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TERRA ECONOMICUS

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  • The key to understanding the contradictions of the modern economy (to the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx)

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE CONTRADICTIONS OF THE MODERN ECONOMY (TO THE 200TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF KARL MARX)

TERRA ECONOMICUS, , Vol. 16 (no. 2),

The 200th anniversary of the birth of Marx was a world-wide event. The author proves that the classical and modern economic theory of Marxism, cleansed of the layers of past dogmatism, provides answers to both fundamental and contemporary questions of economic life. Classical Marxism reveals the causes and patterns of market and capital emergence, their contradictions, the potential and limits of their development. The theory of commodity production (and the market as its form) as a particular historically specific system of social relations, and not merely a mechanism for measuring the results and costs, the theory of exploitation and subordination of labor to capital are not only characteristics of capitalism of the nineteenth century (and this capitalism is again reproduced in countries of the periphery and semi-periphery centuries later), these are the general foundations of any economy dominated by market competition, money, and profit. Modern Marxism has shown what new content these categories receive in those economic systems where production is no longer based on the reproductive industrial, but on creative, high-tech labor. This is a market in which network corporations increasingly produce not goods, but their signs which are simulacra, where network corporations manipulate consumers, using a complex system of methods of technological and economic subordination of counterparts, up to the hype. This is capital, which appropriates not only surplus value, but also intellectual rent and subordinates the personality of the creative worker. But this is also the system of relations in which both elements of post-capitalist relations-public regulation, the withdrawal of a part of the profits of the owners of capital and its use for public needs, the property of everyone for everything (free unlimited access to public benefits – culture, education, etc.) are developed and undermined its bases. Such are counterpoints of the market and capital of the 21st century, revealed not only by Marx, but also by modern Marxists all over the world.


Keywords: Marx; Marxism; political economy; market; capital; creative labor; intellectual rent

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Publisher: Southern Federal University
Founder: Southern Federal University
ISSN: 2073-6606