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.
In my experience 90% of the people who claim to have "debunked" the LTV are conflating value with price.
Every single one I've ever had it out with quite literally made arguments addressed by Marx in the very first chapter of Capital.
Maybe a half dozen, although two were actually the same person on different platforms who didn't realize they were arguing with me twice. That one was a shame though, because they were the face in my Shadowrun game for a solid year and I liked them as a person, even though they have terminal chauvinist brainworms.
As far as I understand it, value vs price is like capital vs money, they're closely related but they're not the same thing at all
If you ever have the question "is X Marxist theory correct" please just read the theory, the LTV is literally the first chapter of Das Kapital and is the easiest to understand
I am currently reading it! Marx is such a good, but dense writer. I tried reading some “introductions” and “explanations” by others but tbh, it’s just better to read him directly.
The video goes in-depth about testing the theory and concludes there isn’t any empirical proof for it. Not so much challenging it on philosophical grounds.
I would suggest then reading the text again very carefully and potentially even delving into Value, Price and Profit.
Also this title has big :bait: energy
I would actually say read VP+P and Wage Labour and Capital before reading Capital. It gets across 90% of the main ideas from Marx that you’d want to explain to a friend or co-worker to try and set them down the commie path.
Plus they’re much shorter and easier to read.
Also this title has big :bait: energy
Man…this has happened multiple times to me. I don’t know what to do.
As long as youre putting in the effort, its all good, youre a comrade.
The simplest test of the theory is to just imagine how an economy reacts when certain products are removed from it.
Corn? Maybe a famine, or an increase in potato farming.
Iron? Reversion to stick building and subsistence farming.
Gold? More use of banknotes and state backed fiat currency.
Labor? Total and complete collapse of the entire social economy. All sectors. Mass famine or possibly a return to subsistence farming
LTV is already empirically proven and Burgis is a hack. There's no reason to make such a concession. It's like "Marxists" who still concede to the Mises' and Hayek's economic calculation problem even though it has been technologically solvable for about 50 years now.
Do you know where I could find reputations of the economic calculation problem?
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.
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.)
It's one way of framing reality that has a lot of utility and explanatory power (how economies function on a large scale, how economics interacts with power between classes, for example). Subjective theory of value has some utility and explanatory power as well (why a specific item sells for a specific price at a specific point in time, for example). If someone is outright rejecting LTV, rather than accepting its limits or adapting it, they're probably doing so out of ideology more than anything (and/or they misunderstand it).
Funnily enough, the site tagline just told me to go read Synopsis of Capital.
That’s what I thought. But some socialists and even Marxists claim otherwise.
i wish i had a source that wasnt a massive dickhead, but this video has some good empirical data showing very strong correlations at industry levels
edit: also i read that jacobin article and i cant find any actual substantive criticism of the ltv at all, he seems to veer off almost immediately into completely separate questions
gotta be honest that im not gonna watch an hour-long video on this right now (i also think youtube videos are a very imperfect forum for these sorts of technical debates, though i realise im guilty of providing a video link as well)
but i must say that i was astonished that cockshotts numbers lined up as well as they did when i first saw them, because reading capital itself its abundantly clear that its not supposed to be a formula that you can plug a bunch of numbers into and model an economy in that way, because these things are so complex with so many other factors overlaid on the top (and especially with the complicated relationship between value and price). i would have expected the relationship to look a lot messier than cockshott modeled, and if it turns out that the reality is in fact messier, i dont think thats a fatal criticism of the ltv that "someone tried to stretch the ltv to do something it wasnt intended to do, and it turns out that actually it couldnt do that thing it was never intended to do"
a bit of a tangent, but fwiw the critique im most open to (and partly why i was so surprised the numbers lined up as well as they did in cockshotts analysis) is graebers, where he suggests that the ltv loses applicability somewhat in modern capitalist economics because so much of the work being done in even commodity-producing companies absolutely does not need to be done for the production and sale of those commodities (even from a purely capitalist perspective where work for e.g. labour discipline and advertising are "valuable") and that capitalist social relations seem to break down in the internal structures of large modern corporations. and while i think he is completely correct and it is possible that some aspects of this sort of work falls outside the ltvs scope (which explicitly only applies to capitalist production), i would counter that i think this is mostly already accounted for in the ltv by average socially-necessary labour time which only needs to factor in whether labour is socially considered necessary rather than whether it is actually necessary for production of that commodity in order to contribute to the value of that commodity in a capitalist mode of production. so i think it can really still apply in this rather strange newer territory, the really messy bit is rate of exploitation etc in this sort of bullshit labour and i havent seen anyone really delve into that but may just not have been looking hard enough.
Video has to be the worst format for having any kind of serious discussion about anything. God save us from video essays.
he suggests that the ltv loses applicability somewhat in modern capitalist economics because so much of the work being done in even commodity-producing companies absolutely does not need to be done for the production and sale of those commodities (even from a purely capitalist perspective where work for e.g. labour discipline and advertising are “valuable”) and that capitalist social relations seem to break down in the internal structures of large modern corporations.
This sort of make work program is a defense mechanism of capital. Those workers are in fact a form of the reserve army of labor. They exist to be kept on hand and ready for liquidation when the labor market contracts. That's why when a firm starts to contract, it's those workers that are the first to get the can.
However, white times are good, keeping a well paid reserve army also helps to prevent crises of overproduction as they temporarily are able to consume surplus and give a large portion of their inflated wages back to the capitalist class through consumption of luxury goods.
The labor aristocrat is buffer for capital.
I did enjoy the video and it does discuss and play around with value vs price and couple of other arguments. I do appreciate modern economists at least doing some grappling with Marxism, even if I don't agree.
Couple of critical notes: Marx doesn't say that labour is the ONLY source of value. Nature (land, extracted resources, etc) is an obvious other source.
Unlearning does not address thought experiments like "what if my landlord died and we didn't find out for a year? Is his corpse 'producing value' or what? In exploring this, we eventually see that the labour that a capitalist might* do (managerial tasks, directing labour, stocking inventory) is minuscule compared to their recompense; the majority of the capitalists income does not actually require the capitalist.
You can also branch off into discussing technology, how it's built with labour, how capitalists usually aren't actually the engineers etc.
He does mention that even without the ltv Marxism promotes strong arguments against labour exploitation, but unlearning also just has soccdemmy vibes and spruikes for mixed market economies
Marx mentions that rarity is also a source of value. I remember he gives the specific example of pearls in Capital. I've only had to bring this up like one time though, when a liberal was trying to say Marx was debunked by replicas of famous art not having the same value as the original piece, even if the replica had a more complicated labor process.
Liberals really like to invent very convoluted brain puzzles that go nowhere.
I feel like this is just the ship of Theseus with extra steps.
And I haven't read Capital but I'd be shocked if Marx doesn't mention speculation somewhere, and the value of art is entirely based on speculation.
The price of art is based on speculation, the value of art is equal to the material and labor inputs
Where the labor value is calculated using labor time normalized on the average consumption of social product the laborer/artist needs to maintain their standard of living.
Firefox glitched out. I was able to click post but my phone slowed down to the point where a keypress took more than a minute to respond.
The YouTube video addresses Cockshott and tries to disprove his conclusions.
The video guy had an AMA where he said that he landed on a more centrist political perspective after his university days. He’s also made videos responding to breadtubers about privatization which was basically like “yes the trains were better, newer, cheaper to operate and perhaps as safe as their privatized versions but who is to say which is better?”
Doubt he succeeded, Cockshott is a transphobic shithead but there's a reason no one in the orthodoxy tries to counter him, his math is solid and his numbers aren't lying, the last time an academic came for him was 2004 and Cockshott embarrassed the challenger
Something similar happened with Anwar Sheikh when he exploded the theoretical underpinnings of the only serious challenger to LTV (i.e. Marginalism) all the way back in 1974, a feat that should have won him a Nobel prize in economics, which resulted in complete radio silence from the whole field and whose paper is probably the only one in the whole of academia that's never had a challenger or rebuttal despite its age of 50 years, which blows my mind to this day
Anwar Shaikh is the most important economist since Marx, and it's criminal that so few economists even know him.
I'm sorry I can't remember the details, but I remember Richard Wolff :RIchard-D-Wolff: giving a talk on the labor theory of value, where he explained that it's more like an alternate model that is not designed to predict price but is instead necessary to explain part of the relation between exploitation and labor, where the utility theory of value is not a useful model.
Anyone know what I'm talking about?
Labor theory of value is about production, as soon as you enter into market prices you already gone wrong in your application/critique
Value, Price, and Profit
Price and Profit are components of value, but can rise and fall independently from it.
The only reason market prices are so inflated now is because of futures trading and over leveraging to generate the conditions for a crisis that investors can use to extract more value from those smallholders that are liquidated or proletarianized by the crashes.
Anyone who tries to give you bunk about how LTV is wrong because of modern international stock market prices is either a moron or are intentionally trying to mislead you.
Value is exclusively created by labor and all other forms of it that float around in exchanges are either already dead and reified labor, or promisory notes from one capitalist to another that they will be able to exploit labor at some time in the future.
This is like someone saying gravity doesn't exist because they've gotten used to living on a space station then proceeding to shut off the reaction thrusters that maintain an orbit because if gravity doesn't exist, there's no need to maintain an orbit.
The most common critiques I see of LTV is that it conflicts with other ideas of value, but these are all people who haven't read any of Capital, as Marx explicitly states that Value has multiple meanings. I've had endless conversations with a central European succdem who thinks the existence of the Exchange Theory invalidates LTV.
https://ianwrightsite.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/general-theory-labour-value2.pdf
if ya wanna get way into the weeds here is ian wright's paper on the matter where he tries to prove the labor theory of value.
Guglielmo Carchedi recently proved LTV empirically so a couple of YouTube hacks who don't read aren't likely to have anything interesting or honest to say on the subject
