Question

My professor said according to Marx, what capitalists purchase is not labor goods, but the products of labor. The result is not the market economy of distribution according to labor, but the collapse of the whole market economy.

I don't figure out what's the big idea of it. How can capitalism be against itself? The issue, as Marx sees it, is that laborers aren't technically part of the capitalist economy. They do not sell material goods that they themselves produce; they sell their time and effort at a flat rate. Thus they cannot extract any of the benefits of supply and demand curves. Labor is effectively in the position of old-school farm animals: they work in exchange for food, shelter, and bare necessities, while the products of their labor are sold (by the farmer) at market rates. Capitalists make all the profits, and laborers are kept, you know... comfortable... at least as long as they are useful and productive. So it isn't exactly that capitalism isagainstitself. It's more thatclasscapitalism excludes large numbers of people from the market because the products of their labor are given over to the capitalist class in non-market transactions before those products ever enter the market. Marx observed in his time people working in factories and mines under harsh conditions without earning enough to build personal wealth. Marx also knew from history several examples of violent uprisings of peasants or similar when those would not be able to finance their lives with their work. Marx put those two observations together and predicted that those exploited workers in factories and mines would necessarily start a violent uprising in the future. Marx did not consider democracy and state-organized welfare as realistic mitigations because those were not as developed at the time as they are now in developed countries. So the predictions of Marx are less based on complete economic reasoning but more on historical context of early industrialization. Sadly Marx did also not understand that revolutions led by non-elites would degrade immediately into worse systems of oppression, so he painted an exaggeratedly rosy picture of a future after revolutions. What is the Precautionary Paradox in philosophy?

a) A paradox related to time travel
b) A paradox questioning the reliability of conjunctions of individually justified beliefs
c) A paradox concerning the nature of reality
d) A paradox in moral philosophy

Answer 1

Marx is critical of the private accumulation of capital and holds that the value of an object is determined by the socially necessary amount of labor used in its production. In historical hindsight, Marx was writing about what would happen if capitalism was allowed to run rampant, highlighting the negative aspects of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Marx believed that the proletariat would eventually defeat the bourgeoisie and establish a socialist utopia.

Step-by-step explanation:

Marx is critical of the private accumulation of capital, which he defines as money and commodities. Stockpiling of capital allows for private accumulation of power. Marx holds that the value of an object is determined by the socially necessary amount of labor used in the production of that object. In a capitalist system, labor is also a commodity, and the worker exchanges their work for a subsistence wage. In Marx's view, workers' labor in fact creates surplus value, for which they are not paid and which is claimed by the capitalist. Thus, the worker does not receive full value for their labor.

In historical hindsight, Marx was really writing about what would happen if capitalism was allowed to run completely rampant, as it did in the first century of the Industrial Revolution. The hellish mills, the starving workers, and the destitution and anguish of the factory towns were all part of nineteenth-century European capitalism. Everything that could contain those factors, primarily in the form of concessions to workers and state intervention in the economy, had not happened on a large scale when Marx was writing - trade unions themselves were outlawed in most states until the middle of the century. In turn, none of the factors that might mitigate capitalism's destructive tendencies were financially beneficial to any individual capitalist, so Marx saw no reason that they would ever come about on a large scale in states controlled by moneyed interests.

Karl Marx, a German philosopher, criticized the growth of capitalism and industrialization, and brought a new analysis to economic thinking. Marx saw industrialization as the last stage of human development, a final struggle between two opposites that would create something new. According to Marx, this last battle was between the more numerous workers, whom he called the proletariat and the industrial capitalists, the bourgeoisie. Marx believed the proletariat would inevitably defeat the bourgeoisie, seize the factories, and create a socialist utopia.