Karal Marx
One of the first and most persuasive advocates of modern capitalism was Adam Smith. The most serious challenge to Adam Smith and his followers came from Karl Marx, a nineteenth century German. The son of a Prussian lawyer, the methodical Marx was a worthy and resourceful opponent. He unfolded his economic theories in his monumental Das Kapital, a work on which he spent eighteen years of research and writing. Marx's main objection to the capitalistic system was that it was unfair to workers. To show this, he developed his now famous theory of "surplus value." This theory involves the relationship between the worker and his product and the employer and his profit. It implied that whatever profits the capitalist class acquired, it stole from the workers. Seventy years after his death about a third of the human race was living under governments that called themselves "Marxist". Marxism is more that just a set of bright ideas which anyone, at any time, might have thought up. "It is rather a time and place phenomenon, which acknowledges that the very categories in which it thinks such as abstract labour, the commodity, the freely mobile individual and so on could have emerged from a heritage of capitalism and political liberal
The ideas conquered, but the societies that grew from it collapsed or separated themselves from Marxist policies (Magee, 167). New York: Harperand Row Publisher, 1950. Out of this grew a plurality of different Marxist schools of thought, at odds with one another, sometimes violently so. They could be both admirers and critics of capitalism, but at the same time recognized exploitation, alienation and troublesome features of the new society, which they thought would be overcome when the working class successfully built the system. Societies organized according to Marxist principles seemed to be coming up everywhere, they spread from zero to a third of the world, (Gurley, 3). Once socialist ownership had benn consolidated, true communism would arrive (Gurley, 65). Government has been playing a bigger role in business affairs. Capitalist exploitation would worsen the living standards of workers until, one day the workers would revolt violently. Since they are not, there is no guarantee to assume that the value of labor power will be equal to the man hours that enter into production. Marx's theories have been the source of continued disagreement. Marx was duly expelled from Brussels in the same year, and ended up in London in 1849. Nowhere in the world was there a society where changes were happening according to Marx's "scientific laws of historical development.
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