enough to make any leftist cry In order to yield regulatory results, the market automatism presupposes a principle on which exchange is based, a principle that explains prices and their changes. If a price is given, it may vary in the interplay of supply and demand, but the question of what determines prices remains. For the classicists, price derived from value and value was determined by the labor incorporated in commodities. This conception does not rule out specific cases in which price has no relation to labor time. Marx found the labor theory of value indispensable for understanding the developmental tendencies of capital production and in fact, the only “rational basis of political economy.” The labor theory of value underlies both early bourgeois economic theory and its Marxian critique, and in both cases deals with social production and its distribution between different social classes. Classical economy, according to Marx, culminated in Ricardian economies and was an expression of the rising industrial capitalism within the decaying feudal regime. It represented itself as the theory of the productive classes, as opposed to the non-productive classes, which appropriated their privileges in the form of Interest and rent. It did not as yet concern itself with the industrial proletariat and was thus able to see in labor the sole creator and measure of economic value. The labor theory of value became an embarrassment for the capitalist class as soon as the newly-arising frictions between bourgeoisie and proletariat replaced and overshadowed those between the feudal and the capitalist regime. If the value of commodities is determined by the quantity of labor time required for their production, and the product of the whole of social labor is divided into rent, profit, and wages, it would seem to follow that the elimination of profit and rent would allow for an equal exchange of commodities in accordance with their labor-time. Ricardian economics gave rise to a school of “Ricardian Socialists,” which demanded an exchange system that would assure producers the full value of their labors. Marx did not draw similar conclusions from the labor theory of value. Nonetheless, as Friedrich Engels pointed out, “in so far as modern socialism, no matter of what tendency starts from bourgeois political economy it almost exclusively links itself to the Ricardian theory of value.” It is for this reason that Marx has often been called “the last, as well as the greatest of the classical economists.” This fulfills the double purpose of granting Marx his undeniable greatness and yet dismissing his theory as outdated, along with all classical theory. Even though Marx accepted and developed Ricardo’s value theory, he was not the “greatest” of the classical economists, but their adversary. He knew that the social labor process itself has nothing to do with either value or price but only with the time-consuming physical and mental exertions of the laboring population, and that “value” and “price” are fetishistic categories for existing social production relations. His criticism of political economy was conceived as part of a social struggle to abolish capitalism together with the economic theories which rationalized its existence. #economy #politicaltiktok #communism #viral #fyp - @karmarx1312