It is impossible, for anyone who as actually read Das Kapital, to read Einstein’s essay “Why

Socialism” as anything but a boiled down version of it.

Only those completely unfamiliar with the analysis of Das Kapital could even pretend otherwise.

This includes not only specifically Marxist terminology (e.g the Marxist distinction between
labour and labour-power, means of production), very close approximations (e.g Einstein’s ‘army
of unmployed’ vs Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’), but also specifically Marxist understandings
of capitalist processes.

This pervades the entire piece, but here are three particularly distinct analytical points from Marx
paraphrased by Einstein:

“Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition
among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing
division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of
smaller ones.” - Corresponds directly to Marx’s understanding of concentration and
centralization of capital accompanying relative surplus appropriation

-“Production is carried on for profit, not for use.” - A Marxist distinction between exchange
value and use value, which from mainstream micro-economics ignores/collapses

-”Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an

easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition
among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of
capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. ” - Corresponds directly to Marx’s
theory of the rising ‘organic composition’ of capital, and its destabilizing impacts
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