Karl Marx: Rational Miser
on Monday, March 28, 2022Karl Marx Money Quote saying that being miserly is simply captialism of rationality. Karl Marx said:
“While the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser” — Karl Marx
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In this quote, Karl Marx is drawing a comparison between capitalists and misers. He argues that a miser takes the capitalist mindset of accumulating wealth to an irrational extreme, by being excessively stingy and refusing to spend any money.
However, Marx views the capitalist himself as a “rational miser” – someone who is still primarily focused on accumulating riches, but does so in a calculated way through the economic system of capitalism. So in essence, Marx is criticizing capitalism by equating capitalists to misers, even if capitalists pursue wealth accumulation in a methodical rather than obsessive manner.
The overall interpretation is that Marx saw the profit-seeking behaviors of capitalists as essentially the rationalized and systematized form of the individual miser’s pathological desire to hoard wealth.