Dear Green Party “(Green critics, with only the dimmest knowledge of classical political economy (or of neoclassical economics)”:
“In Marx’s critique, value was conceived of as an alienated form of wealth. Real wealth came from nature and labor power and was associated with the fulfillment of genuine human needs. Indeed, “it would be wrong,” Marx wrote, “to say that labour which produces use-values is the only source of the wealth produced by it, that is of material wealth….Use-value always comprises a natural element….Labour is a natural condition of human existence, a condition of material interchange [metabolism] between man and nature.” From this standpoint, Lauderdale’s paradox was not a mere enigma of economic analysis, but rather the supreme contradiction of a system that, as Marx stressed, developed only by “simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth — the soil and the worker.””

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