Marxist Theory

More Wealth in Fewer Hands

To explore how social wealth is produced and consumed, Marxist theory attends to the social relationships embedded within economic arrangements. Karl Marx took special care to explore the modern factory as a model for the radically new social relationships required of industrial capitalism. By investigating the modern factory, Karl Marx uncovered a peculiar contradiction: Namely, the wealth produced by industrial capitalism required more and more people to be brought into a social relationship conducive to capitalist production, yet fewer and fewer people benefited from the wealth that was produced by capitalism. Wealth was produced by the labor of many, but was in the hands of fewer and fewer. The key to unlocking the peculiar logic of capitalism was the extraction of surplus labor from those working longer and increasingly faster in the factory. The study of industrial capitalism revealed two key antagonistic groups or classes of people: the bourgeoisie, the owners of the factory; and the proletariat, the workers brought into the factory to turn raw materials into commodities. From the standpoint of Marxist theory, the ethical and political problem of capitalism is that the bourgeoisie enriches itself at the expense of the proletariat.

Marxist theory reveals how capitalism produces social wealth through the production and consumption of commodities. The more things that can be bought and sold, the more potential there is for capitalists to generate a return on their investment. To appreciate the imbalance of power in the social relationship between capital (bourgeoisie) and labor (proletariat), Marxist theory pays close attention to how capitalism transforms labor into a commodity. This is first done by thinking of labor as an abstract capacity—what Marxist theory calls labor power, the capacity of the worker to work in a specified way and for a specified time. The capacities capitalism may need from labor are infinite, including physical capacities associated with the body, intellectual capacities associated with reasoning, cultural capacities associated with ways of living, and social capacities associated [Page 608]with communication. The worker's labor power is just as much of a commodity as the commodity he or she produces in the factory. The ability of the bourgeoisie to control the social wealth produced by the factory is due to its ability to control the fruits of the worker's surplus labor. Surplus labor is the difference between the labor time it would take for the worker to earn the wages to pay for his or her daily needs and the amount of time the laborer spent producing the commodity for the owners of the factory. Since the capitalist controls the products produced by the surplus labor of the worker, it is to the advantage of capitalism to control as much surplus labor time as possible. For example, the longer the working day, the more surplus is being extracted because the worker is producing commodities that exceed what she or he can consume. Second, the faster the worker can work, the more surplus is produced because the worker is producing more commodities in the same amount of time. Ironically, as the worker becomes more productive, the factory needs fewer workers, and while the capitalist takes more social wealth, the total sum of possible workers makes less. Whether by working a longer day or by working more efficiently, surplus labor is extracted from the worker because the commodities created during this time are controlled by the owners of the factory. At the center of the working day, therefore, is a social relationship structured by exploitation. A capitalist enterprise creates an exploitive social relationship because the success of the capitalist is dependent on expanding its control over surplus labor time by limiting the cost of labor time. By focusing on surplus labor time as important to the production of social wealth, Marxist theory can begin to analyze capitalism as a global system socially organized by an international division of labor. Marxist theory was the first to provide a critique of globalization because the international division of labor revealed that the labor and resources of one part of the world (e.g., Latin America) were extracted to promote the social wealth of another part of the world (e.g., North America).

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