Essay on the Marxist critiques of liberal capitalism

The standard litany of Marxist critiques of liberal capitalism rely on a common theme which presupposes that capitalism is fundamentally flawed and evil because it relies on a structure of exploitation, i.e., the bourgeoisie, those who own the means of production, ruthlessly exploit the proletariat, the individuals who sell their labor and do not own the means of production. Marx believed, essentially, that capitalist empires are built on the backs of the proletariat, who reap inadequate rewards for their work. He hypothesized that the essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based in wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer. (Marx, 1859[1967], p. 209)

While well intentioned and valid in some ways, Marxists critiques generally fail on intellectual, practical, and empirical levels. The first intellectual failure is manifest in Marx’s own quote, above, which presumes that wage-labor is effectively the same means of oppression as slave labor. This is only true if the proletariat serving as the labor have no means or hope of achieving ownership stake in the work that they do or the organizations for whom they do the work. Though it may have been true in 1859 when he wrote it, liberal capitalism has evolved, particularly in the United States, to the state of an individual-ownership society, where opportunities abound for individuals to assume a stake in the work that they do, not merely collect a paycheck for their labor.In Marx’s mind, the only way for workers to free themselves from this slavery was to collectively own the means of production. The efficacy of this intellectual model has thus far been an abject failure in terms of the results when …

Tags: capitalism, China, democracy, Marxism, proletariat, USSR

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