Smith's Wealth of Nations is often misread as naïve celebration of free markets. Yet Smith's core insight was not market efficiency, but the productive power of labour and the moral limits of commerce. He advanced a labour theory of value (in pre-capitalist settings) recognizing value derives from human effort—not mere possession. Though he later abandoned it for cost-of-production theories, his early insight initiated Marx's critique. Equally, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warned that market society can distort the impartial spectator and disfigure moral judgment. His "invisible hand" was not ethical justification but semi-religious hope embedded within deeper moral anxiety.
Marx absorbed these contradictions via Ricardo's systematization. In Capital, he reworked the labour theory into a critique of surplus value: the structural appropriation of unpaid labour through the sale of labour-power itself. He saw what Smith left unresolved—that the wage relation is not reciprocal but extractive. Marx transformed Smith's empirical moral economy into a critical political economy, exposing how commodification deforms human life.
While Smith praised a division of labour for its productivity, Marx revealed its alienating effects. The very mechanism that enriched society, Marx argued, also deskills workers and estranges them from their creative capacity. Likewise, Smith's progressive view of history—from primitive to commercial society—is reinterpreted by Marx as a dialectical unfolding of modes of production and class struggle, culminating not in equilibrium but in transformation.
Marx didn't reject Smith's sentimentalist ethics—he historicized it. Smith's scattered discomforts become in Marx a coherent materialist indictment: capitalist wealth is purchased with the disfigurement of the human subject. Where Smith naturalises commercial society appealing to prudence and sympathy, Marx denaturalizes it—and calls it into question.
Today, in an age of technocratic neoliberalism and data-driven utilitarianism, both thinkers are selectively misappropriated. Smith is stripped of his moral vocabulary; Marx of his humanism. But to rebuild a just economy we must recover what connects them: the insistence that economic life is never morally neutral. Our task is to reclaim political economy as a moral science—capable of confronting exploitation and interrogating the institutions that shape our capacity for virtue and collective life.
Between Adam Smith and Karl Marx lies not a chasm, but a dialectic—a historical arc that marks birth, betrayal, and critique of modern capitalism. Contrary to popular caricature, Marx didn't simply oppose Smith. He inherited him, transformed him, and exposed the contradictions Smith could not resolve. What most people miss is that both thinkers, in radically different ways, were engaged in the project of moral political economy—a vision now largely abandoned.
Pubblicato il 19 gennaio 2026