Intersting Points on Marxism

After today’s class discussion I decided to go back and re-listen to the radio interview on Marx and write about some of the things I found interesting. I didn’t know much about Marx beyond the Communist Manifesto, so I found a lot of his points worth writing down. First, I liked Wheen’s description of Marxism as a way of trying to understand the world through questioning everything, not as a set way of doing things. He described it as a descriptive idea rather than a prescriptive idea and even though communism as a prescriptive idea failed, Marx’s ideas are still very applicable and can be used to question any system. I also liked Marx’s descriptions of capitalism. After thinking about it for a while, describing capitalism as a system of “creative destruction” seems surprisingly fitting. The need for competition to constantly increase production and efficiency within organizations while at the same time seeking to destroy competition to increase market share is a very interesting view on the inherent instability of a capitalist society. Finally, I wanted to comment on the capitalism as Frankenstein idea. I thought it was a very interesting, albeit simplified and abstract, concept. Wheen described Marx’s view on capitalism as a monster created by humans that has come to life through the form of commodities. In the process, the humans are reduced to the level of simple machines of production and the objects become more “human” than the workers. The thought that capitalism was created by humans and is now out of our control and destructive seems especially significant now, given the current state of our market. Greed and the constant drive for profit led to subprime loaning and subsequently the debt crisis that is responsible for the mess that our economy is in.