KARL MARX CAPITALISM

1. Background

• One reason for 19th-century philosopher Karl Marx’s enduring appeal to date is his analysis of capitalism’s ills.
• Marx in his lifetime saw only the nascence of industrial capitalism today, we see it at its zenith.
• Yet his insight into the injustice and exploitation that marks the system continues to be as relevant today, if not more.
• In his famous work The Communist Manifesto, Marx and his collaborator, Freidrich Engels, write “the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
• A simple quote, it has a profound message describing the state of workers under capitalism and making an appeal to them to fight for change.
• On the centenary of the creation of the USSR, the first and largest attempt to put Marx’s words into action, these lines by Marx and Engels mean and how they fit in today’s time. 

2. The Communist Manifesto

• The Communist Manifesto was originally published in 1848.
• It was a political pamphlet co-authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two of the leading public.
• According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, a manifesto is “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer.”
• We generally hear the term used most commonly by politicians or political parties during election campaigns.
• For instance, in the 2019 elections in India, a key aspect of Congress’s manifesto was NYAY, a basic income scheme targeting the poorest people in India.
• The Congress identified a problem (poverty, poor human indicators, etc.) and proposed a solution that it felt will fix the problem. So goes the Communist Manifesto.
• It is a short document that both identifies the problems of capitalism and suggests action to bring change.

3. Marx’s Capital or Engels

4. The proletarians

•  Proletarians or members of the proletariat, refer to the working classes.
• In more simple terms, proletarians are people who earn wages in return for their labour, which they sell to the capitalist.
• Factory workers, construction workers, and farm workers (not land-owning farmers but people who actually work in the fields) are all examples of the proletariat.

5. Inherent injustice of capitalism

• In Marxist theory, “the proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital.”
• Marxism states that capitalism is built on the backs of proletarians’ labour (rather than “capital” itself, as classical economists would argue).
• It is labour that turns resources or raw materials into commodities for sale.
• However, under capitalism, while the labour is paid in wages (more on that later), it is the capitalist who earns the “profit”. According to Marx, this is the inherent injustice of capitalism.

6. Nothing to lose but chains

• The prescient question is, “why are proletarians, proletarians?” According to Marx, the defining feature of proletarians is that they own no capital machines, tools, equipment, land, raw materials, etc.
• Thus, they are reliant on capitalists, the owners of capital, to be able to produce anything, even though they themselves are the ones who do the production.
• This is a system that chains the proletarians, that ties them and their existence to the mercy of the capitalist.
• Think of when there are mass layoffs because a novel technology makes the skills of a worker obsolete.
• Or when workers are paid under the minimum wage (which is anyway paltry) simply because they have no leverage in their relationship with the capitalist.
• Thus Marx and Engels say, “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
• Crucially, the proletariat did not come into existence in a vacuum.
• It was with the expansion of capital that “craftsmen became workers.” This process continues today, in its own shape and form.
• Think about how Amazon has wrecked the business of small booksellers and publishers. Or how advancement in technology has killed many “cottage industries.”
• Capital constantly expands, consolidating itself and creating more and more inequalities in society.

7. “Working men of the world” must unite

• Now that Marx and Engels have stated the problem (that workers under capitalism are exploited), the second part of the quote offers an idea for change, highlighting arguably the most important tenet of Marxist politics solidarity among workers.
• One of the fundamental reasons why capitalism continues to prevail to date, despite ample evidence of its unjustness, is because of the individualist philosophy that accompanies it.
• One example is the “American Dream” or the myth that tells people to work hard to climb up the social ladder, essentially individualising what is a systemic issue work hard, do well or conversely, if you are not doing well, you do not work hard enough.
• As humans struggle in their pursuit of happiness, they do not even realise the deep-rooted injustice in the world and their role in perpetuating it.
• Thus, Marx and Engels call for unity among workers across the world.
• They call for a rejection of petty national identities or the many ways in which the poor are pitted against the poor.
• Rather, they call for solidarity based on the common proletarian class.
• Effectively, this means Mukesh Ambani (Indian capitalist) and Jeff Bezos (American capitalist) have more in common with each other than they do with their fellow countrymen.
• Similarly, workers across the world have more in common with each other than they realise.
• It is this unity born out of class consciousness that is fundamental to overthrowing capitalism, according to Marx and Engels.

8. Communist countries rise and fall

• The USSR came and went. So did systems in most countries that ostensibly adopted communism.
• Marx and Engels have been criticised on many counts, such as the fact that their theories do not give much thought to individual action, and that they give supremacy to economics as a mode of analysis above all else, for instance.
• While there are various reasons for the fall of communist regimes across the world, one being that they were never genuinely communist in the first place as envisioned by these philosophers, what is still undeniable is that capitalism has aspects that are deeply unjust.

9. Covid-19 impact

• The ideas of workers’ solidarity have also helped in the creation of labour unions, that demand better working conditions for all workers.
• If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the naked exploitation of workers and the working class.
• While for some, the pandemic brought the luxuries of “work-from-home” and online ordering, others struggled to survive as jobs were lost and wages fell, even as profits among the richest soared.
• Therefore, as capitalism continues to exert is influence on workers across the world, Marx and Engels’ manifesto stays relevant.

For Prelims & Mains