ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a re-reading of the reflections on the effects of mechanization on labour by two great economists, David Ricardo and Karl Marx, who have common ideas about the role of production prices, but a very different concern towards the critique of political economy and the working of the capitalist system of production. In Ricardo’s analysis, net income increases in terms of the quantity of goods that the profits in monetary terms are able to buy. Examining the effects of the introduction of machines on employment, Marx starts with a critique of the compensation theory using Ricardo’s conclusions. In Capital, Marx distinguishes immediately, in the first chapter dedicated to “Commodities,” between useful labour and abstract labour. A specific contribution of Marx is to have shown how–in a society already producing commodities–capitalist conditions of the production of commodities emerge.
