She is a good little Marxist! Bless her ignant self.
Late last month, US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted a criticism of Ivanka Trump, who had said she was against the idea of a guaranteed minimum wage because "I don't think most Americans, in their heart, want to be given something. ... People want to work for what they get. So, I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want."
Ocasio-Cortez responded, "A living wage isn't a gift, it's a right. Workers are often paid far less than the value they create."
That caught my eye because it is essentially a restatement of Karl Marx's "Labour Theory of Value," and it's not often you see that discussed in the mainstream media.
If all workers are paid less than the value they create, then there will never be enough workers to buy the things they make
Prior to Marx, the "value" of any product was regarded as pretty much the same as its price in the marketplace. It's how much you would pay to avoid making the product yourself, according to Adam Smith (1723-1790). The reason you might spend $100 on a pair of shoes is because even though $100 is quite expensive, it's a lot easier than making a pair of shoes by hand, yourself, Smith said.
Marx (1818-1883), who was a big fan of Smith, was more interested in how products acquire value as they come into existence. A cow doesn't slaughter itself and magically transform into a pair of leather shoes. That only happens because workers apply labour to the cow's corpse, turning its skin into leather and then sewing that leather into shoes. Only after labour has been applied do shoes have any value. It's the labour that creates the value, not just the fact that the shoes can be traded for cash.
https://www.businessinsider.com/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-tweet-workers-paid-far-less-than-the-value-they-create-2019-3
