What Marx has tried to highlight is the prevalence of classical and neoclassical economics over historical materialist categories which includes and exploits the traditional concepts of utility, choice, and scarcity in the form of feudalism. This has emerged in a historical context as class struggle and according to Marx, has failed to capture the essential features of a specific economic system. For example, the modernist system condemns what bourgeois society has developed in the form of capitalist and socialist economies. Such economies have disrupted the capitalist mode of production which itself has been a threat to modern modes of production. Marx blames communal ownership as an essential social relation of this system because exchanges values, commodities, and labor power has contributed towards determining wage-labor which decides the fate of the mode of production. Marx visualizes and blames the traditional feudal relationship for creating only two classes, among which the bourgeois class is the enhancement of capital over wage labor.
As expertise and salary wage level vary in the proletarian class, with the advancement of technology and with the help of financial assistance offered by the government or private financial institutes, we can also observe varying levels of the bourgeois class in terms of assets. Therefore, it is not wrong to say that contemporary classes fit into bourgeois and proletarians as due to the advancement of the industrial revolution in technology, the bourgeois class is responsible for introducing modernity and competition in society. The reason is that it always took for granted the factor that the wage-labor rests exclusively on the competition among the laborers (Marx & Engels, 2006, p. 56). Moreover, what Marx categorizes bourgeois in the development of industrialization, is responsible for putting an end to the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products (ibid). Another reason for having two classes in the society is due to the capitalist or entrepreneurial mentality that invokes material interests that encompass various small or large, short term or long term decisions about whether to defer consumption and re-invest profits or consume present profits, how, when, and where to invest, whether to diversify or to expand and so on. Proletarians’ material interests entail decisions such as whether to pursue individualistic strategies involving their job training or to go further for higher education to improve their economic circumstances about the labor movement. As far as health care and education are concerned, if these systems are privatized and are accessible only by those who possess the means to purchase them, they are market commodities. These commodities are only accessible to the bourgeois capitalist class who own the provision of health and education.
Pro Marxists believe that there are factors behind promoting capitalism among which contemporary change is the foremost, which sees that the traditional accumulation of capital is coming to an end. Since the cultural and political barriers that once were effective in holding back capitalism are being swept aside, newer ways of commodification and or marketization are being implemented. These include vulnerable grips over noncommercial spheres of human activity which are now directly linked to community and family, and since these links are being transferred to capital, geographical expansion is experiencing immense capital’s impact on all aspects of living. Various aspects of living standards depict patterns of consumption that result in a lesser total of the free wills of atomized consumers as compared to the result of the systematic use of modern culture. This process that utilizes the tools of marketing and advertising tends to generate pressures not just for standardization of production and labor conditions throughout the world, but also for social, political, and cultural practices, which has deeper implications for power relations.
The problems addressed by Marx in the passage of feudalism illustrate some universalities that lack modern-day consumption standards. For instance, every argument of Marx is based upon an unnecessary transcendental concept that invokes the historical phenomenon of the mode of production. Marx sees the historical concept of labor as the lifeblood of all economic systems which ends up relying on concepts and theories that are universal. Many theorists visualize that contemporary capitalist society is based upon impure household production which Marx does not take into account as a socio-economic system. He never mentions the role of empirical observation or research in various market structures and systems that have coexisted through history. Similarly, Marx’s perspectives are devoid of human motivation factors which are today used broadly in the economic forces of a capitalist system which are implemented in context with various dimensions of appropriate work design along with intrinsic motivation to create the need to innovate in supporting technical corporate entrepreneurship. All Marx believes as an important component in the modes of production are the personifications of capital and wage labor.
Despite considering the human motivation factor in today’s innovative era, it is evident that no particular change has been observed to get hold of the economic crunch. Marx believe that a time would come that a proletarian class would be in power to force the bourgeois class by shrinking their profitability and increasing their wages. If this continues, then a time would come when no investor would find any attraction in creating an industry and hence producing newer jobs. This would again create economic chaos where people would find fewer industries and rare jobs.
The solution lies in a dual context, short-term and long-term. The short-term or immediate solution is that the government should dictate the labor policies, commodity prices, and interest rates in such a manner that both bourgeois and proletarian classes would find it easier as well as beneficial to perform their duties. The long-term solution is that the government should devise certain financial policies along with government-backed financial institutes which encourage proletarians to become entrepreneurs so that they may create their businesses and participate in the economic cycle. This would diminish the fewer bourgeois monopoly while distributing proletarians into a larger number of entrepreneurs.
What is reflected in the capitalist system of today’s economic crises is a system that contracts the salary scale of the proletarian class, which is the main consumer of all the products, the bourgeois is producing. By contracting the wage labor, they are contracting the buying power of the proletarian class which in turn reduces the profit margin of the capitalist class as their products would no longer be consumed as required. Another example is that of devastating financial institutes mainly in America due to which the Obama government has given a bailout program by floating 700 billion dollars in the financial sector to let them survive. The reason for this crunch is because they have immensely given mortgages to the proletarian class (the salaried class) and the return of the mortgages back to the financial institutes is only dependant upon the wage labor. Examples around us include increasing joblessness due to outsourcing of technology and industries to China and other Eastern nations. Another reason for the economic crisis is that people in the US are not opting the local products since they are higher in prices as compared to those which are being imported from Eastern nations. To save the local market, the government should impose certain taxation rules or import duties so that the imported product prices would become comparable or even higher than the local market prices. In this way, not everyone would go for foreign products. Another clear example has been observed in the IT sector. Since 1998 the bourgeois class who has invested immensely in the IT sector, to gain surplus profit, have been outsourcing the projects or tasks to Eastern countries like India, as they get cheaper labor. Since there is no check and balance on outsourcing, therefore, the IT jobs in the local market are getting squeezed and surplus number of IT engineers are either jobless or are bound to work on lower wages.
The solution to cope up with the consequences of capitalism demands that the government should devise a policy for which a local IT company can only outsource the tasks when it justifies that it fails to get the right technical expertise in the area required. In this way the outsourcing would be squeezed out and the local IT jobs and their wages would be restored.
Work Cited
Marx Karl & Engels Frederick. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Cosimo Classics. New York, 2006.