Marxist Theory: Capital, Labor, and Social Structures
Capital
Marx believes that capital dominates the operating conditions of modern society. The critique of political economy is the fundamental starting point for understanding how the relations of domination between classes, the proletariat and the capitalists, work.
Capital, in common parlance, has the economic significance of loans and interest; capital can earn higher wealth.
In respect of capital, work creates the product and makes capital, making it grow and accumulate.
Therefore, economic capital is not in these or those things, but represents the idea of a use or purpose that everything can receive: money, wheat, a tree uprooted from the earth, all products without distinction. Capital will cease to be as such if engaged in new production or are consumed in a barren manner.
On the other hand, the capitalist system contains contradictions. It needs to exploit the proletariat in order to profit, and each capitalist at the same time has to compete with other capitalists. If an investor obtains no surplus, they would be ruined and become proletarian. There are more and more proletarians and fewer capitalists, but the capitalists are richer.
The worker’s labor is getting cheaper under the laws of the market. The proletarians are increasingly poor, capital will be concentrated in the hands of a few capitalists, and work will be concentrated in a mass of proletarians. This process of concentration will lead to a crisis. There will come a time when the proletarian class acquires consciousness and measures their own strength. They will instead join the revolution, and with it, the demise of capitalism and private property. The capitalist economy is replaced by a socialist economy.
Value
Marx set out his theory of value in his “Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” which distinguishes between use value and exchange value. The use value is that value that satisfies human needs, and the value of exchange or merchandise is the price that the goods are in the market.
In capitalist society, the use value is replaced by the exchange. The objects are valued as goods, worth the price they have on the market, responding to the law of supply and demand.
The labor theory of value is a theory that considers the value of a good or service depends directly on the amount of work that it incorporates. It assumes that the exchange value of a commodity is determined by the amount of work required to produce it, and this amount of work time is measured.
Capital Gains
Capital gains are the benefit to the capitalist with the sale of goods produced by the worker. If all goods can be exchanged in the market, they have a value. Work is the only measure by which to measure value. In capitalist society, the worker’s labor is a commodity to be bought and sold, according to the law of supply and demand. The surplus is the difference between the exchange value of the goods or objects produced by a worker and his salary in return.
The surplus is the benefit of the capitalist. This may increase their benefit in many ways, exploiting the worker, paying less, or making them work more hours. To be effective, the added value is that the capitalist must sell their products. Marx distinguishes goods across its value in use of its exchange value.
Use value is the value that things have to meet a particular need, any need, from the biological, such as eating, even the psychological, such as leisure, culture, etc.
The value of change is the value of an object on the market, shown quantitatively and measured by money. Two objects with different use values can have the same exchange value as determined by market laws, such as a pen can cost the same as a table. The goods are subject to changes and market fluctuations, by the laws of supply and demand.
The workforce has an exchange value (the salary received by the worker) and a use-value (its value to produce other goods). In turn, the goods created by the work have use value and exchange value, but their exchange value always exceeds the value of change that is the productive force that created them; they are greater than the salary paid to make them. Even if we consider other quantities such as the corresponding payments and depreciation of machinery used for production, and costs that the employer has to make her business, there will be a big difference. This difference is called goodwill and is the benefit of the capitalist. Without this benefit, there would not be a capitalist society.
Translated in terms of hours of work, of the hours the employee works, some work for him (which corresponds to what the employer actually pays) and one for the employer (which gives rise to excess exchange value has not resolved the worker and gives rise to the profit of enterprise or goodwill).
Marx’s proposal is the removal of that benefit. The value of the produce again, in some way to it, well, because the ultimate benefits are distributed directly to all workers, as in socialist cooperatives, either because the state uses to offer other goods that can be enjoy (roads, bridges, education and health, unemployment or old age, etc.).
Infrastructure and Superstructure
The infrastructure is what is underneath, which holds the rest; the economy is infrastructure. Infrastructure or economic structure is the material basis of society.
The clearest Marxist theses concerning the infrastructure are:
- It’s the key factor determining the historical process and social development and change. In other words, when the infrastructure changes, it changes the whole society (social relations, power, institutions, and other elements of the superstructure).
- The make up the productive forces (natural, technical, and workforce) and the relations of production (social relations established between the people from how they are linked to the productive forces, social classes for example).
- All it depends on the superstructure (legal and political forms, philosophy, religion, art, science, etc.).
The superstructure is what is above, ideology, political ideas, social, legal, aesthetic, and religious, but they try to justify and maintain the prevailing economic relations order, those of capitalism.
Superstructure all elements of society, dependent on infrastructure. This group includes religion, morality, science, philosophy, art, law, and political and legal institutions.
The basic thesis of historical materialism is that the superstructure depends on economic conditions in which each society lives, the means and forces of production (infrastructure). The superstructure has its own independent history, but is in line with the interests class of groups have created. Changes in the superstructure are the result of changes in infrastructure. This theory has important consequences:
- On the one hand, the complete understanding of each element of the superstructure can only be done with the understanding of the structure and economic changes are at their base.
- On the other, the idea that there can be no independence of the human mind, thought, on the economic world in which people are engaged, which can promote a certain relativism.
The history of philosophy can be an internal history of thought (something like the story of how philosophical systems give rise to others) must be treated externally, the same economy, so as to understand the philosophical changes. Philosophical theories are the result of economic circumstances, and the class struggle is the motor of history.
Economic reality determines the consciousness and not vice versa. The proletarian lives in society, has a form of labor and industrial relations determined. Productive relations, productive forces constitute the economic structure of each society, on this way of life economically speaking, the ideological superstructure mounted and not vice versa.
The ideology is believed to develop freely on the sidelines of the economy, but you must realize that their economic situation will reflect who is social and ideological level.
Work
Work is what we must do as human beings, but in a capitalist society, there is an alienation of the fruit of labor. The worker is part of a production line, where the worker produces goods that do not belong to them but are of the owner of media production. Labor is profitable for the capitalists but given the poverty in every sense of the worker.
Work is the activity by which man transforms reality to meet their physical and personal needs. In capitalist societies, farm work is an alienating experience, and not as an activity of self-realization.
For Marx’s work goes beyond its purely economic dimension and becomes an anthropological category: Man is not a passive but active, and the work is an expression of their physical and mental work is the activity in that man develops and improves, hence the work is not just a means to produce goods, but an end in itself.
Human nature is done at work, but not a meaningless job, alienated, but rewarding work in a free work, and this alienation work will be extended also for other fields, social, political, and even psychological.
Alienation
This concept emerges from Hegel, Marx’s teacher, and is defined as a feeling of tearing, like a feel alienated or separated from something. For Marx, in capitalist society which alienates man, both economically and ideologically. Alienation is the loss of something essential in a person.
There are different types of alienation:
- Economic alienation, in which the worker rather than performed as such, is depersonalized and loses its reality. For Marx, the solution is to eliminate private ownership of the means of production (banks and industries).
- Social alienation, which is to divide society into antagonistic classes together, first capitalists with all the privileges and the other the proletariat, which are confined to their physical strength and intellectual ability.
- Political alienation, in which the state belongs to the ruling class, instead of serving the entire society.
- Religious alienation, which makes people escape from reality, “religion is the opium of the people” Marx said, numbs all revolutionary struggles and retraces the release of the proletariat.
If economic alienation disappears, all the others will disappear.
The alienation or estrangement, or alienation, is the circumstance in which any person lives is not master of itself, nor is ultimately responsible for their actions and thoughts. For Marx is the condition in which the oppressed class lives in every society of exploitation, in any company which supports private ownership of the means of production.
Marx believes that the emergence of private property there is an entirely new social situation that can only be removed with the abolition of this form of private property.
According to Marx, the capitalist production system, the man does something, merchandise, used by the owner of the means of production only as one tool in the production chain of goods. Private property alienates the man because he does not treat it as an end in itself but as a mere means or instrument for production.
Comparison with Other Authors
Marx and the Concept of Alienation in Hegel
Whether Marx to Hegel, alienation describes the situation where an individual has not himself, when the activity performed (work) I canceled, he makes himself out and become something else (goods, or production line), the subject is alienated.
Although Marx took Hegel’s concept, there are important differences in how both philosophers performed:
- For Hegel the subject of alienation is the idea thought, conscience, the act of knowing, the subject is the antithesis in the process of knowledge, is the negativity, denial, finiteness, for Marx the subject is the real man, who works and transforms nature, but felt alienated by doing so for another.
- For Hegel, alienation is the peculiar process by which the idea is nothing radically different from each other, it alienates and is Nature, and have plans to do with the idea (of absolute spirit) to his own perfection or self-knowledge. Alienation in Marx refers to the exploitation of man by man, refers to the loss of autonomy and freedom of social class as a result of the operation to put it another social class, mainly because of existing property private production.
Alienation is the main economic alienation, the alienation that occurs as a result of the socioeconomic structure that rests on private property, but is not limited to it, as also expressed in religious alienation, political, and intellectual. We understand all of Marx’s philosophy as the attempt to create a philosophy for understanding the causes of alienation (and ultimately human suffering) and find its solution.
Comparison between Marx and Rousseau’s Social Contract, Locke and Kant
According to Rousseau conceived of a state of nature, in which human beings were happy to share everything, without private property, and a civil state in which the will of the people governed, without government, with full equality, freedom and without private property, Marx conceives a story of materialism, in which the first societies, which he called Asian, living in harmony and without private property (with Rousseau would be that private ownership makes men selfish and leads to the domination of some over others) but Marx does not see civil society without a state, but with a communist government in which private property, or the means of production are held by the state.
The social contract of Locke and Kant serve as proof of the bourgeois state, so Marx would be against this concept, and defending private property above all, and thus the necessary division between the bourgeoisie and employees or workers. The bourgeoisie in the seed that grows on capitalism.