Now let's move on to what this text is really known for, which is the articulation of Marx's theory of alienation.

Let's get into it.

So Marx opens this section showing how he in the previous chapters has proceeded entirely from the premises of the political economists of his time, like Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc.

And through their own premises and arguments, has shown, quote, that the worker sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities, that the wretchedness of the worker

is an inverse proportion to the power and magnitude of his production, that the necessary

result of competition is the accumulation of capital in a few hands, and thus the restoration

of monopoly in a most terrible form, and that finally the distinction

between capitalist and landlord, like that between the tiller of the soil and the factory worker,

disappears, and that the whole of society must fall apart into the two classes, property

owners and property-less workers, end quote.

He then goes on to make a profound claim that foreshadows so

much of what is to come in the tradition of Marxism. He says, quote, political economy proceeds

from the fact of private property. It does not explain it to us. In other words, the work of people

like Smith and Ricardo are products of capitalism, not explanations of how it actually operates or how it arises.

In effect, like so much of the economics of our own time, it takes the dominant system as given and then works backwards to justify it.

When you walk into an Econ 101 class today, you are walking into a class that presupposes the

truth of capitalism, not a class that seeks to really understand it from an objective point of

view, much less challenge it. As Mark says, political economy expresses in general abstract formulas

the material process through which private property actually

passes, and these formulas, it then takes four laws. It does not comprehend these laws, i.e.

It does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property. Political economy

throws no light on the cause of the division between labor and capital and

...