This Page
This page discusses Marxism, but it does not discuss exactly what Marx did. This is specifically how I would describe Marxism, bringing up whatever points I think are relevant. This is because Marxism is a method of analysis more than just worship of Marx's writings. (He was sometimes wrong!)
Where the Surplus Goes
Under capitalism, people are--in most cases--placed into wage labor under an employer. There, the employee will do labor, and make the employer more value than the employer pays them back. This extra value, produced by the worker, is the surplus value, that allows businesses to turn a profit. This profit might go back into the business-buying more capital, hiring more workers; or it might be taxed, and go to the government--or it might simply go into the pockets of the employer and the shareholders. At the end of the day, there is a lot of money going into the pockets of the shareholders and the upper-level management. Thus, value that was created by everyone ends up in very few hands.
This, to some extent, makes sense! You want to reward people for discovering new productive ways to employ people. It makes less sense, however, as the amounts of money get higher, and the timespan lengthens. There is a point where there is more value lost to the rich's pockets than there is value gained from their innovative capacity. This point is, under capitalism, very easily reached.
Proletariat vs. Bourgeoisie
With the distribution of surplus value, there is a conflict between the average working person, and the people who own the companies that people work for.
On the battleground of a single company, this relationship is obvious. The employer wants its workers to be paid less for more work: the employees want the opposite. The most competitive businesses will be those who get the most out of their workforce while paying them the least.
However, this battle also occurs at the societal level, where the relationship can be less obvious. Rich people may--out of conscious identification with their class, out of self-interest, or out of a sense of moral responsibility--act to make sure rich people overall maintain power and control over working people, and reap a greater reward from business activity.
It's at this point where we need better definitions than "rich people" and "working people," for many rich people don't own businesses and many employers aren't spectacularly wealthy.
The proletariat is the class of people who perform waged work, and benefit from surplus value being taken away from the people who own the businesses, or the means of production. They--we--are the vast majority in the world, and we benefit from getting more of the surplus value generated by businesses. The adjective form of proletariat is proletarian.
The bourgeoisie is the class of people who own the means of production. They benefit from surplus value going to them. They would like to pay proletarians less, have the proletariat blame itself for the problems the bourgeoisie causes, and would love for, say, regulations on oil drilling to be lifted. The adjective form of bourgeoisie is bourgeois.
Under these definitions, you can have rich proletarians--famous actors being a notable example--and you can have poor members of the bourgeoisie, such as many small business-owners. The important thing is how you get your money: is it by being paid, or is it by paying others less than they earn you?
The less-wealthy bourgeoisie form a notable enough distinction from the richer bourgeoisie that they are commonly separated out as the petite bourgeoisie, or petty bourgeoisie. They are that section of the bourgeoisie that is on the edge of being forced back into the proletariat. Many of them work on the shop floor alongside their employees. In some ways, they can be on the side of the proletariat, and individual members of the petite bourgeoisie can have very good politics. However, their precarity often means they'll be most enthusiastic for anti-proletariat measures, and be on the front lines against anything which might increase costs of doing business.
The bourgeoisie is engaged in a long-term battle with the proletariat for control over the means of production. The two groups have irreconcilable material needs.
Most people would look at this, and decide that it sounds conspiratorial. After all, different CEOs are competing against one another--why would they collaborate to push down the proletariat as a whole? What would that even look like? And why would the individual members of the proletariat push for better conditions for anyone besides themselves?
The bourgeoisie often takes action against the proletariat as a whole because of the values they have gained through their exploitation of their workers. They will usually believe that people like them deserve money, while people like those that they exploit do not deserve money. They will sometimes act on these values in what they consider to be a philanthropic manner: clarifying, in their opinion, who is deserving and who isn't, and making sure everyone else knows that too.
The bourgeoisie also often collaborates with others to take action against the proletariat, out of self-interest. They might know that their profits will rise should environmental regulations be cut, for example, and know that they can't get that policy passed without the help of other members of the bourgeoisie with similar interests. Or they know that a left-leaning government would be bad for them, so they direct resources towards groups that would prevent such a thing from occurring. This happens more as the status of the bourgeoisie is placed more under threat.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the bourgeoisie takes action against the proletariat inherently, through the pursuit of its own basic individual interests:
The basic desire of the bourgeoisie to pay its workers the least for the most in return, when done successfully at an individual company, reduces the leverage workers have at all companies to improve their conditions.
Any work an employer does against a union forming at their company hurts the labor movement overall and makes it harder to form unions elsewhere.
Any work an employer does to create internal division among its workers, or to get its workers to blame themselves for their problems, carries over into those workers' communities and their lives at different employers.
In times of heightened class consciousness, the bourgeoisie will act relatively blatantly to protect its interests as a class, because this prevents them all from losing their ill-gotten gains, and because they're more powerful together than they are alone. But even when there is no class-consciousness to speak of, the passive and unintentional actions of the bourgeoisie still serve to impact proletarians as a class, and slowly drive them towards needing to fight back.
There are two major entities which are popularly conceived as democratizing power over corporations, to prevent this class war and exploitation. Those are the government, and the stock market.
The stock market can be ignored as a tool of democracy. It's an important part of capitalism, but it doesn't really democratize all that much. 10% of people own 90% of stocks, and over half of that is the top 1% alone. You need money to buy stock, and so the bourgeoisie is going to have much more stock-buying power than the proletariat. In a sense, it exists to blame the proletariat for its own class-character. "You see, if you'd just invested better, you would also would get to benefit from the mass exploitation of workers!"
The government is more notable. It can be and often is used to gain real wins for workers and the proletarian class. However, it is a battlefield that serves to enfeeble and disadvantage the vast majority. While voters get to decide which team wins, and in some systems get many choices to choose from, they don't form the engine of the system--donor money does, and lobbyists do. The goal of a politician is to take the policy positions their donors want and put in just enough of what voters themselves want for their campaign to be chosen over the other guy. Lean too hard into the donors, and you won't be elected--but lean too hard into the people, and you'll get primary'd.
It's not a wholly terrible system for workers, and various governments across time have enacted beautiful pro-proletarian policy, but it always comes with a time limit. The bourgeoisie uphold democracy, ultimately, because it allows the class war to be fought on their terms--away from the workplace, and inside the ballot box; Not permanent, but once every four years; not cooperative, but competitive between different sections of the working class.
Indeed, our competitive democracy system encourages tensions to be inflamed, and discourages the proletariat from accessing its true power: We can literally just shut down everything. We are the people actually running society. We hold all of the power! We come with an army built-in!
It's this immense power of the proletariat that makes the bourgeoisie so concerned with keeping us separate, and keeping our opinions in line with their material interests.
Bourgeois influence on Bigotry
For every major form of bigotry in existence, there is a portion of the bourgeoisie that benefits from it directly, and there is the whole of the bourgeoisie that benefits from the reduced solidarity between workers.
Take racism for example. Traditional analysis holds that anti-black racism is a holdover from slavery and the Jim Crow era. This is, to an extent, true: white people are much more okay with benefiting from and upholding racism now that it already exists. It is also, however, something that benefits large groups of employers who pay for Black labor. Every bit of anti-black racism is something that increases the precarity of Black workers, making them more desperate for jobs, and something that justifies societally the phenomenon of Black people so often holding said low-paying jobs. Racism upholds a system that allows a group of people to be paid less and placed into worse jobs, without people really minding. This was put to effect, for example, with the Covid pandemic, where Black people were disproportionately categorized as "essential" workers, who were placed at substantial risk of infection and who were denied access to the stimulus packages sent out by the government.
The bourgeoisie have a lot of means at their disposal to fan the flames of resentment. By "means," of course, I mean "dollar bills," such as those that get sent to Fox News, or the GOP, or The Heritage Foundation. Indeed, the Think Tank is basically a machine that converts bourgeois money into paragraphs on television and in the press. (And to great effect! Think about how often a news source will "be objective" by transitioning to a ready-made quote by an "expert" from the We Should Bomb Brown People Institute, or the Trickle-Down Economics Is Great Institute.)
This isn't to say that every member of the bourgeoisie is a far-right nutjob. The bourgeoisie is not in complete agreement on everything, because different businesses have different interests - the cybersecurity industry, for example, is perfectly fine with minimum wage increases. And even the (e.g. agriculture industry) businesses that benefit from anti-immigrant sentiment generally don't want those illegal immigrants to actually be deported. But, in general, when a political party fights for progressive social causes, it's because that gets them votes, rather than because it gets them any donor money from big business.
The far-right is not to be seen as some abomination, though. It holds a very real use for many members of the bourgeoisie in assigning scapegoats, banning unions, lowering wages, privatizing industries, and giving out some fat defense contracts. It's a death cult, but it increases profits while it lasts. The slide of liberalism towards fascism isn't some mistake--it's just what the system does when profits are endangered.
(This is given an engaging and worthwhile examination in the first chapter of Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti)
Bourgeois influence on Values
Alongside the encouragement of bigotry, the bourgeoisie also tries to alter our fundamental values.
The biggest example of this is the distinctly Western focus on individual rights over collective prosperity. In this conception, collective freedom comes from the freedom of each separate individual: freedom to own private property, to speak out, to have whatever religion, and so on. This is a great framework, until "property" begins to mean "people," "speak out" begins to mean "promote fascist ideas," and "religion" begins to mean "homophobia."
To contrast, a Marxist would hold that individual prosperity comes from collective liberation. "An injury to one is an injury to all." Nobody is truly free until everyone is free from the throes of capitalist exploitation. It's only once we stamp out the bourgeoisie that we will begin to heal from the ways capitalism has made us conceptualize ourselves and each other.
The Falling Rate Of Profit and "Primitive Accumulation"
With all of this, capitalism would be bad, but it wouldn't be world-ending. After all, even if everyone is constantly being exploited, and we're all in an endless battle to get more of the pie, it's all alright so long as the pie keeps growing at a steady pace. Everyone still achieves prosperity eventually, it just would take a while longer for some than for others. And, yknow, maybe it's the best system we've got!
However, Marx explains how capitalism comes with a time-bomb. Popular anticapitalist conception holds that capitalism relies on permanent exponential growth, and is thus unsustainable - Marx writes of a specific mechanism to that extent.
To explain, we'll first need to go over the labor theory of value.
Every production process takes two forms of capital to run. The first is "constant" capital, or the capital invested in raw materials and machinery - essentially, everything that was already done before this production process started. Then, there is "variable" capital, or the amount paid to human beings to perform work.
When a production process takes $1000 of materials, pays someone $100 for their labor, and then sells the final product for $1300, $200 of that is surplus value.
The labor theory of value holds that the $200 of surplus value was only earned because of the involvement of the worker. If you had a machine that did the same thing that the worker did, then your profits would slowly approach zero.
This is unintuitive--Don't companies love replacing workers with machines?--but it ultimately makes sense. Machines, and other non-human forms of value-creation, are commodities. Capitalism loves to underpay workers for their labor, but it hates to misrepresent the value of a commodity. To be able to buy machines and permanently make as much profit from them as you could a worker would be an infinite money glitch. Which, in turn, would increase the perceived value of said machines, until their price matched their actual worth--or it would reduce the value of the product, as competitors undercut your prices while using the same methods. Maintaining profits while reducing human labor requires having a monopoly (or a headstart) on the acquisition and implementation of the labor-reducing measures.
This approaching of zero of profits does not, on the other hand, apply to human labor. The amount paid to humans can be reduced to the cost of reproducing the human and their labor, because human beings can be made to take bad contracts and can be placed into unfair social situations. The whole of capitalism is, in fact, an unfair social relation that allows surplus value to be extracted from human labor--but not from commodities.
Individual companies, though, are indeed incentivized to reduce the "variable" part of their capital costs by as much as possible. They want to produce the same amount while paying humans beings the least. They will restructure their companies to reduce the workforce, they will buy or create tools to replace workers. In the short term, this can substantially increase profit, and for sure increases productivity. In the long term, though, this reduces the profit that can be made from the company's activity, because it reduces the involvement of human laborers.
Thus you get the "falling rate of profit" under capitalism. This is reflected in how further-developed countries have consistently lower GDP growth rates than they used to. It also is reflected in the slowdown of investments in production in the West, and the rise of speculative investment (like that which caused the 2008 crash). It is also reflected in the past few decades' increased investment in global south countries from the West. Also, while China isn't exactly capitalist, their market's falling rate of profit was likely a big reason for the beginning of the Belt and Road Initiative that increases investment elsewhere.
Capitalists as a whole don't like when they can't make as much profit. In fact, the whole thing causes a lack of investment that is pretty dangerous to the whole system. So they do two things to combat this: exploit workers further, and what Marx calls "primitive accumulation."
Exploitation of workers can be increased through the institution of a recession. Recessions result in lowered wages and benefits. The recession of 2008, for example, took away many middle-income jobs and eventually replaced them with lower-wage service or gig-economy jobs. Alongside this, it reduced wages at many jobs without eliminating them.
An additional method for increasing exploitation of workers is to influence culture away from class-consciousness. The rise of the right-wing think tank, and the consolidation of media outlets under superwealthy owners, can be seen as actions taken as a result of the falling rate of profit. Danger to the capitalist system as a whole means individual capitalists are willing to spend more on cultural influence, and willing to reduce competition in favor of it.
The other method for raising the rate of profit is "primitive accumulation." (Primitive as in originatory, not as in unsophisticated.) This is not something I understand very well, but my understanding is that it's basically when you get more things to do capitalism with. This means commodities and industries, where the rate of profit will be higher due to their previous lack of development. Sometimes it means war, where the destruction of industry allows for new industry to be created, under different ownership, for profit. Primitive accumulation can also mean the accumulation of laborers, or the lifting of barriers that might prevent workers from competing with one another. The globalization of the last few decades can be seen as a wave of primitive accumulation.
The problem is: There is a point where you run out of accumulates to primit. The world only has so many productive industry possibilities, and it only has so many people to employ. That leaves it with the only other option: Increasing the rate of exploitation... without end.
Thus, real wages in the US have, since the early 1970s, become further and further decoupled from our actual productivity. Our rhetoric about other nations and their peoples is increasingly intolerant. Our social institutions are in decline, resources are being poured into making us hate each other. Our democracy is falling apart: even the meagre protections offered by it are becoming too much for the bourgeoisie to tolerate. It's not just here: in Europe, the far-right is almost universally on the rise, after decades of economic stagnation.
Capitalism is at its breaking point, and it may fall apart within the next couple centuries.
Dependency Theory
It won't break in the West first, though. It will break elsewhere.
The Western nations form an "imperial core" where they use their preexisting status to make sure the rest of the world remains a source of cheap labor and cheap resources. This began with colonialism, and continues under empire. First it was Europe, then it was mainly Britain, and now it is mainly the US.
The basic timeline is laid out beautifully in Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. First, colonial powers establish an export economy in a colonized region. Second, that region gains independence, but retains its dependence on exports. Its existing bourgeoisie (which specializes in the export of raw materials) both benefits from the rampant unemployment that prevents an internal market from forming, and benefits from the lack of tariffs that smothers any embers of a national industry. Third, that region's industrial development, when it does happen, is on the terms of the imperial powers.
Countries in the global south, besides being at a natural disadvantage due to the structure of their bourgeoisie, also deal with the political subterfuge of the imperial powers. When the workers of the country do manage to pressure the government into passing pro-worker policy, or nationalizing key industries, the US exclaims, "You dare act like this in my subreddit?" There's a reason the global south has had such a problem with rightist dictators, who just so happen to be installed by the US or Britain. Even as the US flatlines in real wages, its military spending grows ever higher.
(Of course, there are non-military ways in which the US subjugates other countries. Sanctions can cripple a country's economy, and cause internal unrest. International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans, with conditions set by the US, are designed to create an endless cycle of debt. However, the US's military strength continues to be the backbone of its "diplomacy.")
It is useful, with this, to define a subclass of the proletariat: the imperial proletariat, or the bourgeois proletariat. This is the portion of the proletariat that, existing in an imperial power, benefits from the exploitation of the peoples of the global south. For as long as this exploitation continues, the West will always be able to make more concessions to its working class than the countries in the global south will theirs--and, as such, the West will likely be the last to boot the bourgeoisie.