Private Property and the Modern State
According to Karl Marx, the ideological underpinning of capitalism is that private ownership and private properties are absolutes to its philosophical implementation into real world economics. Unquestioned acceptance of this absolute in turn is the origination point of the modern state. Marx's justification is that since the ruling class owns all the means of production and the private property, those on lower economic scales seeking to become more active agents in the exercise of their rights and responsibilities must accept that acquisition of ownership is the key that opens the door to all power. This acceptance in turns assures the reproduction of that ideological underpinning of the modern state. From this reproduction is borne the conflicts which has accorded the modern state very much the same history of warfare and bloodshed which had in the old order been instrumental in reproducing the ideology of sovereigns accorded absolute authority directly from a supreme being.
Capitalism as Vampirism
Marx’s vampire metaphor for capitalism is determined by his outline of classic struggle which reveals that nearly aspect of the economic ideology when put into practice is analogous to the vampire class of the owners sucking the very will and reason to go on living from its working-class victims. The surplus value of the workers sucked dry by their exploiters who need to wring every last available cent of that value from the worker in order to push the profit margin up every cent possible. This process consistently replenishes the blood supply of the vampire—immediate profit—but at the cost of equating worker value with owner profit, thus ignoring or overlooking the value of the equating the worker with a value related to the worker—and the potential benefits of short-term loss but a greater long-term profit. Like the vampire always in search of an immediate need for blood, capitalism views the worker as a disposable and replacement resource.
The High Cost of Profits
One of the themes that recurs throughout Capital is the unknown effect on society and innovation that capitalism obsession with profit has had. The demand to wring every last but of surplus value from workers creates an environment of alienation from actual worker value and the value he represents as a business resource. This, Marx suggests, is the real evil of capitalist mentality. That reality is that an infinitely unknown quantity of value to the world has been and will continue to remain in the deficit column of history as actual contribution to society of workers is denied for the sole purpose of supplying the rich with an ever-increasing share of ever-expanding profits. Today the devaluation of workers is expressed in the form of the rich engaging in excesses of conspicuous consumption that only serve to heighten and intensify the disparity between the wealthy and middle class and underclass becoming increasingly less disparate.
An Ideology of Dissatisfaction
Capitalism according to Marx is about the lack of fulfillment for both the producer and consumer of goods. As capitalism has evolved more and more into a leisure economy, this is even more so. The means of production have now become almost completely dependent on instilling a lack of fulfillment for the consumer as well as the producer. Once the consumer has his needs fulfilled, the only value left for a product is surplus value. Surplus value is about the commodification of desire. The alienated worker must continually create for the capitalist owner a series of never-ending products that creates not a sense of fulfillment on the consumer end, but a lack of fulfillment: the iPhone 3 that brought such joy is now a piece a junk compared to the iPhone 4 and then there will be the iPhone 5 and so on even though the changes in actual use-value remains prohibitive at best: all three phone can be used for talking, texting and taking pictures in pretty much identical ways. Such a paradox is the very essence of the nature of contradictions that makes capitalism work.
Degradation of the Worker
The worker has long been alienated from the product he creates and that alienation has the effect of making work a degrading experience. People spend a third of their lives going to work at jobs making things or selling things to people that they have no investment in and—worse—aren’t paid enough money to buy themselves. By comparison, the blacksmith may have been brutally hard work that was physically incapacitating at time, but just as he could forge the exact product for himself that he was paid to forge for someone else the day before. He was invested in the work he did in a way that the vast majority of capitalist workers will never be. Thanks to contradiction within capitalism that allow the potential for profit to create opportunities that subvert its dependence upon degradation and lack of fulfillment in the worker, entire industries run by new owners who were former workers have risen to provide funding for workers to live out that dream, regardless of how minute the chances of actually living it may be.
