A MARXIAN CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM: A CONTEMPORARY APPROACH

This project is intended to expose the nature as capitalism as well as its merits and demerits. An exposure of the Marxian critique of the capitalist system and how marx pressed for the replacement of the system with the inauguration of communism through socialism shall then be explicated. It should be noted that according to marx, the only was to attain this goal is through a mass revolt bloody revolution. Hence a critical evaluation of the Marxian critique of the capitalist system as well as his suggestion of a bloody revolution will be done to see how valid these suggestions are when applied to the contemporary era.
Thereafter, a workable alternative solution/recommendation shall then be done in place of Karl Marx’s own solution/suggestion.
Also, while many workers today are indeed better off, many others are met. They are occasional sweat shop conditions even in countries like the United States, and there are many countries where the majority of workers are as relentlessly exploited today as they were during the capitalist era in Karl Marx’s time. Hence the general trend on which Marx had his eyes still prevails: the rich still get richer and more powerful, while the majority of ordinary employees can count themselves lucky if they have steady employment and more or less adequate benefits. In Africa for example, the income gap between the rich and the rest of society has been wealth usually translates into an imbalance of political power and influence as well, many capitalist countries tend to be, for all practical purposes, oligarchies rather than genuine democracies. Although their democratic institutions may be intact and functioning, their policies tend to be determined by wealthy elites much more than by citizens at large.
It may have been time in the 19th century that workers had to work under sweatshop conditions, that the workday lasted twelve to fourteen hours, that sometimes children were literally chained to machines to work, that workplace safety did not exist, that workers were deprived of education, and most of all, that wages were so low that workers rarely could afford to buy the things they produced. But all these have since become very different. Capitalist in the 19th century may have been rather brutal, but the system has been reformed. Wages have increased, all sorts of benefits are provided by employers or social security system, and today’s industrial workers sometimes own and consume more material goods than even members of the old political cartoons that showed the capitalists with to[p hats, coat tails, and big guts, while depicting workers and their bedraggled families as emaciated, subdued wrecks, are surely outdated. Today’s workers are not as exported and miserable as marx describes them, and the relation of capital and labour is not so antagonistic and bad as to justify such old concepts as “class struggle” or “class war”.
It should be noted that the above objectives are not pointless due to the long and often ardius struggle of unions, as well as the vastly increased productivity of industrial labour, the economic position of many workers has significantly improved since the days of the Industrious revolution.