Question

1. How does a Marxist view of labor and power relate to a basic economic view?
   1. Where does Marx say profit comes from?
   2. What implications does this have for how we decide how to allocate our resources as a society?
   3. Did this section surprise you? If so, in what ways?

Answer 1

The labor theory of value is a major pillar of traditional Marxian economics, which is evident in Marx’s masterpiece, Capital (1867). The theory’s basic claim is simple: the value of a commodity can be objectively measured by the average number of labor hours required to produce that commodity.

If a pair of shoes usually takes twice as long to produce as a pair of pants, for example, then shoes are twice as valuable as pants. In the long run, the competitive price of shoes will be twice the price of pants, regardless of the value of the physical inputs.

Although the labor theory of value is demonstrably false, it prevailed among classical economists through the midnineteenth century. Adam Smith, for instance, flirted with a labor theory of value in his classic defense of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations (1776), and David Ricardo later systematized it in his Principles of Political Economy (1817), a text studied by generations of free-market economists.

So the labor theory of value was not unique to Marxism. Marx did attempt, however, to turn the theory against the champions of capitalism, pushing the theory in a direction that most classical economists hesitated to follow. Marx argued that the theory could explain the value of all commodities, including the commodity that workers sell to capitalists for a wage. Marx called this commodity “labor power.”

(a) Marx argues that profit is derived not by selling commodities above their value, in which case capitalists could raise prices at whim, but that commodities sold at or near their natural value produce profit because workers are only paid for that portion of their work which pays for their own labour power, i.e. that labour which generates enough value to pay workers their wages. In this regard Marx distinguishes value as the natural price of a commodity through the labour power invested in it, which forms an upper limit to wages, and the rate of profit as the ratio between the surplus value left to the capitalist after paying the wage, and the wage itself, thus excluding investments in capital prior to production, and disregarding payments by capitalists in rent to landlords and interest to moneylenders which must come from surplus value after production.

(b) Criticisms of the labor theory of value affect the historical concept of labor theory of value (LTV) which spans classical economics, liberal economics, Marxian economics, neo-Marxian economics, and anarchist economics. As an economic theory of value, LTV is central to Marxist social-political-economic theory and later gave birth to the concepts of labour exploitation and surplus value. LTV criticisms therefore often appear in the context of economic criticism, not only for the microeconomic theory of Marx but also for Marxism, according to which the working class is exploited under capitalism.

Opponents of Marxist economics argue that the labor theory of value is disproven as commodities may diverge from the average price of production. In his 1871 work Principles of Economics, Austrian School economist Carl Menger writes:

There is no necessary and direct connection between the value of a good and whether, or in what quantities, labor and other goods of higher order were applied to its production. A non-economic good (a quantity of timber in a virgin forest, for example) does not attain value for men since large quantities of labor or other economic goods were not applied to its production. Whether a diamond was found accidentally or was obtained from a diamond pit with the employment of a thousand days of labor is completely irrelevant for its value. In general, no one in practical life asks for the history of the origin of a good in estimating its value, but considers solely the services that the good will render him and which he would have to forgo if he did not have it at his command...The quantities of labor or of other means of production applied to its production cannot, therefore, be the determining factor in the value of a good. Comparison of the value of a good with the value of the means of production employed in its production does, of course, show whether and to what extent its production, an act of past human activity, was appropriate or economic. But the quantities of goods employed in the production of a good have neither a necessary nor a directly determining influence on its value.

(c) No this section section does not surprised me.