Janoah wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2026 6:56 pm
I can say that I, too believed that Marxism was right, I had no doubts about its formula for surplus value.
But when I saw that socialism doesn’t work, I started to think about it and came to the conclusion that Marx’s formula is wrong.
Well, that's the right conclusion. Marx thought all value came as a result of labour, and thus, that any value derived from a product belonged to the labourer. But that's very easy to demonstrate as false.
Let's take a simple example.
How much would it cost you or me to buy the following things: two small, three-inch plastic tubes, one small piece of metal, and a miniscule quantity of water and pigment? What is all of that worth? Perhaps US 30c? Very likely, much less than that.
But for how much can you sell a ball-point pen? At least US $1, and probably a bit more than that, at least. The profit margin is at least 70c US, let us say.
Now, did a labourer buy any of the components? The 30c for the materials did not come from him, obviously.
Did he provide the machinery that made the components into a pen? No, it was there when he arrived. It's a factory, after all. Somebody put it together, but it wasn't him.
Did he invent the ball-point pen? No, the ball point pen was invented by John J. Loud, in 1888. The labourer is merely acting on the cleverness and inventiveness of others.
So how did 30c worth of materials turn into $1 worth of product? The assemblage, the rearrangement of them produced value that does not inhere in the materials. A pen is worth much more than its equivalent in plastic, metal and liquid. It's valuable
as a composite. New value, value that is not produced by the labour involved, and does not inhere in the materials themselves, comes out for the materials when they are machined and assembled to be a pen. That's new value. So value can be created beyond what labour can add...and quite a lot of it, actually.
The materials in your computer probably have significant value raw. But the assembled computer has much, much more value than the raw materials. And it's the fact of their right assemblage, not merely the activity of manual labour, that generates that value. Things done well produce much more value than things done badly, or things not assembled into anything. But this transformation is not primarily a product of labour, although some labour always remains involved and adds a little value; the multiplying value comes from other things...the utility, desirability, functionality, attractiveness, applications, and so on, that the new product has.
So then, the Socialist question: what happens to an economy if we start pretending that all of that is not true, and that all we have to do to create fairness is give the $1 entirely to the labourer? In theory, that's what Socialism is supposed to do: to divide the spoils of labour among all the labourers, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." The whole Socialist economic scheme is about dividing what value already exists in whatever we have...which might just be two tubes of plastic, a piece of metal and some liquid and pigment...between all the labourers of the proletarian class.
Well, the answer's obvious, isn't it? No wonder today's Marxists call it "crude Marxism," and disparage it. It's so obviously wrong.
