Criticism
Critics of Marxian value theory object that labor is not the only source of value-added goods.
Examples of such arguments:
- devaluations or revaluations of types of assets in response to changing demand conditions, which are influenced by price inflation. In national accounts and business accounts, for example, the change in the value of inventories held is adjusted for changes in their current market prices, affecting the profit calculation.
- Steve Keen argues that "Essentially, Marx reached the result that the means of production cannot generate surplus value by confusing depreciation, or the loss of value by a machine, with value creation" . His argument is, that a machine can add a value to new output in excess of the value of economic depreciation charged
- Marxism asserts that capitalist production reduces all production to a combination of commodity inputs to complete the M...M' circuit. However, when one considers human labor to constitute a particular kind of activity among the many necessary to the production of goods, and when one considers that the price of other input factors like raw materials, machines, facilities, land or even other intermediate goods may vary based on the availability of such assets on a market, then the labor commodity is no more or less variable than any other, whether or not it is the sole source of surplus value, and hence profit. The dichotomy "fixed" vs. "variable" is thus a specious mathematicization of the actual "labor" vs. "non-labor" dichotomy.
Read more about this topic: Constant Capital
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“As far as criticism is concerned, we don’t resent that unless it is absolutely biased, as it is in most cases.”
—John Vorster (1915–1983)
“To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)