Marxist Theory

Analysis of Capitalism

According to Marx, capitalism is characterized by the separation of the workers, or producers, from the means of production. Unlike in traditional societies, workers in capitalism do not produce for their own or the community's immediate use, using methods and tools that are their own. Instead, they must labor for others to produce commodities to which they have no [Page 914]necessary relationship, using machinery and processes that do not belong to them and over which they have no control. This is the condition, in economic terms, of alienation. In alienation, workers are estranged from their own activity and its results, from the natural material with which they work, as well as from themselves and their fellow human beings (since their intrinsically human creativity becomes the property of others). This condition of estrangement has also been described as an overarching influence on relationships in general within capitalism, even outside the immediate situation of economic production.

Capitalist society depends for its reproduction and development on the exploitation of the working class by capital. Through the labor process, workers produce commodities, whose value is measured by the average labor time taken to produce them. In turn, they are paid a wage that are just enough to allow them to survive and to continue to work. (Their own labor power, also a commodity in capitalism, has a market value equal to the labor required to produce the food, shelter, and other necessities that maintain them as workers.) In a working day, however, a worker produces a value that is greater than that given to her or him in the day's wages. The difference between the value returned to the worker, and the total value produced, is called surplus value. Surplus value is the source of profit in capitalism, and its accumulation is the goal of individual capitalists as well as the capitalist class as a whole. In one sense, capitalists do not cheat workers, to the extent that they return to them in wages the value of their labor power. What is masked, however, is the fact that the excess portion of the value produced by the worker is appropriated by the capitalist.

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