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Karl Marx 001 I was listening to a lecture on Marx's critique of capitalism, and it got me thinking - why are Marxists not fans of corporations? Yes, I get the basic jibe - corporations are greedy, do not care about the little man, plow through the environment, etc. etc. However, one of Marx's basic criticisms of capitalism was that laborers were not able to rise out of their state in life, and that they were paid merely to subsist and to reproduce. The capitalists, according to Marx, were the ones living off the sweat of the proletariat. At this basic level, I can understand some of Marx's concerns, even if they do not seem to have been very well thought out.It seems, however, that with corporations, the ownership of capital has become democratized. Particularly with public corporations, laborers now have an opportunity to purchase - at low cost - part of the company in which they work, or of those that their neighbors work for. Effectively, then, laborers can assume the role of capitalists and earn income off the sweat of their own labor (or that of their neighbor). This kind of ownership in publicly traded companies has become more and more widely available, especially over the past couple of decades, which seems to be a blessing for all those laborers who want to enjoy the same advantage enjoyed by company owners.Yet, we constantly hear from leftists that corporations are bad, etc. Shouldn't corporations be praised as a way out? As an opportunity which is realistically available to the masses? On a personal level, I frown when I hear politicians wanting to impose "windfall profits taxes" on oil companies. As a small-time shareholder in the Exxon Mobile company, the success of the company benefits me personally. The profits do not remain in the hands of a few, but instead are spread out into the hands of potentially thousands, or tens of thousands of shareholders who own stock in the company. Seems to me that this corporation is doing what it is supposed to be doing and helping the masses rise out of their limited state through the earning of wealth.I thought Marx valued the Capitalists as a means of concentrating wealth to make it easier for redistribution when the Proletariat overthrows them? Or did I get that part wrong?
He may have, but that would make such a concentration of wealth a means for making the overthrow easier….effectively a minor point in the larger plan to redistribute the wealth. Why not just address the problem from the get-go and effectively spread the wealth to begin with through multiplicity of shareholders? That's what owning stock allows for. To me, it seems that capitalism provides the mechanisms which address at least this one flaw that Marx saw in the system.One thing that gets me is that owning shares in corporations had been done for several hundred years by the time Marx was writing (c. 1860-1870s), so he would have known about their advantage. Perhaps we can say that trading shares was not widely done back then and was effectively a bourgeoisie activity. It wasn't until sometime in the twentieth century that buying and selling share became a reasonably accessible activity for the proletariat.I also wonder what Marx would have thought about possibly paying laborers in shares of company stock, in lieu of or as part of monetary compensation.
Marx was seeking an economic and political Utopia. He reasoned that the Capitalists would never relinquish their wealth willingly and would have to be overthrown. So, it would be to the benefit of the Proletariat for them to compete in earnest concentrating their wealth down to ever smaller circles until they were few in number and could easily be overthrown from a bottom up revolution. Also, the fierce competition would build a strong foundation for the economy the Proletariat would inherit. What he failed to see was that the Proletariat would become fat and lazy once in charge, and would still seek to differentiate themselves in social standing/class despite the idealism of their revolution. Marx never accounted for the flaws in human nature that center around greed. He just assumed people would become content once everyone had the exact same thing.
