Hey everybody, this is Monica Perez and we are finishing the Marx chapter of

makers of the modern mind. We're on Section 5.

Let's hit it.

Marx applied historical materialism

with the doctrine

of the class struggle

to contemporary capitalist society

in order to come forth with revolutionary conclusions.

Whereas Malthus and Ricardo framed their laws as if they had always worked exactly as they did in

1800, Marx looked upon capitalism as a passing phenomenon in world history.

The general thesis of Capital is that capitalism was produced from the competition of many small owners of private property

because the survival of the fittest eliminated small producers and concentrated wealth in fewer men's hands.

That there is a, quote, contradiction within capitalism that drives it in turn into socialism

because the factory system of production is a socialized system.

Since it depends upon the factory method of production,

therefore capitalism by its very nature begets a negation of itself. This, of course, is socialism.

Yeah, that's what I learned in Harvard. Here, briefly, is how it happens.

Competition resulting from private property reduces most workers to the status of wage earners employed by the few most ruthless employers who have survived and become capitalist.

Okay, so like I already am like,

it's much more likely that it's the most industrious or the most innovative.

Was that the famous class word innovation?

Now, competition among these capitalists reduces their numbers, puts more and more wealth into fewer and fewer hands, increases the proletariat, and decreases the number of employers in larger and larger factory. Production, meanwhile, is becoming more and more socialized in larger and larger factories.

...