از زمان پیدایش سرمایهداری و اصول اساسی آن، مورد بررسی، انتقاد و حمله قرار گرفته است. از جدیترین این حملات، حملاتی است که از سوی فیلسوفان سوسیالیست و کمونیست مانند مارکس، انگلس و لنین صورت گرفت. برخی از اندیشمندان اسلامی نیز انتقادهایی از منظری متفاوت ارائه کردهاند.

Since its inception, capitalism and its main principles have been under scrutiny, criticism, and attack. Among the most serious attacks are those that came from socialist and communist philosophers such as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Some Islamic thinkers provided criticism from a different perspective.

But it was Marx who provided one of the most thorough criticisms of the basic principles of capitalism. Marx, in his account of capitalism, focused on the definition of "value" and thought he had found a major and fundamental defect in the theory of capitalism. Marx redefined "value" and used his own definition of "value" to attack the core ideas of capitalism. Marx defined value as "the amount of labor invested in the process of producing a product." He claimed that whatever benefit a product has is a direct result of the labor invested by a laborer. This applies to products of lands made by farmers as well as products of industry made by workers. Marx defined "surplus value" as the amount of labor (or its monetary equivalent) retained by the capitalist after the consumption of the product. This surplus value, Marx maintained, is a direct theft of the labor of workers by those who own the means of production (the land or factory). Marx predicted that surplus value would result in a massive accumulation of wealth in the hands of the owners of the means of production at the expense of those who exert their labor to produce the value in the first place. Eventually, this process should lead to a clash between the class of laborers who produce the value and the class of capitalists who keep the value for themselves32.