A lot of what Marx writes is pretty straightforward observations about how capitalism functions.
If profit isn’t the excess value of labor then where does it come from. You’ve got some inputs, you transform them into some outputs, you sell the outputs for more than the inputs. Something happened to make the output more valuable than the input.
And it seems hard to argue against that idea. Capitalism as a system describes who should get to allocate that value and as the name would suggest, it’s the people with the capital. If you own the factory you get to pay people to do work, they convert low value inputs into higher value outputs, and as the person with the capital you get to capture the difference as profit.
Marx simply looks at this system and says, why should they get to decide what happens with the value that got created by labor.
That tends to be where it goes from an objective “this is how this system operates” to “here’s an alternative system”
I think people would serve themselves well to read what he had to write. Even if you come away thinking the alternative doesn’t work, the analysis of capitalisms strengths and weaknesses is interesting.
As life becomes more unaffordable for many under a capitalist system, as rent seeking and exploitation become more rampant, people are going to want to critically analyze whether this system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Why do some go hungry while Jeff Bezos has more than he can ever use? Why do the wealthy get to have an outsized say in our society and our governments? Can the set of incentives that capitalism erects survive a condition like climate change?
When we decide that people are no longer allowed to ask those questions, we need not worry about the a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat. Ask only who you are not allowed to question to see who is in charge.
No system should be above examination and reformation for the good of humanity.
A lot of people also has the misconception that Marx "hated" capitalism. But half the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto is Marx being a total capitalism fanboy, arguing that capitalism has brought about advances never previously seen, and championing capitalism as eroding xenophobia because it interferes with the need for trade.
He first then goes on, as you say, from a "this is how this system operates" to "here's an alternative system".
To Marx, capitalism was both a necessary stage and a positive step, just in his view not some final utopia.
Arguably, one of Marx' biggest failing was that he severely over-estimated how quickly capitalism would saturate the world markets and get to a stage where growth is only possible through the reduction of labour costs, as his prediction of capitalism failing was predicated on that.
If profit isn’t the excess value of labor then where does it come from. You’ve got some inputs, you transform them into some outputs, you sell the outputs for more than the inputs. Something happened to make the output more valuable than the input.
And it seems hard to argue against that idea. Capitalism as a system describes who should get to allocate that value and as the name would suggest, it’s the people with the capital. If you own the factory you get to pay people to do work, they convert low value inputs into higher value outputs, and as the person with the capital you get to capture the difference as profit.
Marx simply looks at this system and says, why should they get to decide what happens with the value that got created by labor.
That tends to be where it goes from an objective “this is how this system operates” to “here’s an alternative system”
I think people would serve themselves well to read what he had to write. Even if you come away thinking the alternative doesn’t work, the analysis of capitalisms strengths and weaknesses is interesting.
As life becomes more unaffordable for many under a capitalist system, as rent seeking and exploitation become more rampant, people are going to want to critically analyze whether this system is really all it’s cracked up to be. Why do some go hungry while Jeff Bezos has more than he can ever use? Why do the wealthy get to have an outsized say in our society and our governments? Can the set of incentives that capitalism erects survive a condition like climate change?
When we decide that people are no longer allowed to ask those questions, we need not worry about the a theoretical dictatorship of the proletariat. Ask only who you are not allowed to question to see who is in charge.
No system should be above examination and reformation for the good of humanity.