Karl Marx Essay

Essay on Marx vs. Conservative Economists

First, lets begin by thoroughly explaining the “laws of motion” of Karl Marx, then I will dive into the question to be answered for this assignment. Now these laws of motion consist of many parts of the sophisticated capitalist economic system such as: accumulation of capital, the transformation of the work place, concentration of capital, the banking system, the growth of wage labor, and the decline of capital. There are a few other key elements to these many “laws of motion” but they will not be addressed in this brief paper. All these terms of the “laws of motion” are from Karl Marx's famous synopsis of capitalist societies called Das Kapital. Accumulation of capital is simple, lets refer to it as the base of the tree, because it is the most simplistic of these following concepts that Karl Marx states. Accumulation of capital is growth of a nation fiscally, this divides all nations; and has done so for centuries. The most powerful nations in the world are the most profitable, 3rd world nations like Ethiopia or other African nations are lower on the scale of nations because of its wealth. Wealth makes the world go round for some people, hence the famous “golden rule”: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” This holds very true across thousands of years, the nations that have the most money are the most powerful nations and have the most advanced societies. This directly relates into a bigger population and a more advanced and intelligent society, especially if they are using a money system. Even today in the year 2011 there are still some nations that have no sense of the word currency, or have never heard of the concept money, while in our advanced societies we use money for everything and without money you are nothing in our advanced world. The transformation of the work place is not far off a concept from the prior, accumulation of capital. The more capital you accumulation as a nation, this directly relates to the work of the nation. China for example has a enormous amount of capital because of their work load on that nation, they work more hours than any other nation and they are in their industrial revolution now, just as we were back in the 1900’s. The work place on the other hand is constantly changing, using China as an example again we can travel there and see that the work place is much different. I can assume that the work place for them is similar to ours during our industrial revolution, dark and dirty and unsafe for all. Work place incidents and injuries are common for those people because China has yet to transform their work place like it is in the U.S. Here in the U.S. we have seen the horrors of the work place and have put laws in place against child labor and other safety standards to protect our workers. These laws both protect our workers and citizens but also keeps them working longer because they are under the illusion (if you will) that their work place is a proper working area. We will see more and more changes be made to the work place across the globe as these economies progress further in the future. Now the banking system is quite related to the accumulation of wealth, because not all nations start out with a bank or currency, these things are developed and adapted as nations grow economically. Banking is directly related to accumulation of wealth because in our society we accumulate our wealth using banks. Banks are a great way for us to store money and not have to worry about it but also for that institution to use that money for the advancement of a economic society and have specialist handle money better than the average citizen. We trust our earning with those tellers everyday. Imagine for a moment that you are working hard at your occupation and are not being paid. That sounds like insanity to us but in the past these primitive nations would use slave labor or just labor in general that would not be paid, it could also have been labor for the common good of the community. Similar to volunteer work in today's age. I heard a story recently that Nike (the shoe company) has used unpaid labor for a short period of time to maximize their profits and become the leader in their market. Using a technique called island hopping to jump from pacific island to island and set up centers there for mass producing shoes, while employing the local people of these primitive 3rd world nation that have never seen money or cars or heavy machinery in their lives. Back to the topic of growth of wage labor, labor was not considered a job long ago because it benefited the area but as intelligence increases people want some form of reward for their efforts. Now a day we call that minimum wage or a cost of living increase in pay is another example of the growth of wage labor. Now the decline of capital is occurring right now in the United States, because of these poor economic condition the value of our dollar is declining. Simply put, the dollar isn't worth a dollar any longer. This is because of a flux in the market, our nations debt does not help that problem but capitalist economies go through cycles as Karl Marx also writes about and this nation is going through a negative cycle known as a recession. The world economy is better off than us and their currency is competing with our currency and visa verse, in result our economic standing among the world is lower than it was and our dollar is declining because of this. Our nation is in debt to many other countries (*cough, cough* China) and the wealth of our capitalist economy is declining. Hopefully this nation will do something to pull itself out of this hole and grow again to a profitable nation that is once was because I don’t think even Karl Marx himself could predict when this nation will rebound from this recession. Karl Marx and his analysis will always seriously disagree with the stereotypical conservative economist because Karl Marx is the polar opposite of those people from a political stand point. Marx is a radical and so are his views, but his brutal honesty in all of his work is honest and its the fair and just truth. Economists are perpetuating some of the corruption that exists in some capitalist societies and Marx fought to expose that and show the honesty of a capitalist society. Capitalism is not a bad thing and its not all corruption but Marx and this topic which we discuss in the paper deals a lot with the negative aspects of capitalistic societies. Capitalism from a political stand point seperates power from the people, a great example of this is the polarizing of wealth and the “I am the 99%” ads all over the media. The 99% means that we are the average 99% of the population because 1% of the U.S. population owns the majority of the wealth, that is how capitalism is supposed to work apparently. We are just now figuring out these ramifications of capitalism though here in 2011. In hindsight of the previous paragraph Karl Marx stressed that the workers would have to organize unions and struggle collectively to get ahead in their work place. This is extremely true because a single worker cannot make changes inside a major corporation with out it being a rare occasion. If there is something corrupt within the work place then most lower ladder employees can’t do anything about it because of fear of losing their job or other concerns. Hence why Marx says to band together and form a union and then with your hundred or so workers in a union then you can rally as a collective and make changes as you see fit. Conceptually this is a great idea for any worker, but there are negative consequences of being involved in a union like dues and other obligations that are necessary for union involvement. Unions have almost completely turned the tides on their major corporations e.g.: steel workers and other manual labor natural resource corporations are heavily influenced and nearly ran by the unions that are the general work force. This is okay as a worker of that union because the union protects you but if your on the other side of the union, or you do not belong to that union then its a different story. In this paper I had touched briefly on the topic of which is more accurate, Marx and his theories or the standard conservative economist. I personally believe that Marx has a much more accurate representation of what exactly capitalism is and does, hence his enormous popularity in economies and sociology and some politics. Both in England and in the U.S during their industrial revolutions Marx is correct and he will be more correct with any society during their industrial revolution because the society and culture do not matter. the industrial revolution is all the same. Karl Marx has a concept that is universal for all nations going through the same revolution and conservative economists are conservative, that’s the key adjective in their title as economists and because of their conservative manner they will not be as radical of a thinker as Karl Marx was. Marx was a genius and his ideology of capitalist societies will thrive for decades to come.