Tag Archives: Marx

A Marxist called “Jehu” who writes at The Real Movement blog challenges me here with four questions: Jehu, “Four Questions for LK on Money,” The Real Movement, February 20, 2016. His four questions are as follows: (1) Did not Marx predict the collapse of production on the basis of exchange value?(2) Did this collapse occur in the 1930s just as Marx predicted it would?(3) To save capitalism was it not necessary to sever gold from fiat?(4) What was the implication of the collapse of the gold...

From Karl Marx’s Critique of Political Economy (1859): “Direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange, signifies the beginning of the transformation of use-values into commodities rather than the transformation of commodities into money. Exchange-value does not acquire an independent form, but is still directly tied to use-value. This is manifested in two ways. Use-value, not exchange-value, is the purpose of the whole system of production, and use-values accordingly cease to be use-values...

Chapter 22 of volume 1 of Capital is called “National Differences in Wages” and deals with the various factors that cause differences between national wage rates. For Marx’s views on how the value of labour-power is determined as a subsistence wage, see his analysis in Chapter 6 of volume 1.Marx reminds his readers of the discussion in Chapter 17 and the issue of how the subsistence wage may vary: “ … the quantum of the means of subsistence in which the price of labour is realised might...

Chapter 21 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Piece Wages” and deals with wages paid by the number of output goods produced.A “piece wage” is a wage payment by quantity of products or units produced by a worker.Time wages and piece wages both exist and sometimes side by side. Marx argues that “[w]ages by the piece are nothing else than a converted form of wages by time, just as wages by time are a converted form of the value or price of labour-power” (Marx 1906: 602).But piece wages conceal...

In Chapter 19 of volume 1 of Capital Marx quotes the Classical economics on wage determination: “Classical political economy borrowed from every-day life the category ‘price of labour’ without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes, i.e., the oscillations of the market price...

Chapter 20 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Time-Wages” and deals with wages paid by the hour.Wages can take various forms but the two fundamental forms are time wages or piece wages (Marx 1990: 683).In essence, the hourly wage can be calculated by the value of a day of labour-power (the subsistence wage equal to the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour-power) divided by the number of hours in a working day (Brewer 1984: 64). As the working day rises so the hourly wage rate...

Chapter 19 of volume 1 of Capital is called “The Transformation of the Value (and Respectively the Price) of Labour-Power into Wages” and discusses how capitalist wages conceal the reality that the wage is a payment for the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour (Harvey 2010: 242), a subsistence wage, which is equal to the necessary part of the working day. But capitalists generally pay hourly wages so that this alleged reality is obscured (Brewer 1984: 63).The use-value that the...

Chapter 18 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Different Formulae for the Rate of Surplus-Value” and Marx discusses his basic formulae here.For Marx, the rate of surplus value is represented by these formulae:Surplus value  =  s  =  Surplus value  =  Surplus labour —————————— —— ———————————— —————————— Variable capital v Value of labour power Necessary labour The first two formulae are expressed in values, but the third is a ratio of the relevant quantities of time (Marx 1990: 669). For Marx,...

Chapter 17 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour-Power and in Surplus Value” and discusses how capitalists extract surplus value in relation to wages.Marx divides the chapter into four sections: (1) Length of the Working Day and Intensity of Labour Constant. Productiveness of Labour Variable.(2) Working-Day Constant. Productiveness of Labour Constant. Intensity of Labour Variable.(3) Productiveness and Intensity of Labour Constant. Length of the...

Chapter 16 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Absolute and Relative Surplus Value” and discusses the nature of labour, surplus value and surplus labour time. This chapter begins Part 5 of Capital (which comprises Chapters 16, 17 and 18).Marx opens his chapter with a discussion of the nature of productive labour. Under the capitalist mode of production, the commodity ceases “to be the direct product of the individual, and becomes a social product, produced in common by a collective labourer,...