Tag Archives: Karl Marx

Karl Marx was born on 5 May 1818. Over half a century ago, economists, building on the work of Piero Sraffa, extended Marx's critique. They showed that his approach to political economy was basically correct. The marginal revolution was a mistake. Here are the titles of some of the books on my bookshelf: Syed Ahmad. 1991. Capital in Economic Theory: Neo-classical, Cambridge and Chaos. Edward Elgar. C. E. Ayres. 1946. The Divine Right of Capital. Houghton Mifflin. Eugen von...

Several editions have been published of the works of Marx and Engels. One can also look in the Marxists Internet Archive. Many individual works have been published in various translations in various places. Marx's manuscripts ended up in the Institute of Social History (ISH), in Amsterdam. A first attempt was started in 1927, the first Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA), in which the works were to be published in their original languages. This project was never completed. David Riazanov,...

1.0 Introduction This post argues that there is more than one labor theory of value. 2.0 The Labor Theory of Property John Locke argued that what one mixes one labor with, one has a right to own. One could read Marx's Capital as a reductio ad absurdum of this labor theory of property. I disagree with this reading. 3.0 Labor Commanded as a Theory of Welfare Given a unit of money - one dollar or one british pound - the labor commanded by that money is the amount of person-years of labor...

1.0 Introduction I find the question in the title of this post hard to answer. I should probably say something about secondary literature, which I do not consider myself well-informed on. For purposes of this post, I ignore distinctions between socialism and communism. 2.0 Marx Wanted To Implement An Utopian Vision Of A Post-Capitalist Society You will sometimes find reactionaries assert that wherever Marxism was implemented, the government killed tens of millions. They are too ignorant...

[embedded content]Victor Margariño explains labor theory of value to Vaush Marx sets his theory of value within the capitalist (or bourgeois) mode of production: "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities'..." (Marx 2010, first sentence of chapter 1) Feudal societies, with lords and serfs, and classical societies, such as the Roman empire with its slaves, present other modes of...

Socialism became a mass movement in many European countries about the time of the heyday of the Second International. Many leaders of these movements and those struggling for leadership produced works of scholarship, albeit often with an activist spirit. I think of, for example: Eduard Bernstein. The Preconditions of Socialism and the Tasks for Social Democracy. Nikolai Bukharin. The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. Richard B. Day and Daniel F. Guido (eds.). 2018. Responses to...

Empirically, prices are fairly close to proportional to labor values. But that is neither here nor there as far as the correctness of Marx's theory of value. To see that, you have to get to the last footnote in chapter 5 of Capital. (Most "refutations" of Marx are based on ignorance of the first few pages of chapter 1.) From the foregoing investigation, the reader will see that this statement only means that the formation of capital must be possible even though the price and value of a...

Apparently, Lincoln responded to this congratulations from the International Workingmen's Association: Sir, We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant warcry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery. From the commencement of the Titanic-American strife the working men of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of...

Happy 155th Birthday to volume one of Capital! In his 1965 farewell lecture at Brandeis University, Herbert Marcuse read a long passage from the Grundrisse’s “fragment on machines” and then observed: “But Marx himself has repressed this vision, which now appears as his most realistic, his most amazing insight!” In Time, Labor and Social Domination, published 28 years later, Moishe Postone addressed the same section from the Grundrisse and...

This is the start of Section 5, "Strikes and combinations of workers", in the second chapter of The Poverty of Philosophy: "'Every upward movement in wages can have no other effect than a rise in the price of corn, wine, etc., that is, the effect of a dearth. For what are wages? They are the cost price of corn, etc.; they are the integrant price of everything. We may go even further: wages are the proportion of the elements composing wealth and consumed reproductively every day by the...