this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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I, Dagoth Ur, believe that the entirety of his theory rests upon a grievous error. He, in his folly, regarded labor as the solitary font of worth and, in his ignorance, failed to grasp that capitalism thrives not solely by the exploitation of laborers but also through the ceaseless march of technological advancement. He dared to belittle the other wellsprings of wealth: innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, and the unyielding progress of technology, all of which lie at the very core of his theory.
Curiously, passages within "Capital" and the "Communist Manifesto" speak of the global ascendancy of capitalism, prophesying the vanishing of all things traditional and the dissolution of feudal remnants. Therefore, I, Dagoth Ur, put forth the audacious proposition that we may indeed regard Karl Marx as the inaugural, true theorist of globalization.
Hey look someone who didn't read Capital talking about Capital.
Marx definitely wrote literally chapters about industrialization
interesting where does this technical advancement come from?
Marx talks about most of what you just mentioned in the first chapter of Capital. Socially productive labor transforming nature is the source of value in any society. He also mentions rarity as a source of value, like I remember him specifically mentioning pearls as an example a few times.
He included machinery and technology as what he called "constant capital," and the labor is the variable capital. To say Marx didn't consider technology would suggest he was unaware of what a factory was and that he didn't observe the industrial revolution as it was happening. He was born in 1818. He watched Germany in his childhood go from empty fields full of peasants to factories, railroads, and telegraph lines in his adulthood. You know what made that technology possible? Labor? And who operates that technology? Laborers. This is all cooked into his work.
I'd also like to point you over to the Grundrisse, the chapter called Fragment on Machines, where Marx even speculates on if machinery were all fully automated, saying laborers could move aside from production and just become just "watchmen." This part is good:
"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, in that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as the sole measure and source of wealth [...] On the one side [...] it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature [...] to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it [...] On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created"
He's saying capitalism would have a hard tike reducing labor time to zero through technological advancement, since it would defeat the concept of value itself. In simple terms, how would you even price anything if there was no labor cost involved? How would a capitalist sell their product or assign value to it? Who would they sell it to?
What a grand and intoxicating innocence to presume Marx did not consider these things