A Must Watch For Working People. Defending Marx's Labor Theory of Value

Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO

I have not read any of Richard Wolff's books but I really appreciate his explanations of Marx and Engels economic views and in particular of how the capitalist system works. I am not familiar enough to speak about his solution or how he sees the transformation of society from a free market system to a democratic socialist economic and political system. He has talked of worker collectives developing within the market system and stuff like that and that doesn't ring well with me but as I say I would have to find out more.

Here Wolff talks of all the criticisms and barriers thrown against Marx's labor theory of value and his critique of capitalism by those whose interests are advanced by maintaining that system. As a ruling class, they not only own the use of the worker's labor power, they direct it organize it and so on. But the means of production and the use of labor power is not all they own. They also own the means of communication, or as Marx put it in The German Ideology, they own the means of producing the dominant ideas or ideology in  society. The universities, the education system, the mass media, are all their tools. 

In the feudal state, the dominant ideology was that the King was king by god's will. We all know of the Divine Right of Kings. Well that idea did not have its origins in the brain of the peasant or serf.  That ideology was wrecked in England when Cromwell cut the king's head off and god didn't do too much about it proving that it was a myth propagated by the class that benefited from it including the religious authorities.

What I would like and I doubt I'll get my wish. Is that many of the folks I have worked with throughout my life would  watch and listen to this and even more that they would be willing to get together and discuss it, ask questions, raise how things can change or what Marx might have said about social transformation.

Wolff exposes many of the myths of capitalism in this. He makes Marx easy and Marx's views of how the world works are easy for workers to grasp because they correspond to objective reality.