/biz/ - Business & Finance

Marx was mostly operating within the framework of classical economics, anon. This is actually why classical economic was abandoned, the bourgeoisie became too afraid of it providing ammunition to the socialist movement.

You want to understand marxian economics the first should read contending economic theories: neoclassical, Keynesian and marxian. You should also understand the basic ideas of david Ricardo and Adam Smith.

Perhaps the three most important aspects of marxs theory was the labor theory of value, exploitation, and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. Essentially he said that the value of goods, that is their long term exchange (equilibrium) exchange ratio between goods was determined by the amount of socially necessary labor time required to make them. This meant values, and real prices of commodities, goes down when labor saving technology is used. (Even main stream economists say the only way to have real wage growth is to have higher productivity, this is a similar forumulation) Competition also means that you cannot simply do a really lazy or bad job and expect a higher value, hence socially necessary. And if you are making something that doesnt have a use value in the first place, you aren't making a commodity.

With the theory of exploitation Marx isnt necessarily making a moral arguement. Rather, he's saying that the reason profit and surplus value exists is because the value of labor power is not determined by the value of the goods produced, but rather by the value of the commodities required to reproduce that labor. This allows profit and surplus to exist.