The accumulation of capital generates higher productivity and transforms systems, but it is also associated with uneven development. Marx saw capitalism as being in a situation of continuous disequilibrium, because of this tendency of uneven development, which is not confined to a single arena, but characterises all social and economic relations.
Thus, there is an inherent tension between the expansion of the productive forces and the ability of the economic system to generate sufficient demand for the goods that are produced. There is disproportionality between the expansion of fixed and variable capital, which makes it more difficult to generate profits. There is disproportionality between sectors that emerges in the process of accumulation.
This can be extended to explain imperialism, which can be understood as the struggle for control over economic territories of different kinds. And the imbalance between money as a medium of exchange and money as a measure of value gets amplified by the development of credit and finance, creating a higher tendency for crisis.
The system generates many conflicts and contradictions, only some of which culminate in periodic crises. Since the basic dynamics of capital is simultaneously to aggrandise itself and impoverish other classes such as workers and peasants, within and across nations, it obviously generates class conflicts.
But the system also generates intra-class conflict, pitting individual capital against other capitals and the individual worker against other workers. There is a Darwinian struggle for survival constantly at work, so individualism, conflict and competition become the driving forces of the system. But these also create what Marx called the anarchy of the market and the inevitable tendency towards crises.
Overproduction in terms of the market even when human needs of all the people in the society need not be satisfied is a characteristic feature simply because of the way individual capitals operate in the drive to generate more profit. That depiction of a world propelled by the imperatives of capitalist development, memorably portrayed by Marx and Engels in their pamphlet The Communist Manifesto , still fits.
Indeed, since the fall of the Soviet Union in , it has become ever more dominant as an economic trope. In Das Kapital 's first volume, Marx explored how workers are exploited through production — the actual process of work.
He argued that the capitalist purchased labourers' capacity to work, not their labour. To profit, or extract 'surplus value' from workers, the capitalist had to lengthen the working day or increase productivity during each hour. Drawing heavily on records such as those of Britain's Factory Inspectorate, Marx argued that to 'realize' surplus value, commodities had to be circulated and sold at a profit in the world market.
But with no certainty of sale, 'capitalist crisis' could ensue: goods might be over-produced or profits decline. Marx saw the introduction of 'labour-saving' machines such as steam-powered textile looms, which displaced workers, as leading to a declining rate of profits; he believed that only living labour could produce profit.
In terms of immediate impact, Das Kapital was a damp squib. The German edition sold only 1, copies in 5 years. The volume was not translated into English until , after Marx's death. It was in that decade, from to , that the real impact of the book and its author's wider thinking began, owing much to Engels' efforts in promoting Marxism — especially his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Das Kapital became a founding document of the international socialist movement, which emerged in Paris in with the formation of the Second International, an organization of socialist parties and trade unions.
In the twentieth century, with the Russian Revolution in and especially during the cold war, Marxism as we now understand it came to dominate international relations.
Ironically, it was the fear of communism and its appeal to the working classes, especially in France and Italy, that encouraged many Western countries to establish effective systems of social security and the welfare state. Some of the most prescient aspects of Marx's thinking do not appear in the published book. His speculations on a future of increasingly automated production are aired only in notes. In these, Marx looked forward to mechanized labour allowing more leisure time and more creative use of it; meaningful work, he believed, was humanity's ultimate vocation.
Today, of course, recession-linked redundancies, the 'gig economy' and the rise of robotic workforces evoke very different responses. But the basic assumptions made in both the notes and the published book still hold: class, society and capital were human and historical creations and, as such, could be abolished or transformed by human agency.
Marx was also deeply interested in ethnology, notably the work of US anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, who pioneered kinship studies and developed a theory of social evolution in Ancient Society In his later years, from this and other sources, Marx elaborated the concept of primitive communism — the idea that traditional cultures, existing before the advent of private property and the state, upheld common ownership and social equality. They would also exert a powerful influence over many in the Labour Party and the trade union movement, even if they did not always share his vision of a global workers' revolution.
Marxism became a way of interpreting the world - the simple idea at its core that history was a battle between opposing social classes could be applied to everything from the study of literature and film to the education system.
It also became a byword for totalitarianism - as one-party states and dictators proclaimed Marxism as their guiding philosophy.
Some argued that this was a perversion of Marx's ideas as set out in Das Kapital, and that the Soviet Union, for many the ultimate example of a Marxist state, was really just a form of state capitalism, where the factory owners had been replaced by government bureaucrats. But the Soviet Union's collapse in the early s dealt a major blow to the credibility of Marxist theory and it went out of fashion on university campuses and in mainstream left-wing political parties that aspired to gain power in the West, such as the Labour Party.
It underwent something of a revival in the wake of the global financial crash, however, which some saw as a classic example of capitalism in crisis, just as Marx had predicted. Marr questions McDonnell on Marxism. Giving his imprimatur, the censor, one Skuratov, had written 'few people in Russia will read it, and still fewer will understand it. Sorge that 'our success is still greater in Russia, where Kapital is read and appreciated more than anywhere else.
Kugelmann in the autumn of , when he was working over the manuscript, he described a four-book three-volume work on lines identical with those edited after his death by Friedrich Engel s. Thus vol.
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