Marxist economics begins with a simple fact: before people can make history, write books, create art or take part in politics, they have to produce the things needed to live.
Under capitalism, that production is social — millions of workers depend on one another across factories, farms, mines, warehouses, offices, transportation systems and communications networks — but the means of production are privately owned, and production is carried on for profit.
Karl Marx studied capitalism to uncover the social relations hidden behind the everyday world of wages, prices, commodities and money. He showed where profit comes from, why capital must continually expand, why enormous wealth accumulates in a few hands, and why capitalism repeatedly plunges society into economic crisis.
The central secret is surplus value: workers produce more value than they are paid, and that unpaid portion of their labor is the source of capitalist profit. Competition drives capitalists to turn part of it back into capital, expanding production and piling up wealth — but production stays privately controlled and unplanned, so the same process that builds tremendous productive power also throws up unemployment, overproduction and recurring crisis. Marxist economics explains all this not as the result of individual greed or bad policy, but as the workings of the capitalist system itself.
The introductions below develop these ideas step by step.
Commodity, value and money
Under capitalism, almost everything people need is produced as a commodity — something made not only to be used, but to be sold. Marx began here to uncover what lies behind prices and exchange: human labor, value and a system of social production that its own producers do not control. [read more]
Capital
Factories, machinery and money are not capital by themselves. They become capital under a social system in which the means of production are privately owned and used to exploit workers’ labor for profit and the accumulation of more wealth. [read more]
Labor power and surplus value
Workers sell their labor power — their ability to work — for a wage. But during the working day they produce more value than they receive back in wages. Marx called that unpaid portion surplus value. It is the source of capitalist profit and the basis of exploitation. [read more]
Exploitation
Everybody who works for a capitalist is exploited. If the capitalist couldn’t profit from your labor, they wouldn’t hire you. [read more]
Accumulation and crisis
Capital must expand. Capitalists turn part of the surplus value produced by workers back into capital and enlarge production in the struggle for profit. But production remains privately controlled and unplanned. The result is recurring overproduction, unemployment and economic crisis. [read more]
Capitalism
The bosses like to call it “free enterprise.” But for the millions who do the work — who keep society running and still can’t keep up with the rent, the bills and the price of everything — the system is neither free nor enterprising. What makes capitalism tick, and why does it so often bring war and economic catastrophe? [read more]
Slavery and capitalism
Capitalism did not rise after slavery and leave it behind. It grew alongside racialized chattel slavery, drawing wealth from plantation labor, colonial conquest and the slave trade. Enslaved workers were part of the developing capitalist world economy — and a powerful force in the struggle to destroy slavery. [read more]
Capitalism and the environment
Capitalism has given humanity enormous power to transform nature, but production is organized for profit, not for the long-term needs of people or the earth. The drive to accumulate turns land, water, forests, minerals and fossil fuels into sources of profit while leaving society to bear the damage — from poisoned communities to climate change. [read more]
Imperialism
Capitalism must expand or die. When monopoly capital is driven beyond national borders in search of markets, resources and profits — economically and militarily — this is imperialism, the highest and last stage of capitalism. [read more]
Related: Private property
Private property, to a communist, is not your shoes or toothbrush, or even your house. Marxists are concerned with private ownership of the means of production — the factories, land, machinery and other resources through which one class is able to exploit another. [read more]