Karl Marx's Utopianism

 

Patrick Parr

May 3, 2021

Phil 1030

Final Report

Karl Marx’s Utopianism

Karl Marx is looked at to be the father of Communism. Marx was a philosopher. He disliked capitalism and sought ways to make it better.

Karl Heinrich Marx was born on May 5,1818. He died on March 14, 1883. Karl Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, and socialist revolutionary. Karl Marx, like his father Heinrich Marx, studied law. Both Karl’s mother and father were Jewish. His maternal and paternal grandfathers were rabbis. Karl Marx’s father converted to Christianity to practice law. Due to his political views, he became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades.

While in London, he collaborated with German thinker Friedrich Engels. He published his writings here and researched in the reading room of the British Museum. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume Das Kapital.

Marx thought Modern work was alienated. Marx believed that with capitalism, workers are not appreciated enough. He felt that when workers produce something they should feel special and prideful about what they have created. It is hard to have that feeling in Capitalism when production is looked at for profit and nothing else. Capitalism makes workers expendable. He did not like that workers got paid little while capitalists got rich. Marx believed that capitalists shrunk the wages of laborers as much as possible to gain a wide profit margin. He called this tactic primitive accumulation.

While others might see profit as what you gain from doing business, Marx saw profit as theft. He saw it as stealing the talent and hard work of your work force. Marx thought that at its worst, capitalism was paying a worker one price for doing something and then selling it to someone for a much higher price. He thought of profit as being a fancy term for exploitation.

Karl Marx thought that Capitalism was unstable. He thought that crises were made from Capitalism. He thought Capitalism made a crisis of abundance. He thought that Capitalism often has a problem with overproducing. There are more things being produced that people have time to consume. Marx thought that Capitalism makes people only think about money. Since things are being produced faster than everyone can consume it, there becomes a surplus, giving people more than they need.

Marx thought since the economy is so productive, lots of people did not need to work. He thought there were enough homes, hospitals, food being produce that everyone could be acquired one. He thought that not having a job was not a bad thing.

He did not like the word “unemployed” as it often has a negative connotation. He saw not having a job as being free. He thought that Capitalism was the reason people did not see it that way. Marx thought we should make leisure admirable. He figured that we redistribute the wealth of the massive corporations that make so much surplus money and give it to everyone.

Marx thought that Capitalism was bad for Capitalist. Marx that there were undertones for middle-class marriages. Marx argued that marriage was an extension of business. Karl Marx looked at middle-class families having tension, oppression, and resentment. He thought they were staying together not because of love, but for financial reasons. Marx believed that the capitalist system forces people to put economic interests at the center of their lives so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency commodity fetishism.

Interesting enough, Karl Marx was actually against the idea of a Utopia. In Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto,” he describes a world without private property or inherited wealth. There is a steeply graduated income tax. There is centralized control of the banking, communication, and transport industries.  He also mentioned free public education. Though Marx was against Utopian ideas, his idea of a better society is described as a Utopia. Paradoxically for a man who wrote dismissively about "utopian socialists", Marx’s legacy is to be exactly that.

•      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx#Thought

•      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSQgCy_iIcc

•      https://philosophynow.org/issues/131/Karl_Marx_Man_and_Mind