Karl Marx – he was, on the one hand, the theorist of history whose theories have today largely gained acceptance. The idea that tools and the mode of production of a society determine its political and social structure, and that human thought is formed by the use of tools and moral positions by interests – insights which Marx and Engels encapsulated in the concept of “historical materialism” – have found their way into many individual sciences, into sociology, educational theory, psychology, the study of religion, law, literary theory, engineering and the cognitive sciences, to name only a few.
It has been different with Kapital, Marx’s most important work. No work of social science has so strongly fuelled intellectual debate in the last 150 years and exercised so powerful an effect on politics. The European workers’ movement, the Bolshevik revolutionaries, the liberation movements of the Third World – all appeal to Marx’s Kapital, which studied not only the fine mechanics of capitalism but also seemed to prophesy its end. But precisely for this reason no other theory has been so obdurately ignored by mainstream economics, especially in the years of the rivalry between global systems.
THE CAPITALISTS ARE THE DRIVEN OF THE SYSTEM
Today, after the end of the Cold War and in the age of climate crisis, of chronic underemployment, of global inequality, of financial speculation and of weak growth, it has long been not only surviving leftists who talk of the end of capitalism. In economics, word of “secular stagnation” is spreading, and at the world summit of the capitalist elite the sentence “The capitalist system no longer fits into this world” was making the rounds.
In Das Kapital, Marx lays claim to having discovered “the economic law of motion of modern society”. It is, first of all, a law of progress: capital-driven economy, as the sketch in the Communist Manifesto predicts, “has created more massive and colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”; it has fostered technology and science and created the world market. But the actors in this economy, the capitalists, are driven men: at the risk of bankruptcy, they must develop the productive forces, perpetuate innovation, press out of the workers as much output as possible and exploit the raw materials of the earth as rationally as possible so as to transform them into commodities. Thus capitalism creates the conditions for a world without want and hunger. But under the systemic constraint to maximize surplus value and drive on growth, this mode of production can in the long run “develop only by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker”.
Explanation:
There you go, you'll find the answer somewhere in there :)
