We have seen, then, that capitalism is no different from any other form of society insofar as wealth must be produced through the productive activities of human beings. This goes without saying, for without such wealth production no society (or the people living in it) could continue to exist for very long.
The key difference...
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Marx
Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (3. Labor Theory of Value)
Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (2. The Starting Point)
Marx begins his examination of capitalism in Capital with the analysis of the commodity; and he succinctly explains the reason for his starting point in the first paragraph:
“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’; the individual commodity appears as its elementary...
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Socialist Guide to Marx’s Capital (1. Intro)
This series of short articles will examine the first volume of Marx’s Capital from a “socialist perspective,” which is to say, with an eye to how an understanding of capitalism can contribute to our understanding of socialism.
I should recognize the obvious fact, right away, that a worker hardly needs to read Capital to arrive...
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150 Years of Materialist Conception of History
This year is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin The Origin of Species but also of the publication of Marx’s first economic writings after his more detailed study of the workings of capitalism, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
The Preface to this work contains a summary of Marx and Engels’...
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Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, first published in 1859, only consists of two chapters (apart from its famous Preface). Marx had intended it to be the first installment in a massively ambitious project that was to include six separate “books” addressing, respectively, the topics of capital, landed property, wage labor, the...
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