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Among economic historians, Marx is often considered the most important economist of the 19th century. His attempts to provide a systematic explanation of the functioning of capitalism was on a far grander scale than anyone who preceded him, and in that sense, he reset the bar very high for what would henceforth be considered comprehensive economic theory, ...
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The Labor Theory of Value has been replaced by the theory of Marginal Utility, which was already accepted by Marx time. In fact he acknowledged:
"nothing can have value, without being an object of utility"
-Wikipedia: Marginal Utility - The Marginal Revolution and Marxism
Marginal Utility addresses the diamond - water paradox by explaining that the more ...
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Marx addresses this about two-thirds of the way through Section 1 of the Manifesto. In the standard English edition of 1888, it reads:
The lower strata of the middle class - the small tradespeople,
shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and
peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly
because their ...
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You seem to be looking for the phrase 'wage share' or 'share of labour compensation'.
Wage share:
The wage share (or labor share) is the ratio between compensation of employees (according to the system of National accounts) and one of the following variables:
gross domestic product at market prices
gross domestic product at factor cost
net ...
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(I am not certain of whether I use established English terminology here).
The answer is no, because in a communist state (as described by Marx), there are no markets, especially, markets for production factors. And in none of the countries that implemented a socialistic socio-economic system, was labor "directly socialized" -it continued to be considered as ...
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From reading a selection of writings by Marx, I have come to understand the following three as the core elements of Marxian economics.
The labour theory of value. It asserts that the exchange value of a commodity $x$ (what quantities of $x$ that can be exchanged for another commodity) is determined by that labour time which is socially necessary to produce ...
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Material capital is any durable good that is used as a factor of production and, by virtue of being durable, it is gradually consumed in production over a maximum possible duration of a length that is determined by (i) how much a unit of capital is used and (ii) the depreciation rate of a unit of capital. Capital forms by labor and savings (which is in ...
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Marx is indeed an influential classical economist, however he added almost nothing to economics as a discipline. His theories of labor value, exploitation and modes of production were all articulated before him, which he acknowledged. What he did do was systematize and popularize these theories as scientific. Marx was closer to Malthus than to Smith in terms ...
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"I have read that the Labour Theory of Value holds that the value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of labour involved in its production."
That would be Adam Smith's version of the LTV, which according to him only holds in pre-capitalist societies.
Karl Marx's version is thus:
the value of a good or service is determined by the total ...
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Here are some comments on Marx from people who can certainly not be called marxists.
If Karl Marx and V. I. Lenin were alive today, they would be leading
contenders for the Nobel Prize in economics. Marx predicted the
growing misery of working people, and Lenin foresaw the subordination
of the production of goods to financial capital’s accumulation ...
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Two main changes happened when capitalism came into existence these being the ability to buy and sell property among the peasantry.
Under the feudal system each household was endowed land which was used to produce food/ agricultural products for the household and the lord which provided the land.
When feudalism was abolished the possibilities of production ...
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There is a major disciplinary specification problem here: “who is an economist?”
At the time Marx was active as an author (including posthumously with Engels) the field of knowledge was known as “political economy,” so as to distinguish it from the domestic economy of household management—both from the Greek oikos. Political economy was, and still can, be ...
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There is a very interesting paper by John Roemer, published in Econometrica in 1980, that presents a mathematical general equilibrium Marxian model. I am not sure someone have ever estimated it though. Find it here (subscription required).
General equilibrium models (oftentimes idyosincratic) were also developed in the USSR. Check here for an account of them....
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Your question is complex.
First of all, what is science? Not even methodologists have settled this question. Falseability, testeability, a method? (great read here).
Second, what do you mean by Marxism? Marxism is around 150 years old, and has evolved in the process.
Karl Popper argued that Marxism became a pseudoscience from the moment that their ...
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Quantities of products are not increased by transportation. Nor, with
a few exceptions, is the possible alteration of their natural
qualities, brought about by transportation, an intentional useful
effect; it is rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things
is materialised only in their consumption, and their consumption may
necessitate a ...
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Paul Samuelson wrote a series of papers formalizing Marxian economics, e.g.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123567505500177
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The example you've picked is slightly complicated, because I think there are two possible reasons for the difference in price. Both could contribute at the same time, depending on your view of how wood production works in your example.
1. The labour value invested in growing, harvesting and processing better quality wood (prior to furniture manufacture). ...
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This is how I view it. At the very core of economics, is each and every human on this earth making decisions he or her thinks are in his or hers best interest. In real life, we do not calculate utility before making a decision or compute any expected values; we do what feels right at the moment.
Taking the cross-section of human decisions, economists try to ...
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I'm not a Marx expert, but I've read The Capital some years ago and as far as I can remember Marx said that only the workers produce value. All others' wages (and the workers' wages too!) and other costs are covered by the produced values of the workers, so the others decrease the "profit", which could remain at the workers otherwise. Therefore Marx ...
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No. Importantly, the conditions for the creation of a Marxist communist state has never occurred. Namely, the identification of workers along class lines over nationalist lines. Soviet totalitarian communism insisted upon socialist 'brotherhood', but this was mandated rather than organically occurring.
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There is a lot of misunderstanding here. First, LTV only operates in capitalist societies. In capitalist society, production is guided by the market, without anyone coordinating between the various branches of production from above. Wealth takes the form of commodities, which have different prices relative to each other. For marginal utility, prices do not ...
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A Marxian view of the Diamond-Water Paradox would be that diamonds are scarce and expensive BECAUSE they require a lot of labor to produce (at the margin), while water is cheap because it can be produced with relatively little labor (anyone can go down to the river and draw a bucket of water).
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One (perhaps flippant) answer is that Marxists have a lot of ideas about how prices "should" work or how the value of labor "should" be rewarded, that aren't in line with what we observe, because central planning and/or mass subsidies that Marxist economies like end up being grossly inefficient. :P
Another (perhaps more interesting) answer is that there is ...
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Labour power is a commodity like any other. Its value is consequently a function of the labour embodied in it.
Taking your example,
product A (a webpage)
takes 10 hours
you need special skills (those of a webdesigner) that are hard to learn
only 14% of population already have those skills to build that
product
Versus
product B (a chair)
takes 10 hours
...
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It has nothing to do with new products in the market, nor with confusion of use-value and exchange-value. To make it a bit simpler:
1) Commodities in capitalism have a two-fold character. The use-value (they are useful products for the buyer to consume) and the exchange-value (they can be exchanged to another products in a given way).
2) The exchange-...
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Marxist Economics: Understanding Capitalist Exploitation through “speed up” or increase in intensity
Though I'm certainly no expert in Marxist economic theory, I think he's presenting it as an "if you can figure out a way of speeding workers up, then you can generate additional surplus from their efforts. Effectively, this is just saying "say you're Ford, and have teams of 7 working on assembly lines that generate 4 cars per hour. Suppose there is some way ...
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Marxist Economics: Understanding Capitalist Exploitation through “speed up” or increase in intensity
I not familiar with Marxist theory, but assuming your equations are right, we can just banter about the math:
Given: $I,h$ are both fixed
$I*h = \frac{sv + v}{l}$
I would assume in the short run $l$, labor force is also fixed, if you're trying to solve this for the whole economy, the workers must end up somewhere. So,
$I*h*l = sv + v$
$fixed\_value = sv+...
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I really don't see any paradox in here.
1) Marx clearly separates the (exchange) value of a commodity from its use-value. Of course for an item to contain value, it needs to have at least a substantial use-value, but the later is not a measure of its exchange value. In simple words, we might assume that water has indeed much more use-value than diamonds, ...
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I think an excellent example of communist societies would be small tribal societies, before the industrial revolution. Means of production were generally shared and workers generally worked to benefit the societal unit which worked because individual societies generally small and tribal.
In modern day industrialized society I think the answer is probably ...
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If the output of a machine is arbitrarily reduced, what happens to the
value of the goods being produced? If we simply divide the labour put
into the machine across the units produced then it seems like their value
should increase, but then it seems like the whole notion of value becomes
quite arbitrary.
According to the LTV, machinery transfers a ...
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