Karl Marx’s Critique Sounds Loud, Clear From His Grave; As World Recession Drags On

Karl Marx
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Karl Marc
Karl Marc

By Comrade Ogbu A. Ameh

The continuing world recession that has now dragged on since late 2007, with no sign of abating has renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. Mainstream media like TIME.com once wrote; “Karl Marx was supposed to be dead and buried. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s Great Leap forward into capitalism, Communism faded into the quaint backdrop of James Bond movies or the deviant mantra of Kim Jong Un or so we thought. With the global economy in a protracted crisis and workers around the world burdened by joblessness, debt and stagnant incomes, Marx’s biting critique of Capitalism; “that the system is inherently unjust and self-destructive cannot be so easily dismissed. A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right.

It is sadly all easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not”. “Marx’s critique of Political Economy” shows that only Marxist economic theory is a “developed alternative theory” in counterpoise to free-market and Keynesian economics, both which exist to justify capitalism. Marx was a social scientist as well as a critic of the social science of his time. In his time, political economy was the archaic term for economics and philosophical reflections on such.

To any one versed in modern economics, from the beginning of the first volume of capital would appear as a philosophical mish-mash laden with Hegelianism. Marx only lifted the veil off the commodity to make it transparent by exposing the social relations of production that lie within. Marx’s work is a totality that encompasses and subsumes within a number of separate disciplines; economics, sociology, philosophy and across different nature Marx wrote as a classical economist in capital. He never dealt with price as such, which are measurable and established, but instead dealt with values, which are not.

Marx’s critique reads quite straightforward as a continuation of Economics 101, 201 and 301. Thus, the theory of value and surplus value, commodities, use value and exchange value. The emergence regulation and generalization of commodity production are directly related to alienation. The law of value is one of the consequences of the appearance and progressive generalization of commodity. Determination of the exchange value of commodities becomes regular and generalized questions like what is socially necessary labour has very special import application in the analysis of capitalist society. We also look at the origin of nature of surplus value. It takes place through the exchange like all important operations in capitalist society, which are always relation exchange. To conclude, we look at the analytical proof which proceeds’ by breaking down the price of a commodity into its constituent elements and demonstrating that if the process is extended enough, only labour will be found.


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