Some of the comments and questions that these students bring up shows how engrained the neoclassical economic thought is in our minds. The professor is trying hard to make them break from those assumptions but it clearly doesn’t go away easily.
Sadly I was one of them at one point. A young Black kid from a bad neighborhood and a low income family that wormed my way up to University. I went in there with this Free-market, objectivist, neo-liberal ideology and a whole lot of survivorship bias, and the old "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" nonsense (despite the copious amount of help I had to get there). It took one question to snap me out of it. Do things "Really" work the way you think they work? I then went and did a thorough investigation - using scientific materialist analysis... No appeals to character, or ideology. Boy did it hurt, especially when I had come to the realization that one of my peers was only there because my family had been paying his family rent for years. The money gained exploiting my family went directly to funding their sons education.
The rent problem is easy to explain. Suppose workers rent the means of production it implies that the produce belongs to the workers, but obviously it is not. The capitalist dictates both the production process and the produce, which the worker has neither of them and thus do not classify as rent.
The workers also can't do whatever they want with the Capital, which they would be able to do if they really "rented" it from the capitalist. The worker must do what the capitalist tells them to do with the Capital.
Mr. Anwar Shaikh is misleading the the whole class, (30:00) in the sense that why the labor was not the part of determining and deciding, on so called "civilized society" 's distribution of surplus value on "the fair and just basis", in order to maintain "equality" - for the same the standard of living of labor and producer? This is the origin of exploitation and inequality in a capitalist society. That is the first point need to be clarified and instilled in, any and all, students of Economics and Political Economy. How does one knows whether the other person is fair, just and honest, in any transaction? For example, if there is a round cake and that must be equally distributed, how this is to be accomplished? The "fair and just" way is to have a condition that state: If one cut/divide the cake first, then the other will pick up first the portion s/he chooses. This will resolve the problem in the sense that the dishonest party will suffer, in the sense that creating inequality in the first place to begin with, he lost the bigger piece of the cake. This is the duty and responsibility of a TRUE TEACHER.
