Mark and Rawls
Karl Marx: Capitalist Society is Exploitative and Alienating
The Communist Manifesto characterizes capitalism as exploitative and alienating by pointing to three primary features. The Manifesto identifies the role of industrialization and technological advances, the commodification of the individual laborer, and the profit derived by some members of society not from their own labor but that of others. (Marx, 68-72) Capitalist society's tendency to produces classes of people who are either members of the bourgeoisie or proletariat, and the remnants of the aristocracy is itself seen as problematic. In Marx's attack of the bourgeoisie, he links the capitalist process itself to their own downfall. He writes "what the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all is their own grave diggers." (Marx, 79). This overly dramatic sentence and indeed the chapter can be viewed as a bit of propaganda or an act of psychological warfare against Marx's critics, but what it illustrates is the relationship between industry and Marx's notion of exploitation. The two are nearly inseparable.
As to the exploitative implications of the means of production, Marx and Engel are concerned that the value of the individual laborer's wages are reduced in value because of the sheer scale of production- I think he is pointing to the ability to negotiate that comes with monopolies. They write "no sooner than is the exploitation of the laborer…at end…then he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie." (Marx, 70) In that passage they seem to be asserting...
Marx cries out that in Capitalism, "That culture... is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine." It is this exploitation which persists today and which is far worse than the mere depression of living standards. Capitalism is intrinsically linked with consumerism, and both replace a sacred connection to one's vocation and one's art with a profane connection to one's paycheck and the throw-away products
(O'Hagan, 1999, p. 113) Marx' Alienation Applied to Project: Marx conceived of and in many ways developed a blueprint for collectivism. The individual would transcend alienation in an environment where he did not have to possess goods, as everything he needed was provided for him and his work was a demonstrative example of making sure this was so. Marx project therefore became the development of communism, and later the transitional socialism,
Marx and Historical Materialism Karl Marx rejected the philosophical Idealism of Hegel and the utopianism of the early socialists in favor of a theory of history thoroughly grounded in materialism. For Marx, ideas, cultures, political systems were all part of the superstructure of society while economics and the social relations of classes represented the base that truly drove history forward. Economic forces were the motor of history, not ideas, philosophies or
Thus, state policies in a capitalist society are determined by the government's need to protect the development of the economic base while coercively preserving social stability. Therefore, state policies must be favorable to capitalist relations of production to ensures that a dominant economic class may actually rule even though it does not directly govern; it can determine the political agenda. 3. The worker-control movement was not forced on people by the
Humans had to learn to use freedom in a positive, rather than a negative fashion, said Sartre. A modern manager, cognizant of such critiques, thus must try to create a workplace where a sense of connection to the product, place, and community is fostered. For example, at Google, workers are encouraged to use company time and equipment to pursue their own projects. Google is a place where workers can eat
Monticello, the mansion that Thomas Jefferson designed in the hills of Virginia near the State University that he founded, has three portraits that are to be found on the wall of President Jefferson's study that have remained there for 200 years. These portraits are of three writers Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and John Locke. Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence and acquired the Louisiana Purchase form the French, refers
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