It is a fact of historical materialism that the development of the productive forces reduces the amount of labor required by production. As technology and techniques improve, the amount of work required to meet human needs is reduced. This should be a fact that liberates humanity from toil, freeing us to pursue our interests, hobbies, goals of self-development, and so on.

When we enter into employment, our bosses are trying to play a trick on us. They want us to understand the process one way, when, in fact, something else is happening. They want us to think that we have agreed, as equals, upon a deal, where they pay us an agreed upon hourly wage, and we, in turn, do some agreed upon labor for them. They make a profit and we get paid, and everyone gets what they agreed upon. At least, that’s how they want us to understand the process.

To understand Marx’s critique of capitalism, it is essential to understand capital dialectically. We see again and again in Capital itself that Marx breaks things down into their contradictory aspects. We’ve already seen this with value, which considers both use-value and exchange-value. Now, as we look at capital itself, we will see Marx’s dialectical method of analysis at work again, as Marx shows how capital is divided into constant and variable capital.

In our previous article we looked at what a commodity is and examined use-value and exchange-value. This discussion of value is a cornerstone of Marx’s critique of political economy. The value of any commodity is equal to the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity. This is the Law of Value, and it is essential to understand if we are to really grasp what is revolutionary about Marx’s critique of capitalism.

Karl Marx begins his critique of political economy in the great work, Capital, with an analysis of commodities. He writes, “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” So, what is a commodity, and why is it that Marx begins here?

As we have seen in our previous article, capitalism’s origins are largely based upon “primitive accumulation” – the theft of land and resources during the colonial period. This theft helped to jumpstart the original accumulation of capital. In the U.S. this began with settler colonialism, whereby colonizers from Europe settled in the Americas, bringing with them terrible violence and oppression of indigenous and other oppressed peoples.

Despite what bourgeois economists, the priests of property and profit, would have us believe, capitalism isn’t the eternal way of things. It had a beginning, and it will have an end. As we begin our discussion of political economy, let’s draw upon historical materialism to examine how capitalism arose.

Thanks to Marxism, we know that ideological superstructure of society arises from and supports the material, economic base of society. What we think is shaped primarily by our practical activity in production, class struggle and scientific experiment. Furthermore, Marx was fundamentally a revolutionary organizer, interested in helping the working class to understand and overthrow its exploitation. This is why Marx devoted the bulk of his theoretical work to an analysis of political economy.

Detroit, MI – A group of activists in the Detroit area joined the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) in June 2022. This expands FRSO to an important and historic city for labor and Black struggles. The young workers and activists organized together during the George Floyd rebellion of 2020, and continued protesting through 2021, when they formed their own study group.

In the ideological terrain today, Marxism must struggle against postmodernism. What is postmodernism? In The Postmodern Condition, the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard summed up the postmodern view as the rejection of “metanarratives.” By “metanarratives” Lyotard means any theory that claims to be able to explain the totality of social, historical and cultural phenomena. This includes the Enlightenment and Marxism. In other words, postmodernism opposes the idea that the world can or should be objectively and rationally understood. The idea that the world as a whole is rational and comprehensible is thus deemed “modern” and postmodernism claims to have gone beyond modernism.