>>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 accomplished by the arrangement of capital, and that included the human workers themselves as "human capital". Basically, it is the technical knowledge of the workers that is valued as capital or stock, rather than any intrinsic value to human labor-power by itself. Smith's claim is that the labor-power is what we are really contesting, rather than any particular pre-existing wealth such as gold or food. Basically, humans know how to produce things, and over time their labors diversify as a society becomes more complex and no "universal man" can possibly do everything or should do everything. All of the labor in Adam Smith is only valuable once it is engaged in productive capitalist activity. If you labor for yourself and there's no money or contract involved, it is economically without value, regardless of any claim that you need to do these things to live… like breathing or sleeping.
Marx begins the slow process of the "final enclosure" in the mind, where the most basic acts of life can be subsumed into capital. Classical political economy presumed rational actors in charge of the state, who hold a regulatory role over the situation by passing laws and holding institutions, could intervene as they deemed fit for higher purposes, for they would have the foresight to look past the immediate outcome and navigate the situation. A lot of people are superimposing either bad Hegelian, bad Austrian, or bad Malthusian arguments onto Marx's critique, when that wasn't the point. The point in Marx was that, if the capitalists really wanted to, they could easily cannibalize the workers and the universe would go on all the same, and this creates a situation where large swathes of the middle class, who Marx wrote to, were fucked. They would be dispossessed, monopoly would take over, and to the victor go all of the spoils.
We haven't done "real capitalism" for a long time, and for most of the world, it never was "real capitalism". Every country either sought to shield themselves from the British system, was conquered by it and democided, or were the British themselves for whom the proposition was never for British national identity but the ruling interests of the British Empire and its fellow travelers around the world. The British system was intended to turn viciously on the ruled at the first opportunity, and that is exactly what it did. It fomented famine in India, it provoked the American rebellion, it won a stronger position for the Company in the British Empire, and it intensified the Poor Law and stripped away things the people clung to for dear life. None of that was "progress". It was an openly democidal nightmare and you'd have to be crazy to think this was some sort of benevolent act. Adam Smith is not a nice man, and neither is Marx.
By the mid 20th century, that old system was over, replaced by what we did up until 1980 and sort of kept doing all the way up to 2008. You might call that situation "socialism" of various sorts, but it was a very terrible version of it and the history of the past 110 years is a great tragedy. I would say it is the greatest tragedy if I did not know the sort of beasts coming for us now and where this goes for the next century. Humanity will not want to live after they see the worst of this. Some of the people have already seen the worst of this new situation. Everyone will in due time be forced to reckon with it.