Karl Marx - History of Economic Thought - Lecture Slides, Slides of Economics

Download Karl Marx - History of Economic Thought - Lecture Slides and more Slides Economics in PDF only on Docsity!

Karl Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883)

• Capital
  • Vol. 1 (1867)
  • Vol. 2 (1885)
  • Vol. 3 (1894)
• The Communist

Manifesto (1848)

• By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

MARX’S THEORY OF HISTORY

Theory of History

• Marx’s theory of history is called Dialectical Materialism.
• It is derived from
  • Hegel’s idea that history follows a pattern of progress through (ideological) conflict—“thesis, antithesis, synthesis”—called the dialectic and
  • Feuerbach’s idea, called materialism , that the ideas that people come up with are their ways of making sense of the material conditions they are in.

Technology And Power

• When productive forces change, the mode of

production needs to change

• This is because for every set of productive forces there is a unique set of class relations that is appropriate.
• That is, for every set of productive forces

there is a unique distribution of power among

the various classes.

Ideological Superstructure

• Changes in the mode of production will be resisted by the ideological superstructure which is determined by the current the mode of production.
• When productive forces change, the mode of production needs to change.
• But the current mode of production uses its control over the ideological superstructure to resist any change in the mode of production.
• That is, the dominant class will resist the loss of dominance.

Revolutionary Change

• When the mode of production changes—as a

result of changes in productive forces and the

revolution it unleashes—society could go

• from having one type of class inequality to another type of class inequality, or
• from a society with class inequality to a classless society.

Revolutionary Change

• When one kind of class inequality is replaced

by another kind of class inequality, the

process of change will continue.

• When productive forces change again, there

will eventually be another revolution leading

to a new mode of production.

An Illustration

• Marx showed how social changes from

primitive society to slavery to feudalism to

capitalism fit his theory.

Capitalism

• Marx argued that a new form of class inequality, called capitalism, characterized the society at the time of his writing.
• His theory implied that there would have to be a revolution that would destroy capitalism.
• The eventual replacement would be communism.
• Communism would create a classless society and, therefore, it would be the final and permanent state of society.

MARX’S THEORY OF CAPITALISM

Marx’s Theory of Capitalism

• Marx argued that the only source of a firm’s profit is

the labor it employs.

• Marx based his view on an application of the Labor Theory of Value. Simply put:
• Machines without workers are useless.
• Workers without machines, on the other hand, are not useless because the workers can make the machines that they need to do their work.
• Therefore, in a sense, all production is done by labor.
• Income of capital is purely exploitation

The Exploitation of Labor

• Capitalists use the workers’ “labor time” to

produce commodities

• Labor time is the socially accepted length of the typical working day
• Example: It may be traditional for workers to work ten hours a day. In this case, the labor time taken by the capitalist is ten hours per day

The Exploitation of Labor

• But capitalists pay the workers for their “labor

power”

• Labor power is simply the ability to work
• The payment for labor power is the subsistence wage, the bare minimum for labor to survive
• Example: If it took six hours of labor to produce the goods a worker and his family needed to survive for a day, the value of his labor power was six hours per day