I’m not sure how you can think that if you read Marx. He’s explicit that merchants are parasitic because he makes an artificial distinction between use value and exchange value. From your link:
“ If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value.”
He makes the distinction so that he can special privilege the value of labour as productive “use value”, but the value of all goods derive from their use. The job of a merchant is to buy something from someone who has no or little use for it, and sell it to someone who has greater use for it.
In the same text he claims that no value can be created by converting a currency note into change, but this is trivially not true. With coins I can buy things from people who can’t change a note. I can also buy things from a vending machine that won’t accept notes. In some circumstances coins are more useful, in others notes are. That’s why people expend time and effort to go to banks to exchange one for the other.
Marx cannot accept any of this though, because if he does his entire economic analysis of capitalism comes crashing down.
For Marx distribution of goods creates no value. Seriously, read the text. He had no answer to the question why anyone would ever pay to transport a product from a factory to a purchaser. No value can possible be created by doing this. Really.
I'm not disagreeing with you or defending Marx, only pointing out a common misconception. Marx's project is frequently misunderstood.
> but the value of all goods derive from their use
That's the definition of value economists adopt today following the marginal revolution, just as artificial as Marx's definition of value, which he qualifies as use-value or exchange-value. Marginalism is a great descriptive explanation for situations like the diamond-water paradox, but it is not really relevant to Marx's prescriptive project, as it concerns only what Marx calls use-value, and Marx's project very much relies on exploring this distinction he identifies between use-value and exchange-value. Whether that exploration is correct or important is another question, but I hate seeing this confusion of definitions and goals crop up all the time. Marx doesn't hold all these obviously stupid straw men views people ascribe to him regarding (use-)value, rather he thinks that the way we conceive of value should be rethought.
It’s a shame the ways he rethought value were so toxic. Defining everything that isn’t primary production as parasitic really isn’t a healthy way to look at an economy.
“ If equivalents are exchanged, no surplus-value results, and if non-equivalents are exchanged, still no surplus-value. Circulation, or the exchange of commodities, begets no value.”
He makes the distinction so that he can special privilege the value of labour as productive “use value”, but the value of all goods derive from their use. The job of a merchant is to buy something from someone who has no or little use for it, and sell it to someone who has greater use for it.
In the same text he claims that no value can be created by converting a currency note into change, but this is trivially not true. With coins I can buy things from people who can’t change a note. I can also buy things from a vending machine that won’t accept notes. In some circumstances coins are more useful, in others notes are. That’s why people expend time and effort to go to banks to exchange one for the other.
Marx cannot accept any of this though, because if he does his entire economic analysis of capitalism comes crashing down.
For Marx distribution of goods creates no value. Seriously, read the text. He had no answer to the question why anyone would ever pay to transport a product from a factory to a purchaser. No value can possible be created by doing this. Really.