Engel Vs Marx

For many years, people have fought to defend capitalism claiming that capitalism brings “freedom”. Capitalism is often regarded as the “fairest” economic system as well. Engels and Marx have been able to dissect into capitalism and have revealed the underlying realities of a capitalist system. Engels and Marks have made notorious that capitalism does not actually represent “fairness” nor “freedom” (or at least not to everyone). Under capitalism, the people who have the most freedom are the people who have the most money, or the people who exploit others. Though they may have many critiques of capitalism, Engels and Marx have two major ones that they have revealed throughout their writings. Engel’s and Marx’s major critiques of capitalism are:

This writing explains how the prices of certain commodities are affected by the economic principles of supply and demand. However, a major critique that can be pulled out from this reading begins with the main topic about how labor power becomes a commodity. The Labour Theory of Value that is covered in this writing distinguished the differences between labor and labor power. The labor theory of value states that “the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor that went into producing it”. In this reading, Marx defines a commodity as “an external object that satisfies wants or needs and distinguishes between two different kinds of value that can be attributed to it”. Marx explains how commodities have a use-value, “that consists of their capacity to satisfy such wants and needs”. “For the purposes of economic exchange, they have an exchange-value, their value in relation to other commodities on the market, which is measured in terms of money”. Marx states that “in order to determine the relative worth of extremely different commodities with different use-values, exchange-value, or monetary value, they must be measurable in terms of a property common to all such commodities”. We come to realize that the only thing that all commodities have in common is that they are a product of labor. Therefore, the value of

Estranged labor is labor that has been made a stranger to the laborer. In other words, he or she is no longer related to it; he or she is alienated from it. According to Marx and Engels, the social system makes us aliens or strangers to ourselves. A quote pulled out form the reading says, ““…The object which labor produces – labor’s product – confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been congealed in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor.” Marx and Engels believed that people are stopped from being truly human by the stunting effect of a corrupt social system, like for example, the present system: