Marx defined dialectics as thought which
includes, in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things…also the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because [such thought] regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and hence takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.
Marx, Capital, Morse & Aveling 1906: 26
This is a far more useful definition than the standard three-step straw man of thesis-antithesis-synthesis that Stalin used to “prove” that the society he controlled was the wave of the future, and that Western philosophers and economists still prefer to knock down when they think about dialectics at all.
It is true that even Marx’s good definition conveys a misunderstanding, for it allows him to try and use dialectics to make predictions. In Hegelian terms, dialectics is a way of organizing social memory, not a predictive device (# 26). What Marx is trying to do in predicting the death of capitalism is a form of future-oriented dialectics: Marx sums up the premises of a contemporary capitalist economy, negates just one of them—individual ownership of the means of production (i.e. factories) —and draws the conclusions. But in fact, as Hegel would point out, there are many such premises, and just which one (or ones) will get negated is not for philosophers to predict. Nor can they tell how the negation will proceed: Marx thought the negation of individual ownership of the means of production would transfer the ownership to the workers, via the revolution; in fact, it was transferred to the investor class, via the stock market.
As to markets in general, as far as I can tell, Marx has little to say. He thinks they are chaotic, but we all know that. His main complaint about free markets, I think, is that they don’t stay free. The moment one participant gains even a temporary advantage over another, they will seek to convert it into a permanent one, and from there into a monopoly. Sometimes they do this by direct action against the competition; sometimes they use the state as a weapon, calling in government regulators to act in their favor (see Thomas Philippon, The Great Reversal, Harvard 22019).
None of this is news to anyone (though Philippon’s revelations of the extent of it came as a surprise to me). What made Marx special is that he did not view market consolidation, the evolution of a market from freedom to monopoly, as a series of unfortunate accidents. It is what markets are: a free market is to a monopoly market as an acorn to an oak. This insight is part of his overall critique of political economy, the previous generation or two of economists (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, etc.) who, in Marx’s view, tried to determine how the major components of the economy functioned without asking where they came from. Thus, they asked about how private property works, but not how there came to be such a thing as private property in the first place. They thereby eternalized it.
They, and their descendants. also failed to see needed distinctions. Private property for Marx originates in the appropriation of others’ labor. Nothing, then, could be further from Locke’s account of an individual enclosing and working on a given piece of land. Compared to Marx’s compelling and empirically-grounded account of the genesis of capitalism, Locke’s story seems like an idle thought-experiment; and yet things such as he presents have in fact happened, if only rarely. So there are two kinds of property: private property, which has immoral origins, and what we may call personal property, which does not.
Now suppose I go into a store and buy a toothbrush. I am buying something that was produced, let us say, by eight-year-olds working in a factory somewhere very far from the store I am shopping in. Their labor is being appropriated, but not by me; I have appropriated no one’s labor, and my toothbrush belongs to me as personal, not private, property. I benefit from the alienation of the childrens’ labor in that far-off factory, and this gives me certain moral obligations toward the people whose labor has benefitted my oral health, but it does not make me an exploiter or a capitalist; even in capitalist countries, socialists are allowed to buy toothbrushes.
The difference between private property and personal property lies in the path by which each come to be: they are path-dependent. Ignoring this led some defenders of capitalism to claim that Marx wanted to expropriate peoples’ toothbrushes, or clothes, or houses; but that is an idea he justly ridicules.
One thing that Locke and Marx have in common is the deployment of ousiodic structure in their accounts of private property. For Lock, one person enclosed a territory—gave it a boundary—and then, in laboring, ordered it so as to produce goods which he then controlled: ownership consisted in boundary, disposition, and initiative exercised by a unified agent over a limited space. For Marx the capitalist controls the boundary of his factory (or factories), determining who is allowed in (hiring) and who is expelled (firing). Within the enterprise, he sees that the individual jobs are done and allocates resources, ordering the whole, to that end; and he controls the output: boundary, disposition, and initiative are the three axes of private property.
The major difference is that for Locke, the ousiodic structure of individual ownership is a good thing; indeed, it provides the ontological framework for its justification. For Marx, such ousiodically-structured ownership is evil, and needs to be replaced by communal ownership—which I would argue, is not “ownership” at all. But that is a different story, a different path.