Term Paper on "Karl Marx Friedrich Engels and Adam Smith"

Term Paper 4 pages (1592 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Marx, Engels, And Smith

Capitalism does not create a marketplace of free and fair economic competition, rather it creates a state of human as well as economic subjugation. Or so said Karl Marx's co-author of the "Manifesto of the Communist Party," Frederick Engels, when Engels penned the phrase that "in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production. It goes without saying that society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed. The old mode of production must therefore be revolutionized from the top to bottom, and in particular the former division of labor must disappear." (Engels, "On the Division of Labor in Production") as is evidenced in this quotation, Marx and Engels saw all of human society in a continual cycle of polarized class warfare, between the haves and the have-nots. The solution, they felt, was to abolish class divisions and to establish a society where all properties and economic profits were held in common by those who produced both the commodities and profits for society. Communal ownership would free the individual from wage-slavery and the tyranny of working for a capitalist, upon a capitalist's property and producing a surplus of value for goods that was enjoyed only by the capitalist, not by the worker.

Marx's most damming view of such capitalist wage-slavery is found in the first volume of his treatise Capital, where he wrote with horror about how workers were alienated from their means of production. In other words, for the enrichment of the factory-owner, the worker rented out his or her body and the labor that body could provide. The worker, to sustain his or her wage in a monetary system of capitalist ownership was thus forced to produce far more commodities, pins for example than he or she could ever conceivably require in a day.

Adam Smith's defense of capitalism, the Wealth of Nations in 1867, written in praise of industrialization, however, saw such a division of labor as a boon -- from the consumer's as well as the capitalist's point-of-view, if not the workers. "The greatest improvement," wrote Smith, that had been conferred upon "productive powers of labor, and the greater part of the skill, dexterity, and judgment with which it is any where directed, or applied," was from the effects of the division of labor between owner and worker so denounced later by Marx and Engels. (Smith, Section I.1.1, pp.7-8) but the productivity of factories was Smith's main form of economic evaluation, not the ability of economics to create a society infused with a sense of social justice. However, Smith did believe that the more divided the nature of the productive process, the more efficient it could be and the greater the opportunities of worker employment and competition in the marketplace.

For example, Smith writes with great approval of the modern industrial revolution, whereby once a pin maker, "with his utmost industry, make one pin in a day, and certainly could not make twenty." Now, that the factory means of production allows for a much more considerably specialized (although less skilled, Marx might add) division of labor, "one man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head... In this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them." (Smith, Section I.1.3, p.9)

Smith focuses not on the laborer's work, and the wealth produced by the laborer for comparatively small wages, as did Marx, but on the greater profits for the maker of pins. In fact, in Smith's analysis the maker of pins, seamlessly becomes the owner of a pin-making factory. Once, the pin maker could only make a few pins, now the manufacturer can make many, and sell many at a much cheaper price. However, Marx would note that the real gift of the industrialist is not making anything, but simply owning the pin factory.

What was formerly an individual and specialized trade, owned by the pin maker himself, as he made the labor and provided his workplace and materials, was now a mechanical process performed in a series of parts by many workers, in a factory owned by a capitalist.

In Smith's view, the consumer profited by the lower price of pins and the greater availability of the commodities, while the factory owner profited by the increased supply of goods to sell, and thus could lessen the price in a competitive market. Freedom and division of workers, Smith believed, in a spirit of self-interest, produced positive results because it produced more jobs and more commodities to be sold in an increasingly competitive and diverse marketplace.

In contrast, Chapter 7, Volume 1 of Capital, Marx suggests that it is really the production of the labor in crafting goods that conferred the value upon the material means, turning it the metal by the worker's sweat and toil into a pin. Throughout this capitalist enactment of conferring value upon raw materials, the factory owner did nothing but provide the raw materials, pay the labor and while away the day. The capitalist owner experienced no wear or tear upon his or her body, by simply owning the factory and hiring the workers to work at the factory. The worker worked harder than the property-owning capitalist, but made less money in profit.

This is why private ownership of factory production space, or any productive space was unjust, stated Marx -- it was based merely upon an accident of ownership. The capitalist profited more through the ownership of the factory and the means of production than the laborer toiling all day, the labor providing his or her functional body as an implement and a piece of property rather than a human being. (Marx, Capital, pp.283-293) Thus, in Capital, Marx defined wage-slavery as the condition of the worker being forced to labor for more than he or she had need for, in the service of profits for the capitalist. Marx expanded upon his belief in "The Germany Ideology" that the nature of human economic and historical "life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life." (Marx, "The German Ideology -- Chapter on "History: Fundamental Conditions)

Marx notes that at least, before capitalism became accepted as the only mode of economic life, the pin-maker who made pins owned the pins he or she made, and the profits derived from selling the pins. Now, the factory owner hired the workers, reaped the profits from the pins, by merely owning the means of production and temporarily, the labor of the workers themselves. This is why Marx and Engles regarded private property as evil. "We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence," and the capitalist competition of the marketplace so celebrated by Smith. But they scoff in the Manifesto, "Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of… READ MORE

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