For Marx, what defined feudalism was that the power of the ruling class ( the aristocracy ) rested on their control of arable land, leading to a class society based upon the exploitation of the peasants who farm these lands, typically under serfdom.

Marx thus defined feudalism primarily by its economic characteristics.

Marx defined the proletariat as salaried workers, in contrast to the lumpen proletariat, who he defined as outcasts of society, such as beggars, tricksters, entertainers, buskers, criminals and prostitutes.

Factors of production are defined by Karl Marx in Das Kapital as labour, subjects of labour, and instruments of labour ; i. e., the term is equivalent to means of production plus labour.

Cuba is constitutionally defined as a " socialist state guided by the principles of José Martí, and the political ideas of Marx, the father of communist states, Engels and Lenin.

Marx and Engels, in their analysis of the abortive 1848 Revolutions, defined such a coalition: " a commercial and industrial class which is too weak and dependent to take power and rule in its own right and which therefore throws itself into the arms of the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy, exchanging the right to rule for the right to make money.

Some, like Murray Bookchin, argue that capitalism has already been superseded: in a modern information society the old industrial system is a thing of the past, and the reference to capitalism is an anachronism ( although Marx never defined capitalism as being purely industrial ).

The rate of surplus-value in production is defined by Marx as the volume of surplus-value produced by the workforce divided by the variable capital ( or labour-costs ) expended to produce it ( the ratio S / V ).

Marx defined the " value " of commodities as the total amount of socially necessary labour embodied in their production.

Bordiga proudly defined himself as " anti-democratic " and believed himself at one with Marx and Engels on this.

He claims that structural functionalists pay too little attention to the realities of social conflict and that Marx defined class too narrowly and in a historically-specific context.

In his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Karl Marx famously defined humans as " creatures of need " or " needy creatures " who experienced suffering in the process of learning and working to meet their needs.

While Marx never used the term " class consciousness ", he did make the distinction between " class in itself ", which is defined as a category of people having a common relation to the means of production, and a " class for itself ", which is defined as a stratum organized in active pursuit of its own interests.

The fact is that Marx himself, in the introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript, had defined the economic sphere as the totality of production, circulation, distribution and consumption.

" In the 19th century, Karl Marx defined man as " labouring animal " ( animal laborans ) in conscious opposition to this tradition.

Marx saw classes as defined by people's relationship to the means of productions in two basic ways: either they own productive property or labour for others.

For others ( like Karl Marx ), it is defined by the creation of a labor market in which most people have to sell their labor power in order to make a living.

Karl Marx defined the state as the institution used by the ruling class of a country to maintain the conditions of its rule.

# From a strategic point of view, sectors can be defined as information sector, means of production, means of consumption, thus extending the classical Ricardo-Marx model of the Capitalist mode of production ( see Influences on Karl Marx ).

" problem of Original Accumulation presented itself first to those authors, chiefly to Marx and the Marxists, who held an exploitation theory of interest and had, therefore, to face the question of how exploiters secured control of an initial stock of ' capital ' ( however defined ) with which to exploit – a question which that theory per se is incapable of answering, and which may obviously be answered in a manner highly uncongenial to the idea of exploitation " ( Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, Vol.

In Das Kapital and other writings, Marx divides the new " social product " of the working population ( the flow of society's total output of new products in a defined time-interval ) into the necessary product and the surplus product.

While Marx used the concept of the law of value in his works Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Theories of Surplus Value and Das Kapital, he did not explicitly formalise its full meaning in a mathematical sense, and therefore how it should be exactly defined remains to some extent a controversial topic in Marxian economics.

Labor, not labor power, is the key factor of production for Marx and the basis for Marx's labor theory of value.

Here Marx elaborated his labour theory of value ( influenced by Thomas Hodgskin ) and his conception of surplus value and exploitation, which he argued would ultimately lead to a falling rate of profit and the collapse of industrial capitalism.

Marx called the difference " surplus value " and argued that this surplus value had its source in surplus labour, the difference between what it costs to keep workers alive and what they can produce.

Since Marx believed that surplus value appropriated from labour is the source of profits, he concluded that the rate of profit would fall even as the economy grew.

Here he was influenced by the American thinker Henry George ( see Georgism ) and German thinker Karl Marx ; the land value tax in Taiwan is a legacy thereof.

However, Karl Marx never used the phrase " labor theory of value " to describe his theory of value, but instead made reference to a law of value, which is not to be confused with the classical economics concept of labor theory of price.

Ricardo, other classical economists, and Marx began their expositions with the assumption that value in exchange was equal to or proportional to this labor value.

The final sentence shows us how Smith sees value of a product as relative to labor of buyer or consumer, as opposite to Marx who sees the value of a product being proportional to labor of laborer or producer.

Marx later called this " Smith's adding up theory of value ".

Some writers ( including Bertrand Russell and Karl Marx ) think the labor theory of value can be traced back to him.

The value of labor, in this view, covered not just the value of wages ( what Marx called the value of labor power ), but the value of the entire product created by labor.

Marx expanded on these ideas, arguing that workers work for a part of each day adding the value required to cover their wages, while the remainder of their labor is performed for the enrichment of the capitalist.

Here Marx is drawing a distinction between exchange value ( which is the subject of the LTV ) and use value.

With the rise of European industrialism, Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels witnessed and responded to the growth of what he called " surplus value.

Marx described this loss as commodity fetishism, in which the things that people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt.

According to Marx capitalists take advantage of the difference between the labour market and the market for whatever commodity the capitalist can produce.

Both David Ricardo and Karl Marx attempted to quantify and embody all of the labor components in order to set the real price, or natural price of a commodity.

Marx held that the " price " and the " value " of a commodity were not synonymous.

Prior to Marx, economists noted that the problem with using the " quantity of labour " to establish the value of commodities was that the time spent by an unskilled worker would be longer than the time spent on the same commodity by a skilled worker.

Marx pointed out, however, that in society at large, an average amount of time that was necessary to produce the commodity would arise.

This average time necessary to produce the commodity Marx called the " socially necessary labour time " Socially necessary labour time was the proper basis on which to base the " exchange value " of a given commodity.

However, Marx held that the value and price of any commodity would coincide only when demand and supply were equivalent to each other.

In the Theories of Surplus Value (" Volume IV " of Das Kapital, 1863 ), Marx refines this theory to distinguish between scenarios where the destruction of ( commodity ) values affects either use values or exchange values or both together.

Marx presents the process of commodity production as a unity of TWO distinct process -- the labour process through which labour-power produces use-values, and the valorization process through which labour-power produces additional value over and above its own value.

Marx defines value as the number of hours of labor contained in a commodity.

This includes two elements: First, it includes the hours that a worker of normal skill and dedication would take to produce a commodity under average conditions and with the usual equipment ( Marx terms this living labor ).

He describes labour power as a commodity, and like all commodities, Marx assumes that on average it is exchanged at its value.

Karl Marx explained the philosophic concepts underlying commodity fetishism thus:

Hence did Karl Marx apply the concepts of fetish and fetishism, derived from economic and ethnologic studies, to the development of the theory of commodity fetishism, wherein an economic abstraction ( value ) is psychologically transformed ( reified ) into an object, which people choose to believe has an intrinsic value, in and of itself.

Such were the political-economy arguments of the economists whom Karl Marx criticized when they spoke of the " natural equilibria " of markets, as if the price ( value ) of a commodity were independent of the volition and initiative of the capitalist producers, buyers, and sellers of commodities.

Since the 19th century, when Karl Marx presented the theory of commodity fetishism, in Section 4, " The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret thereof ", of the first chapter of Capital: Critique of Political Economy ( 1867 ), the constituent concepts of the theory, and their sociologic and economic explanations, have proved intellectually fertile propositions that permit the application of the theory ( interpretation, development, adaptation ) to the study, examination, and analysis of other cultural aspects of the political economy of capitalism, such as:

Marx thereby modified his theory of alienation exposed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 and would latter arrive to his theory of commodity fetishism, exposed in the first chapter of the first book of Das Kapital ( 1867 ).

* C-M-C ', one of the forms of commodity trade in the theory of Karl Marx

Marx employed a labour theory of value, which holds that the value of a commodity is the socially necessary labour time invested in it.

Moreover, Marx argues that markets tend to obscure the social relationships and processes of production ; he called this commodity fetishism.

Marx uses Hegel's notion of categories, which are forms, for economics: The commodity form, the money form, the capital form etc.

) Marx defines a commodity as a product of human labour that is produced for sale in a market.