Karl Marx is an infamous figure in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is arguably the most important philosopher and economists to have lived, although many people argue that his ideas regarding the nature of capitalism were fundamentally flawed. His work emerged in the mid to late 19th century and sought to provide a critique of the conception of political economy held by Adam Smith and Ricardo, amongst others. This paper will consider Marx’s work from two perspectives. First of all it will focus on the nature of his writing concerning aspects of political economy such as primitive accumulation and the labour theory of value. It will then see how this can be seen to be located with in the context of a specific view of history and class struggle.
Crucial to any understanding of Marx is his theory of social development and the transition from pre capitalist to capitalist societies. Throughout, he argues that societies which were pre-capitalist were based on a fundamentally different form of property ownership than the one which existed at the time of his writing and which continues to exist today. This form of ownership centres around the idea of social classes which can be seen as being split roughly into either the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or more analytically, into what is termed ‘labour’ and what is termed ‘capital.’ From his earliest work, Marx understood the labour theory of value to be at the heart of modern capitalist society. This is theory which states that the value of a particular commodity is determined by the amount of labour time which has been spent on producing it.
Marx sees modern society as being entirely dependent on the exchange and accumulation of commodities and therefore sees the theory of their value is at crucial for understanding modern capitalist. In order for the labour theory of value to come into effect and to have meaning across society, indeed across the globe, it is necessary for labour time to become quantifiable and therefore to serve be measured according to a standard. Marx argues that in order for this to be the case then a society must contain a group of individuals who posses labour power and are able to sell it. These individuals are disenfranchised from the mode of production in a given society and have the opportunity to own literally nothing other than their capacity to labour.
Labour is the measure of value, as such it is described by Marx as the only commodity which is capable of adding value to an existing set of materials. In order for this process, which is the basis of waged work, to come into effect then it is necessary that the working class occupy a position which Marx describes as one of ‘double freedom.’ This double freedom takes the form of freedom from ownership of the means of production and freedom to sell labour power. Marx argues that the fundamental difference between modern and pre-capitalist societies lies in the ‘generalisation of this state of dispossession’ (1979, p. 100).
For Marx, it is the case that this state came into being due to large degrees of violence on the part of the ruling classes. He claims that the history of modern capitalism is one of terror and violence and that by studying things such as land enclosure and property law it is possible to see how, in the desire to accumulate capital, landed classes proceeded to remove rights to ownership to for millions of people across Europe from the 16th century onwards. This can be seen both through an understanding of national histories and through the study of colonialism:
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation’ (p. 600).
Marx’s philosophy of history is often termed ‘dialectical materialism’ and should be seen as directly influencing his economics. According to this theory then two conflicting classes are in constant conflict and the history of their struggle is the driving force of history itself. At the start of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ Marx writes that: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journey man, in a word oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted fight’ (2013, p. 61) Marx is primarily a philosopher of contradiction and the violent clash between classes leads to a change in social formation. It is against this background that one should see his writing. Marx sees this primarily in the French and English revolutions in which he claims that a radical shift was made from the ruling power of the monarchy to the ruling power of land owners. Dialectical materialism claims that this process will inevitably lead to the abolition of capitalist social relations and to a communist society.
This thought of contradiction also emerges in a key section of Marx’s writing around the dynamics of capitalism itself. He writes that Capitalism is contradictory because it makes labour the standard of value and at the same time individual capitalist strive to maximise profits by increasing productivity and therefore expelling labour from their production process. This view fits with his view of history: ‘Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high’ (1993, p. 700). For Marx history is movement of antagonism between classes which, due to the inherent contradiction of capitalist society will one day lead to the abolition of all classes.
In conclusion, this paper has considered the work of Karl Marx. It has argued that Marx’s work emerges out of a critique of the political economy of Adam Smith and his contemporaries. This work focuses on the labour theory of value, and places this focus within the context of a dialectical materialist philosophy that sees class struggle as the prime moving force in history. In order to understand Marx fully, it is therefore necessary to have grasped how each of these elements inter-play in his thinking and his writing. Only once this is done can one see that is equally important as a philosopher and as an economist.
