If Marx says that value is determined by socially necessary labour time isn’t that circular or basically the same as the marginalise argument that value is only determined by what is desired by society? I.e. isn’t the “socially necessary” part basically making a demand-side argument? Although at a societal level rather than individual.

Or have the lib brain worms got to me and this isn’t actually the main conflict between LTV and marginalism?

  • Liberalism [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't see a conflict between LTV and marginalism, or that the former is materialist where the latter is idealist. It seems to me like they're both independently sound concepts that aren't really interchangeable, or in competition with one another except in that they're both called "value."

    If marginalism is idealist, how could there even be a materialist analysis of the demand side of the economy? After all, individual preference is both pretty important and pretty inscruitable, and while the marginalist sort of value might be subjective in that it varies from person to person, for a particular person or over a large population of people it's pretty concrete, or no less so than the labor theory of value. Just like how you could call the LTV "subjective" because it takes different people different amounts of labor to produce the same thing, but it really isn't, because the concept of socially necessary labor takes care of this.

    This is basically how I see it as copied from something I wrote farther down:

    And, when most modern economists use the word “value,” they mean something closer to this second one where it’s entirely subjective and refers to how much a given person is willing to give up to get a specific thing. When people use the mud pie argument they’re, mistakenly or maliciously, calling the labor theory of value wrong because it’s not the same as a different theory of value.

    That makes this a very important distinction, but you can still see the connection between the two concepts. Since the point of an economy is to deal with the fact that resources are finite and you can’t just have everything you want, it makes sense to ask “how much do I have to give up to get x thing?”. The labor theory of value says how much labor must be given up by society to get something, and the second, individual conception of value says how much currency (which is just labor by proxy) one person is willing to give up to get something. They both have their merits but fundamentally they’re just different things that happen to both be called “value.”