ABSTRACT
From a purely economic point of view, the author define capitalism as an economic system based on production by means of private ownership and free endeavour, according to a free interplay between supply and demand, and where profit is obtained by investment of capital and employment of labour. Over a century and half ago, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel, in The Communist Manifesto, stated that the bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. Marx used the concept of “alienation” to explain how workers become alien from the commodity they produce, “that the worker is related to the product of labour as to an alien object”. Although this notion has validity in explaining some of the complications of capitalism, the authors feel Marx lacked the psychological awareness necessary to understand such a concept in depth.
