Thank you, again. I do appreciate that very fulsome response back. I am not a Marxist [I have no ideology.], but I am familiar with Marx’s writings.

One thing we have to keep in mind is that Marx lived and wrote when capitalism as a form of enterprise was in its very early stages. It was a very different thing than it would become, first through the influence of labor unions and later through a relationship with government and even society as a whole that did not exist in Marx’s day. That his theoretical positions do not precisely fit today’s realities can hardly be a mark against him.

Marx was trying to use mathematically expressed relations in order to avoid invoking subjective assertions such as justice, fairness, etc. — i.e. to avoid metaphysics. Marx accepted the standard economic position that money = value. The money people receive defines the value assigned to their input.

For Marx, the question was how that value got assigned and what were the material — remunerative — consequences that followed from that. Marx’s overriding point was that relations of power — and only that — determine the distribution of remuneration within any business.

Today those relations of power are vastly more complex than they were in Marx’s time, but it is still the case that self-interested people determine, within a web of constraints unknown in Marx’s days, what the remuneration within an enterprise will be. We can see from changes in the ratios of remuneration that those constraints are becoming weaker.