Paul Sweezy Quotes

In possessing exchange value relative to one another, commodities show their unique characteristic. It is only as commodities, in a society where exchange is a regular method of realizing the purpose of social production, that products have exchange value.

Capitalist society is characterized by a degree of labor mobility much greater than prevailed in any previous form of society.

So far as the individual capitalists are concerned, each takes the wage level for granted and attempts to do the best he can for himself. In introducing machinery he is therefore merely attempting to economize on his own wage bill. The net effect of all the capitalists’ behaving in this way, however, is to create unemployment which in turn acts upon the wage level itself. It follows that the stronger the tendency of wages to rise, the stronger also will be the counteracting pressure of the reserve army, and vice versa.

In possessing use value a commodity is in no way peculiar. Objects of human consumption in every age and in every form of society likewise possess use value. Use value is an expression of a certain relation between the consumer and the object consumed. Political economy, on the other hand, is a social science of the relations between people.

It seems obvious that in this way the economist avoids a systematic exploration of those social relations which are so universally regarded as having a relevance to economic problems that they are deeply imbedded in the everyday speech of the business world. And it is even more obvious that the basic point of view which modern economics has adopted unfits it for the larger task of throwing light on the role of the economic element in the complex totality of relations between man and man which make up what we call society.

It must be emphasized, because the contrary has so often been asserted, that Marx was not trying to reduce everything to economic terms. He was rather attempting to uncover the true interrelation between the economic and the non-economic factors in the totality of social existence.

It is essential to realize that it was this analysis of the social characteristics of commodity production, and not an arbitrary preconception or an ethical principle, which led Marx to identify labor as the substance of value.

Society is more than a number of individuals. It is a number of individuals among whom certain definite and more or less stable relations exist.

The legitimate purpose of abstraction in social science is never to get away from the real world but rather to isolate certain aspects of the real world for intensive investigation.

Turning from political economy in a narrow sense, it is apparent that the commodity-producing form constitutes the most effective possible veil over the true class character of capitalist society.

The real danger from advertising is that it helps to shatter and ultimately destroy our most precious non-material possessions: the confidence in the existence of meaningful purposes of human activity and respect for the integrity of man.

Discussions of methodology in economics, as in other fields, are likely to be tiresome and unrewarding. Nevertheless, to avoid the problem altogether is to risk serious misunderstanding.

Under simple commodity production, to which we have so far largely confined our attention, each producer owns and works with his own means of production; under capitalism ownership of the means of production is vested in one set of individuals while the work is performed by another. Both means of production and labor power, moreover, are commodities; that is to say, both are objects of exchange and hence bearers of exchange value. It follows that not only the relations among owners but also the relations between owners and non-owners have the character of exchange relations. The former is characteristic of commodity production in general, the latter of capitalism only.

Supply and demand will be in equilibrium only when the price of every commodity is proportional to the labor time required to produce it. Conversely prices proportional to labor times will be established only if the forces of competitive supply and demand are allowed to work themselves out freely. The competitive supply-and-demand theory of price determination is hence not only not inconsistent with the labor theory; rather it forms an integral, if sometimes unrecognized, part of the labor theory.

The expansion of value, which is the objective basis or main-spring of the circulation M-C-M, becomes his subjective aim, and it is only in so far as the appropriation of ever more and more wealth in the abstract becomes the sole motive of his operations that he functions as a capitalist, that is, as capital personified and endowed with consciousness and a will. Use values must therefore never be looked upon as the real aim of the capitalist; neither must the profit on any single transaction. The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at.