Tag Archives: Karl Marx

This is more for my commonplace book. The first two quotations are part of a symposium with Morishima and Samuelson: "This paper will suggest that the meaning of the relationship between values and prices described in Capital has been widely misunderstood. Commentators as eminent as Mrs. Robinson and Professor Samuelson have sought in the transformation discussion issues which Karl Marx never meant it to contain. Writers on 'the transformation problem' since L. Bortkiewicz have...

I have expressed an appreciation before of the section in Capital on commodity fetishism. Perhaps this section stands up to a critique of Marx's theory of value. "But Marx had drawn a nightmare picture of what happened to human life under capitalism, when everything was produced only in order to be exchanged; when true qualities and uses dropped away, and the human power of making and doing itself became only an object to be traded. Then the makers and the things made turned alike into...

1.0 Introduction This post illustrates a derivation of prices of production, based on certain properties of duality theory as applied to linear programming. I strive to be more concise and elementary than previous expositions. This exposition is based on John Roemer's Reproducible Solution (Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, Cambridge University Press, 1981). You will find no utility maximization or supply and demand functions below. I have no need for such hypotheses....

1. Introduction Elsewhere on the internet, I have been explaining my understanding of some rudiments of the political economy of Karl Marx. Marx's concept of surplus value is a generalization of the concept of profit, in some sense. Surplus value takes in all returns to ownership, whether they be profits, interest, rent, and so on. Surplus value arises from the distinction between the use value and the exchange value of labor power, a peculiar commodity. Because capitalists own the means...

[embedded content]Automation Of Chinese Ports With automation, many processes for production and distribution now execute with minimal human oversight. How can the labor theory of value, as in volume 1 of Capital, be compatible with this? Marx has some comments on this subject in the Grundrisse: The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the...

"There is in every society or neighbourhood an ordinary or average rate, both of wages and profit, in every different employment of labour and stock... There is likewise in every society or neighbourhood an ordinary or average rate of rent... These ordinary or average rates may be called the natural rates of wages, profit and rent, at the time and place in which they commonly prevail. When the price of any commodity is neither more nor less than what is sufficient to pay the rent...

Infinite are the arguments of Marxists. This very selective survey needs references. A first difficult is that everybody knows Marx has something to do with the Soviet Union. Many come to reading Capital with certain preconceptions. A couple comments in the book, for analytical reasons, contrast capitalism and feudalism and a post-capitalist economy with common ownership. But the book is about capitalism. The book contains expressions of outrage, often ironical. But is capitalism...

1.0 Introduction This post outlines an unoriginal argument against Marx's version of the Labor Theory of Value (LTV), if that is the right name. Somehow, this post was obliquely inspired by Fabio Petri's recent working paper. Suppose technology, net output, and the real wage are given. Then the rate of profits and prices of production are determined. Suppose that the technology provides a choice of technique. Then the determination of the choice of technique requires an analysis at...

Marx, in Theories of Surplus Value, quotes James Stuart writing about 'profit upon alienation'. When one sells a good one owns, one has alienated it from oneself. In the typical work relation under capitalism, the managers of firms, that is, the representatives of capitalists, sell the product or services that workers produce. Workers do not own the goods they produce, for they have previously sold their labor-power. That is, they have agreed that their product is not owned by themselves,...

Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance...