AWOL - Supplement Sessions on Marx's Critique of Capitalism [OPTIONAL]

Karl Marx, a philosopher and analyst of Capitalism, is known for his book The Communist Manifesto, with Friedrich Engle, a radical capitalist. During the mid 1800s, Marx tried to understand capitalism and how it developed; a process known as the Dialectic. The dialectic is the method of looking at different situations that could have led to an event/phenomenon; the way things changed due to collisions. Within the dialectic is the thesis (the original situation)<-> anti-thesis (developing contradiction): higher synthesis (Capitalism). The Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, another philosopher at the time, believed that the change in quantity, in any given situation, lead to a different kind of reality. He thought that history was a process that the world was most likely going to turn into in a point in time; a physical reality. In relation to Marx’s dialectic process in Capitalism, it was believed that Capitalism was a process that helped others become socialists. The “division of labor necessarily draws after it greater division of labor, the employment of machinery greater employment of machinery, work upon a large scale work upon a still greater scale” (Marx). In Capitalism, it was also a process that showed how the owners got richer while the worker of the company remained poor.

The division of labor, within the capital, also defines Marx’s Primitive Accumulation of the Capital. The Primitive Accumulation of the Capital is “a small percentage of the population obtained possession of the necessary resources to start businesses which employ people and gain profit” (Wikipedia). The process in which the capital creates businesses/companies is through the laborers. Capitalism also seeks for “competition by restlessly introducing further subdivision of labor and new machines, which, though more expensive, enable him to produce more cheaply, instead of waiting until the new machines shall have been rendered obsolete by competition” (Marx). Marx felt that overall; capitalism was fundamentally irrational for workers. In order for the owners to obtain the machinery, land, farms, etc. to make the commodity, the owner had enslave and create genocide, by exploiting people who were and are still willing to alienate him/her self to work for the capital. In Capitalism, one is capable of alienating his/her self by selling the time and energy to make money. Workers who are easy to sell his/her labor-power, “their ability to work” (Ollman), to capitalism are known as ‘Proletarian’. An example that used to take place, and still exists today is prostitution. Women who seek for money use their own body as the product of their own ‘company’ are known as prostitutes. They sell their body by having sex with men (or women), and get paid in return of their ‘deeds’ that were made. In relation to capitalism, laborers sell their selves to the capital by “[maintaining] the total of his wages for a given time by performing more labor, either by working a great number of hours, or by accomplishing more in the same number of hours” (Marx). Regardless of how great or little the pay is for a large amount of hours worked, laborers are more willing to sacrifice what they would normally do at home, or maybe school, to make money and provide for his/her family.

That’s where Marx’s Labor Theory of Value comes into play. Marx thought that “the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity” (Prychitko). The value of a commodity, within the capital, and how the commodity is produced is all reliant to the workers and how they are the source of all wealth. The workers within the capital are responsible for making the market/commodity, while the owners of the company are making most of the profit.


“His labor theory of value, however, is primarily concerned with the more basic problem of why goods have prices of any kind. Only in capitalism does the distribution of what is produced take place through the medium of markets and prices” (Ollman).
According the comic above, the artist tried to portray the perspective of the laborers who spent, and still spend, most of their time trying to make a living that is being invested to formulate the capital. At this point in time, workers are unaware of their dedication to the capital and how he/she is being abused. According to Marx “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him” (Marx). The term used for ‘sucking living labor’ out of workers was known as Vampirization. While a worker is in the process of making a commodity, the capital is already extracting from the workers labor-power.

In order to take away capitalism, a revolution must occur.

In my own opinion, I can understand Marx’s concern towards Capitalism and how it is not fair towards laborers who are innocently trying to provide for his/her self and family. Based on this week’s class lecture, one can agree that America’s past centuries of enslaving Africans and Indians, in the West, enriched capitalism to continue to provide jobs for proletarian workers. The dialectic between the slaves and America, and even before that with the Indians, collided by creating a higher synthesis which is known as capitalism today. Because of the people who still continue to work, others who are possibly in the same position are also willing to work for the capital. However, as ‘irrational’ capitalism may be, one can also agree that society can’t live with it, and cannot live without it. To imagine, how would society turn out to be if Capitalism no longer existed? I mean it would stop the exploitation of workers within the company, but how else are workers supposed to work in order to make money? Capitalism and the working class is just one big cycle to how the American society is supposed to function.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_accumulation_of_capital

http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/marx.html

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Marxism.html

http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm