Good stuff, thanks.
Marx was surprisingly ahead of his time when it came to labor relations. It's mostly a labor of translating how people talked centuries ago to today.
I’m amazed that a drunk German guy could logic this stuff out in the 1860’s while people today with the internet don’t even understand how their own lives are controlled by economics. Most people don’t even know how the electricity gets to their lights. There is a dearth of education in our society.
The problem with Marx was that the surplus value is nothing else but paper exploitation. Real wealth can only be in the consumable product of work that is being send to the market, not in work itself. That's why his labor theory and ideas on surplus value are all wrong.
In a private economy, the final product is, literally, socialized once in the market... because it never remains in the hands of the capitalist. If the capitalist produces cars, he doesn't get to keep hundreds of thousands of cars in his own garage. All the capitalist obtains in terms of capital increases, are symbolic riches on painted paper - in other words, its not just that labor exploitation is not exploitation as such... its that the capitalist is even deceived by his own economic system, so that he becomes willing to share his output freely with others, the economy can work, and goods can be exchanged. This happens every time he receives money, or make believe wealth, in exchange of giving real material wealth to another... probably a worker for some other industry who gets to benefit, as a consumer, from the work of another.
We have to understand that money is useless for absolutely everything, except in aiding in the exchange of goods and services. It has -no value- in and of itself.
But even if it had value, if money in itself were wealth, redistribution and expropriation as solutions to social inequality are also mistaken, because the math just doesn't add up. Pick any super billionaire from the US and divide his/her fortune by the population number. You'll see that if we wanted to take entire fortunes from the rich in order to distribute equally to all the rest, we wouldn't be able to cover household expenses for more than a couple of months, if that. And you sacrifice entire production lines in doing this, so you'd get scarcity and price increases on top of this failure.
There's a good reason why marxist economics have been tried so many times and have always failed. Marxist conclusions are indeed very sound in a logical sense... but their starting point is a problem which is badly defined. The premises which are contained in their arguments are completely wrong in empirical terms.
