STAGE 1880: KARL MARX - WORKER ARE EXPLOITED GROUP
Karl Marx (5 May 1818 –
14 March 1883) was a philosopher, political and social theorists Prussia.
Although Marx addressed numerous issues throughout his career as a reporter and
philosopher, he is best known for his analysis of history in terms of class
conflict, summarized in his claim that, ‘The Importance of capitalist and
employees against each other’. His writing formed the basis for the movement of
communist and socialist.
Marx’s theories about society,
economics and politics. It’s collectively known as Marxism. Marx’s hold that
human societies progress through class struggle. Class struggle a conflict
between an ownership class that controls production and a dispossessed
labouring class that provides the labour for production. He called capitalism
the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie’ believing it to be run by the wealthy
classes for their own benefits, and he predicted that, like previous
socioeconomic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead
to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system which socialism. He argue that class antagonism under
capitalism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat would eventuate in the
working class’ conquest of political power in the form of a dictatorship of the
proletariat and eventually establish a classless society, socialism or
communism, a society governed by a free association of producers.
Karl Marx socialists
theory, worker are exploited group. The exploitation theory is the theory, most
associated with Marxists, that profit is the result of the exploitation of wage
earners by their employers. It rest on the labour theory of value which claims
that value is intrinsic in a product according to the amount of labour that has
been spent on producing the product. Thus the value of a product is created by
the workers who made that product and reflected in its finished price. The
income from this finished price is then divided between labour (wages), capital
(profit), and expenses on raw materials. The wages receive by workers do not
reflect the full value of their work, because some of that value is taken by
the employer in the form of profit. Therefore, ‘making a profit’ essentially
means taking away from the workers some of the value that results from their
labour. This is what is known as capitalist exploitation.
The theory has been
opposed by, among others Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. In History and Critique of
Interest Theories (1884). He argues that capitalist do not exploit their workers.
They actually help employees by providing them with an income well in advance
of the revenue from the goods they produced, stating ‘Labour cannot increase
its share at the expense of capital’. In particularly. He argues that the
theory of exploitation ignores the dimension of the time in production. From
this criticism it follows that, according to Bohm-Bawerk, the whole value of
the product is not produced by the worker, but that labour can only be paid at
the present value of any foreseeable output.
An understanding of the
basics of Marx’s theory of the exploitation helps to explain the different
forms of struggles between workers and capitalists. One of the earliest such
struggles was over the length of the working day, which Marx discusses at
length in the first volume of capital. So long as everything else remains the
same, capitalist can increase the amount of ‘surplus labour’ over and above
that needed to produce the value of wages by extending the length of the
working day. This increases the rate of exploitation, as worker spend a greater
portion of the working day performing unpaid labour for the capitalist.
In the 1880s in the U.S
workers, led by anarchists and socialist, waged heroic struggles to limit the
working day to eight hours. These workers were struggling to decrease the rate
of exploitation. By fighting for a shorter working day, they were fighting for
a shorter working day, they were fighting to decrease the amount of unpaid
labour they were forces to perform for the capitalists. Similarly, struggles
over wages and benefits are struggles over the value and price of labour power,
which is an expression of workers’ standard of living. Capitalists seeks to
lower wages and slash benefits, decreasing the price of labour-power in order
to increase the accumulation of surplus value, to maximize their profits.
Most importantly, Marx’s
theory of exploitation reveals that because the source of capitalists’ wealth
is the unpaid labour of workers, the interest of workers and capitalist like
slave and master or serf and lord before them are diametrically opposed and are
impossible to reconcile. The two will always come into conflict since
capitalists can only increase their share of the wealth at the expense of
workers, and vice versa. Workers have to struggle to decrease the severity of
the exploitation they face under capitalism. But as long as the capitalist
system exists, workers will be exploited, and their unpaid labour will remain
the sources of the profits that are the lifeblood of the system.
Therefore, Marx concluded
that the only way for workers to control the wealth they create and use it to
meet their needs was under a different system altogether. As he wrote in Value,
Price and Profit. According to Marx, only when workers control the means of
production for their own benefit can exploitation be abolished only then will
the expropriators expropriated.
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