Introduction: According to the Filcommedia website, Marxism is a group of interrelated political and economic theories of the German philosopher Karl Marx. Marx predicted the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the lower and working classes and the eventual attainment of a classless communist society. Marxist theories focus on inequalities of wealth which the capitalist economic system creates, and point out the effects of this system on individuals in the exploited working class. One idea central to Marxist thought is that throughout history, nations and their legal systems have been vehicle by which a dominant class can exploit work of the masses (Arrowsmith).
Marx believed that capitalism causes alienation. This alienation is caused by the fact that capitalism as an inherently unjust system in which those who own the means of production exploit the proletariat -- meaning the people who must sell their labor in order to live. Some examples of this alienation would include migrant workers in the American west traveling from farm to farm throughout the year doing backbreaking labor for minimum wage or less and living in substandard housing provided by the land owner. Another example of this exploitation involves the lives of long haul truck drivers who are away from their families for days or weeks at a time, often sleeping in their trucks, barely earning enough to get by and being exempted from overtime pay requirements by the federal government's Fair Labor Standards Act. Another example are the thousands of workers and tens of thousands of small investors at Enron Corporation who saw their investment Enron stock drop to the point that the stock was almost worthless while insiders in the company including its senior executives sold their stock for millions based on their insider knowledge of the upcoming financial disaster at Enron.
A. Marx suggests that in the capitalist model, workers are treated as a commodity...