*For context: I want to draft a simple English, intro-level academic explanation of the LTV that, through careful wording and framing, preempts those criticisms.
i think simple explanation will crash into rent and land prices. it's simpler to use word profit, and insist that "if bosses paid your worth, they wouldn't make a profit. " or "you won't get hired, if you don't bring more money than you get in salary"
You might be picturing something slightly simpler than I had in mind. My intended audience is lay people who are interested in economics. "Economics" is one avenue of attack against Marxism as a body of thought. Because Marxist economics is not the standard academic position, we are vulnerable to being accused of "not understanding economics." If we want to defend against this, we should learn to articulate our position in clear, simple, concrete language, simple enough that people think, "How could that possibly be wrong?" This forces liberals to contend with the arguments instead of brushing them aside, and most liberals are not capable of this.
adepts of phillips curve and natural rate of inflation won't be convinced by ltv
you can slightly expand mind palace and talk about how the only reason people building yachts get money to build them and buy food is because people paying for yachts expropriated the food during production process via cmc cycle.
i'm also not trying to convince people who are already entrenched neoliberals. I'm thinking of less-committed people who might read the comments of entrenched neoliberals, and will be easily swayed by them unless they hear an alternative. And I'm thinking of hexbear users who might try to argue with neoliberals out in the wild. As communists we need to be able to communicate in a variety of contexts, including when people start talking about economics. Here on hexbear we can help each other do that. Hexbears carry rhetoric from this site out into the world, so with that in mind we should try to come up with some good rhetoric here.
Presumably we talk to workers. I have 4/5 general acceptance of "do you think your boss/app would have hired you if he/she/it thought they wouldn't make more money than they are paying you", "Do you think it would be better if they have paid you more in line with what you bring", "you can see how that porsche comes from your sweat therefore". where it crashes is "organize a union". you can't generally convince well paid people (they don't give a fuck), and where the bosses actually do stuff and are nice to workers or at least earn respect, and wage differential is not that crazy in any case (so - small business, pending on bosses behavior)
that's all good, but not directly relevant to the kind of conversation I'm thinking of. Suppose people are already talking about "what communists think about economics." For example, maybe someone says, "I've heard that communists don't believe in supply and demand? is that true?"
But if you go into free markets price construction, you already gone into the weeds. Marxist theory is that exploitation happens at the point of production. When commodity enters market and gets priced at x dollars, you already debating something else, if you debate the x number. Point is capitalist would look at input prices and expected x price and decide to produce it or not, the finding of supply demand happens over very long scale of competition (if one exists), moving to cheaper labor if possible, skirting regualtions etc. But all of that assumes capitalist sees profit in endeavor, people don't front capital to unprofitable ventures (in production)
I agree that you don't need the LTV to argue that we are exploited. You just need a simple moral argument, "my limited time on earth should not be 1000x less valuable than your limited time on earth."
But I also think that if we are Marxists we should be able to articulate and defend some form of Marxism, especially if it comes up organically in conversation. If we can't do that, we look like cranks.
Well, does the law of value or LTV, as you call it, in regards to socially necessary labor time used to produce commodities, inherently take into account supply and demand, or is it a seperate factor overall?
The LTV says that socially necessary labor time largely determines the equilibrium about which prices fluctuate, while supply and demand contribute to the fluctuation
I don't think supply and demand have to be seperate from LToV. Supply is the quantity and quality of a commodity, while demand is the want or need of a commodity. Demand is self-explanatory. If you elaborate further on supply, the way you increase supply is through extra labor, either making more commodities or by allocating more time to their production.
Marx and Engles were directly refuting Adam Smith who couldn't come up with an explanation for why prices didn't change when supply or demand changed, even at macro scales. Smith thought this discrepancy occurred due to "the invisible hand of the free market." He was being literal, as in God was the one causing or not causing these changes. Marx and Engles came up with the real answer based on work by Ricardo: the discrepancy was due to profit. When prices change, it's the capitalist economy having profit realign with value that's been stolen from workers.
I want to leave it open. Someone might argue that the labor cost is itself determined by supply and demand, for example.
*Basically, I don't know what lines of argument I should expect to see, so I want to keep the prompt open-ended.
