In a capitalist society, the typical worker doesn’t own the products he produces and is therefore alienated from his work. The process of alienation is demonstrated in the division of labor. The result is that the proletarian’s existence is alienated from his essence. Marx argued that capitalism continues to be sustained and maintained in part because the alienation of the proletariat is so thorough that the workers eventually begin to accept their situation as inevitable even as they aspire to be members of the upper class.
Marx felt that capitalists are just players. What is important is the natural law of capitalism. His criticism of capitalism and its inherent “surplus value” stems from the development of the working class and its historical separation from the means of production and the skills of production. The propertied class hires property-less workers to work for them. The compelling motive for capitalists “is always the creation of surplus value” (Capital, Volume II), an excess of value produced by laborers over their own wages and its consolidation in the hands of the economic elite. This small group of individuals who take the surplus are the rulers of society. In Marx’s paradigm, the professional class is supported by the surplus-getters, and consequently, the professional class will tend to hand down decisions that sustain their economic superiority.
According to Marx, hierarchical society and the exploitation of the proletariat leads to the estrangement of the worker. He predicts that class disparity in capitalist societies will eventually lead to revolution. Marx asserts that capitalist systems are not harmonious but are marked by a perpetual tension between labor and capital, between wages and surplus value, that is, between proletariat and bourgeoisie.
