A world turned against ourselves
There has only been one serious tradition of analysis to attempt to provide an account of the system in these terms. It is that which originated in the writings of Karl Marx and his long-time colleague Frederick Engels.
Marx came to adulthood in the early 1840s, just as industrial capitalism began to make its first, limited, impact on southern Germany where he was born. Engels was sent by his father to help manage a factory in Manchester, where the new system was already flourishing. They shared with almost the whole of their generation of German intellectual youth a desire to overthrow the oppressive Prussian feudal system of class rule presided over by a monarch with despotic powers. But they soon began to grasp that the industrial capitalism that was supplementing feudalism contained oppressive features of its own. Above all it was characterised by an inhuman subordination of the mass of people to the work they did. What Marx was beginning to discover about the functioning of this then-new system led him to undertake a critical reading of its most eminent proponents, political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. His conclusion was that, although the system vastly increased the amount of wealth humans could produce, it also denied the majority of them the benefits of this wealth:
The more the worker produces, the less he has to consume. The more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes . . . [The system] replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of workers back to a barbarous type of labour, and it turns the other section into a machine . . . It produces intelligence-but for the worker, stupidity . . . It is true that labour produces wonderful things for the rich-but for the worker it produces privation. It produces palaces-but for the worker, hovels. It produces beauty-but for the worker, deformity . . . The worker only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel at home.
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Introduction