"Karl Marx understood capitalism as an historically specific mode of production (the way in which the productive property is owned and controlled, combined with the corresponding social relations between individuals based on their connection with the process of production) in which capital has become the dominant means of production (Burnham). The capitalist stage of development or "bourgeois society," for Marx, represented the most advanced form of social organization to date.
Following Adam Smith, Marx distinguished the use value of commodities from their exchange value in the market (Scott 2005). Capital, according to Marx, is created with the purchase of commodities for the purpose of creating new commodities with a higher exchange value higher than the sum of the original purchases. For Marx, the use of labor power had itself become a commodity under capitalism (Scott 2005); the exchange value of labor power, as reflected in the wage, is less than the value it produces for the capitalist. This difference in values, he argues, constitutes surplus value, which the capitalists extract and accumulate. In Das Kapital, Marx argues that the capitalist mode of production is distinguished by how the owners of capital extract this surplus from workershahaha8212;all prior societies had extracted surplus labor, but capitalism was new in doing so via the sale-value of produced commodities.[6]
For Marx, this cycle the extraction of the surplus value by the owners of capital or the bourgeoisie becomes the basis of class struggle. However, this argument is intertwined with Marx's labor theory of value asserting that labor is the source of all value, and thus of profit. This theory is contested by most current economists, including some contemporary Marxian economists (Scott 2005). One line of subsequent Marxian thinking sees the centrally-planned economic systems of existing "communist" societies that were still based on exploitation of labor as "state capitalism."[7]"
The way I see it is simple.
Our current system is based on the exploitation of labor for a surplus.
In short our current system is not fair to the individual labor worker.
Yet supposedly we live in a Democracy/Republic.
