What Can Be Learned From Karl Marx: Everything About Work and Wealth in Capitalism

Capitalism, which Marx analyzed and criticized in the phase of its emergence, has changed since his day in this way and that, but in nothing really essential. The accumulation of money is still the dominant purpose of work. Working people are still a cost factor, thus the negative variable of the company’s goal: profit. The development of the productive power of labor, the greatest source of material wealth, still takes place exclusively to save money on wages and lay off employees -- thus making workers poorer. Because of this reality, and only because of this, the long forgotten thinker deserves to be remembered. His books help to explain economic reality today. This talk will demonstrate this by quotations from the first chapter of Das Kapital Volume 1, “The Commodity.” It offers thoughts about use value and exchange value, concrete and abstract labor, money and benefit, work and wealth – paired together, terms that our modern world can no longer distinguish, when they really contain the hardest opposites.