Marxist economics is useful and highly relevant in analyzing 21st century capitalism.
Marxism is the basis for modern communism and socialism.
Marx Believed that the want and drive for profits would lead companies to mechanize their
workplaces, producing more and more goods and at the same time squeezing their own workers'
wages until they could no longer purchase the products they created. “We produce and produce
until there is simply no one left to purchase our goods”. Think of The U.S housing market crash
back in 2008, after decades of shrinking wages and income led to more and more Americans to
take on debt. When there were no subprime borrowers left to scheme, the whole system fell
apart, just as Marx knew it would
Marx warned that capitalism's weakness to focus on high value, high priced on unreasoned or
unneeded products would over time lead to what he called "a contriving and ever-calculating
subservience to inhuman, sophisticated, unnatural and imaginary appetites." It is hard to
understand but it essentially means people are driven by a constant need to buy more stuff .
Think of the iPhone 8 you may own, Is it really that much better than the iPhone 7 you had last
year, or the iPhone 6S a year before that? Is needing a new iphone a real need, or an invented
one?
Marx's ideas about overproduction led him to predict what is now called globalization which is
the spread of capitalism across the planet in search of new markets. Marx said"The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the
globe," and he also said "It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections
everywhere." Marx wrote those words in 1848 and he was right about why it happened, The
continual search for new markets and cheap labor as well as the need for more natural resources
are constantly going to need to be tended too.
Marx believed that wages would be held down by a "reserve army of labor," which he explained
simply using classical economic techniques: Capitalists want to pay as little as possible for labor
and which is easiest to do when there are too many workers looking for jobs. That is why after a
recession, using a Marxist analysis we would predict that high unemployment would keep wages
low as profits grow because labourers are too scared to quit their terrible, exploitative jobs in fear
of unemployment. --Corporate profits are high and rising productivity has allowed companies to
grow without doing much to reduce the vast ranks of the unemployed. " That's because workers
are terrified to leave their jobs and therefore lack bargaining power. It's no surprise that the best
time for equitable growth is during times of "full employment," w...
