What Was The Purpose(s) Of Marx's Capital?

Marx was trying to be as simple as a kindergarten teacher:

Jura writes:

All that has been said is: a commodity is produced by human labor transforming nature according to needs. Subtract the natural qualities and what do you have? The labor. This isn’t abracadabra. All the alternatives listed here already presuppose labor; do calories expend themselves?

The absurdity of “human intentionality” as the “value determinant” is shown by the fact that a specific quantitative ratio never results from “being objects of human intentionality.” They are incommensurable. How is a bicycle as an object of intentionality less “valuable” than a house?

“Scarcity” is not a property of any commodity. If there is a scarcity, then it is a matter of working to produce more. The dogma of modern economics is that scarcity is always insurmountable and needs are always excessive. The reality is that this society is choking on abundance – an abundance of people looking for work because they are not needed, of means of production that can’t put to use, of food that could be eaten but can’t be sold. Scarcity as it really exists in this society is a consequence of private property.

“Being subject to supply and demand” wants to put demand on an equal footing with supply. Marx later includes demand in his determination of value-creating labor, but in a different way than in the fairytales of bourgeois economics: needs only count in this economy when backed by money. No money, no food. Bourgeois economics says that the consumers co-determines production with their buying decisions. But in capitalism the consumer’s need is merely taken advantage of by the producer in order to make as much money as possible. That’s why huge stockpiles of useful goods collect dust right next to people who could use them. And no matter how much they are needed, things that could be produced – e.g. Aids drugs for Africa – are not produced in the first place because the money isn’t there.

44 quotes Erik Olin Wright:

This is partly just illiteracy. Marx writes a few paragraphs later:

The other part is that Marx isn’t arguing that labor generates value. It only does so under the “real relations” of private property. Why this is important: this equation is quite brutal. If labor had the economic purpose of meeting needs, it would be irrelevant that two completely different activities – making beer and building a house – take different amounts of time. Why equate them if the purpose is to meet the need for them? One takes longer than the other; so what? The principle of equivalent exchange – despite the good reputation of justice eternelle in this society – not only doesn’t have the purpose of meeting the needs for use values, it negates them.

It does both. That's the point. It meets the need for use values only under specific social relations, which involve subordinating use to production for exchange.

At a certain point the suppressed conflict that forms the identity of capital's relations, the labor process and the valuation process, labor and the conditions of labor, use value and exchange value, the means of production and the means of producing value, erupts so that neither can continue to exist alongside the other,

Cool, I agree with all of this. But none of this is explicitly a part of Marx's argument. At best, you could call it implicit premises and the argument an entymemathic one. But on the face of it, the argument is not a valid deductive argument.