Karl Marx’s Theories: Value, Alienation, and Capital
The Increase in Value
Upon reaching the production of goods’ degree of development, money becomes capital. Marx’s surplus value is the amount the employer receives as a benefit from a product made by the workers.
The Value
Merchandise is anything that satisfies a certain human need and is changed to something else. The utility of a thing makes it a use value. Exchange value is the ratio or proportion that a number of use-values of one class has to a number of use-values of another class.
All these values have in common that they are products of work, and the changing of these products involves men in more different jobs.
The production of goods is a social system in which individual producers create diverse products, and they are matched together by exchange.
The magnitude of value is determined by the amount of work needed to develop a product or a use value.
We can say that commodities, as values, are nothing more than representations of a certain working time.
Types of Alienation
What is Alienation?
Alienation is the circumstance in which a person lives without being master of themselves, nor ultimately responsible for their actions and thoughts. For Marx, it is the condition in which the oppressed class lives in every society of exploitation, in any company that supports private ownership of the means of production.
1. Religious Alienation
It is positive because it focuses on all the values of humanity. However, through it, man confirms that he cannot achieve what God can. Every religion has a social origin and is an indicator of misery and disappointment. Religious piety is a protest against the world in which we live. Religion acts as a narcotic; it is the opium of the people.
2. Philosophical Alienation
Philosophical alienation is achieved through ideology. These are all doctrines that are not seeking pure knowledge but to persuade the listener to take certain preconceived positions and practices. All philosophical systems are ideologies. The ideologies conceal the motivations of classes (bourgeoisie). In 1848, it was seen that on the one hand is social life, on the other politics, on one hand the people, on the other the bourgeoisie…
3. Political Alienation
A consequence of this will be social alienation. Social differences are products of the struggle for production.
4. Social Alienation
The Enlightenment dream: that every man would be free and equal. But Marx says that this is a lie. The earlier philosophers said that:
“Society’s role in human life was achieved through an implicit bargain. There is only humanity if man lives in society because it abandons its primitive nature and offers pure rationality.”
“Everything that man owes to society. Society produces individual beings and not the reverse.” And all religious events, art, and science must be related to a particular society.
Differentiation between social alienation:
Superstructure
The superstructure is the set of elements of social life dependent on infrastructure. This set includes religion, morality, science, philosophy, art, law, and political and legal institutions.
The basic thesis of historical materialism is that the superstructure depends on the economic conditions in which each society lives, the means, and forces of production (infrastructure). The superstructure has a history of its own, independent, but is in line with the interests of the class of groups that have created it. Changes in the superstructure are the result of changes in infrastructure.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure is the material base of society that determines the social structure and social development and change. It includes the productive forces and production relations. It depends on the superstructure.
The clearer Marxist theses on the infrastructure are:
- It is 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).
- It is composed of productive forces (natural, technical, and workforce) and the relations of production (social relations established between people based on how they are linked to the productive forces, social classes, for example).
- The superstructure (legal and political forms, philosophy, religion, art, science, etc.) depends on it.
5. Economic Alienation
Economic alienation is the basis of other alienations. Whoever controls the production controls the other elements that form the social system. From the beginning, man is a “homo faber”, i.e., a producer. Man is equal to what he can do. The realization of man as man lies in the fruit of his work reverting to himself. “Work is the fundamental and foundational fact of human life.”
Technical industry is the historical relationship of nature to man. This is positive, a sign of progress that has to be sustained and further progressed. If the work of man does not reverse itself on the value of that work, i.e., modern man does not receive the fruit of his labor, then he is alienated. An alienated man is an alienated employee.
- Work is a process of alienation (man ceases to be someone).
- This is produced by the private property regime; a few possess the material.
- We are facing a reality: “The worker does not receive the benefits of their work.” “The bourgeois who sells the benefits without working.”
- Solution: The liberation of man must go through the redistribution of property without losing the effectiveness of production.
Capital
Capital is a treatise and a critique of political economy. At the same time, it can be read as a study on the historical specificity of modern society. To the extent that Marx considers the economic sphere, Capital, as dominating and determining the functioning of modern society, the critique of political economy, i.e., knowledge on this area, becomes an essential starting point for understanding what modern society is and how it works through the power relationships between classes, on one side the proletariat and on the other the bourgeoisie.
Active work is the process by which man transforms reality to meet their physical and spiritual needs. In the operating companies, work experience is seen as alienated and not as an activity of self. It is also critical because that is where man builds himself. It transforms nature and makes it in his image. Through work, he relates to other men; this means progress and development.
But the consequence is the alienation of labor. Alienation of labor occurs:
- With respect to the Product. Because the work was to be used for the growth and development of human beings, this becomes Alien Capital. That is, instead of serving to develop oneself, it happens to be developed for the wealth of others. The more you work, the less you have.
- Regarding the activity. The activity is unmanageable for the employee. Work is alien to himself.
- With regard to nature. Marx argues that nature should be the inorganic body of man, but being owned by others, it is something foreign. The manipulation of nature is a manipulation for others, for the owner, so it is alienated labor. That is, Nature is changing for others, not for oneself.
- Compared to other men. No one is working to develop themselves or to respect others or for the propagation of the species, but by/for the interest of others who take possession of the labor force of people.
Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism
Materialism
Materialism is the philosophical system that understands reality as a series of elements that move in space, resulting in random combinations of matter, without any other explanation (not really) for any event other than the mere touch of these bodies in space. It embraces, therefore, the corpuscular or mechanical atomistic philosophy.
It comes from a reduction of any metaphysical thought, to eliminate any transcendent explanation.
There is epistemological, metaphysical, monistic, mechanistic materialism, and so on. But here we are interested in two: the historical and dialectical.
Dialectical Materialism
According to dialectical materialism, material phenomena are articulated processes according to three laws:
- Transition from quantity to quality
- Unity and struggle of opposites
- Negation of the negation
The only form of interpretation of any reality passes through the dialectic, that is, to seek the struggle of opposites that generate any movement.
Historical Materialism
It is the Marxist method of interpreting history. All historical processes are based on different dialectical processes of motion: i.e., the constant struggle between nature and man. This general struggle of man and nature can be seen in the study of the relations of production.
The relations of production are the new object of this “science” which aims to open new Marx.
His method is to search for the processes that lead to changes in production conditions, framed in dialectical laws.
Criticism of Marx
Marx is placed against the right and against the left, against Hegel. Against the right, and against Hegel that make this possible, because the idea that “everything real is rational and all that is rational is real” allowed to consider the current situation (real) and everything that happens as rational as what has to be, encouraged to accept the history of mankind and its concretions now and here as manifestations of reason, making any attempt to transform irrational.
Marx is placed against the left, despite sympathy with some of his supporters, especially by Feuerbach, because it was not enough criticism of religion and political criticism. According to Marx, it was only an academic criticism and moved on a theoretical level. Marx took up a good point of departure the analysis of religion from man, as Feuerbach does: God is the essence of the man hypostatized. But it is only an analysis of no practical dimension. In addition, the thought of Feuerbach largely lost the dialectic: the reality is divided, contradictory, and in it the elements that must be enhanced processors. Marx wants one thought capable of explaining things and criticize them to discover their causes material and guide change. Marx retained Hegel’s always the dialectical aspect, the need to think contradiction as the motor of history.
According to Marx, the critique of the utopian socialists against the system was ideal, abstract; in their methods did not meet the new social situation, they had a romantic: wanted to continue with the groups of conspirators against the State, while the economic reality and social (the system of bourgeois production) remained intact.
Marx and Engels described as utopian these socialists because they are unable to carry out their ideals.
According to Marx and Engels, it is necessary to analyze the reality of industrial society at the time, not from the point of view the abstract but concrete, in order to capture the functioning of internal contradictions. This understanding should make it possible to enter the real movement of history and effectively influence their progressive tendencies. This is what Marx and Engels called the transition to scientific socialism, drawing on real factors, lead society towards socialism.
Marx pulled out all the implications of the analysis of the classical economists and exposed the ideological and distorting reality.
Indeed, the collective, common, the production process, confirming the validity of socialism, and claimed that the common ownership of the means of production. As social work is necessary, it follows that the ownership of assets must also be working.
But in the society of the time, the collective work does not create a common wealth (the wealth of nations economists) but generates wealth for some and slavery for most. Marx wanted to deepen the classical economics to discover the cause of the contradiction between social reality and what they say economists. The error of the latter, according to Marx, is natural to declare the laws of economics (for example, that the worker was sentenced not to exceed the living wage or that the work was subject to the law of supply and demand). According to classical economics, the production process was naturally so, and could not be otherwise. The natural and coherent position was simply accept the reality of things.
Marx rejected this conclusion and said that the laws referred to are historical economist, valid for a period, the capitalist, but not worth forever. If they were natural laws, would mean that the misery of the majority is necessarily eternal, and no reason to be really well.
The criticism of religion is not interpreted as an axis of Marxist work but as a consequence of capitalism itself, as there is a religious alienation feuerback applied to each individual: if the man is concerned about an alien called God, man is huge, a member of a society captivated by that. Thus both religion and philosophy and the right are super-structures and ideologies, understanding ideology as “anything that is not reality” (Marx’s Critique of Hegel and Manuscripts). Marx framed the critique of religion in the critique of capitalism and believes that overcoming the alienation of religious type is a necessary precondition to get to the real human. It is then that religious alienation is a false existence is justified by which oppressed life is unfair is compensated with a better life in another life.
The critique of the alienated condition leads to a critique of the ideological consciousness, now understood ideology as that system of ideas or political, legal, moral, aesthetic, religious and philosophical ideas that are part of a social superstructure and which constitute the system both behavioral and social representations. On the other hand, the ideology has a negative meaning because a thing is what it is and what one thinks one is, the ideological contents do not have a proper noun.
Among the critics of Marx to Gramsci also important to note which emphasizes the role of ideology in civil society for the construction of political hegemony
Marx shows a personal score to study the system of bourgeois economy as: capital, land ownership, wage labor, state foreign trade and world market, a time before it all work materials in the form of monographs, noting that large intervals were drafted to clarify their own ideas, and not for publication, the systematic production of these materials depend, as Marx himself admitted, of external circumstances.