Constant Capital - Criticism

Criticism

Critics of Marxian value theory object that labor is not the only source of value-added goods.

Examples of such arguments:

• devaluations or revaluations of types of assets in response to changing demand conditions, which are influenced by price inflation. In national accounts and business accounts, for example, the change in the value of inventories held is adjusted for changes in their current market prices, affecting the profit calculation.

• Steve Keen argues that "Essentially, Marx reached the result that the means of production cannot generate surplus value by confusing depreciation, or the loss of value by a machine, with value creation" . His argument is, that a machine can add a value to new output in excess of the value of economic depreciation charged

• Marxism asserts that capitalist production reduces all production to a combination of commodity inputs to complete the M...M' circuit. However, when one considers human labor to constitute a particular kind of activity among the many necessary to the production of goods, and when one considers that the price of other input factors like raw materials, machines, facilities, land or even other intermediate goods may vary based on the availability of such assets on a market, then the labor commodity is no more or less variable than any other, whether or not it is the sole source of surplus value, and hence profit. The dichotomy "fixed" vs. "variable" is thus a specious mathematicization of the actual "labor" vs. "non-labor" dichotomy.