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Tag Archives: Karl Marx

Adam Smith On The Source Of Profits And Rents In The Exploitation Of The Worker

"In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for or be worth two deer....

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Karl Marx/Benjamin Franklin Mashup

Karl Marx/Benjamin Franklin Mashup Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Remember that time is money. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the...

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Karl Marx/Benjamin Franklin Mashup

Karl Marx/Benjamin Franklin Mashup Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Remember that time is money. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the...

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The LTV And Commodity Fetishism

You will occasionally come upon supposed refutations of Marx's theory of value that I find just ignorant. One might talk about two divers. One comes up with a handful of sand, and the other comes up with a pearl. They have put in the same labor, but their products are of quite different exchange values. Or consider the labor that goes into making a useless product, something that cannot be sold as a commodity on a market. Obviously, labor does not create value. A refutation can only be...

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A Derivation Of Sraffa’s First Equations

1.0 Introduction Piero Sraffa wrote down his 'first equations' in 1927, for an economy without a surplus. D3/12/5 starts with these equations for an economy with three produced commodities. I always thought that they did not make dimensional sense, but Garegnani (2005) argues otherwise. This post details Garegnani's argument, albeit with my own notation. There are arguments about how and why Sraffa started on his research project I do not address here. The question is how did he relate...

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Unpublished Reviews of Sraffa’s Book and Related Matters

I have a new working paper. The article presents previously unpublished material from file D13/12/111 in Sraffa's archives. In particular, it reproduces an English translation of Aurelio Macchioro's review in Annali dell'Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a summary by Christopher Bliss of a paper that he read to the Cambridge Political Economy Club, a draft response by James Meade, a rejected paper on Marx by Vittorio Volterra and Moshe Machover, and a paper on the subsistence economy by...

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Why Do Mainstream Economists Not Make More Out Of The CCC?

Marx is mostly right. That is the conclusion one should draw from capital theory. But honestly understanding how we are fed, clothed, and housed under capitalism is not what academic economics is about. Ownership of property in, say, the United States results in the generation of income. This income takes the form of interest on debt, dividends, capital gains, rent, and so on. Many of those who are among the most wealthy often have returns to property ownership as their only source of...

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Marx’s Theory Of Value Is Consistent With And More General Than Marginalist Economics

1.0 Introduction One inspiration for this post is stumbling across this abstract 2.0 Marx Start with labor coefficients and a Leontief input/output matrix, in physical terms. You can construct this from make and use tables for your country, given price indices by sectors. For any existing capitalist economy, I expect that matrix to characterize a more than viable economy. After all the capital goods used up in producing the final demand in, say, a year are reproduced, some commodities...

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Erich Fromm’s Marxist Sociology Forty Years Later — Kieran Durkin

Remembering Erich Fromm on the fortieth anniversary of his passing. Most people remember him for his book, The Art of Loving, but he wrote several other important works in sociology. Fromm’s critique of contemporary capitalism continued a year later in The Art of Loving, perhaps his best-known work. Not the most obviously socialist or Marxist book (in fact, Herbert Marcuse criticized Fromm for supposedly betraying radical thought, and becoming a “sermonistic social worker”) Fromm was...

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Michael Roberts — Marx’s law of profitability at SOAS

Last week I gave a lecture in the seminar series on Marxist political economy organised by the Department of Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). The Marxist Political Economy series is a course mainly for post-graduates and has several lecturers on different aspects of Marxian economics. Course Handbook – Marxist Political Economy 2019-20 (8)Mine was on Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Not surprisingly, the department team has...

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