| Witnesses |
| Karl Marx |
| Adam Smith |
| Sir Robert Peel |
| David Ricardo |
| Charles Dickens |
| Sarah Carpenter |
| Charles Darwin |
| George Hudson |
| Elizabeth Barrett Browning |
| David Rowland |
|
| Karl Marx |
| Marx diagnosed capitalism's disorders
and eventual demise. He saw history as a continuing struggle among social classes.
According to Marx, capitalism was a wicked economic system. The division of labor was
responsible for egoism because it created the system of private property. As Marx put it
in Capital: "Capitalism mutilates the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrades him
to the level of an appendage to a machine, destroys every remnant of charm in his work and
turns it into a hated toil; it estranges from him the intellectual potentialities of the
labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as independent
power." According to Marx, the dirty little secret is that money is made by
purchasing labor-power as cheaply as possible so that the goods produced by it command
more in the marketplace than they cost to produce. The only way that could be done is by
exploiting wage labor. This, according to Marx, is capitalism's "magic." As Marx
sees it, capitalism sows the seeds of its own destruction. In its ceaseless quest for
profit it continues to generate more and more proletariat class members. In time the
proletariat will become conscious of itself as a class and lead the revolution, which will
overthrow the bourgeois class. This will occur when capitalism reaches its natural limit.
The conditions will then be right for an economic revolution, whereby the proletariats or
workers will overthrow the bourgeoisie class. This will usher in the age of communism.
Humans will then relate to each other not as means of production but as fellow members of
a genuinely human community, each possessing multiple skills, any of which can be employed
as the occasion arises to serve the needs of the community. |
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