Tag Archives: Marx

It follows clearly if you accept the interpretation of Marx’s law of value (as he expressed it in volume 1 of Capital) by Engels in his “Supplement and Addendum” to Volume 3 of Capital (see my discussion of it here).According to this interpretation, the view that labour values are anchors for individual prices and that prices tend to correspond to labour values can only be held to be true for the pre-modern modern of commodity exchange before about the 15th century. This law of value ceases...

This is made at the end of volume 1 of Capital in the “Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation” chapter: “ As soon as this process of [sc. capitalist] transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from, top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of...

I cannot stress enough how important this issue is for clarifying and refuting Marx’s economic theory. Though I have said much of what is below before, it bears repeating with some new observations.In essence, Marx published volume 1 of Capital in German in 1867, but only volume 1 of Capital was published in Marx’s lifetime. The other volumes were edited and published by Engels (for an extended discussion of this, see here). For some reason, Marx refused to publish volumes 2 and 3.In volume...

Just for all you Marxists out there.Here are Marx’s comments on mass immigration into Britain in the 19th century in a letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt in 1870: “But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English...

The cry that “Marx was not responsible for the crimes of Soviet communism” is Marxist apologetics at its worst: an attempt to completely exonerate Marx from the horrors of 20th century communism.It is also curious that many Marxists claim that Soviet communism was some “betrayal” of Marx and Engel’s vision of communism, but then at the same time go on to engage in the most disgraceful apologetics for Soviet communism.However, that is not my purpose here. The question is: to what extent was...

An interesting passage from Wilhelm Liebknecht’s book Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs (1901) about Marx’s predictions: “ … whoever prophesies revolutions is always mistaken in the date.Well, though Marx was a prophet looking into the future with sharp eyes and perceiving much more than ordinary human beings, he never was a prophesier, and when Messieurs Kinkel, Ledru Rollin and other revolution-makers announced in every appeal to their folks in partibus the typical, ‘To-morrow it will...

I've been teaching an Intermediate Political Economy course, substituting Berhanu Nega, who regularly teaches this course. The text used, and it was already in the bookstore, is Bowles, Edwards and Roosevelt's Understanding Capitalism, which puts an emphasis on individual behavior as the main difference with the marginalist view, and is not the best choice, in my view. At any rate here are a few old posts on Marx, which is central to the first part of the course (towards the end Veblen...

This can be seen in an article Engels wrote in May 1895 for the Neue Zeit (Marx 1991: 1027, n.), which is available as the “Supplement and Addendum” to Volume 3 of Capital in Marx (1991: 1027–1047).Right at the beginning of this supplement, Engels notes that people such as Achille Loria had pointed to the devastating contradiction between volume 1 and volume 3 of Capital in the theory of value (Marx 1991: 1027–1028).Next, Engels mentions that Werner Sombart, in a review of Marx’s work...

There are two important passages here: “But, although the money that performs the functions of a measure of value is only ideal money, price depends entirely upon the actual substance that is money. The value, or in other words, the quantity of human labour contained in a ton of iron, is expressed in imagination by such a quantity of the money-commodity as contains the same amount of labour as the iron. According, therefore, as the measure of value is gold, silver, or copper, the value of...

Chapter 8 of volume 1 of Capital is called “Constant Capital and Variable Capital” (Marx 1990: 307), and it discusses non-labour factors (constant capital) and living labour (variable capital).Marx divides capital as factors of production into two categories: (1) constant capital, and(2) variable capital (Marx 1990: 317). Constant capital is the means of production used in the production process whose values are merely transferred to the output product (Marx 1990: 307; Harvey 2010: 128).How...