Friday, November 7, 2014

Karl Marx - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat

After all we discussed in class, Karl marx was a philosopher born in 1818. He is from Germany and his most famous book calls The Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx started argued against the capitalism, his first idea was not to create socialism, it happened after all the point he showed against the capitalism. 
He reduced the classes to only two: Bourgeoisie (owners of the mean of production) and Proletariat (workers). From his argument, "Capitalism rests upon a fundamental contradiction" - it is contradict because the proletariat class works the most, and gets the least. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie class works the least and gets the most. It is an inverse proportion. But why? He says it is the capitalism. For instance, assuming that a company spends 2 dollars to product a shirt, and sell it for twenty-five dollars, that difference (twenty-three dollars) goes to the Bourgeoisie, the owners of the company. All the people that actually produced the shirt will get the least from what Marx called the SURPLUS VALUE, in other words profit. From this case we can assume that people who are poor, would get poorer, and people who are rich, would get richer. We have a system that is immoral. System based on exploration of the workers.    

What is your opinion about that? And what kind of solutions to our system you would provide?

1 comment:

  1. Diego, I think this was summarized very sufficiently. I totally agree with the point about the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariats; furthermore, one are the owners of the mean of production and the others are just workers. The Proletariat class definitely does work the most and put forth much more labor, but in the end, they end up with the short end of the stick. The other class works ver little and gets much more than the hard workers. I think your why statement was spot on. Capitalism is the reason. Just as we discussed in class about a worker that works for apple will still not be able to buy an iphone. Apple is the Bourgeoisie and the worker for apple is the proletariat.

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