Karal Marx
One of the first and most persuasive advocates of modern capitalism was Adam Smith. The most serious challenge to Adam Smith and his followers came from Karl Marx, a nineteenth century German. The son of a Prussian lawyer, the methodical Marx was a worthy and resourceful opponent. He unfolded his economic theories in his monumental Das Kapital, a work on which he spent eighteen years of research and writing. Marx's main objection to the capitalistic system was that it was unfair to workers. To show this, he developed his now famous theory of "surplus value." This theory involves the relationship between the worker and his product and the employer and his profit. It implied that whatever profits the capitalist class acquired, it stole from the workers. Seventy years after his death about a third of the human race was living under governments that called themselves "Marxist". Marxism is more that just a set of bright ideas which anyone, at any time, might have thought up. "It is rather a time and place phenomenon, which acknowledges that the very categories in which it thinks such as abstract labour, the commodity, the freely mobile individual and so on could have emerged from a heritage of capitalism and political liberal
Magee, Bryan. The Story of Philosophy. Montreal: The Reader's Digest Association (Canada) Ltd., 1998 By the end of the nineteenth century it was becoming clear that things were not turning out as Marx's theories said they must. Nowhere in the world was there a society where changes were happening according to Marx's "scientific laws of historical development." This gave rise to something that became known as "revisionism." Different Marxist thinkers started trying to revise Marx's theories so as to fit in with the contrary evidence and also started to reinterpret the evidence to fit in with Marx's theories (Magee, 170). Out of this grew a plurality of different Marxist schools of thought, at odds with one another, sometimes violently so. What led in with the end to the withering away of most of them was the fact that wherever Marxist political movements came to power the result was, invariably and without exception, a bureaucratic dictatorship, a society nothing like the one the theory had claimed was inevitable (Magee, 168). The capitalist system has changed over the years in the industrialized democratic nations of the world. The main reason has been the ongoing changes between government and industry and also between industry and labor. Government has been playing a bigger role in business affairs. The proliferation of laws regulating monopolies, the pricing of goods child labor, and minimum wage scales have succeeded in controlling or removing most of the excesses which characterized industry in the 19th century (Leone, 54) Through collective bargaining, unions have won higher wages, better working conditions, and benefits for their members. Some may claim that when the government is able to interfere in economic affairs, there will be inefficiency and an erosion of political freedom. Under the present system, it is argued, the worker never has, and never will, receive a fair share of the pie. "When the capitalist can't make a profit, they turn off the machines and they turn us off like we were part of the machines. If General Motors can't make enough money, they just lay off 10 000 people, as if they were turning off a machine," said Peter Camejo; Socialist Workers Party candidate for president in 1976, from a speech delivered at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1975 (Leone 57). Eagleton, Terry. Marx. London: Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 1997. Karl Marx was born in the Germany in a town called Trier. His parents were Jews who converted to Lutheranism when he was six, but Marx was an
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Approximate Word count = 1716
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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