Michael Dawson
"supplies raw materials and instruments of production which add value"
Untrue. Those things are products of past labor, which is the only thing besides nature that adds value.
^^^^^ CB: Yes, I agree that the means of production that the capitalist owns are gotten from labors in other departments of the economy. However, the capitalist from whom those are bought got them by the same process described before. The workers in those other departments owned their labor power and sold it to capitalist in the other departments.
In the Marxist scheme, "nature" adds _use_-value, not exchange-value. Labor is the only source of _exchange_-value. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme famous quote , Marx is saying that nature is a source of "wealth", but wealth as use-value, not exchange-value.
^^^^
And, btw, workers in pre-capitalist class societies didn't own most of what they produced. If they owned half, they were lucky.
^^^^^^ CB: I'm thinking most of what they produce is things like wheat , potatoes, pigs, sheep, clothes. How much wheat,potatoes and pigs, sheeps can the lords and bishops eat ? If they pile it up in the nobles' barns it is going to rot. Most of production was for personal consumption in feudalism and other agrarian societies, no ? And most of the personal consumption was by the masses of peasants.
I know that my comment seems to oppose your point of view on this thread, but I didn't really mean to contradict the spirit of what you are saying. There is some sense in which Marx definitely recites and subscribes to the metaphor that workers are alienated from the fruits of their labor. However, he describes that alienation as I have sketched it here. The ripoff is a bit more circuitous than directly taking "property." Marx puts a lot of emphasis on the idea that the exchange between the capitalist and the wage-laborer is a fair exchange. However, he is certainly also famous for being associated with a lot of disdain for the end result of the process, and "exploitation" is a critical way of describing this "fair" exchange. Marx seems to think it is important to describe the process as "exploitation" and not directly "theft of property", without implying that exploitation is moral or good.