Karl Marx's Capital

In Capital, Karl Marx expounded the idea that class conflict was the inevitable result of capitalism, and that communism would emerge in industrialized societies when alienated laborers revolted against the tyranny of a society based on the radical inequality inherent in the labor-capital relationship. In order to present his ideas about political economy effectively Marx worked from both ends of the spectrum. He took the broader, macro-level, view of the economic forces that led to capitalism and accounted for its success and the essential nature of its influence in creating bourgeois society, demonstrating the manner in which capital produced the institutional and ideological superstructure of that society. But he also developed the micro-level view of the process of worker alienation which occurred as a result of the frustration of humanity's natural productive impulse in such a system. Thus, in the first parts of Capital Marx writes of the impersonal economic forces that constitute the basis of capitalism. When he comes to discuss the source of the alienation of the proletariat, however, he begins to use individual examples and, at the very least, to speak of the direct effects of the conditions of labor and the misbegotten distribution of wealth and opportunity on the individual worker.

In one sense, of course, Marx takes an even wider macro-level view insofar as his materialist conception sees history as an inevitable progression toward a foregone conclusion. M

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anged, however, they are deprived of their use value and assume exchange-value (or, simply, value) alone. The only property commodities for exchange share is that of being the products of "human labour in the abstract" and their value is determined by the amount of labor that has gone into their production (305). The transformation of products with use-value into commodities can only take place when the products are not produced for the producer's subsistence, it can only occur "with production of a very specific kind, capitalist production" (338). Products only become commodities when their use-value is separated from exchange value--but this can begin with the initiation of a relatively simple system of barter. The emergence of money in societies is a clear indication of a further stage in the exchange of commodities. In general, however, the functions of money "which it performs either as the mere equivalent of commodities, or as means of circulation, or means of payment, as hoard or as universal money, point," depending on which of these functions predominates, to distinct stages of social production (339). In each of these cases, the same social relations of production can also be produced by the simple circulation of

Category: Economics - K