WordaDay – Marxist Glossary Expanded 3.0 – Capitalism

The bourgeois mode of commodity production, capitalism, is commodity production based on socialized means of production, the factory system and bourgeois private property, that is, the buying and selling of labor-power. Capitalism is competition between capitalists for customers, anarchy of production and competition between the laborers for wages. It is commodity production at its highest stage of development, where labor-power appears on the market as a commodity, bought and sold alongside every other commodity.

Two conditions are necessary for capitalist production: firstly, the concentration of the basic means of production as the private property of capitalists, and, secondly, the absence of means of production among the majority, or a considerable portion, of the members of society. This compels those who possess nothing but their capacity to work to become wage workers in capitalist enterprises in order to keep starvation from their door.

(Fundamentals of Marxism Leninism Manual, 1963, edited by Clemens Dutt.)

Bourgeois private property is the power of the capitalist class to appropriate the surplus products created by the working class. It is through this appropriation that surplus value (which bourgeois economists call “profit”) is realized from the unpaid labor of the working class. At each stage of growth of the capitalist system, a “surplus” population and industrial reserve army are created as a condition for capital’s development. Capitalism rests exclusively on competition between the laborers for wages. Having no means of production of their own, the laborers as a class of wage earners, must sell their labor-power to the owners of means of production for wages or starve.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.

(K. Marx, F. Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.) https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm#007

The capitalist mode of production arose and achieved dominance on the basis of the industrial revolution and the factory system. As is the case with all modes of production, the bourgeois mode of commodity production (capitalism) comes to its historical end based on the emergence of qualitatively new productive forces. Computers and robotics are such productive forces.

(See, Anarchy of production, Base and Superstructure, Bourgeois mode of commodity production, Capital, Factory system, Falling rate of profit.)

Marxist Glossary Expanded Edition 3.0 can be found on MARS website at the Marxist Glossary for the 21st Century page. Also can be downloaded from the files of the Marxist Glossary Discussion group Facebook page.

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