Discuss Marx's concept of surplus value and the exploitation of workers by capitalists. How convincing is his argument - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... Marx also considered labor as a form of private property, classical economists, whereby considering the social labor as dead labor. Nevertheless, the main objective of the paper is to analyze various arguments by Marx concerning the concept of surplus value and exploitation of workers by capitalist, in order to determine how convincing they are. Marx redefined human being as a social being, who conceives the human generic life as a social activity of labor in a way that the concept of alienation is established with a certain meaning. On the other hand, there are consequences related to the difference of the definitions, role of the concepts of value as it is depicted in his works. The theory of labor value focuses on the scope of economic investigation, whereby even the historians of economic thought included Marx among classical economists. Therefore, Marx’s theories are depicted as radicalized versions of the classical theory of labor value. Marx’s concept of labor value has been inspired Neoclassical or NeoRicardian theory, which argues that labor is a unit of measure of commodities and capital, as he applies the argument to discuss the theory of capitalist exploitation (Skillman, 362). Moreover, the difference appears more relevant to remember, since the works various economists such as Torrens and Sraffa have embraced the knowledge of labor value. This is through the Ricardo’s theory, which serves as a unit of measure of capital and social products under assumptions. Moreover, the effort of assigning the role of measuring the distribution of the social products to the concept of value is a crucial role in Marx theoretical framework. The critical role refers to the specifically social and historically relative state of production mode, which depends on the exchange value. There are claims by Marx indicating that the classical economists identified labor as a source of value, and they considered the law of the capitalist mode of production to be natural and internal. This resulted to consideration of value form being quite indifferent or external to the nature of the commodity. There is a significant explanation of Marx perception concerning the inability to deduce more developed form of value such as money and capital or labor from economic classes. Therefore, there is a critical aspect of Marx methods, which depends on exposing the relative value of social labor in the contribution made in the first section of Book I of The Capital (Skillman, 309). Marx claimed that the reason why political economist fails to recognize the source of value in labor is due to exclusive concern on the question related to distribution of the social products, which relate to the magnitude of the value. Consequently, they consider the labor manifests in the value of commodity, hence making them unable to differentiate between labor producing use value and labor producing exchange value. Invocation of price value equivalence by Marx is considered as ideal case of the commodity exchange, which is appropriate based on pursuing the basic logic of capitalist exploitation and treatment of alternative circuit of capital that fails to account for a mode of production in which they operate. Moreover, Marx suggests that an imprecise conception of capital is a social relation of production, whereby three divergent circuits of capital that ...Download file to see next pagesRead More