AskProfWolff: Basic Marxian Economics: Challenges and Questions

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A patron of Economic Update asks: "What's the Marxist response to the marginal revolution? And, do you think Dr. Baetjer is right when he says that the employer “earns” the profit by correctly judging how to combine scare resources, given that he'll make a loss if he makes an incorrect judgement."

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[moji]

So true professor! You speak many of our life stories as risk takers working for the employer! Thanks for being a voice for so many of us🙏

[cheemdd]

Papa wolf really put that foo in his place ✊🏽

[monikakonrad]

Karl Marx, a native of Trier, Germany, and his basic economics theory is as important today than a 100 years ago. I am glad that he finally gets the attention he deserves, not to forget Friedrich Engels his close friend and supporter.

[scottluthy]

That was an excellent question and Richard Wolffes response is spot on. The worker is taking on more risk and has more to lose than business owner employer.

[amapparatistkwabena]

Title of this talk:
Marxism v Capitalism: A Primer
Succinct & easily understood by nearly anyone who has completed 9th grade (US), 6th grade (Int'l.).

[killakaiju]

I never thought in the year 2020 that I'll be excited to learn more about Marxism lol

[nasserderakhshan]

Beautiful explanation of simple concepts which are difficult to grasp because of mindset hammered in to the minds of people who call this status quo as reality of life.

[itzenormous]

I had a group of people make the risk argument to me, in response to my complaints about the level of value extracted from my workplace ($35 million in this case) and the wages paid to the workers (which were written off as "operating costs").
My response to the risk argument was not only what Dr. Wolff just said, but I also added that drug dealers, drug traffickers, pimps, and prostitutes ALL take a tremendous risk, every day. Is their line of work that much more admirable and deserving of much higher compensation, based on the risk that they take? They, in fact, risk their lives much of the time ... yet their work is often viewed as illegitimate or criminal. The contradictions that these people often put themselves in, based on their silly arguments, are usually too many to count.

[Synerco]

people who try to equate exchange value with use value should consider the law of diminishing marginal utility applies to money itself. that means the more money you have, the less utility each unit of currency has for you. since people's purchasing habits are largely influenced by the amount of money they have, we can't assume the price of a commodity objectively measures its utility.

[kermit]

Thank you for your explanation. Learnt from it.

[WeThePeople]

Not to mention the risk-reduction of bankruptcy the employer has, but the employees may not.

[jamesmorton]

Yep, this really got to me, before I quit to retire.

[helengarrett]

I loved this discussion. We hear these stupid complaints all the time and now a master of the subject has put those capitalist arguments to rest. I do not ever want to hear the "poor boss he takes all the risk" argument again.

[totonow]

Dr. Wolff kicks as*@! You've confused use value with exchange value 😂.

[DV-dtsq]

Risk? I would say risk= responsibility. As we all can see, when big companies ruin their deal or busniss they avoid being responsible for it and pay (from their own pocket) for the mistake. They ask workers and citizens to pay for it, and they keep their personal wealth. I would like someone else to pay my bills too.

[tomlee]

Other commodities cannot be exchanged directly, just because of the contradiction between the use value and the value of the commodity itself. Commodity owners are opposed to each other in actual exchange. Therefore, they can only choose one commodity and regard it as a value that can be seen by the human eye. All commodities are first compared and exchanged with it as value, and then Exchange the commodities you need, and finally, this special commodity becomes currency. But in this way, the unity of the original exchange-in and exchange-out commodities is split into two temporal and spatial processes of buying and selling, so commodity exchange hides a crisis. The crisis of capitalism is the development form of the crisis of the commodity economy itself

[tomlee]

Currency is also a commodity, because all commodities use it to express the value of their own commodities, so currency itself has no regulations on the amount of value. The value scale and means of circulation are the functions of money.

[karlzipp]

Labor can create capitol, but can capitol create capitol without labor input?

[destroctiveblade]

So I think your first point sells the marxist theory short. The marxist theory is a rebuttle for the classical theory, wich says that the wage that the worker gets is compensation for his work while the profit that the capitalist gets is compensation for teh capital that he provided, meaning the fact that he provided the machines, the land, the factory etc. What marx said is that this can't be fair, the reason for that is that the machines and the factory that where necessary for production were also made by workers, and under capitalism there must have been a capitalist to profit out of that as well, and if we go back through all the cycle we would find that everything we get is made by workers, and that capitalists are just a parasytic class that sucks value from the workers work.

[ZE-nggw]

How does one counter the conditioned fear in people regarding Socialism or Marxism?