Karl Marx Compared To Capitalism

When a individual invokes the word communism or Karl Marx in today’s time, many people have a strong aversion to it. This is substantiated throughout the history of American sociopolitical development, culminating with instances such as the Red Scare in the 1940s where policymakers like Senator Joseph McCarthy capitalized (no pun intended) on the fear of the everyday American. Implicitly, his goal was to use such rhetoric to cause Americans to reject ideologies and structural frameworks that could possibly benefit them had they been thoroughly analyzed. This immediate rejection of Karl Marx’s ideologies has led to an entrenched notion that capitalism, as a socio-economical system, is the best and only way to effectively govern our society and our social culture. Because of this, Americans tend not to critically analyze capitalism and simply accept its ideological tenants as mere truths. The arguments of Karl Marx present a necessary contrast to capitalism that forces Americans to reconcile the inherent harms of capitalism and, at

Many liberal thinkers such as John Locke, speak about the notion of free enterprise and property, Locke going so far as to speak about the “naturally industrial and entrepreneurial sprit” when defending a person’s right to private property. Capitalism, therefore, as we conceptualize it, is system in which the majority of trade, commerce, and means of production are held by private owners rather than the state themselves. Here, in a capitalist state, the primary focus is that of profit. In this instance, producers have an incentive to accumulate as much property as possible in order to create more property. Further, capitalist systems tend to build intricate structures in order to protect said property from other individuals who might lay claim to it. As a result, capitalist systems usually lead to an inadvertent creation of class solely based off of private