MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German philosopher, political economist, historian and political theorist. Having introduced his ideas on class struggle in The Communist Manifesto (1848) and some other writings, he dedicated more than twenty years to the scientific analysis of capitalism to create a grounding for his ideas. Taking as a starting point the political economy elaborated by British writers Adam Smith, David Ricardo and socialist Thomas Hodgskin, he developed and transformed their ideas into an incisive critical analysis of the capitalist mode of production in Das Kapital (1867-1894). Marx’s major treatise, Das Kapital is composed of three volumes, two of which were compiled and published after his death by his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels. In the first volume, Marx centres on the analysis of capital’s mechanisms of exploitation of labour. Having outlined the concept of ‘surplus value’ (value created by workers in excess of the cost of their own labour-cost and appropriated by the capitalist), he argued that the surplus value forms the basis of capitalist production and had its ultimate source in the unpaid work of the wage-earning proletariat. Thus, in a capitalist economy, with its constant need to extract surplus value, workers continually reproduce the economic conditions by which they labour. Or, as Marx put it:

“[The capitalist mode of production is] a mode of production in which the labourer exists to satisfy the need of the existing values for valorisation, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development. Just as man is governed, in religion, by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production, he is governed by the products of his own hand”.

Marx argued that, based on private profit, enriching the capitalist and dragging the workers deeper into poverty, the capitalist system will eventuallydestroy itself. Extremely influential, Marx’s ideas based on the opposition of social classes, has formed a philosophical school that inspires workers’ movements and intellectuals around the world.