on average, have to pay the value of a day's labour.

This then adds the value of that day's labour onto the cost of the commodity the worker produces, the commodity is then sold for a price that corresponds with the amount of labour put into it, this does not however, show how the capitalist makes a profit. The answer to this lies in 'surplus-value', "surplus value is the value the capitalist is able to extract from the labour-power he buys, above the exchange-value of the labour power he must pay", in other words, a worker may be paid for 12 hours work, yet advancements in technology mean that he can get that work done in 6 hours, the capitalist will continue to pay the worker the set amount for 12 hours work, even though the worker is now producing twice as much as he was previously able to. This enables an increase in the use value (because twice as many commodities is more useful than just one) of a day's labour but not its exchange value (more commodities means that prices will go down). It is in this, according to Marx, that capitalism enslaves its workers, increasing their productivity but with no benefits for the workers themselves, serving only to increase the capitalist's profits because "the capitalist obtains the use value of the worker's labour-power, and pays only the exchange value", all the extra capital produced by the worker's increased productivity (the surplus value) is kept by the capitalist.

Surplus value, Marx compares to slave labour, suggesting that the only difference is the manner in which surplus-labour is taken from the producer (worker), he goes on to claim that a period that involves man working to keep himself alive is a period in which he is not free. Pre-feudal times, going as far back as the hunter-gatherer human, productive forces were poorly developed to the extent that people spent the vast majority of their time providing for themselves (but had no choice, simply did this to survive), upon development of the productive forces came the development of a feudal society in which the serf was subordinate to their landlord, working a certain amount of day's on the lord's land, rather than their own. This distinction made it clear when the serf was feeding himself or working for his lord and again, like in the society beforehand, he had no choice in the matter. Under the capitalist system, the forced labour witnessed in feudal times still exists, but it is masked, "under feudalism the nature and extent of the forced labour is apparent; under capitalism then nature and extent of the coercion is disguised.

Workers appear to be 'free labourers', voluntarily making agreements with capitalists". These are not free choices, simply because the worker must take what is offered to them by the capitalists or they will die, it is a matter of survival for the worker to work under a system which promotes the extraction of surplus value by the capitalists. This is summed up by Marx as the development of capitalism into "a coercive relation, which compels the working class to do more work from the narrow round of its own life-wants prescribes. As a producer of the activity of others, as a pumper-out of surplus-labour and exploiter of labour power, it surpasses in energy, disregard of bounds, recklessness and efficiency, all earlier systems of production based on directly compulsory labour". At this point, Marx focuses on how capitalism itself will be the death of capitalism, competition between capitalists will create an ever-decreasing number of monopoly holding capitalists, "innovate or die is the logic of capitalism", where as the number of degraded working class will ever-increase and down to the nature of capitalism, these working classes are more organised and numerous, a social revolution will be inevitable. Attention now shifts to what's next after the revolution, for Marx, it is communism.

To discover exactly what Marx meant by communism isn't easy, it appears as though he left a blue print for his communism, without ever going as far as to provide a model for it, hence the 'failures' of supposedly communist nations like the Soviet Union, China and Serbia. Marx was adamant that communism would not come about until the economic base of society had developed to the point where the working class was ready to participate in the revolution, again highlighting the failures of the world's 'communist' nations. Like Hegel, Marx approached history with an end goal in mind, where Marx differs from Hegel is that he believes communism is "the goal of history and the answer to all problems, a virtual paradise on earth". This view of communism is Utopian with Marx also describing it as 'the riddle of history solved'.

As shown by Marx's view of history, a change in the economic structure not only brings forth a new set of politics, culture, religion, etc but also alters the consciousness of its citizens, ie. the way they think changes. Characteristics of capitalism such as greed and envy are not static for Marx, nor the division between individual interest and community interest, regarded more as a feature of one stage of human development, rather than a general assumption of humanity. (capitalism aggravated this stage by turning everything into a commodity). Thus, in order for capitalism to be truly overcome, stopping individuals from taking advantage of community interest, human nature itself would have to be altered, a process that would occur naturally when the economic base was ready to change to communism. In this communism, man would lose their self interest and work for the good of the community in which citizens would "find happiness in working for the good of all" Marx's views, although many were wholly sound, some where essentially flawed, for example, he predicted that the capitalism will collapse because of its internal contradictions and that revolutions will occur in the most industrially advanced countries (namely Great Britain, the economic powerhouse at this time), this is not the case as "capitalism has gone through several crises, but nowhere has it collapsed as a result of its alleged internal contradictions. Proletarian revolutions have broken out in the less developed nations, rather than the more developed ones". His legacy on the other hand, is his view on human nature, that it is relative to the social and economic conditions of each period with the prospect of changing this nature through the alteration of the economic base of society.

This view paved the way for a "new social science which would explore the relations between such apparently unconnected areas of life as the tools people use to produce food and their political and religious beliefs". By opening this new area, "Marx shattered the assumption that our intellectual and spiritual lives are entirely independent of our economic existence". In conclusion, communism was Marx's ideal, he expected it in his lifetime yet over a century after he died, the revolution hasn't happened and doesn't look like it is going to. Many countries have claimed to follow in Marx's teachings but their versions of communism have fallen short of what he wanted, it remains unclear as to whether the revolution will ever come.

Bibliography

Why Read Marx Today?' by Jonathan Wolff (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2002) 'Marx' by Peter Singer (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 1980) 'Karl Marx: Selected Writings' (Second Edition) by David McLellan (Oxford University Press, Oxford: 2000) 'Marx, A Clear Guide' by Edward Reiss (Pluto Press, Chicago: 1997) 'Interpretations of Marx' by Tom Bottom ore (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford: 1988) 'A History of Modern Political Thought' by Iain Hamp sher-Monk (Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford: 1992) web historical materialism.
html (16th May 2005, 'Marx and Historical Materialism').