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Victor C. Bolles

Building Blocks

A recent viewing of the 2016 BBC series on modern geniuses hosted by historian Bettany Hughes that profiled Karl Marx led me to contemplate about the nature of exploitation and surplus.


Marx had a very dim view of surplus. He believed that surplus, which he called capital, was derived from the exploitation of the workers whose physical labor produced all the products necessary for life in the modern world. He even opposed the capital that was used to purchase the great machines that were necessary to create all those products of modern life because those machines were created only to increase productivity (which generates more surplus) and not to improve the lot of the workers.


Marx propounded the Labor Theory of Value wherein the economic value of a good or service was based on the amount of labor necessary to produce the good or service. If the employer of the laborer could increase the economic returns due to the utility of the product (demand) or the scarcity of the product (supply) surplus would be created. The amount of surplus appropriated by the employer was unjustifiable exploitation of the labor of the worker.


Modern progressives carry on this Marxist tradition. They believe that the profit employers and investors receive is not legitimate and is, therefore, subject to expropriation through taxes so that it can be redistributed to deserving workers. In his 2012 hit Shackled and Drawn, famous celebrity .01 percenter Bruce Springsteen sings,


“Freedom, son, is a dirty shirt The sun on my face and my shovel in the dirt A shovel in the dirt keeps the devil gone I woke up this morning shackled and drawn.”


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