Capitalist Economy: Karl Marx - Essay Example

He maintains that history is the product of an ongoing struggle between masters and slaves; carried on between the bourgeois and the workers during the lifetime of Marx. Similarly, Marx identifies money as a force destructive to the worker's innate capacity.

Both money and class hinder the ability of workers to realize their full potential. According to Marx, the class struggle was destructive to production because one class always exploited the other and opposed their interests. In many respects, Marx considered that the struggle between classes created the alienation of the worker from his work. By being subjected to the rule of a master class, the worker is alienated from his work because he does not benefit directly from it. The worker is isolated from the product of his labor by the sense that his work is for someone else's benefit.

Marx considered money to have a similar effect, if more dramatic. The flag of capitalism and the most fundamental aspect of the capitalist economy, Marx regarded money as equally destructive to the natural productivity of humankind because it became the driving force, the controlling force, to the point of excluding the product.

Ultimately, the worker became isolated from the product, which is the fruit of his labors, by money and the class system, by the capitalist economy in general.

In evaluating the achievements of capitalism, it becomes clear that Karl Marx's views are very significant. As an economist and a historian, Marx reviewed the human history and concluded that the worker would eventually seize control of production, abolishing the systems that hindered his natural productivity.

In consideration that this has not been the outcome of recent history, any evaluation of capitalism, if the views of Marx are generally held to be sound, must consider that capitalism has successfully maintained dominance of man's natural capacity to produce whilst also maintaining a high degree of productivity within society and maintaining a controlling influence.

If Marx is correct that capitalism and the capitalist economy isolate the worker from what he produces, then the achievements of capitalism – its survival and its prominence – must be considered the more remarkable.