19th Century PhilosophyReaction Paper – Marx 16 November 2015Das KapitalKarl

Marx’s Das Kapital can be understood as a work of sociology and philosophy, as a

work of politics and economics. As a German political philosopher, Marx uses this

writing to express a well-reasoned, though perhaps discriminatory, report on the

capitalist system. In addition to his exploration of commodities and the role they

play in a society’s productivity, he discusses the plight of the worker and the

relationship he has with the capitalist. In his pursuit to expose the shortcomings of

the capitalist system (and perhaps, in doing so, promoting the communist structure),

Marx highlights how profits cannot be sustained and also the ways in which workers

are unfairly utilized under th e weight of the capitalists. Ultimately, he criticizes the

fundamental instability of such a system and maintains that any governing network

invested in trade and for-profit industry will be insufficient as a competing system

on the global playing field. Marx begins with his definition of a commodity, which

he writes is “an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human

needs of whatever kind.”1 This means that a commodity is material in some form

that can be bought or sold to the benefit of the buyer and/or seller in any exchange.

He then distinguishes between the “value” and “use-value” of these commodities,

where the value (or exchange-value) of a commodity lies in the amount of labor one

puts into creating it, and its use -value represents the “usefulness” of the commodity

itself in the greater system of society. He puts heavy emphasis on the notion of a

commodity’s exchange-value, and maintains that material

with any use-value can only have an exchange-value when it is made of some form

of human labor. Thus, according to Marx, the value of a commodity “varies directly

as the quantity, and inversely as the productivity, of the labor which finds its

realization within the commodity.”2 Here, Marx contends that a system that

functions on the open trade of materials, such as the capitalist system, can only be

successful as long as the valued commodities are in high demand and the

productivity of these commodities is affordable and satisfactory. When this is not

the case, however, an argument can be made to show how workers are socially and

economically abused—or exploited—by the system to which they are bound. Marx

contends that commodities have both use-values as well as exchange-values, and

that the amount of labor put into the creation of any commodity is what grounds the

commodity to its inherent exchange -value. Moreover, because the capitalists in this

economic organization strive ultimately for increased profit, they often buy

commodities and aim to sell them for an amount of money larg er that that which

they used to pay for the original material. If this becomes a pattern, a capitalist can

make a profit as long as he pays those who labor for him only the minimum of what

it costs for effective productivity, (and one can do this because c apitalists in such

an socio-economic structure have a greater authority and power over workers). This

arrangement may even have a long-term impact on the attitude and character of the

worker, as his humanity is, to an extent, demoted to that of merely a machine.

While Marx briefly touches on the adverse effects that such a degrading system can

have on the individual worker, he focuses primarily on the method as a whole and
explores the “positive” and negative aspects of the capitalist system in relation to

the

superior communist structure of economic governance. What I find most interesting,

however, is what could potentially happen to such a system when workers refuse to

work under such exploitive conditions. It goes without saying that the United

States, as a capitalist nation, faces such concerns on a regular basis, but it is

significant to consider the potential consequences of a dramatic decrease in

productivity. What happens when the cogs stop turning? The nation may fall into

another depression, which could also lead the world (because so many nations are

now interconnected) into a state of economic despair. But surely the leaders of the

capitalist system under which we live today have taken the appropriate measures to

guarantee the nation’s longevity in the global economic sphere, or else we can

ensure a rippling effect of economic ruin. And yet despite his criticisms of the

capitalist society, Marx’s Das Kapital is a compelling work that brings to light his

ingenuity in the fields of philosophy, sociol ogy, politics, and economics