The tale of Marx

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Chapter 1 in A Brief History of Political Economy, 2016, pp 1-44 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Karl Marx was the one who named the emergent economic system in the mid-nineteenth century Europe: capitalism. Adam Smith had emphasised the importance of free trade and global distribution of labour for the world he saw ahead. This imagery of future of Smith was the present of Marx but it looked different from how Smith had imagined. Karl Marx discerned a different key factor than Smith for the development of the industrial “system” after the industrial “revolution”: capital. He saw that investments of capital of a new kind produced not only fortunes but also social problems, and new forms of poverty. He theorised the social question, he recognised the global nature of capitalism, and he discerned the crisis-heavy nature of the new system and tried to explain it. Karl Marx deeply shaped the three most important responses to the tensions of capitalism: the revolutionary approach, the left reformist approach, and the top-down social conservative reform approach through concessions (Bismarck), in response to Marx, embraced as a way to avoid something worse.

Keywords: Economics and Finance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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