/lit/ - Literature

has any other author so absolutely wrecked the political economy of the elites like this man? think about it
>smith
>ricardo
both analyzed capitalism on a materialist basis. this worked great because it fit well with the nascent bourgeoisie in their fight against monarchy and mercantilism. they were entirely on board with a scientific understanding of political economy
but then our boy karl comes along, corrects some mistakes made by smith and ricardo and reveals the nature of exploitation to the workers. the reaction by the now dominant bourgeois class to this was a collective
>oh shit oh shit shut it down shut it down
which is why marshall's unfalsifiable supply/demand curves, and subjectivism, are dominant today. that they have no explanatory power, that they can fit any observation, is a strength rather than a weakness. it allows the people who own and run the world, the elites, the bourgeoisie, to justify their hold. it allows them to handwave away the fact that it is concrete human labour that is the source of all things useful to humans

>>18780147
>1
Work is the metabolic between the wealth of nature and social wealth. All civilizations have had work, productive activity, but labor specifically refers to the bourgeois relation of work; which is bound up with private property, market competition, and universal exchange. Look at any labor contract: it's treated as private property. Historically, labor as property was incredibly important -- and remains so!
>2
That's blatantly incorrect. Marx viewed medieval Judaism and medieval Christianity as losing their respective social character, its content surviving in secular terms into the 'materialism of civil society' and the 'idealism of the political state'. Judaism had become Christian and Christianity had become Jewish in that their social character under feudalism had been liquidated into the private beliefs of individuals under civil society rather than cosmologies of separate spheres of being.
>3
The expansion of the division labor created new industries while also replacing workers with machinery, the latter of which Adam Smith could not have predicted because in his time most capital investments were into expanding labor and not machinery. For Smith, wage-labor was capital rather than a moment in capital's reproduction.
>4
Whenever Marx supported any policy, he didn't because it would supposedly provided an immediate solution to society's ills, and not because it ameliorated the condition of the poor, but that it may make more apparent the underlying social contradictions, or in other words, the respective potential unleashed by capital.
For example, socialization is the agglomeration of individual proprietorships into organized corporate conglomerates, which by its own existence undermines bourgeois property by its own immanent logic towards monopolization. Nationalization into state monopolies was only, for Marx, the quickest way to speed up socialization. Whether or not Marx was right or wrong in expecting socialization to unleash capital while also going beyond capitalism is not the point; the point is that the premises on which civilization is supposed to rest upon have been thrown into crisis by the mere fact that socialization, as one phenomenon of many, exists as an emergent self-undermining tendency.
>5
What does that even mean?
>6
Nope, politically, capitalism is the contradictory expression of bourgeois social relations, which include private property. For example, the rights of workers are rights expressed through private property, that come into conflict with the property rights of the capitalist.
>7
Marx was engaged with a critique of value, wherein labor became superfluous by capitalism, that the premises of civilization affirmed by Locke had in fact been undermined by its own self-development. So of course economists would eventually abandon the LTV! The disconnect of property from its premises in labor IS capitalism.