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Karl Marx: Writings
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Marx distinguished industrial capitalists from merchant capitalists. Merchants buy goods in one market and sell them in another. Since the laws of supply and demand operate within given markets, there is often a difference between the price of a commodity in one market and another. Merchants, then, practice arbitrage, and hope to capture the difference between these two markets. According to Marx, capitalists, on the other hand, take advantage of the difference between the labor market and the market for whatever commodity is produced by the capitalist. Marx observed that in practically every successful industry input unit-costs are lower than output unit-prices.
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Marx's theory of alienation was often employed to criticize religious, political, and economic divisions. However, the fact that it was basically about individuals and could only with great difficulty be applied to society made it a misleading tool when used in sociology.
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[T]he problem is that such an account would seem to introduce a larger element of contingency than Marx seeks, for it is essential to Marx's thought that one should be able to predict the eventual arrival of communism. Within Darwinian theory there is no warrant for long-term predictions, for everything depends on the contingencies of particular situations. A similar heavy element of contingency would be inherited by a form of historical materialism developed by analogy with evolutionary biology. The dilemma, then, is that the best model for developing the theory makes predictions based on the theory unsound, yet the whole point of the theory is predictive. Hence one must either look for an alternative means of producing elaborating explanation, or give up the predictive ambitions of the theory.
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Karl Marx emerges here as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation. Indeed, rather like Groucho, Karl could hardly bear to be a member of any club that would accept him: he memorably dismissed a new French party that claimed to be Marxist, replying that, in that case, 'I, at least, am not a Marxist'.
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The term alienation cannot be found in the later writings of Marx, but modern commentators are in error when they contend that Marx abandoned the idea. It informs his later writings, more particularly Das Kapital. In the notion of the "fetishism of commodities," which is central to his economic analysis, Marx repeatedly applies the concept of alienation. Commodities are alienated products of the labor of man, crystallized manifestations, which in Frankenstein fashion now dominate their creators. "The commodity form," writes Marx in Das Kapital,
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What is significant in Marx's noting of an analogy between the functions of language and the fetishizing of commodities? What does that suggest concerning words (and implicit social forms) such as "money," "capital," "labour," "productiveness," etc.? Are such terms in need of defetishizing and deciphering? What may lie under the wraps of such language? Where should the analysis stop? Is Marx's own discovery of certain forms of labour underlying value in need of further analysis?
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