General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: This is the future. It doesn't include jobs for humans. [View all]JackRiddler
(24,979 posts)Marx was absolutely obsessed with technological advancement as a means for reducing the amount of labor. It's found throughout Capital and hence it's ridiculous to say he didn't focus on this. His theory was of labor time as the element producing *surplus* value over cost inputs, an important distinction; as is the fact that labor time is conducted under differing arrangements of the productive forces. What produces an eventual price is related to many other factors including such that we would call "the market." Efficiency and reduction of required labor time contributes to the tendency of profit rates to fall over time, and thus to crises. The libertarian "Econlib" site's summary of Marx is a laughably false and simple caricature unrelated to his actual theorizing. Hardly the place to "start," any more than is Wikipedia. (Capital and many other Marxian works are online in full, I believe.) From the sound of it you may have once turned every page in a copy of Capital, but it doesn't mean you really "read" it outside your choice of an ideological framework.