Ethics of Enterprise and Exchange

Karl Marx is a German philosopher, sociologist, economist, writer, poet, political journalist, and public figure. His works formed the dialectical and historical materialism in the philosophy while in the economy – the theory of surplus value, and finally, theory of class struggle in politics. These areas became the basis of the communist and socialist movement and ideology under the name of Marxism. This paper will examine similarities between Marx’s theories and political economy of Smith to critique capitalistic economic system with a particular attention the category on overproduction from writemyessay4me. The first aspect refers to the success of the author in economic discipline. Smith’s dogma is one of the fundamentals of classical political economy A. Smith formulated; according to his concept the price of the annual product of society is calculated as the sum of income of all members of this group. The K. Marx’s theory has become an alternative to the A. Smith’s dogma. The main difference between them lies in the choice of a starting point to build the model. If A. Smith was relying on the sphere of circulation, K. Marx elected a sector of material production as the one to build his theory around. The model built in this perspective avoids the revaluation of the real economic potential. On the one hand, the K. Marx’s criticism of A. Smith’s theory is really significant since Smith described all the annual labor cost of the product" that will be distributed brings the whole last to income, of which, he believes, the price of product is composed of. In other words, according to A. Smith’ theory it is not about enlargement of business but of simple reproduction process in which the consumption prevents the accumulation in order to get the value of compensation (depreciation) of means of production. On the other hand, K. Marx conceived socialist transformation as a result of political processes in the capitalist economy and announced capitalism to be a solution of economic problems. However, K. Marx was trying to prove himself as theoretician of rules he created and that is the reason why he returned to the reduction of the economic concepts to the political which was criticized by A. Smith because the latter was against "political arithmetic" according to which the state is needed to be strengthen as the final point of application of all economic effort as some kind of medium giving the final shape of economic activity. For A. Smith, this would mean to identify a country with a controlling function while the state itself does not control but appears as a monitoring agency. Socialism was conceived as a society where material interest ceases to be the dominant aspect. The fundamental idea of K. Marx was that people themselves create their history in the process of production. Karl Marx believed that private property is the source of all social issues and evils in the society because it contributes to the emergence of social inequality leading to the emergence of classes and the state. The fundamental, basic to all human communities is economic alienation or alienated labor which according to the economics had 4 types. The first type of alienated labor is exclusion where the worker uses natural materials that do not belong to him in the labor process producing things that accrue to the owner of the production plant. Thus, the starting material and the products of labor themselves do not belong to the worker becoming alien for him. The second type of exclusion: the process of employment for the worker is forced itself. The worker is not free; he cannot choose whether to work or not because he cannot procure for himself on his own. The worker in the labor process is controlled and dependent with the production control function being completely independent from his will. The third type of exclusion is where bonded labor in general takes from worker so-called tribal life, and a worker treats his work and the nature in excluded way contrasting them to himself because, in his heart, he hates them seeing them as something alien and hostile. The fourth type of exclusion is bound to the theory that such forced labor creates a rift between people named the process of competition in a capitalist society where each person speaks only for himself despising and ignoring the goodness of others and society as a holistic institution. Life in bourgeois society can be described by the formula "war of all against all". The second aspect is philosophy. In the preface to the 2nd edition of the 1st volume of Capital, K. Marx gives a strange definition of his relationship to G. Hegel when he calls himself as an apprentice of the philosopher and states that he borrowed from him a lot of the writing style and dialectics. The mystification which dialectic experiences in the hands of G. Hegel does not eliminate the fact that he is the first one who comprehensively and knowingly disclosed the general form of its movement. However, it is necessary to find a grain of truth in the mystical shell of G. Hegel’s dialectic. K. Marx’s Capital is a product of processing by G. Hegel (German philosopher) of English political economy and French socialism. However, it is not as simple as it seems to be. K. Marx did not use only interpretations of Hegel theory of D. Ricardo but utilized a completely different concept. In other words, under the meaning of the radically opposite theory of G. Hegel, Marx implied extraction of the rational grain from the mystical shell of philosophical reasoning and the transformation of idealism into materialism where the material category incepted. Therefore, K. Marx's dialectic is not just a new look at Hegel’s dialectics but a totally different point of view. At the core of its existence is the movement of material particles in space and time. However, their interaction according to the rules of dialectics is forming the same steps that are listed in G. Hegel’s dialectics. The result of this process in nature is the emergence of a thinking being. Thus, the dialectic of Marx is based on the dialectic of bourgeois society. Karl Marx identified several important points in his work. The first conclusion was that the existence of classes is only bound with particular historical phases in the development of. Furthermore, he stated that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marx also insisted that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. However, this conclusion is highlighted by himself from the tremendous work done on the basis of his own method and the materialist epistemology to identify precisely dialectics of capitalistic society – contradictions that exist, and the inevitability of the transformation of the social formation. The third point is politics. For K. Marx and his colleague F.Engels, the theory of liberal social contract of the state formation was nothing more than a convenient fiction designed to justify the rise to power of the new capitalist class. To understand the concept of state by K. Marx, it is necessary to consider his teachings about the historic materialism. The state takes a dominant place in the commanding position as it is an instrument of the ruling class to maintain its power over the rest of society. As the social relations about production process change, and the nature of the state changes, too. When there was feudalism, the production system based on land ownership, the state was controlled by the landed aristocracy which used it to maintain control over the agricultural workers and regulate the relationship between big landowners and subordinate tenants. A similar system of land tenure is also based on the military organization of society which is made to control the means of production and the use of force to maintain its power. In the industrial production system, when capital in the production process becomes more important than land, the class of capitalists also controls the state. According to this, the only freedom for Karl Marx becomes freedom of trade). Marx predicted the emergence of a new class of industrial workers, the proletariat, who once will engage in battle with the ruling class, the capitalists. As a result of the revolutionary fight the post-capitalist society would appear with the new system of capitalist relations of production replacing the old one. In the new setting of society called socialism, there would be no domination of one person over another. Consequently, there is no need for the state as a function to maintain the domination of the ruling class. Of course, there would be some kind of centralized control of economic activity; therefore, K. Marx’s vision of the state as a committee playing no particular role at the previous stages of social evolution becomes vital in a proper coordination of the activities of millions of workers in a highly complex industrial economy. However, it will be only a controling not a dominating function. To sum up, it should be noted that a work of any other classics of world philosophy hardly became the subject of such a heated debate as the theory of K. Marx. Moreover, it is the fact that his ideas, unlike the concepts of many other thinkers, were directly or indirectly implemented in the social practice preparing the revolution and the construction of a new society. The practice of life showed how infantile was his idea. His work cost the lives of millions of people becoming a cause of war and genocide that generated more misery than any other idea.