On Marx’s Use of Hyperbolic Statements Regarding Supposed Absolute Truths
“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and size. The worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates. The devaluation of the world of men is in direct proportion to the increasing value of the world of things.”
– Karl Marx, Estranged Labor
While some may not view Political Economy as a philosophical concept, once examined, it clearly has its roots in philosophy. In this short excerpt, Karl Marx is putting across the economical notion of Marginal Cost in labor-man’s terms. This passage is relatively early in the work and is prefaced by Marx claiming that “the economist assumes in the form of a fact […] what he is supposed to deduce” and that the groundwork for his argument is an “actual economic fact.” Just as such, Marx has a similar flaw in his thinking as well. In philosophy, a statement being hyperbolic is a grand leap from a subtle proof step; a proclamation within Marx’s theories falls subject to this intensification.
As a reader, we can clearly assume that Marx believes there are no exceptions to his “actual economic fact,” due to just that—he presents this is a fact. Therefore, every word in his declaration can and must be held accountable for any intrinsic meaning it may have. The misstep lies in the second sentence of this passage—“the worker becomes an ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates.” He presents this as a portion of a larger absolute fact, and as nothing absolutely factual can have any fictional aspects, we can safely assume that he believes this statement holds true for every subsequent worker added. In actuality, the economic principal of Profit Maximization disproves this supposed truth.
As most businesses operate in a perfectly competitive market—namely one that has many buyers and sellers, similar goods/firms and an ease of entry—the point of Profit Maximization is where, on a graph, the marginal revenue and marginal cost curves intersect. The logical reasoning behind this statement is that when marginal revenue is greater than marginal cost, revenue is going up faster than costs and thus the firm should increase production; conversely, when marginal revenue is less than the marginal cost, revenue from the next subsequent output is less than the additional costs and thus the firm should slow production. Consequently, evaluating the worker as an “ever cheaper commodity the more commodities he creates” is flawed in that at a certain point, the next subsequent worker’s production output will actually lose the company money due to externalities such as the products elasticity of demand (is it a necessity versus is it a luxury) and the law of diminishing marginal utility (as supply of a product increases, the utility to consumers of each subsequent unit decreases). Given in this, the worker becomes more expensive as revenues are decreasing due to an increase in the company’s fixed costs i.e., the employee’s wages. Marx would have to account for profit maximization to make his statement impeccable—no exceptions, not even for Marx; there must no exceptions if something is to be presented as an absolute truth.
