Management in Society - Karl Marx - Essay Example

This no doubt increased the gross domestic output of Great Britain, but in the absence of any genuinely effective governmental regulation and control and with industrial production under free enterprise economy just beginning to take a concrete shape, the lot of the workers went from bad to worse. It was under these circumstances that Karl Marx propounded his theories of social exploitation of labour and economic injustice. Marx concluded that private ownership of means of production and insatiable greed of factory owners to earn more profit were the primary reasons for this abysmal condition of workers.

He exhorted the workers to unite and forcibly seize political power so that all means of production can be removed from private ownership and transferred to the ownership of state thereby ending undue exploitation of workers by the greedy owners of factories. Marx at this stage committed two grave errors if one may say so. He did not denigrate capitalist means of production as such and admitted that this form of production did indeed create surplus value but what was essentially a problem of misdistribution of this surplus value was wrongly described by him as an inherent flaw of the production system.

He also failed to comprehend the basic fact that this surplus value was created by the production system as such that included all three factors of production – land, labour and capital. He, one might dare say, rather obstinately held on to his belief that the surplus value was created by labour alone and thus the right to such surplus belonged only to labour. However, the unscrupulous and rapacious capitalists usurped the entire surplus for themselves while paying the labourers only slave-wages that were just enough for them to survive.

Thus, he felt that the only way for improving the lot of workers is to overthrow capitalism. Karl Marx thought that abolition of private property would