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.
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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.
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
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.
I don’t know what to do
Stop being a lib.
As long as youre putting in the effort, its all good, youre a comrade.
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?
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.
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.
Many such cases
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
True.
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.
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
The video counters Cockshott.
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.
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.
