Writing a Marxist paper for class, supposed to convince class of Marxist economics

[Jacob Cliff]

I feel like I have a good understanding of Marxist economic ideas but I doubt my understanding, can I email it to one of you for proofreading? I'm supposed to convince the class but I don't want to teach something Im second guessing myself on

[G4b3n]

Does your paper cover historical materialism and how the same forces that governed the revolutionary collapse of feudal society into bourgeois society will oversee the collapse of bourgeois society into socialist society?

Just be sure not to make Marx out as someone making a moral case against capitalism, that is one of the few ways to make a wrong turn.

[Zoroaster]

Wouldn't this be better as a PM instead of a thread? I don't mean to be rude, but it woul probably be better that way.

[Creative Destruction]

put your paper up on Google Drive.

[Zanters]

If you can't write about Marxists economics because you lack understanding, which is okay just means you have more to learn, then don't. But if you need it for class to be precise, I'd avoid it unless people here basically write it for you. The best you could do without being wrong is creating Marxist propaganda, and appeal to peoples emotions, maybe use both information and emotion.

[Jacob Cliff]

Not so much I lack understanding, but I have major questions on the labor theory of value. Why is it that labor determines value? What is the relationship of price to this?

[Zanters]

Ah, if you have questions like this, I'd advise that you don't right on Marxists theory. ;) I'll let others answer you

[RedMaterialist]

Not so much I lack understanding, but I have major questions on the labor theory of value. Why is it that labor determines value? What is the relationship of price to this?

On the labor theory of value you might want to demonstrate that the idea was proposed long before Marx by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and before them by the Physiocrats. They saw the issue as a farm worker tending a farm and growing crops. The crops grew and developed a value only because the farm worker did the labor necessary to produce the value. It was obvious that a bushel of wheat value was produced by labor, therefore labor was the source of the value.

Later Adam Smith expounded the labor theory of value as applying also to manufactured products. Smith and Ricardo's position was that the workers did the work necessary to produce the object, therefore the value in the product was the labor value. Although Smith and Ricardo saw nothing wrong in the capitalist taking the value of the product and paying the worker only a small portion of the value as wages. It was assumed that the profit from the transaction should go to the capitalist.

Price is the monetary expression of the value of the commodity produced by the labor. The price reflects the cost of production of the product, which is ultimately the cost of the labor. The capitalist then sells the commodity for its real price. However.....this does not mean that the capitalist has paid the full value of the labor which has been put into the commodity. The capitalist has paid for the labor in wages, but the labor adds value to the product during the process of production. This added value is not paid by the capitalist, but the price of the product (determined by the market) includes the added value. The added value is taken by the capitalst as profit.

[Tim Cornelis]

I concur, with those questions you shouldn't attempt to convince others. Marxist economics is the top-tier of Marxism in that it's complex, and has been and is subject to fierce scholarly debate. And what do you mean by "the class"? High school, college? If college, what course? That also factors into it. I don't think a high school class is going to be convinced even if you wrote a perfect essay on the subject.

I mean, trying to convince others that labour is the source of value when you don't fully understand why labour is the source of value isn't a solid foundation.

[Chomskyan]

Read what Paul Sweezy writes, he was a preeminent Marxian economist.

[Dave B]

Actually it predates Adam Smith;


It is a man of the New World – where bourgeois relations of production imported together with their representatives sprouted rapidly in a soil in which the superabundance of humus made up for the lack of historical tradition – who for the first time deliberately and clearly (so clearly as to be almost trite) reduces exchange-value to labour-time.



This man was Benjamin Franklin, who formulated the basic law of modern political economy in an early work, which was written in 1729 and published in 1731. [7] (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01a.htm#7) He declares it necessary to seek another measure of value than the precious metals, and that this measure is labour.

"By labour may the value of silver be measured as well as other things. As, suppose one man is employed to raise corn, while another is digging and refining silver; at the year’s end, or at any other period of time, the complete produce of corn, and that of silver, are the natural price of each other; and if one be twenty bushels, and the other twenty ounces, then an ounce of that silver is worth the labour of raising a bushel of that corn. Now if by the discovery of some nearer, more easy or plentiful mines, a man may get forty ounces of silver as easily as formerly he did twenty, and the same labour is still required to raise twenty bushels of corn, then two ounces of silver will be worth no more than the same labour of raising one bushel of corn, and that bushel of corn will be as cheap at two ounces, as it was before at one, caeteris paribus [other things being equal]. Thus the riches of a country are to be valued by the quantity of labour its inhabitants are able to purchase" (op. cit., p. 265).

From the outset Franklin regards labour-time from a restricted economic standpoint as the measure of value. The transformation of actual products into exchange-values is taken for granted, and it is therefore only a question of discovering a measure of their value.
To quote Franklin again: “Trade in general being nothing else but the exchange of labour for labour, the value of all things is, as I have said before, most justly measured by labour” (op. cit., p. 267).


https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01a.htm

[Creative Destruction]

Read what Paul Sweezy writes, he was a preeminent Marxian economist.

Sweezy wrote from a very Keynesian view point. I wouldn't read what he writes in order to get a handle on what Marx was saying.

[RedMaterialist]

Sweezy wrote from a very Keynesian view point. I wouldn't read what he writes in order to get a handle on what Marx was saying.

Well, then, take Dave B's advice and read Benjamin Franklin. See his post earlier. Nobody can accuse Franklin of being a commie.

[Blake's Baby]

The 'labour theory of value' is pretty simple in outline, so simple it reads like a tautology.

Franklin's example is a good one, but somewhat counter-intitive, because it seems to say that corn gets more expensive as you find more silver. What it actually proves is that flooding the market with money causes inflation.

Think about Franklin's silver mines: there is one that is producing 20 ounces of silver in... let's say 20 days. Then, more silver is discovered.

Before it's extracted, what is that silver worth? Absolutely nothing; no human labour has been expended to extract it, it's unuseable in its current form. The mineral rights may be of interest to speculators, who are gambling on the future extraction, but it it only when the silver is extracted it has value. The value of the land with the silver on it might go up. But this is a speculative bubble (ie a bet against the future). If it turns out that the geologists made a mistake and in fact there is no silver at all, then the value of the mineral rights are zero again. It is only the expectation of future profit that caused the price to go up - there was actually no extra 'value' created.

When the silver is extracted, it is the silver that has value, not the land. What makes it valuable is that people had to get it (expend labour extracting it). If you wanted the same amount of silver, you'd have to go and get it (which would take you energy and effort) or you'd have to pay for the energy and effort expended in getting the first lot of silver. So, again, it is the labour that is the cause of the good having value. That's how it works for all goods. Everyone has a need for air, but it can't be commodified, because no matter how much effort I put in, I can't breathe for you, so you can't derive any benefit from my labour.

As to trade in commodities, Franklin's example shows what Marx would call 'socially necessary labour time'. With a new source of silver, it becomes easier to produce silver, so where previously the community produced 20 ounces now it is producing 40 ounces. But there are no new sources of wheat; it's still producing 20 bushels (on average over the 20 days - let's say 365 bushels in a year, because wheat is a seasonal crop). The socially-necessary labour-time of wheat is the same (it takes on average 20 days to produce 20 bushels); the socially-necessary labour-time for silver has decreased (from 20 days to produce 20 ounces to 20 days to produce 40 ounces, ie the time to make one ounce has gone from 1 day to half a day on average).

So if it takes half as much labour to make a good, it will trade against other goods 'more cheaply'. It will take more silver than it did before to exchange for the same amount of wheat, as the relative ease of production has changed. It's easy to get silver; more must be exchanged for the same amount of wheat.

Does that all make sense?