What is it about Marx's work that produces such comments? First, though Marx was a severe critic of
capitalism, few captured better its inherent drive for technological and social in
novation. As Marx
saw it, capitalism is not only about the production of material goods and services but also about the
production of value. Labor, in Marx's view, is the source of value. And the magnitude of value, he
argued, is determined by the amount o
f socially necessary labor time it takes to produce a given
commodity. Marx held that there is a continual contradiction between these two purposes: producing
for material wealth and producing for value. As productivity rises, more goods are produced in th
e
same unit of time, so the value of each commodity falls. The increase in material wealth corresponds
with a decline in the magnitude of value
—
that is, production costs fall and prices tend to fall as a
result. .