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:
“Cubism had been an analysis of the object and an attempt to put it before us in its totality; both as analysis and as synthesis, it was a criticism of appearance. Surrealism transmuted the object, and suddenly a canvas became an apparition: a new figuration, a real transfiguration.”
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“Parents sometimes feel that if they don’t criticize their child, their child will never learn. Criticism doesn’t make people want to change; it makes them defensive.”
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“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
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