Karl Marx Economic Views

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Karl Marx Economic Views
Trained as a philosopher, Marx turned away from philosophy in his mid-twenties, and started leaning towards economics and politics. Historical materialism, Marx's theory of history, is centered around the idea that forms of society rise and fall, and then impede the development of human productive power. He saw this as the way that the economy rises and falls, with expansions and contractions. There was no way to stop this. There are always going to be periods where the economy does really well, then the economy will have contractions, and neither of those times last forever. He also said that 2 necessary conditions for commodity production are in a market. Exchange can take place, and a social division of labor, in which different people produce different products. Without which there would be no motivation for exchange. Marx suggested that commodities have both use value, in other words a use value, and an exchange value which is their price. Marx says that use value can be easily understood, but he insists that exchange value is hard to understand, and exchange values need to be explained. Thus the labour theory of value suggests that the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor time required to produce it. Marx provides a two stage argument for the labor theory of value. The first stage is to argue that if two objects can be compared in the sense that they are equal, then there must be a third thing of equal magnitude in both of them to which they are both reducible. As commodities can be exchanged against each other, there must be a third thing that they have in common. This then motivates the second stage, which is a search for the third thing, labor....