“Conservative that I am, I’ve always been a fond believer in Milton Friedman,” wrote MissStofeles.
“Did that article just criticize Friedman’s analysis as biased? I have to admit I stopped reading at that point,” wrote epluribus unum.
Petty and Smith didn’t individually built capitalism of course, but the arguments they made supported would-be politicians, merchants, and industrialists in their campaigns for independence from the rules and impositions of the feudal system. Ultimately, the dismantling of these feudal imposts over time, along with sometimes violent action such as the English Civil War (1642–1651), transformed the feudal system into a capitalist one.
Clearly, if capitalism succeeded in overthrowing feudalism, while socialism did not—and ultimately lost out to capitalism—then there must be something fundamentally wrong with the arguments of philosophers and economists in favor of socialism—something fundamentally wrong with the arguments, in other words, of Karl Marx.
And indeed there is. Locating it was my first major work in economics. So I’m going to treat fans of Milton Friedman here to an argument that they can use to really, really annoy any Marxists they bump into.
Marx’s key claim that favored socialism over capitalism was that labor was the only source of what he called “surplus value”—which is basically the same thing as profit. Machines, he argued, simply transferred the “value” that had been used to make them into the value of things they made, leaving no surplus.
In addition, Marx argued that competition between capitalists led to innovation that increased the ratio of machinery to labor over time—and this caused the rate of profit to fall as well. The “tendency for the rate of profit to fall” would lead to capitalists exploiting labor even more, which would cause workers to revolt, and bring about socialism.
He developed a brilliant proof in 1857, but it had the opposite outcome: it showed that machines were a source of profit.
I’m conscious of another comment from MissStofeles that my last op-ed was “WAY too long,” so I’ll cut to the chase here (with more detail in a postscript). Marx’s original assertion that machines didn’t add any value meant that their contribution to value was equal to their depreciation—and this is how Marx put it in Capital I:
“However useful a machine may be, though it may cost £150, yet it cannot, under any circumstances, add to the value of the product more than £150.”
However, when he first developed the proof I cover in the postscript, he made this observation:
“It also has to be postulated that the use-value of the machine [is] significantly greater than its value; i.e. that its devaluation in the service of production is not proportional to its increasing effect on production.”
This original observation was correct: with his proof below, a machine can add value because its contribution to production (its use-value) exceeds its cost of production (its exchange-value).
Postscript
In 1857 Marx developed an argument based on the concepts of the “use-value” and “exchange-value” of a commodity. A purchaser pays the exchange-value of something, and consumes its use-value. Marx developed a historically based and sophisticated argument that use-value and exchange-value were independent of each other.Normally this meant that use-value was subjective, while exchange-value was objective. But in production, the use-value of an input was objective: the use-value of an input was how many units of output it could produce.
Marx argued that the exchange-value of a worker was the cost of the means of subsistence—which might take 6 hours to produce. The use-value was how long the worker actually worked—which in his time was about 12 hours per day. The gap between the two—12 minus 6—was “surplus value.”