ABSTRACT
Two major contributions differentiate Marx’s explanation for how a capitalist economy works. One involves theorizing its functioning from the perspective of class, namely the processes of producing, appropriating and distributing surplus labor. Adding Marx’s concept of class to economic explanation provides a potential threat to capitalism, for the stark implication is that the value received by industrial capitalists exactly equals what they exploit from their workers. In direct contrast to the claims of non-Marxian economic theory, class exploitation, and not the latter’s marginal productivity, determines the economic rewards of industrial capitalists as well as of the managers, merchants, state officials, landlords and bankers who live off the surplus distributed to them by those capitalists. That class exploitation supports the incomes received by such an otherwise venerated group of individuals in society tarnishes, if not makes ridiculous, non-Marxian claims of capitalism’s underlying fairness and efficiency.
