The Inexorable System Of Karl Marx

Karl Marx created a new philosophy called dialectical materialism; dialectical because it incorporates Hegel’s idea of inherent change, and materialism because it grounds itself not in the world of ideas, but on the terrain of the social and physical environment.

– I think dialectical materialism should be described as a milestone in human thinking history as it changes the way that how human beings can think about, cognise and understand the world.

– Marx was very much impressed by Kant and Hegel’s category of reciprocity which plays an important part in the world process. Causes produce effects, and parts produce wholes, but effects react upon their parts in such a manner that they modify and partly determine their nature. This process is exemplified by organic and social phenomena.

– Engles says, “With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world, reflected by the human mind, and transformed into forms of thought”. Therefore, the ultimate causes of social changes and political revolutions are not result of the minds of men but the development of productivity. ‘They are to be sought not in the philosophy but in the economics of the epoch concerned.’

Capitalism would sooner or later destroy itself and it must unknowingly breed its own successor.

– I can not make a clear judgment for this idea but I found that another economist, Schumpeter, held that capitalism would be eventually destroyed by its success.

– Some arguments may disagree Marx’s analysis given that his communist vision failed in practice. However, the communism developed in the Soviet Union was not exactly a Marx’s vision of a social structure, but distinctive developments of Leninism and the Russian revolution.

– Furthermore, Marx did a lot of critical thinking on communism, and he wrote relatively little about exactly what it would take for communism to become reality, or how it would function.

Marx also focused on how to operate a market system and explored the ‘ invisible hand ’.

– A market system allows each of us to choose how to contribute and allows the compensation to be set by competition: if you want to earn more and more, you have to find a way to create more and more value, by providing something that people will freely choose to pay you for. Then the government takes a proportion of what you’ve created but allows you to keep a proportion of it. Thus, people have an incentive to maximize their contributions.

– Perfectly competitive market is not practical as firms and households have the purpose of making a profit. In a perfectly competitive market, everyone gets 0 economic profit and have no incentive to work or innovate.

– The unobservable market force that helps the demand and supply of goods in a free market to reach equilibrium automatically is the invisible hand. From my understanding, the invisible hand can be described as everyone tries to pursue individual plans and fulfill their needs and desires.

– For example, if we imagine an individual makes a decision to buy a burger and a coke to make them better off, this decision will make the whole economic society better off. The supplier will gain from the decision of buying the burger and the coke because more profit are created. Meanwhile, it also makes the production market that distributes the goods better. This pattern will benefit everyone because it will make the firms and the households produce resources better off.