[quote=paramount][quote=CA renter]Yes, he was largely right. He’s one of the greatest economic philosophers in history. Like him or not, he was brilliant.
I’ve found that the **vast majority** of people who put down Marx and/or his theories have never actually read Marx. Most haven’t read Adam Smith, either.[/quote]
Is it brilliant to theorize that a brain surgeon and a janitor should be paid the same? No, and that’s essentially what Marx claims.[/quote]
No, of course they shouldn’t be paid the same. I know that some really radical communists would say that everyone should be “paid” exactly the same (different economic systems might use different mediums of exchange), irrespective of their contribution to society, but the vast majority of socialists, and many/most communists would agree that people could be compensated unequally, as long as it’s within reason and justifiable in some way.
While some would claim that our labor market in the U.S. is a “free market,” it’s not. Here, those who control money flows determine how those resources are allocated. It’s not about compensating those who provide the greatest benefit to society, it’s not about transferring the money that the end consumer is willing to pay for a particular good/service directly to the people who provide that good/service (the employer is the middleman who skims a portion of every transaction), and it’s not about who works hardest or who is most intelligent. It’s about the unequal ownership of capital, and the unjustifiably outsized rewards for the owners of capital that were created by those who labor for a living. That’s what Marx was opposed to. He believed that those who create the capital in the first place (workers) should be the ones to reap the greatest share of the surplus value that they’ve created.
Without labor, there is no capital. Labor precedes capital in every case. Even when one considers natural resources, the only way to extract value from those resources is to mine/grow them, assemble them, package and distribute them, etc. That all requires labor. Even land is worthless until workers build roads, ports, buildings, etc., or plant and harvest food from the land.
Marx correctly pointed out that unbridled capitalism ends in only one way: a relatively small group of very wealthy and powerful men at the top will own essentially everything, and everyone else must spend their entire lives working for these owners because the only “capital” they own is their labor, which has to be exchanged on a perpetual basis for life’s basic necessities.
