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hiner112 's review for:
This is one of those books that is formative of lots of political thought. One of those books that you should read if you are going to be spouting strong opinions on Facebook or whatnot. The TL;DR version is that all capitalist wealth is unpaid, exploited labor.
Having said that he inadvertently makes a strong case for limited governmental debts and power (just a tool of bourgeoisie accumulation), low immigration (reduced labor competition reducing the power of employers), and the efficiency and inevitability of capitalism. He also spends 5-10% of his time just insulting economists with opinions that differ from his which I don't think was terribly constructive.
The main gist of his argument is that the only source of capitalist value is unpaid, exploited labor which wouldn't exist if a significant portion of the population had not been dispossessed in the past. He also talked a lot about how all of the improvements in capitalist production accrue to the owner and not the laborer since improvements either directly put the laborer out of work or increases the intensity of the work involved or both. The jobs created for the construction, maintenance, and minding of the new equipment is always less than those lost. All of the competitors have to adopt the new way of doing things or be put out of business and everything will be made with the new methods anyway.
He disagrees with Adam Smith on why laborers tend towards near starvation wages but he agrees that a sizable middle class is an unstable historical aberration and that society tends to move towards a huge population of poor, hard working individuals and a small population of people who don't work but reap the benefits. Marx rolls his eyes at Smith's claim that "natural population growth" is at all close to the effects of mechanization in terms of labor competition and downward pressure on wages.
He tends to be really repetitive and his mentions of other economists are almost always insulting or I would have given him 5 stars for his intriguing description of how society and the economy works.
Having said that he inadvertently makes a strong case for limited governmental debts and power (just a tool of bourgeoisie accumulation), low immigration (reduced labor competition reducing the power of employers), and the efficiency and inevitability of capitalism. He also spends 5-10% of his time just insulting economists with opinions that differ from his which I don't think was terribly constructive.
The main gist of his argument is that the only source of capitalist value is unpaid, exploited labor which wouldn't exist if a significant portion of the population had not been dispossessed in the past. He also talked a lot about how all of the improvements in capitalist production accrue to the owner and not the laborer since improvements either directly put the laborer out of work or increases the intensity of the work involved or both. The jobs created for the construction, maintenance, and minding of the new equipment is always less than those lost. All of the competitors have to adopt the new way of doing things or be put out of business and everything will be made with the new methods anyway.
He disagrees with Adam Smith on why laborers tend towards near starvation wages but he agrees that a sizable middle class is an unstable historical aberration and that society tends to move towards a huge population of poor, hard working individuals and a small population of people who don't work but reap the benefits. Marx rolls his eyes at Smith's claim that "natural population growth" is at all close to the effects of mechanization in terms of labor competition and downward pressure on wages.
He tends to be really repetitive and his mentions of other economists are almost always insulting or I would have given him 5 stars for his intriguing description of how society and the economy works.