23/09/15 Felix Sellers
Why did Marx believe that capitalism was doomed to collapse and how would this occur?

In order to fully answer this question I believe that first I should define the key word in the title “capitalism.” The OED definition for this word is “an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.” The first reason why Marx said that capitalism was doomed to fail was because he subscribed to the idea of historical materialism, this is the theory that material and/or economic conditions are responsible for the structure of law, politics, culture and other aspects of life at that time. He also believed that the driving force of history was the process of the two forces of humanity, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, opposing each other and an eventual higher stage emerging (communism), this is called the “dialectic”. In short, Marx believed that the class struggle which has plagued the entirety of human history can only be brought to an end when comes a “higher stage”, a classless society.
Marx also believed that capitalism contained within it the seeds of its own destruction. These “seeds” being the proletariat. This contradiction is routed in private property, something only held by a small minority of the population. Due to the constant drive for increased profit by the bourgeoisie, the labour and skills of the proletariat is reduced to being a mere commodity, like cogs in a machine, this is called “alienation”. The harsh material and economic conditions put upon the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, often harshening due to competition for profit among the bourgeoisie is due to the fact that capitalism’s quest for profit can only be satisfied through the extraction of surplus value from its workers, by paying them less than the value their labour