Capitalism

Capitalism has by no means lacked for criticism from many different quarters. Communitarians, such as Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), asserted that capitalists' concentration on competition and individual self-interest at the expense of social solidarity would ultimately corrupt and corrode communal order. Utopians, such as Charles Fourier (1772–1837), sought to replace capitalism's exploitation of labor with a free and creative socioeconomic system in which human potential could flourish. The anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865), proclaiming that "private property is theft," denounced the collusion of state and capitalist enterprise and proposed to level the unequal distribution of the material benefits of work and to liberate workers to collaborate freely in their chosen activities. What all of these essentially left-wing responses to capitalism shared was a belief that cooperation rather than competition was the key to the improvement of human society and the amelioration of psychological as well as material misery.

The most famous nineteenth-century opponent of capitalism was Karl Marx (1818–1883), who, with his collaborator Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), offered far-reaching and systematic criticism based on a careful study of the inner operations of the capitalist economy. It is too seldom acknowledged that Marx shared more with the classical political economists than with capitalism's moralistic antagonists. In his unfinished masterwork, Capital (volume 1 published in 1867), Marx viewed himself as engaging in the "scientific" analysis of capitalism, borrowing heavily from Smith and his successors, while pointing out the structural weaknesses and limitations that the capitalist apologists had overlooked. In particular, Marx believed that the intense conflicts between capitalists and workers, as well as among capitalists themselves, would produce recurrent and ever-deepening economic, social, and political crises. Eventually the growing body of exploited industrial laborers, whom Marx labeled the proletariat, would recognize the source of its exploitation in the market-engendered condition of "wage slavery" and would revolt against the capitalist system as a whole.

Yet Marx did not dismiss lightly the accomplishments of capitalism. He maintained, instead, that the technological achievement of capitalism in constantly revolutionizing the means of production should be harnessed by any future communist society. Indeed, one of the inherent contradictions of capitalism was its inability to utilize fully its own productive capacity, a situation that would be rectified under communism. In sum, what singled out Marx's criticism of capitalism was its immanent character, in comparison to communitarians, utopians, and anarchists, whose critiques were based on standards external to capitalist economics.