There’s this new video by a good YouTuber - Value by Unlearning Economics. There was also an article by Ben Burgis for the Jacobin which argued the same.
Is it possible, as both these people argue, to separate Marx’s critique of capitalism from his theory of value? To keep the former and discard the latter?
Edit - I’m not siding with the video or with Burgis, btw. I think Marx’s value theory is correct. I’m just looking for people who can shine some light on this new(?) phenomena of leftists speaking out against LTV while trying “save” Marx’s critique of capital. To me, that just seems like a pointless and hopeless endeavour.
Do you know where I could find reputations of the economic calculation problem?
Walmart
I mean, the Wal-Mart vs Sears thing is a good illustrative example, but I meant more like, theory stuff
There's a book called "The People's Republic of Walmart" you could check out. I haven't gotten into it more than I think hearing an interview with the author once.
wdym?
The idea that an economy can't be centrally planned because it's too computationally difficult, or really any other objection, is disproved by the monopolization of retail, logistics and production Walmart achieved reaching the scale of a nation state. They became the sole provider of goods in swaths of the US. At this point, to do communism you'd basically just have to take over Walmart.
"Vertically integrated" is just the politically correct term for "centrally planned"
I use this argument on people a lot. Amazon and Walmart not only prove that planned economies work, they also prove that they're absurdly efficient.
A central problem of Marxism, as well and classical economics generally (Smith, Ricardo, and Marx), is that we couldn't at one point contend how many hours of work would be needed to mine iron, to refine the iron, to shape it into tools, to make the conditions to increase production. The first state of capitalism is great at this, it just produces and produces until the excess completely craters one section of the market, making another advantageous to exploit. From what I understood from a Capital lecture series, it was impossible to calculate the costs of labor between each step at the time, though Marx and David? Ricardo tried to do so. A centrally planned economy would still have been advantageous though because at least you can guess and adapt in a concrete fashion as an individual actor over an entire market.
However it wasnt long after computers were invented that the problem was solved, IIRC a nobel in economics was given out to a guy who did all the math for the US economy's to function. I think this is called the input output problem but I cant really remember what this all was given I kinda stopped bothering with the economics side of Communism at some point.
Paul Cockshot has a couple of videos on his youtube-channel about the labour theory of value which are excellent. In this one he adresses the economic calculation problem briefly and summarizes the empirical evidence in favor of the labor theory of value.
(I know he's a terf, but on this subject he's accessible and understandable, so I consider him a decent source for this subject.)