Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of power

[CHIMO]

Having so far concentrated on philosophy and politics we now turn to what was the major part of Marx's output, namely the economics. But it is in the economics where his political philosophy begins to take on real form. There is not space enough here to cover the enormous range of his economics but there are a few basics which need to be dealt with in this slightly longer piece and which can be fought out below the line as usual.

Alan Budd, who was an economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s once made an interesting point about Marxist economic theory and government policy on the fight against inflation at the time:

" did see that it would be a very, very good way to raise unemployment, and raising unemployment was an extremely desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes – if you like, that what was engineered there in Marxist terms was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labour and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since."

Marx's basic starting point was that in contrast to all previous historical epochs capitalism is a system of "generalised commodity production" in which the workers' abstracted labour power itself became a commodity to be traded.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/09/karl-marx-part-6-economics