Karl Marx's Theoretical Analysis

With the implementation of textiles, steel, exports, joint-stock companies, and world trade into the economy, the laborious world in the 19th century was rapidly adapting to new methods and innovations, therefore catalyzing the flourishing of the Industrial Capitalism (Cortez, 2016). However, with such innovations came dramatic effects that impacted the labor force. Through his book, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, well-known Karl Marx, a “German social philosopher, the chief theorist of modern socialism and communism” addresses some of the issues that take place. Born into the Jewish middle class, Marx has the opportunity to express his “mainly humanist ethical and philosophical concentration of ideas…[that] foreground the notion …show more content…
Such depiction infers the working class as inferior and therefore oppressed by the industrialists. Thus, in his manuscript, Marx argues that the error in the political economy is caused by the dehumanizing of the worker that simultaneously promotes the success of the industrialists. While Taylor, too, sees the fine division between the laborer and the employer, Taylor’s perspective derives the problem from the “soldiering” of the laborers, which he then explains is responsible for Marx’s theory because “soldiering involves a deliberate attempt to mislead and deceive his employer, and thus...the employer is soon looked upon as an antagonist, if not an enemy (Taylor, 23). Taylor’s accusation toward the worker’s tendency to “gradually but surely slow down their gait to that of the poorest and least efficient” (Taylor, 19), represents Taylor’s distinguished view that it is the laborers who are responsible for “the feeling of antagonism under the ordinary piece-work system” (Taylor 23). While both Marx and Taylor admit there is conflict between the employer and the employees, Marx’s observation that the laborers are mistreated is undermined by Taylor’s belief that the worker’s laziness warrant and induce such …show more content…
When arguing that “labour is external to the worker” (Marx, 72), Marx believes that the political economy lacks the emotional aspect to value the human worker for his true nature and thus instead deprives the worker so “man no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but in his animal functions” (Marx, 73). Yet Marx argues that man’s “conscious life-activity” is what “directly distinguishes man from animal life-activity” and ultimately infers that if man is more than an animal, then he is undeniably more than a machine (Marx, 75). Contrastingly, Taylor views that “the importance of obtaining the maximum output of each man...is only through the adoption of modern scientific management” (Taylor, 27). Taylor’s lack of awareness for the emotional, mental and spiritual well-being of the worker sided with his meticulous methodology of “analy[zing] and study[ing]...each movement of the [worker]” to eliminate “all unnecessary movements” reinstates that Taylor does not consider the laborers as much more than objects (Taylor, 77). By failing to incorporate the well-being and the intrinsic motivations of men and instead focusing on their happiness in a monetary sense, Taylor fails to enunciate all that Marx upholds. Marx, on the contrary, argues that