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Karl Marx was one of the last of the classical political-economists. Karl Marx both
completed and criticized the classical school of political-economy. Marx wrote at the
final culmination of the classical school, and at the early commencement of the
neo-classical school.
In my reading of Marx, he was dissatisfied with the idea of individual producers,
working in a cooperative context of collective labor, receiving the full value of the
product of their labor, because of the social nature and associated context of modern
industrial labor, and because of the constant need to invest in the maintenance and
improvement of buildings and of machines used in the manufacturing of finished
goods.
And yet, if the industrial property and the manufacturing inventory are the collective
possession of the organized producers, then an investment in the repair, upkeep,
and betterment of factory and equipment is a return to the producer-owned co-operative,
a revenue to the co-proprietors of a collectively-owned industrial establishment.
If price includes/embodies cost, then clearly the exchange value of a commodity must
include/embody the cost of labor involved in the production of that commodity.
Also, it can be said that a finished product has more use value than an unfinished
object. And, therefore, a finished product's use value is a creation of the labor that is
made concrete in a finished product. A leather shoe has more value to a person who
needs shoes than does the leather itself, as the mere tanned hide of an animal.
If a finished product has more value than an unfinished object, then the value
embodied in the finished product is the labor expended in the process of finishing
the product. A finished produce embodies both exchange value and utility value,
and both of these values embody the labor of one or more individuals.
"Truth has but to be seen to be embraced: it imposes itself."
-- Anonymous
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Posted by rallen2 on 2008-03-05 11:01:18 | Rating: | Views: 43
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