Why I am a Marxist
Marxism is an analysis of the way society works, based on a materialist understanding. It’s a scientific theory that isn’t just based on reason but can be investigated empirically.
Central to Marxism is labour. We labour to create products, goods or services that are useful to us. We do so because the world doesn’t just give us everything we need. But our labour can produce more than we need: we can work to produce enough for ourselves and have time left over for leisure or the production of luxury items.
The kind of society we live in, and how we relate to one another, is determined by the organisation of labour and the distribution of the products of labour. Who does the work and who gets the product.
Societies have tended to be fundamentally exploitative: one class does all the necessary labour for the whole of society, while another class benefits from this labour without contributing. But why would one class toil on behalf of another class?
It comes down to ownership. In the past people could legally own slaves who would be kept alive to work for their masters. The masters kept the slaves alive because their labour was a greater benefit than the cost of doing so. In feudal society, lords owned land and allowed serfs to work the land and keep some of their product to live off, while taking the rest as payment for use of the land.
Today, our society’s main method of exploitation is capitalism. An employer who owns means of production (industrial equipment, raw materials, branding and marketing etc) lets their employees use these to create a product. The product is sold and the employees keep some of the money in the form of wages, some goes to covering business costs (maintaining equipment, property, loans etc), and the rest is profit. Since the costs of business are covered, the profit comes from the labour of the employees. The workers in a business work for free in order to make profit for the employer.
The other forms of exploitation, slavery and feudalism, still exist in a different form in our society. Banks provide loans which you have to pay back with interest; money doesn’t naturally grow over time so the interest you pay back comes from your labour (unless you are a capitalist and pay the interest by exploiting someone else). This isn’t very different from people in ancient times selling themselves into slavery to pay off their debts. And today landlords rent out homes to tenants; the rental charge goes beyond the maintenance of the property itself and is a source of income for the landlord.
The basic idea of Marxism is this: labour and property are both necessary to create wealth, but labour creates a surplus. As long as property is owned privately rather than in common, it will be used to capture the surplus and exploit workers.
Capitalism isn’t just exploitative, it’s also irrational. The economy crashes every so often, because the accumulation of profit is money that the workers can’t use to buy back the products they create. Eventually the lack of demand causes capitalists to scale down production and reduce employment, leading to even less demand and causing an economic downturn.
This shows the short-term irrationality of capitalism. But in the long term, as technology improves the efficiency of labour, we will be able to create more with less work. This could mean that we all live lives of greater luxury and freedom from unnecessary toil, but under capitalism it will mean that workers can create more for capitalists to sell without an increase in wages. At the same time, workers will be even less able to afford all that they create, so profit tends to decline due to automation. As capitalism becomes less able to grow, less powerful, the overthrow of the old social system and transition to socialism becomes more likely and more necessary.
