Let’s kill the Capitalist

Among the main topics discussed for this week’s session on Marx is about his principle of alienation through labor. Though the activity of labor itself, man has eventually become alienated through acting instead of a human into a mere robot at work. How come? In the capitalist society, everything is governed by these pieces of paper and metal objects called money. Through this, the relationship of the slave and master, basing it from the Hegelian philosophy, eventually becomes a relation between the slave, who is the worker, and the master, who is the capitalist, wherein money is the one that bridges between the two in a Marxian context.
Among the key points with regards to the Marxian philosophy is that 1) Alienation is the result of the labor of activity itself, and not the product of labor, 2) That in order to stop alienation we should do it through production and not consumption, and 3) The solution to the full freedom or emancipation of man is to abolish private property.
In the first two key points, the main reason why we should be targeting the production instead of the consumption is that alienation itself affects the worker more than the buyer or the consumer. Why?
Let’s analyze the work in a capitalist state; in a capitalist state, a worker is given a minimum wage for his daily labor of work by his boss, the capitalist itself. For this, I will use a hypothetical principle of manufacturing tables as an example. Provided that a worker works for a fixed rate of 50 pesos per hour, and works for 10 hours, he is able to make 5 tables in that span of that time period. So this should mean then that the worker can make a table in a span of two hours, and theoretically speaking, the table’s manufacturing cost is at 100 pesos. Given that he is able to make five tables, and works for ten hours, he then earns 1000 pesos on a daily basis. Now what does the capitalist do? In order to gain income, he sells the tables at double the price at 200 pesos per table, and while the capitalist can sell the 5 tables the worker has made during the day at a total of 2000 pesos, the capitalist ends up paying the worker only the minimum wage, which is 1000 pesos, for that particular labor. Where did the other 1000 pesos go? It went eventually to the pockets of the capitalist, and the other 1000 pesos that the capitalist kept is his profit from selling the tables, hence creating a surplus value with the tables the worker has made.
What makes this unfair then? It is the mere fact that the capitalist makes use of the worker as a commodity to his expanding business, such that by thinking of money, profit, and income, he dehumanizes the laborer by making him into a mere robot that does an automated task of manufacturing tables for the benefit of the capitalist and for the use of the consumers. Marx makes sense when he says that it is the laborer who gets alienated rather than the consumer. Although in one way or another the consumer becomes alienated since he is dictated by the capitalist to buy his products for various reasons (take in the marketing strategy of Apple’s iPods for example), it is still the laborer at the end who is deeply alienated at this modern, capitalist society since he becomes dependent with the work and the (unfair) pay he gets from his master the capitalist. Having said that, this causes the worker in the end to be powerless against the capitalist, his master, as he becomes a dependent entity of the master.
And we all know that in the capitalist society, capitalist always desire for a higher profit while at the same time, investing less. So how does the capitalist compensate for this given that he has given the maximum number of hours to work for the laborer and thew maximum number of laborers he can have in his company? The answer to that is the use of machinery to do the work. Since theoretically speaking the machine can do much more work than the laboring human in a fraction of a time, this then will give the most profit to the capitalist, of which he deeply desires.
In both cases, whether the laboring man is replaced by the machine or the laboring man is abused by the capitalist, you cannot remove the sense of exploitation in the capitalist society. If you use machines, you don’t address the means and needs for survival of the laboring human by not having him work. On the other hand, abusing the laboring man instead of being replaced by machines would jeopardize his health and condition, no matter how much benefits or insurance can the capitalist give to his workers.
And at the same time, machines are like humans; they sure may be much more efficient than humans but we should know that they have to be constantly maintained; wear and tear with its use overtime can make it inefficient, reaching to the point that the capitalist would merit a negative profit because of neglect and abuse to the machine, just like what the capitalist does to the human laboring worker.
And given these problems with Capitalism, and given the Marxian principles of alienation, what should be done to resolve the conflict? Simple. Kill Capitalism, the capitalists and the bourgeoisie class..