Those who assume that Karl Marx emphasized only the negative characteristics of capitalism such as alienation, crisis, and exploitation are mistaken. Indeed, throughout his intellectual career – in philosophic, journalistic, historical, and economic writings – Marx stressed the creative and progressive features of capital. His social theory makes no sense unless essential duality is retained.
For Marx, capitalism is inventive and advanced with respect to the past (pre-capitalist societies), the present (capitalism itself), and the future (post-capitalist society). First, capitalism has “revolutionizing properties” that transform all social, economic, and political relations, thus creating conditions for consolidation and universal development.
Second, capitalism has “universalizing properties”. That is, commodity production promotes the internal (intensive) and external (extensive) development of capitalist relations of production through space and time, drawing all people into a web of economically-based social contacts and dependencies. Universalization thus implies a constant revolutionizing of the present as capital strives to overcome all obstacles to its general development.
Third, capitalism has “industrializing properties”. The logic of accumulation initiates and sustains a revolution that constantly develops the forces of production, thus radically enhancing the power of social labor. Although an outspoken critic of capitalism, Marx conceded that it was at one time a progressive and even radical force. Accordingly, capital needs innovation and change as well as new and more efficient machinery and technology in order to survive.
Fourth, capitalism is said to have “liberating properties” in that the revolutionizing, universalizing, and industrializing tendencies establish the objective and subjective conditions for the transition to socialism. Moreover, the development of the productive powers of the economy provides the material abundance without which socialism would necessarily remain a “struggle for necessities.” The tendency of the system to maximize surplus labor time relative to necessary labor time holds out the promise of the appropriation of that surplus time as leisure or free time for the producing classes, thus allowing for the universal extension of civilization, and the development of humanity as a rich individuality.
Most importantly for Marx, capitalist development generated the proletariat as a universal class, in the sense that in pursuit of its particular class interests (abolition of oppression and poverty) it promotes the general interest (abolition of private property, hence, of capitalism). In addition, capitalist industry socially organizes this class in production, the basis for the realization of class consciousness as praxis (i.e., the revolutionary transformation of capitalism).
Finally, in connection with its liberating potential, Marx held that capitalism demystified, rationalized, and secularized human culture and action, freeing the human mind from that “smallest compass” of superstition, idolatry, religion, and political illusion. Through its development of science and materialism, extended human comprehension of nature, the arts, and achievements in a world-historic sense, people will be free to develop many-sided lives.