Edit: expanded and clarified, 5 March.

I think we should stop referring to the dominant socio-economic system we live under as "capitalism." This implies a rule by capital, which buys in (as it were) to the idea that the structure is impersonal, impartial and inevitable. I think we'd have a much clearer picture of reality if we started calling it "capitalist-ism."

They call their system "the free market," when in fact it has little to do with the market and even less to do with freedom. The system, which is as much political as economic, is about maintaining the power of the uber-rich, who treat the rest of us as pawns to be moved about and sacrificed as will. Mind you, there is some turnover in exactly who constitutes the elite -- the concept of social mobility isn't a complete fiction -- but the structure of the model itself goes on, untouched.

The rich see the world through the lens of marginal utility. That, in a nutshell, says that a thing is worth whatever you pay for it. In other words, prices and wages are proper by virtue of having been paid. If they weren't proper, they wouldn't be paid. Whatever you can get away with is all right, by virtue of the fact that you're getting away with it. As discussed in the first essay in this series, this self-justification ignores the power imbalance between the owner of the means of production and the worker.

What it means is that the owner sets the terms of employment. That's what it is to be a capitalist: he (as it usually is) has a monopoly on the capital, the means of production, and hence all the leverage in the negotiation of wages. Thus, he has the power to only employ those who will provide him with surplus labor -- that production which is above and beyond the value of the employee's wages. This is a subsidy, or even a kickback, to the capitalist, whose only contribution to the production is the possession of the capital.

But I've already veered away from marginal utility, which says that whatever wages are, that's what they should be. I was venturing into the labor theory of value, which says that it is the work that workers do that gives products their value, and thus that workers, not capitalists, are the sine qua non in the economy. This idea is attributed to Marx, but in fact predates him by well over 100 years. Adam Smith accepted it, but only for a society of small producers: "The whole produce of labour does not always belong to the labourer. He must in most cases share it with the owner of the stock which employs him."

This invites the question of why the laborer should not own the stock. If the worker must share the produce of his/her labor with the owner, then effectively, the worker is renting his/her job from the owner. There is no tangible basis for the worker to do so, only the structure of the ownership of the means of production. This is why the philosophers of the capitalist class are so focused on the idea of property rights -- so that the divine right of capitalists will not be examined too closely. Without the right to rent work to workers, wealth and power would become diffused among the workers themselves.

The way in which this diffusing would happen is that workers would gradually begin to understand the labor theory of value... and choose to value themselves as laborers. The best way to do so is to dismiss the capitalist from their economic model, and take possession of the means of production. Then they can sell their products as fair trade, and give buyers the opportunity to put their buying dollars into their community, not the pockets of the already-wealthy.

Marx himself said that labor does not create wealth alone: nature contributes a lot to the process. But to speak of remunerating nature is nonsense. We should understand economics not as apart from ecology, but just the reverse -- economics is a subset of ecology. However, for values that can be expressed in monetary terms, it is safe to summarize matters by saying that labor creates all value. Indeed, it's difficult to conceive of anything else. If we consider each other important, what apart from labor could theoretically hold value?

I'm not so naive as to think there aren't a handful of good answers to this. The Liberty Bell, an aged wine, and a young child's crayon drawing cannot be valued by measuring the labor that created them. Likewise, let's not waste time with the fallacy that if labor creates all wealth, then all labor creates wealth.

These exceptions, however, only serve to prove the rule that the labor theory of value is the economic manifestation of valuing people. It expresses our mutual appreciation in a material way. The best way to do this sincerely and concretely is face to face, but this is not always, or even often, possible. But paying a fair price for fair labor still lets the echoes of that appreciation ring.

That's why, in the face of considerable cognitive dissonance, I stand by the idea that markets are the fairest economic tool. The highest form is Adam Smith's conception of a market, the actual marketplace that you walk to and walk through, negotiating a fair price with the producers themselves. When we abstract "the market" away from this personal meeting, its advantages are diluted, though not gone entirely. The interference of either the government or a capitalist also defeats the purpose and nature of a marketplace. Left to its own devices, a market will distribute wealth and power (but I repeat myself) more or less evenly. Both the government and the capitalist will unbalance the equation, to their own respective advantages. Some would make the case that's why each exists. (To me, it's self-apparent in the case of the capitalist, and evidence for the case of the government is accumulating steadily.)

There are three pieces to production: capital, labor, and raw materials. As buyers, we should value raw materials by consuming products that use them conscientiously and sustainably, and we should value labor by buying from enterprises where labor owns and manages capital, not the other way around. We can choose products with not only value, but values.