Activity

The account of the ‘employment cycle’ is worth thinking about. Marx’s theory is that the Industrial Reserve Army of the Unemployed is essential to the functioning of capitalism. It acts as a ‘dead-weight’ to the aspirations of those in employment. Their wages will always be held down for as long as…

Surplus labour creates surplus value, and on Marx’s analysis, surplus value is the source of all profit. It is this that makes the difference between the money advanced and the money received. The process of ‘extracting’ surplus value is called ‘exploitation’. Finally we have arrived at the point o…

[...] Adam Smith had been so impressed with the miracle of the division of labour that he opens The Wealth of Nations with an unlikely peon to a pin factory. [...]

Yet the sensible Marxist position is to say that real-life politics is determined by many factors, including class struggle, in which from time to time the workers—and even the intellectuals—will win out. But in the long-term the bourgeoisie will win the great majority of the important political an…

Marx’s idea is that economic structures rise and fall as they further or impede human productive power. For a time— perhaps a very long time—an economic structure will aid the development of productive power, stimulating technological advances. Yet, Marx believes, this will typically last only so l…