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How Did Karl Marx Contribute To The Rise Of Capitalism

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According to the InvestorWord website capitalism is defined as an economic system characterised by private property ownership where individuals and companies are allowed to compete for their own economic gain, and free market forces determine the prices of goods and services. Such a premise is based on separating the state and business activities. In addition to this, Adam Smith favoured laissez-faire in which government only regulates and protects the market allowing the private sector to control most market activities. At the present time, capitalism in practice contradicts the main foundations that it was initially built on and for this reason I am for the motion that Karl Marx was correct to some extent that capitalism is bound to collapse. …show more content…

The owners (bourgeoisie) self-interest is to make profits and Marx says this will make the greedy capitalists expand into new markets to satisfy the target market, sell more goods & render more services than what can be consumed, acquire a greater number of consumers to generate additional revenue. In the short run, proprietors will implement the output effect by increasing productivity and decreasing their marginal costs, and therefore reducing the proletariats wages. In the long run, both capital and labour is variable and therefore the owners will substitute labour for the more expensive capital. (Campbell et. al, 2013: 140-141). Consequently, the proletariats earned subsistence wages and during the era of Industrial Revolution in Europe if a worker got injured while working they were thrown out into the streets without being properly compensated for, and were replaced by another worker. Marx was worried that this process of giving the proletariats lower wages and replacing them will continue for …show more content…

Nowadays capitalism is all about bailing out banks which are in trouble and operating in a market that is saturated by credit not wealth. The motion that is against the idea that capitalism is collapsing supports their argument by saying it is evolving. I cannot agree with this because I believe evolution is somewhat identical to metamorphosis or the development of an embryo into ultimately being a human being, with each stage of development the subject becomes better in comparison to its former state. With capitalism, that is not the case as it is vulnerable and cannot easily adapt to change without being ‘rescued’. Therefore there are numerous internal contradictions within capitalism and it’s these contradictions that leads to its gradual

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