Smith vs Marx: Contrasting Visions
Marx read Smith carefully and built on his labor theory of value, but the two thinkers reached radically different conclusions about capitalism's trajectory.
A Shared Starting Point
Marx was a careful reader of Smith, and the two shared more common ground than is usually acknowledged. Both grounded their economics in the labor theory of value: the idea that the value of a commodity derives ultimately from the labor required to produce it. Both analyzed the division of labor as the engine of productivity growth. Both recognized that the interests of workers and employers are structurally opposed in wage negotiations.
Marx explicitly acknowledged his debts to Smith and the classical economists, calling them 'the political economists of the manufacturing period' who had first attempted to understand capitalism as a system rather than a collection of trade policies. Marx's project was to take classical political economy further, to ask where the system was heading rather than merely how it worked at a given moment.