>>7929Marx is the reasonable endpoint to British political economy from Smith to Ricardo. Marx is saying, like a few other people, "this doesn't work". It's worthwhile to note that just about everyone in economics had an axe to grind with the British free trade system, and so you can find in Sismondi scathing criticism of what this is doing to the people and anything someone would want out of it. The Smithian system was not a "total system" in that way that required everyone to violently reassert it as if history cannot change. It's very clearly the opening of the study of "economics" as a thing, rather than a dogma to follow like a religion.
There are problems with some of the people who say "morality is for fags" when discussing Marx. Adam Smith was a moral philosopher, and none of capitalism works if the agents do not morally value anything they're doing. Basically, if those in charge of the system do not want to do this for their own reasons, it can end immediately. What can't end is that there are a lot of people dealing in money and production, and there will be some understanding between them of what they are doing.
I'll just say that everything in Capital could be understood within the British understanding without any "dialectics" or assumptions Marx made about human nature in his other writings. It does help to understand why Marx approached the problem as he did, but the explanation is sensical based on what we know about mechanics. The one "trick" of Marx is abstract labor as a category, which is peculiar to Capital. Before, the labor theory was somewhat vague, since it was primarily a moral claim rather than a scientific one. Ricardo made a violent assumption that labor values are, absent any compelling reason to believe otherwise, equal, but quickly moves to remind the reader it doesn't actually work this way in any complex society, where there are already established customs and expectations that are valued by the participants. What working with abstract labor does is answer pertinent questions like the "Machine Problem", and if you have a mind for operations research, this is really important. Managers have to deal with labor as an abstraction if they want to do anything other than motivational speeches or cracking the whip, and the factory requires this task to produce a product. To Adam Smith, everything in the factory is accomplish
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