A PHILOSOPHY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD: MARXISM (PART 3)

CAPITALISM HARMS HUMANITY

According to Marx, capitalism causes humanity to disappear in the treatment of people by each other, and is replaced by an inhuman drive for profits. So not only did Marx argue that capitalism was economically flawed, but part of his theories focuses upon the ethics of that system, and his views on morality will be further discussed.

THE PROBLEMS OF AN INDUSTRIAL WORLD

According to him, industry and technological advances develop very rapidly, in fact faster than the techniques of controlling them. So those developments which should have made it possible for people to live together more comfortably are doing just the exact opposite.

The system is driven to accumulate the maximum profit, so it will cause wars; children might be forced into labour and the tension between the classes is intensified. This is caused by two factors: 'self-alienation' and 'fetishism'. 

Self-alienation- Marx used this term to describe a person's plight in the industrial world. Industry does not help improve the person's relationship with other people nor is it helpful; people are cut off from one another, are isolated and made fearful and insecure. A person creates a highly technical world, but cannot control it and cannot gain any leisure, culture, comfort and so on from it. 

Fetishism - This is a worship of the products of labour. For instance if the labour results in a car, having produced a car, we become ruled by this object. They could be said to be 'obsessed' with such objects. It might be said that this leads to a very materialistic society. 

MARX'S ETHICAL VIEWS

A picture during the industrial revolution. It shows a child
sweeper.

Capitalism depersonalises the relations between people and makes them more like machines and machines more like people, according to Marx. In his opinion, this is what makes the system ethically inferior and problematic. 

Marx feels that socialism will remedy the economic problems of capitalism (discussed in part 2) and introduce a new morality, which is superior and which will be different to a machine-centred morality. This new morality will be based on human values, not on machine values.

Having explored Marxist ideas, we must now understand some of the criticisms made towards his ideas, and that will be discussed next.