7/21 Response to Marx

The very first passage assigned informed us that workers receive wages in the form of sustenance, and that all of our capitalist and economic system depends on the fact that there exist a surplus between the amount of work in a day and the actual value of keeping the worker alive. As heartless as this seems, it's also true. Marx tells us that if the cost of keeping a worker alive were equal to the labor they did each day, the employer would gain nothing from the employment, and the system would collapse; "capital would not exist." Surplus value, for Marx, arises from the process of producing capital, not from its equivalent value-producing labor. For Marx, capitalism is the excessive production of excess labor in order to create profits. This, in turn, forces the laborer to labor much more than is necessary for his survival in order to churn profits for his employers.

The next passage goes on to inform us of an Anti-Smith claim, namely that 'real wealth' does not come from the direct labor time of a product's producers, but rather the entire market process and context in which that product is produced, with the employees becoming merely "watchmen" in a product's production. This abstraction of labor and wealth from Smith's correlation between the two is a result of the technology and science that Marx was able to identify in the economy which Smith had no access to.

In Das Kapital, Marx tells us that the use-value of a commodity exists independent of the labor put into the product, an important revelation about the nature of use-values. Although labor has gone into a product, labor becomes abstracted as "general human labor" in the final result, unlike the way of the craftsman of old. For Marx, the only value which can be expressed is the exchange value of an item.

The last point I will address is the notion of homogeneous labor. Marx claims "The total labour-power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of all the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour-power, composed through it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other..."
This is fascinating, no longer do we have masons and artisans whose labor is of higher value than a prole, rather we have a large homogeneous group of completely identical workers, one of which is no better than the other. This struck me as having a slightly contradictory notion, however. In capitalism, a system which often has great disparages in wealth, the workers actually become equal. How is it that a system which creates an equality of labor can create an even larger gulf of luxury between the top and the bottom of the social pyramid? These questions will be answered.