In this chapter, the prevailing argument is led by Marx, that the need for money of individuals in society caused by the modern economic system. In a capitalist society, Marx argues that the human needs through a system of private property, when capitalism develops advanced human needs that are defined on the basic requirements of food, shelter and clothing. Capitalism has also the aspect of the creation of more and different social classes that persist further redefining the needs of individuals in each class. Marx argued that since capitalism is mainly in the accumulation of wealth by individuals, is accumulated to an increase in the level of wealth by an individual likely. Such individual, where they lead to more refined in the changing human needs This problem occurs even if workers. Their human needs down by need to work with the bare minimum, which is provided by the system The chapter argues that the modern system of ethics is based have been promoted to the needs caused by capitalism and the virtue of self-denial by savings through capitalism. So by extension, capitalism, the individual needs of the terms of use and price (Tucker, 1978) is based.
Following the arguments in the chapter that capitalism is the basis for the definition of human needs and as such, the ethical values that govern the behavior of the individual in society, accumulated by the amount of wealth in the society. It is argued that a solution to this seemingly erroneous definition of human needs in society through the adoption of communism in which the system of allocation needs wealth creation is based off of (Tucker, 1978) is carried out.
Private Property and Communism
Following the arguments in the chapter, under the economic system of private property, divides society into two classes: the owners and landless laborers. In this arrangement, the workers are not only suffering, impoverishment, but also experience an estrangement or alienation from the world. This alienation occurs because the employee refers to the product of his work as an object alien and even hostile to him. The worker puts his life into the object and the object in the work invested, but because the workers do not own the fruits of his labor, which will be appropriated in capitalism from him, he is more alienated, the more it produces. Everything he does contributes to a world outside of him that he does not belong. It shrinks in comparison to the world of objects that it helps, but do not own. This first type of alienation is the alienation of the worker from the product of his work (Tucker, 1978).
The second type of alienation is the alienation of the worker from the activity of production. The work that the worker does not belong to the workers, but is a means of survival that the worker is forced to perform for another person. As such, his work activity does not arise spontaneously as a natural act of creativity, but exists outside of it and is a loss of self (Tucker, 1978).
The third form of the alienation of the worker alienation from "species-being" or human identity. Work for people, amounts to a life of purpose. The process of acting on and transforms inorganic matter to create the things at the heart of the identity of the people. A person is what he or she performs in the transformation of nature into objects through practical activity. But in the modern system of private property and the division of labor, the workers of this important source of identity and meaning to the human species (Tucker, 1978) is estranged.
Theses on Feuerbach
The Theses on Feuerbach are philosophical notes written by Karl Marx, the number eleven outlines a critique of the ideas of another philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. The scores are usually critique of materialism, which was of the Hegelian school of philosophy promoted (Tucker, 1978).
In the "Theses on Feuerbach" Marx explicitly rejects the epistemology of mechanistic materialism, which he so often is taken to accept. He even claims that one reflectionist conservative theory of consciousness, ultimately, it does not suggest how change is possible is (Tucker, 1978).
This chapter Marx tries to map a middle position between idealism and materialism. He is certainly a concern under the idealism with activity and a focus on the materialism of an objective world. However, Marx has something to add in any idealism nor materialism, that is, found a statement about the centrality of praxis. Sensuous human activity is the activity that transforms the world and objective activity. Marx's understanding that this activity is part of the objective world, the connection between subject and object, which long has plagued western philosophy. Of course, the connection is not the right word, because in the face of this concept is not need anything connected (Tucker, 1978).
Marx argued, as its premises "real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity'' in this development" developed areas ", Marx four aspects of human activity, the production of material life, the production of new needs, the production of human life, and the production of consciousness itself (Tucker, 1978).
If Marx is ultimately the aspect of consciousness, he insists that consciousness is a historical development and at first not appear in its current form. The consciousness is a social product closely associated with the development of language. Arises from the language needs occurring human traffic and exists to meet these needs. What people say and think, therefore, of what determines their lives. At the beginning of consciousness is not the individual self-consciousness that we take for granted. Marx said that in the beginning awareness "herd consciousness" or simply conscious instinct. Only by the growth of the increased needs and the development of the division of labor produces individual consciousness (Tucker, 1978).
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
This chapter develops Engels sets from the materialist conception of history of Marx: "The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that to support the production of the means for human life and in addition to production, produces the exchange of things is the basis of all social structure that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders depending on what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this perspective the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are looking to not in philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. "
Angel provides a simplified view of the economic analysis developed by Marx in Capital, which explains how produces the "anarchy of production", which is essential for capitalism a "vicious circle" of economic crises and crashes. Periods of full production and high employment in capitalism produce a flood of consumer goods, and then to dismiss the capitalists, the workers, who at a time of high unemployment and economic stagnation, because workers no money for the products they produce to buy. The analysis is no less today than when it was written over 120 years ago (Tucker, 1978).
Engels speaks as if the socialist revolution is a once-and-for all events taking place around the world. But in practice it does not happen that way. As Lenin later wrote in 1916, "socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory for first in one or several countries, while the others remain for some time pre-bourgeois or bourgeois. This is bound, not only to create friction, but to destroy a direct attempt by the bourgeoisie of other countries of the socialist state victorious proletariat. In such cases, a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism. "When Lenin shows, even after the successful revolution, the socialist state to be ready to defend the revolution against the capitalists who would wish to destroy it (Tucker, 1978).
Bibliography
Tucker, Robert C. (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader 2nd Edition. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 1978
