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    Marxist's Political Economy

    Marxist political economics emphasizes the social aspect of economics, particularly the relationship between employers and workers. This perspective of economics works towards understanding the economy as a dynamic system. When forming the foundation of political economy, Marx used ideas from classical political economy.  Marx expanded on the idea of what labour is and the relation between a worker’s labour and the organization. Marx looked at the “use-value” of labour and the different types of concrete labour, which today, includes fields such as plumbing and computer programming.

    Marx saw the problem of capitalism as being the nature of labour and its indefinite meaning. One side of labour is that it has a use-value, meaning that there are different types of concrete labour. The other side of labour is that the different types of labour have a certain amount of social labour. Marx found that the exchange value of commodities is determined by the amount of labour within it¹.

    Marx then founded the concept of labour power, which is the ability to work and what capitalists purchase with wages¹. The cost of labour power is socially determined but the surplus of value of how the capitalist system receives profits¹.

    The Marxist theories of crises and Marx’s law of the falling rate of profit are prominent ideas in the Marxist political economic perspective. In the Marxist view, economic crises are the overproduction of workers who would have been the determiners of demand and supply, if they weren’t placed into their roles by capitalism¹.

     

    Reference:

    1. Marx, Karl. Karl Marx Capital Volume One. Retrieved from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

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