Marxism by Thomas Sowell

Author:Thomas Sowell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2011-09-25T17:51:17+00:00

Summary

Marx's conception of "value" continued a pattern of dialectical thinking seen in many other areas of Marxian doctrine. The "law of value" was a principle of resource allocation or the transfer of "socially necessary labor" (value) from one sector of the economy to another—a necessity that was at any given point accidental in a capitalist economy. The conception was dialectical in another sense as well—that value was an underlying "essence" only imperfectly represented by the tangible "appearance" of price or exchange value. The two concepts belonged on different levels of analysis, and Capital proceeded deliberately and laboriously from one level to another through its three large volumes.

Value as defined by Marx cannot equal price, because goods produced by varying combinations of capital and labor cannot exchange in proportion to their respective labor if profit rates are equalized by competition. This point was made by Marx himself, both in developing his own analysis and in criticizing Ricardo's theory of value. It was also the key point in refutations of Marxian value, when misconceived as a theory of prices.

Marx and Engels were especially explicit and vehement in opposing any notion that labor value should become the basis of price or income distribution under socialism. Even the approximate relationship between price and value under capitalism was the result of a competitive economic process that allocated resources. To assign prices by fiat under socialism was to lose the whole necessary allocational process.

The Marxian concept of "surplus value" expressed and attempted to quantify the exploitation of man by man. Marx did not attempt to deny that machinery and other invested resources contributed to production. His analysis was in terms of people rather than things. The inanimate equipment using in production was seen within this framework as contributions of past labor. The purpose of the concept of "surplus value" was not, however, simply to call capitalism immoral like earlier socialists, but to trace certain tendencies and their implications.

The tendency of the falling rate of profit called forth an increasing rate of surplus value. Insofar as workers were presumed to view their relative economic positions as crucial, as Marx did, this would promote resentment and eventually revolution. The Marxian doctrine of the increasing misery of the proletariat included not only surplus value as such, but also the stultifying effect of routine work as science and technology took over through and judgment—again, in the interest of increasing surplus value.

Marxian economic analysis was not a separate activity, independent of his other intellectual and revolutionary efforts. Its framework and mode of discussion were given by dialectical thinking, and its conclusions about capitalism were part of a more general analysis of that system's inner tensions and how they would lead to its ending in revolution. Marxian economic theory thus dovetailed with the Marxian theory of history and with Marxian political theory.

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