Marx's Das Kapital doesn't really contain any moral sermons about the evils
of capitalism, although Marx does cite examples of brutal exploitation. Marx
tries to provide an objective picture of the development of capital, from
the use of money to make more money, to the transformation of all production
for the accumulation of capital. Marx's Capital does not really contain
tools to change the economy, except insofar as it reveals the economic
logics of capitalism and therefore implies what it means to get rid of those
logics.
Lenin observed in 1918: "We have knowledge of socialism, but as for
knowledge of organization on a scale of millions, knowledge of the
organization and distribution of products, etc., that we do not have. This
the old Bolshevik leaders did not teach us. Nothing has been written about
this yet in Bolshevik textbooks, and there is nothing in Menshevik textbooks
either.
That was about a year after the overthrow of Czarist and bourgeois state
power in the Russian empire!
As regards the theory of surplus value ("Mehrwert" or added value in
German), in my experience most Marxists, including most Marxist professors,
do not really understand it. That's mainly because they know little about
economic history and about social accounting, plus, they haven't studied in
detail what Marx actually said about it.
The residential housing sector is a specific sector in the economy, which
has some unique features. It is not at all the same as manufacturing.
J.
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