I never studied Marxism - or any economic theory - at uni, but I was a rabid Libertarian when I was a teenager. I believed that personal liberty was paramount and the only legitimate function of government was to prevent one person from interfering in the peaceful activities of another. For me, that was the definition of "freedom."
This extended to the market, of course, and my argument was simple: A government, being comprised of citizens, can only do what its citizens are capable of; it does not have any magical powers. Therefore, any government interference does not "create" anything; it only forces people to behave in ways they would not normally choose to. To put this another way, if the Air Force wanted to spend two billion dollars on a new B2 bomber and they created a GoFundMe page that only raised $100 million, the difference -- in this case, $1.9 billion -- the government forcibly takes from its citizens via taxes. If citizens refuse to pay, they go to jail and their assets are taken. If they refuse to go to jail (and defend themselves) they are killed.
So for me, the definition of freedom necessarily included a free market, and in the post-industrial revolution, that meant capitalism. Even in the 80s, with corporate raiders, banking crises and a rising national debt (which had just hit $2 billion dollars!) I was unabashedly capitalist because I didn't believe government knew what was best, and all they could do was subvert people's free will and replace it with the desires of a few. In other words, all government intervention could do was introduce bureaucracy and corruption.
If I had problems with America's free-market system, you can imagine what I thought of socialist or communist systems. Now I won't deny I was a "cold war kid" (as described by Billy Joel) and was fed a steady diet of propaganda about the "Godless communists" (as described by Ronald Reagan). Of course, I conflated Russia, Communism and Karl Marx; the failure of one was the failure of all, making it easy to repudiate all three without thinking critically about any one of them.
My daughter is studying sociology and asked me to review a paper where she reviewed Karl Marx's approach to sociology. I was quite surprised because I'd always considered Marx an economist, not a sociologist, but here he wasn't talking about revolution or the value of goods, but instead about how society should treat its people. And he was doing so just after the first industrial revolution when society was completely redefining how people were treated.
Before 1760, most people were tenant farmers, and although they did not own their own land, they produced their own "goods" (in this case, food) which they sold for a profit. With the industrial revolution, Marx noted, most people no longer produced their own goods but instead sold their labour to the "bourgeoisie" who controlled the means of production. ("Bourgeois" was a medieval French term for a person who lived in a walled town that had become synonymous with the middle class.)
Karl Marx was asking what it meant to be "free" and, unlike me -- born into a society of wealth, social mobility and personal freedoms -- he came to a different conclusion. He argued that forcing people to sell their time in pursuit of wages, with no input or control over the finished product, not only devalued them as humans but also "alienated" them from their creative process and social relationships. They were no longer pluralistic individuals part of society but now simply cogs in a machine, incapable of being free.
Growing up in a capitalist society, I never considered any other option. The goal was to have in-demand skills which could command a high value in order to maintain a degree of freedom and a work-life balance. If you didn't have those skills, it was your fault, and you deserved to struggle. I always recognised how lucky I was to have in-demand skills, but I never considered how it would have affected my life if I didn't.
However, thanks to my daughter, I've been forced to question not only my world-view and my sense of worth, but also my views on Karl Marx. Whilst I still don't agree with his conclusions, I have to acknowledge that the questions we was struggling with 150 years ago are still valid -- if not more so -- today. For most people today, the only way to earn money is to sell themselves. Capitalism has turned the world's oldest profession into the world's only profession.
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