Some commenters are put off by the idea that the linked writings somehow relate to Marx, and are not even reading it before commenting. Here's a
TL/DR of the points made in the linked writings which I thought some of you might find interesting :
Most people agree that we need to improve our economic system somehow. It threatens our planet through excessive consumption, distracts us with irrelevant advertising, leaves people hungry and without healthcare, and fuels unnecessary wars.
It is because Marx had such high hopes for work that he was so angry at the miserable work that most of humanity is forced to endure.
Work becomes meaningful, Marx says, in one of two ways. Either it helps the worker directly to reduce suffering in someone else or else it helps them in a tangible way to increase delight in others.
When work feels meaningless, we suffer – even if the salary is a decent one. Marx is making a first sketch of an answer to how we should reform the economy; we need an economic system that allows more of us to reduce suffering or increase pleasure. Deep down we want to feel that we are helping people. We have to feel we are addressing genuine needs – not merely servicing random desires.
In particular, he believed that capitalists shrunk the wages of the labourers as much as possible in order to skim off a wide profit margin...It was very difficult for the labourers to protest or alter their circumstances. Not only were they in desperate need of employment, but their landlords and employers could conspire to keep them desperate by raising the price of living along with any rise in wages. Modern life also brought new challenges that kept the proletariat weak: crowded quarters, disease, crime-ridden cities, injuries in the factory. In short, Marx wrote, the workers could be almost endlessly exploited.
Long before the Great Depression or the computer-traded stock market, Marx recognised that capitalist systems are characterised by series of crises. This is partly because capitalists seek increasingly big risks in order to make even bigger profits, and this speculation disrupts prices and employment.
Ironically, Marx pointed out, we have crises in Capitalism not because of shortages, but because of abundance; we have too much stuff. Our factories and systems are so efficient, we could give everyone on this planet a car, a house, access to a decent school and hospital. Few of us would need to work. But we don’t liberate ourselves.
Marx believes that because we don’t distribute wealth to everyone, nor seek and celebrate unemployment, we are plagued by instability, unhappiness, and unrest. “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism,” he wrote. “And why? “Because there is too much civilisation…too much industry, too much commerce.”
Although Marx sometimes called the capitalists and bourgeoisie “vampires” and “hostile brothers”, he did not think they were evil at heart. In fact, he believed that they were also victims of the capitalist system.
Marx didn’t think the Capitalists wanted to live this way. He simply believed that the capitalist system forces everyone to put economic interests at the heart of their lives, so that they can no longer know deep, honest relationships. He called this psychological tendency “commodity fetishism” (Warenfetischismus) because it makes us value things that have no objective value, and encourages us to see our relationships with others primarily in economic terms.
A capitalist society is one where most people, rich and poor, believe all sorts of things that are really just value judgements that relate back to the economic system, for example: that a person who doesn’t work is practically worthless, that if we simply work hard enough we will get ahead, that more belongings will make us happier and that worthwhile things (and people) will invariably make money.
In short, one of the biggest evils of Capitalism is not that there are corrupt people at the top—this is true in any human hierarchy—but that capitalist ideas teach all of us to be anxious, competitive, conformist, and politically complacent.
He was astounded by the power of Capitalism, the way that it allowed for the “subjection of Nature’s forces to man…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.” But he also could see that Capitalism does not make us happier, wiser, or kinder–it cannot inherently lead us to be more human or more fully developed.
But we need to go out and find the cures that will really work. Tantalisingly, they are truly out there, scattered in this and that research paper and economic book sidelined by the mass media. We need to consider how to build an economy that not only brings us greater prosperity but also a better relationship to nature, to money, to each other, and to ourselves. We don’t need a dictatorship of the proletariat, but we do need to reconsider why we value work and what we want to get out of it. We shouldn’t get rid of private property, but we do need a more thoughtful, authentic relationship to money and consumption. And we must begin to reform Capitalism not by simply deposing heads of banks but by upending the contents of our own minds. Only then will we truly be able to imagine an economy that is not only productive and innovative, but also fosters human freedom and fulfilment. As Marx himself declared, “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”