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2 years agoi 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.