Karl Marx

Karl Marx was a philosopher and mainly researched on capitalism and didn't necessarily approve or disprove with the ideas of capitalism but more likely tells the future of where society is heading. A few things that caught my attention during history class was primitive accumulation of capital, alienation of labor, empiricism, and the crashing of capitalism. First off was the primitive accumulation of capital. None of the capital we have now in our modern society would have become if it wasn't for the accumulation of capital through stealing, enslavement, genocide. An example of how these things was the primitive accumulation of capital, by stealing another person's labor or enslaving people to work for you helps build the capital which in result causes industrialization. As workers are exploited for there labor this causes the theory by Karl Marx of vampire. "Capital is dead labor which, vampire- like lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more labor it sucks"(-Karl Marx). This quote basically means that in order for capital to survive it sucks labor from workers such like a vampire sucks blood from a person to survive. This was the ideas that caught my attention the most as it compares captial to a vampire, this giving me the idea that if there was no labor there would be no capital, so why is it that workers work for such a little amount then what they should be getting? According to Marx he stated that "Capital is going to grow and suck until everyone becomes a proletarian." A Proletarian is someone who sells there labor in order to survive, they have nothing else to sell to survive but there own labor. This giving the idea in class that since capital needs labor it produces proletarians, as proletarians grow it eventually will cause everyone to become proletarian. I think this will one day be true as the more people find work and sell there labor it gives capital more of a oppourtunity to get more labor. This will eventually cause all of society to be selling there labor and just the very few that are capital. Marx also gives an idea of alienation or alienation of labor, this is when someone does not work for themselves or because they want to but because they work in order to survive thus making a person and there work alien to each other. Marx did not see this theory as a good thing. I think this is a very big idea about society because most people today don't really end up working to be something they want to be but working in order to earn a living. This is a big part of the American way of life, these makes me think back to the interviews we did with random people on the street, when asked what they think the American way of life is most of which answered back "work work work!" instead of personal values, dreams, and goals and none of which mentioned enjoy there job but describing it as "tiring". This shows how people will get any work they can no matter at what wage which causes the idea of alienation and capital taking over. This makes me wonder what if one day people start to realize that they are being paid at a low wage just for capital to earn the rest of the higher pay that the workers make for them, what will happen? Would we ever have a crashing capitalism where there is exploitation of works. This usually goes towards the direction of socialism. Would this ever happen to America?