/lit/ - Literature

>>12273698
Socially necessary labour or something Idk

>>12273698
cock

>>12273708
comes down to the same problem
Whether it is a time unit or costs you tack onto it. It doesn't get less idiotic.

>>12273714
Im an austrian so I can't defend the theory. Wait until a marxist responds

>>12273698
There would be no products without labor; all value of a product is added by the labor which creates it. You would not eat caviar if it was not harvested from fish; capitalists steal the value created by the workers and call this theft "profit" to legitimize their misdeeds.

>>12273763
There would be no labour without thinking, and the capitalists have thought it all through. Without thinking by the capitalist, workers would be nothing but apes.

>>12273763
To add on to this, they create machines to reduce the labor-power put into each product so they can steal more money from the worker without his knowing.

>>12273768
That doesn’t give them the right to steal from the working class. Without the workers the thinker’s thoughts would be useless. It goes both ways

>>12273698
If the value of a product is equal to cost/amount of labor, then innovation has no value.

This is why communism fails.

>>12273768
This line of thinking could also be used to justify slavery; if you're trying to create worker-owner relationships with slave-master relationships I absolutely agree. I'm by no means a communist but the LTV has yet to be disproved. Communism just does not work in practice.

>>12273781
equate not create*

>disregarding Führerarbeit
yikes, have fun going to Fellahism within three generations, urbanite Subhumans

>>12273763
>There would be no products without labor

And there would be no labour without demand.
Cost is a secondary thought, as in "Does this pay off in accordance with the present demand"
Labour is considered within that line of thought, so it is not a determining factor of values, but an afterthought.

>>12273763
If I eat soil instead of caviar, the shit I take will still not match the price that soil could make on a market

>>12273810
This is a good argument; I'm not sure what Marx's answer to this would be.

>>12273819

I don't even know what you're talking about here. The soil has value because you dug it out of the ground; it would have no value if it could not be obtained.

>>12273698
Well your being highly disingenuous here obviously... but in a sense yes if you seriously thougth you could turn your shit into a commodity. The thing is other people are producing shit as well and probably in a much cheaper manner... the market competition would force you to LOWER your costs of production if you wanted to actually SELL your shit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valorisation

The thing is value is more of a macro phenomena. Marx claims prices as they empirically appear throughout the economy are a factor of value but they don't coincide and can't. There exists an average rate of profit and for this to exist value has to be redistributed between branches of the economy as they all have different compositions of labour to fixed-capital. As industry (and agriculture) globally becomes less labour intensive the rate of profit should tend to diminish.

>>12273698
It werks

>>12273810
People performed concrete labour before any "aggregate demand" ever existed... even animals perform that sort of activity. However it didn't create "exchange-value" only "use-value". Cost and price emerged historically. Quantified abstract labour, progressively rationalized under management, is revolutionary in that it aims at reducing the necessary labour inputs to a minimum.
You're 100% right that capitalism wouldn't exist without "demand" but it also wouldn't exist without the labour process. How labour is understood by an accountant, labourer, industrial manager, or stock speculator would all be different. When you claim labour is "not a determining factor of values"... well that is exactly what Marxs whole theory of surplus value intends to disprove. Prices are only ever determined in regards with the aggregate value structure. Try to seriously understand what you're criticising.

>>12273698
>says something that makes perfect sense
>gives an example that makes perfect sense
>What is this nonsense?
are you actually retarded? this further begs the question: how can someone so retarded form sentences?

>>12273777
>voluntary transactions of labour is theft
okay hun


>>12273781
prove it

>>12273911
>implying capatialism is voluntary in 2018
Fucking lol

>>12273911
Not who you're responding to but this is very important point. The thing is most self proclaimed "Marxists" are essiently Proudhonists. They don't move beyond demanding the "full value" for their goods produced. Theft is a pure legal conception... Marx never polemicized on wage labour as if it was actually theft (Proudhon did because he admired small individual proprietorship) since it is a pointless criticism... your not going to make factory owners feel morally guilty over anything they do. The law is a creation to protect class interests. If I download an mp3 today without paying I am a robber and a threat to a way of existence. This is a good example because the marginal costs are really effectively notting but the price is maintained by a friendly legal system so in this instance maybe Proudhonists should be a friend of the state for all those poor artists?

Marx wanted to understand the limits of the system of waged labour... it's not a criticism of being "inadequately reimbursed" but exchange-value as such. Capital mediates everything today and can't be simply morally condemned out of existence.

>>12273893
>People performed concrete labour before any "aggregate demand" ever existed...


No they didn't
And it doesn't matter if it's aggregated demand or simple demand.

You are hunting because you are hungry.
Not the other way around.

You didnt read shit. Almost everyone who thinks this is what Labor Theory of Value means have only read Wiki articles and dismissive summaries from other writers.

>>12273763
>There would be no products without labor; all value of a product is added by the labor which creates it

(1) These two propositions don't follow from one another.

(2) The value of a product can fluctuate over its lifetime. The amount of labor that went into a it does not.

>>12273763

>>12274183
>y-y-you jus don geddid!

Okay son. Always the same razzle-dazzle with you, but alright.

>>12274183
This. It reminds me of fedoras thinking human imperfections, or the existence of suffering or something like that disprove Christianity

sign value theory reconciles all of this

>>12274201
it's cool how people screenshoot and save their own dumb posts for all the world to see

>>12273698
>So, if I buy a bunch of expensive caviar, eat it and take a fat shit, that shit is worth the cost of the caviar.
Yes sir. Poo is socially valuable in Mumbai, also please buy BCHSV kind sir

>>12273698
you think it takes the same amount of labour to fish/harvest roe than it does to take a shit?

>>12273780
>what is use-value
brainlets, every ltv thread

>>12273810
cost != value
cost is supposedto tend toward value, which equals congealed labour time

>>12273893
Exchange is only a specific form of use and is entirely taken into account in the value of something.

>>12273893
Also costs did not originate 'historically' except in the manner that everything in the world is history.
Costs are the next utility that is foregone when doing an action. It is intrinsic to any kind of action, even to primitives.

>>12274208
Exactly, it's so obvious it just comes from an echo chamber where they just beat up strawmen and cherry picked opponents. It's a lot easier to argue with screencaps of SocDem twitter thots than it is to read even just one chapter of Capital and then these faggots put on their smug Ben Shapiro face and say "so if I put 10 hour into making a mudpie it's worth more than a diamond I found on the ground? checkmate, jews."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Prove me wrong

Marx claims that socially necessarily labor time is the quantity possessed by all commodities that enables exchange to take place at all. Furthermore, he elaborates that money is no exception to this, as in, commodity money is literally money because socially necessary labor was expended in its extraction from the ground and minting, so that exchange to/from the money commodity is possible. Nowadays, we push a button to create a few hundred billion dollars.

Clearly we have a problem in Marxian theory, among other problems, like the possibility of actually calculating social labor hours that went into a product, explaining basically all of mainstream economic theory, etc. and every Marxist will give a different answer as to how this should be done.

>>12274437
Cost equating value would make the action useless. Cost is always necessarily lower than value acquired in any act.
Even if you mean negative cash flow (which is a specific and often secondary cost) this is wrong.

>>12274472
you're having the wrong discussion.
If anything you could be saying
>Everything should be worth only what its purchaser will pay for it.
and maybe then defend a system that is design to fail.

>>12274472
Okay, how does the purchaser decide how much they are willing to pay for it? Under what circumstances is this exchange happening? This is more of a shallow truism than it is any grounding economic principle.

>>12274476
>every Marxist will give a different answer as to how this should be done.
>every post-marcist will propose a different answer to an issue that came after marx
like, yeah?
You're only focusing on a type of labor that less than 0.01% of the world does and is directly tied to the rest of the process. You can't base your whole understanding on a leech. If anything they are closer to land owners, a class hated even by Adam Smith. There will be bad players, you're not supposed to reward them and fix the world around them.

>>12273698
>So, if I buy a bunch of expensive caviar, eat it and take a fat shit, that shit is worth the cost of the caviar.
is a piece of your shit a commodity with a use-value that's produced for the purpose of being sold on a market? no? then the theory isn't concerned with it.
>Clearly we have a problem in Marxian theory, among other problems, like the possibility of actually calculating social labor hours that went into a product
Marx never claims to be able to calculate SNLT; it's only theoretically calculable to begin with. the theory's soundness doesn't hinge on being able to calculate value.

>>12274502
second part meant for: >>12274476

>>12274490
The person assigns his own preferences to different objects. If he prefers one pound to an apple he may exchange with a guy that prefers an apple to one pound.
Every one has own own preferences and they are the ultimate given of economics, perhaps they may constitute a problem of psychology but economics has nothing to say about them.

>>12274508
that doesn't consider taxes and without them how are you gonna retain the benefits of the state that made the apple available in the first place like roads, security or the education that made the exchange workable for the masses?

>>12274527
Corporations are subordinates of the State that exist with their sanction for the purposes of providing various goods in an efficient manner. There's no contradiction here.

>>12274476
>the possibility of actually calculating social labor hours that went into a product

Why exactly, would this be necessary?

Do you honestly think it would change a thing that you could calculate how much surplus value the capitalist actually exploited from his workers?

>>12274508
cost isn't a personal preference you nonce. it doesnt matter how much I prefer gold to be worth 10 dollars an ounce because the market disagrees. in fact, you could say price is determined by every other preference but your own

>>12274533
but they don't want to be subordinate, they want to be in control of the state. That's why you need specific legislation, otherwise the jews/repitilians/capitalists will abuse as much as they can before they get killed by angry peassants. History sort of proves that this is the eventual route of a system without market laws.

>>12274549
>but they don't want to be subordinate, they want to be in control of the state.
Yes, and you can blame liberals for the takeover.

>>12274540
It would greatly promote basic industries, the basic example is cuba exchanging sugar cane with russia for tractors to improve production at the price of work hours. That way both economies benefit and grow. There is no need to have a distopian world where the majority are functionally slaves while a few get more money than they'll ever need. I don't get why you'd push for a bad end.

>>12274533

I dont think so. It depends. In China maybe, but in America I'd say the state is largely subordinate to corporations.

>>12274544
you still put upward or downward pressure on prices by purchasing or not purchasing something
>>12274549
they still have an incentive to keep the state providing the market infrastructure they need to function
>>12274554
everyone wants to be in control of the state

>>12273698
Technically the shit is worth more

>>12274566
Yes, because socialism with Chinese characteristics is more sane than American liberalism. The entire point of British Liberalism is to set the State at war with itself so that corporations can do whatever they want.

>>12274566
this is really a feature of representative governments

>>12274567
>they still have an incentive to keep the state providing the market infrastructure they need to function
in theory, but in practice they don't
you can even see how Amazon just asks for tax money to set shop and then invests in alternative distribution routes to avoid sharing their common needs with other industries even though they make the product they sell. You also have mass firings to increase the yearly cost by taking out sallaries even though they need those workers to make the product, Tesla being another example of this.
Corporations tend to go against the shared well being to increase reveneu even if it will hurt them on the long term because they are designed for short term success. You can't ignore reality when talking about economy.

>>12274508
you're just using "value" to mean utility or demand. Marx doesn't claim that labor-time determines either of those things. Marx is using "value" to mean a theoretical unobservable that governs the rate at which commodities exchange for each other. unless you have an argument for why THAT is subjective, I don't see what your problem with the theory is.

Is this book difficult to read?

>>12274597
not really. it'll just take a while.

>>12274577
There's a reason America is structured the way it is, after all. It was very carefully designed to benefit corporations.

>>12274597
it's long and it has a considerably more formulas than Plato

>>12274602
this
the constitution literally says it exists to protect the few from the many and they weren't talking about blacks or trannies.

>>12274609
>the constitution literally says it exists to protect the few from the many and they weren't talking about blacks or trannies.
On the contrary, blacks and trannies are used for the sake of going to war with society insofar as society represents a threat to profit or control over the State (which implies access to the wealth generated by it). Quite literally the worst form of government ever created.

>>12274558
It literally wouldn't change a thing because the entire world is still capitalist.

>>12274592
this is because no one interest or collection of symbiotic interests has completely captured the state
>>12274595
and you're using "value" to mean some made up intrinsic quality
how is the rate at which exchanges occur unobservable? have you never purchased anything in your life?

>>12274615
any group can be used for any purpose, it's not the individual's fault.
besides that I really didn't get your post, if you could reword it maybe I could keep the convo going further than that general truth.

>>12274595
this

>>12274597
Difficult as in fairly dry, yeah, unless you're especially interested in the subject matter. But most of it is straightforward and builds very consistently on itself, you should definitely keep notes in your own words though.

>>12274558
You're still a serf of the State under Communism, and any other form of government, really. The State needs to pay for its upkeep, at the very least. inb4 no state under Communism, not happening in the real world.

>>12274622
>and you're using "value" to mean some made up intrinsic quality
intrinsic would imply immutable, so no. value can change over time.
>how is the rate at which exchanges occur unobservable? have you never purchased anything in your life?
I didn't say that the rate at which commodities exchange for each other is unobservable. I said that what Marx posits as the governing force behind this (i.e., "value") is unobservable.

https://youtu.be/dGT-hygPqUM
https://youtu.be/D4MbUx-il6c
https://youtu.be/UltE6U4t8Vc
..

>>12274630
I would agree there is no accounting for taste and precise prices cannot be predicted

>>12274655
well, when you say "prices," do you mean market prices (I assume you do because you prefaced it with "taste")? the theory isn't a theory of market prices.

>>12274617
you don't need to go all out or burst, it's more than possible to slowly lean one way, the same way people slowly lean right wing and go from disliking blacks or trannies to saying the church is great. The whole jump seems absurd but incremental changes change people.

>>12274219
based

>>12274219
this but unironically

>>12273698
>>value of a product is equal to cost/amount of labor
>cost of labor
it literally claims the opposite of this.

>>12274676
By Marx's own logic it should be. Price is just the exchange value of a given commodity K and the money commodity $. The money commodity has value because socially necessary labor was done upon it to make it into the money commodity in the first place, or else it would not be a commodity. If two commodities K, K' have the same exchange value, the same number of social labor hours were done to produce K and K'. Since $ is commodity money it follows that the exchange ratios K/$ and K'/$ should be the same, as in, have the same price.

>>12274748
the idea is that value is a center-of-gravity around which market price will fluctuate due to supply and demand. so two commodities could theoretically have the same SNLT required for their production but have different market prices depending on supply and demand.

>>12274124
People fulfilled their needs and desires without market mediation for most of human history. You seem to misunderstand the term "demand" since it can mean different things. To economists "aggregated demand" is what's actually really purchased on all markets. The thing is I can still "demand" things, psychologically, I can't afford and this information isn't transmitted on markets.
In a primitive society people hunt when their hungry but this isn't the organizing principle of how labour is managed in a society based upon capital accumulation.

>>12274439
Exchange-value is a quantitative empirical price which emerges in market relations, use-value is a pure qualitative evaluation (more specifically outside the context of market relations).

>>12274447
A cost is simply an empirical price actually paid on a market. You're trying to deploy a theory here to attempt to explain cost as a phenomena. The reality is markets didn't always exist and relations to objects in pre-market societies wasn't mediated by any empirical costs.

>>12274472
That's just a truism, it doesn't give any substantive explanation of anything however.. A theory of price and profit is more than just pointing out things are being exchanged.

>>12274756
Even then, everything I wrote in >>12274748 should be true on average, though, so replace K, K', $ by <K>, <K'>, <$>.

>>12274775
you're right. labor-time will determine equilibrium price, under certain conditions, if that's what you're saying.

>>12274786
I was disputing the claim that labor theory isn't an equilibrium price theory, which it necessarily must be by Marx's logic. I don't think it's a correct equilibrium price theory, but it is definitely a price theory.

>>12273698
Lol is the cover making fun of piketty
Pretty creative

>>12274795
oh I see. yes, I agree it's an equilibrium price theory (though certain Marx scholars disagree). my original point was that it's not a theory of market prices, because equilibrium price is only a specific kind of market price. I was just trying to say that the theory doesn't seek to replace supply and demand models, for example.

>>12273763
>>12273768
To claim it is theft for an employer to "take" profit from the worker is ignoring how worker pay is determined in the first place.

Worker pay isn't determined by the value of the product. Worker pay is determined by two factors:

1) How much value you create for the company; and
2) how difficult it is to replace you.

The cashier at a store brings in thousands of dollars each day but is only paid $9/hour. Why? Because a cashier can be replaced by just about anyone with only 30 minutes of training to work the cash register.

The guy who cleans out septic tanks is paid much more. Why? Because it may not be a service everyone needs frequently, there aren't many people willing to get into the ground and handle shit for a living. That's why they get paid more.

>>12273698
How can you call it plain wrong if no economists ever agree on a theory of value lmao?

>>12274868
but the action holders could be replaced with literally nothing.
your system only applies to those who create the actual product and do the actual transactions; it's punishing the vital parts of the system in favor of the imaginary hereditary ones.

>>12274874
The vast majority of economists adhere to neoclassical value theory. Marxian-derived theories are largely relegated to a few departments (UMass, New School) or non-economists.

>>12274868
I don't see how Marx's theory of exploitation ignores that wages are in part determined by how difficult it is to replace a worker.

>>12274899
>The vast majority of economists in the US adhere to neoclassical value theory
ftfy

OP post shows why only people with IQ higher than 120 can understand Marxism. Otherwise you become a right winger.

>>12274868
You just presented two different theories:
1. wages correspond to "value added"
2. wages are determined by scarcity of skills
I presume by "value added" that's a function of the scarcity. You're just getting at supply and demand. Wages are of course notting more than a mere cost to any given firm. Every firm wants to minimize costs to maximize returns. Also a firms income is determined by its sales. Notting special, all micro prospective. The question is... is labour really just a cost like all other costs? Now think about the aggregate profit and wage in the economy. If "exploitation" exists it's only collectively occurring. The wages paid out must be worth less than the collective product output is worth. Than how can the collective product be sold? That's the magic of finance capital.

>>12274799
it's kinda lame tho

>>12275030
>1. wages correspond to "value added"
Marxist theory claims that wages are a portion of the social product given to the proletariat for their labor after the bourgeosie has expropriated their share (everything here is measured in labor hours)

>2. wages are determined by scarcity of skills
Marxist theory claims that skilled labor hours are equivalent to (a larger number of) unskilled labor hours. How? Most Marxists claim that a skilled worker performed socially necessary labor to acquire said skills so that their labor hours are worth more than free unskilled labor.

>>12273698
You could essentially use the same argument to discredit the works of Adam Smith and David Ricardo aswell.

>>12273763
k so if a worker were to eat the caviar, then poop it out, then he would have increased the value of the product, as the amount of labor invested has increased. So the worker's poop is worth more than the caviar he consumed, correct?

bib bib bicu bicu big man jeans apron velho chest machine poopy diarrhea smell stinky xd dog eat my poopoo

poopy pants
diaper smell

schoolhouse 1st grade xd xd stinky bib rotten diarrhea in pants xdd play with furry pet hamster balls diarrhea on hamster xdd teacher smell poop in my big man pants xd sent to principal office principal smell poop i poop in face xdddddd

play with smelly poop mom toys!!!!!!!!!!!! bib bicu bicu diaper diarrhea smelly stinky xdd dirty shirt diaper leak full of stinking diarrhea xddd sprey poop on tv xdd eat pet goldfish lol

xddd daddy smell pee in big fat poop diaper lol like big babby smell xd

eat pooopy mom food!!! sniff dinner plate xd poop on table xdd diarrhea on mom shirt xddddd like binky babby big big bicu xd lol

xddddd diaper stinking in bed xddd wear big man jeans full of rotten stink poop xddd lol like babby leak xdd on apron like velho chest stinky poop machine lol

stinky stinky poop on dog face xddd dog eat my weenie xddd

play with furry pet dog butt xdd poop on dog face barf sniff like great big babby fart xd

binky babby fat poop diaper lol mom smell poo in diaper xdd change diaper diarrhea explode in face xxddddd mom cries like big babby poop on daddy face lol xd

binky babby food like big man smell xdd hike poop on blackberries like velho chestmachine poopy diaper on trail xd dad change on cow i poop cow xdddddd diarrhea stinking beans fart xdddddddddddddd

balls in diaper xdd sweaty balls full of stinky poop diaper leak xdd poop in bed ruin covers xdddd

stinky pooop xddd poop in recess kids run away xddd rub poop on teacher big stinky babby fart lol poopy pants full of stinky diarrhea

xd toilet paper stuck in butt xddd covered stinky rotten poop xddd like babby smell velho xd poopy pants in big man jeans xdd underwear diaper leak stinky smelly poopy diarrhea lol

>>12276041
unless shit made from caviar has some special use-value I'm unaware of, then no, you don't need caviar to produce shit. there are a lot of good arguments against the ltv, but this isn't it anon.

>>12276051
this pwned so many internetz

>>12276051
Based and Dadapilled

>>12276041
>>12276056
if a worker uses all the calories in the caviar to convert raw materials into finished goods does that make those goods worth the same as the caviar that got converted into poop?

>>12276114
If the whole moon was made out of weed would you smoke it?

>>12276123
I think weed has a cancerous culture around it

>>12273763
God I hate communists.

It's just an excuse for revolution, look up the correspondence of the Illuminati that (((accidentally))) was found out after a lightning storm. Not so oddly, the Rothschilds and Freemasons rose at the same time

>>12276206
the absolute state of anti-Marxists

What if a capitalist just does everything himself? Who is he stealing labor from them? I am convinced that Marxism is some low key rhetorical exercise like flat earth theory or something.

>>12276206
>the Illuminati
You know absoultly notting of our doings

>>12276239
exploitation comes from the appropriation of labour value; a capitalist who has no workers isn't a capitalist, he's just a craftsman.

>>12275958
Maybe David Ricardo and Adam Smith in fact wrote flawed works based on a bad value theory.

>>12276239
if he didn't employ any workers he wouldn't be exploiting any workers, that's right.

>>12276253
Isn't that self-exploitation in Marxist theory? It depends on which Communist you ask, of course.

>>12273698
>Have a bunch of people use individual brushes paint a face on a really big rock
>The rock now has more value than a bucket of water gathered from a river

>>12276274
that's why value, for Marx, is determined by the average amount of time is takes to reproduce a good, not the specific time a specific laborer takes.

>>12276288
Does the piece of art not count as a good that can be reproduced?

>>12274758
>In a primitive society people hunt when their hungry but this isn't the organizing principle of how labour is managed in a society based upon capital accumulation.
Capital has always been accumulating as long as simple demand has existed. You're just dividing history into arbitrary stages in order to ad-hoc justify a flawed sublative methodology.

>>12276310
depends. works of art generally aren't considered freely reproducible goods, due to things like copyright, but mostly because competitors can't enter the market to produce them. if this rock is some sort of generic, mass-produced toy or something, then it would be considered freely reproducible.

>>12276239
That doesn't make any sense. You have to enter into relations to be a capitalist. I suppose you mean someone who owns stocks or bonds providing them a yield... it's just a highly reified form abstracted from the concretes of the actual value generation process.

>>12276273
There's no such thing as self-exploitation, ya there does exist self-employed individuals but the tendency is still towards proletarianization.

>>12276310
No, that's why they can capture monopoly rents like land can.

>>12276315
Capital isn't physical tools, it's the social relations of waged labour under which rationalization of the production process can be carried out. People have to not own the productive resources they use before they become agents that work against them.

>>12276322
How does copyright exist in Marxism though?

>>12276340
Is being a serf wage labor? What is an example of non-waged labor? How does Communism accomplish non-wage labor?

>>12276362
I don't know what you mean by "in Marxism." the labor theory of value is a theory of capitalist economies.

>>12276340
>it's the social relations of waged labour under which rationalization of the production process can be carried out.
This arbitrary distinction in defining capital is the linchpin of Marx's entire value-form. Since I'm too lazy to find the original quote in my .pdf file, I'll just steal the Wikipedia block text from David Steele's book on economic calculation:
>[...] any input could be chosen as a creator of value [...] Thus a 'paper theory of value' would hold that prices were ultimately determined by values, defined as quantities of 'socially necessary paper' (measured in pounds weight). The organic composition of capital would be the ratio of non-paper means of production to paper, and it would be asserted that only paper created new value, and therefore surplus-value. The whole of Capital could be rewritten, substituting 'paper' for 'labor'. Exploitation of paper-owners would occur because they do not really sell their paper, but rather their 'paper-power'. Goods requiring no paper inputs would be regarded as having 'imaginary prices', just as Marx regarded salable goods which require no labor inputs. The same thing, of course, could be done with 'electricity', 'liquid', 'metal', or 'machines', or it could be done with 'capital' (constant capital, which would then have to be renamed variable capital), thus showing that the capitalist class produces all wealth and is exploited by other classes, especially the wholly unproductive working class, which contributes no capital and therefore no value. To provide support for Marx's theory, it is necessary to show both that prices can be mathematically derived from labor-values (the transformation problem) and to present a good argument why we would wish to do this - why the class of inputs known as 'labor' should be given this privileged position in the determination of prices.

>>12276382
I mean in the stateless utopia that is the end goal of Marxism?

>>12276391
well copyright wouldn't exist in communism, right.

>>12274472
Ok I will try my best.
Suppose there's a spoon factory and a car factory, and somehow they each get their hands on this graph showing exactly how much they're producing vs the demand and they find out that they're both EXACTLY at this point (equilibrium). They're producing EXACTLY the ammount required to satisfy demand.
Obviously the car factory is producing less cars than the spoon factory produces spoons, because the demand is much smaller. But if supply and demand determines price, does that mean that the spoon and the car will cost the same?
No. Why is the equilibrium point signifying different prices for each then? Costs of labour obviously. This is what Marx gets at with the LTV, that what is at the heart of prices is labour costs

>>12276369
Waged labour is when someone "freely" sells their ability to labour on a market for a limited amount of time in exchange for a payment in cash. Wage labour didn't play much of a role under feudalism obviously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom
The grand majority of labour has been performed under various forms of unfree labour relations throughout the history of class society (that is since the invention of agriculture). Only primitive hunter gather societies experienced as close to true freedom as you can get in terms of relations to their environments and social relations. How waged labour can be abolished is an open question which will historically be solved and capitalism plays its part in this.

>>12276430
>Only primitive hunter gather societies experienced as close to true freedom as you can get in terms of relations to their environments and social relations.
So Communism is like neo-primitivism where fully-automated production produces goods as if they were the gifts of nature? This is about the best I have been able to grasp as to what Communism is supposed to look like if there is no wage labor, no state, etc.

>>12276437
Yes, society arrives back at where it began but on a higher level... the entire history of class society and fixity was a detour and real history begins at this point... that is after value breaks down due to its own internal contradictions. Marx was working on his Ethnological Notebooks before he died.

>>12276483
Why won't someone just create hierarchy again?

>>12276491
That's a good question. You would have to study the historical emergence of agriculture and early state formation and how/why unfree forms of life were imposed in the first place. [1] Once "communism" emerges, in a real sense, could it be overthrown? That's all speculation. Capitalism exists and that's all that can be analysed today.

[1] See: "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States"

>>12276405
Why are they priced differently? Because producing a car is more much expensive than producing a spoon due to all the extra materials. The spoons would be more expensive, on the other hand, if the silver to make them was much rarer and harder to come by than the material used in the cars. In other words, the value is determined moreso by the scarcity of material and what people value the material at.

instead of debating what determines worth, a better discussion is the morality of having a system of currency in the first place.

"All value is derived from labor" is just acknowledging that humans cannot creatio ex nihilo, we can only manipulate things that already exist

>>12276560
well, the theory claims that there's a much stronger link between labor and value than just that.

>>12276527
>things are priced differently because they have different costs of production
>their costs of production are a result of the rarity of inputs

no mention of degree of competition? commodity production is about going beyond rarity, revolutionizing the production process... the labor embodied in any category of commodity tends to decrease over time... that's the novel insight

>>12276536
>>12276536
How is it not inevitable? Sociologically, people desire things, there must be a barter and exchange in place for these people no matter what their mentality is. Currency can, and should, change form, but some form of it must exist, no?

>>12276527
>extra materials
indirect costs of labour. car pieces cost money because in turn they were worked on and thus have value.
Things like diamonds or other rare minerals have permanently unbalanced supply and demand because of their rarity and general desire of people to get them, so trying to find their "labour value" would be pretty pointless. Marx would probably not argue with that.
The LTV works when dealing with a whole full scale economy, where aggregate demand and supply "equilibrate", and its been found that when dealing with whole sectors of the economy, real prices correlate more than 90% with the LTV.

>>12276536
well, communism theoretically IS about eventually abolishing money

>>12276576
I dont understand your point, are you essentially arguing that rarity of a good will cease to exist? if so then yes, the value will change. but it doesnt seem like we are anywhere close to that reality so why bother using it as a foundation of value

>>12273698
>Why did you recommend this trash to me?
You obviously didn't read any of Capital since this argument is addressed on like, the fifth page of chapter 1 (129 of the Penguin edition). Diamond-water arguments are a massive strawman of Marx's LTV and whoever keeps on repeating it needs to shoo. There are legitimate criticisms of LTV (NOT diamond-water), but neoclassical economics hasn't provided us with a good alternative.

Marginalism has even more dire issues inasmuch that it isn't an analysis of value, it's just an appeal to some abstract and meaningless "utility" function.

>>12273780
Well communism would champion scientific advancement as valuable in its late stage, but this scares brainlets because it would mean the retards would be killed due to being useless.

>>12276942
You didn't actually say anything with this post.

>>12276966
>OP's argument is a strawman
>You can see the actual version of LTV on a specific page of Capital
>There are also issues with marginalism
How is that not saying anything?

Does Marx ever acknowledge the use of land, capital and entrepreneurship going into a product’s production?

>>12277077
No. In thousands of pages of writing on capitalism, including a thousand page book called "Capital," he never talks about the use of capital going into a product's production. Not once.

You think that would be important, huh?

>>12277077
if by land you mean raw materials, yes. that, along with other physical capital inputs like machinery, make up what Marx calls constant capital. for Marx, these inputs don't create value in themselves, but rather transfer value embodied in them from the labor involved in extracting/producing them. I'm not sure what you mean by entrepreneurship, could you expand on that?

>>12274472
>Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
If you bought into that line of thinking, you probably got ripped off several times without you knowing it.

>>12273698

Is this bait or are you fucking stupid?

When you eat caviar you destroy it's value as it becomes shit so no point being made here.

It cost roughly 2000 calories to produce a decent shit which is very cheap in term of amount of labor.

So your shit will be worth nothing and Marx was 100% right.

Now, eat a bid diamond and shit it and I will gladly eat your shit.

>>12277731
Why is it worth nothing after OP takes a SHIT? He put in his labour into existing capital, with LoTV in mind, shouldn’t he be able to sell his SHIT with profit?

>>12277750
burning down a house is also labor but it takes away value. making a phone that explodes takes more or less the same labor to make one that works but on was poorly made.
labor isn't always good and you don't get the same result, technology isn't magic.

>>12276391
>>12276398
to develop this a little further
if the surplus is redistributed instead of hoarded everyone's needs could be covered, meaning that artists could exchange their works for extra money or pure status (for example donating your work to people you want to impress).
They would still have to work like everyone else but work times could become more maleable without the owners wanting to meet goal lines, the 4chan example being video game companies complaining that the best selling games they ever did didn't seel as much as they told the investors.

>>12276536
I find it really funny how in the US marxists feel that an emotional appeal should be the most obvious way to make people agree and that the left fail because it focused too much on economic elements that can be easily made amoral and abusive without angering people.
In my country it's the other way around. If it economically makes more sense then that's what should be done, modern liberal structures are just a fairy tale that has never actually worked for us and has no standing besides the weird morality tale of hard work that doesn't correlate with who owns the wealth.

>>12276956
why would you kill the people you freed?
just let them roll around and watch tv or whatever future entertainment they get.

>>12277781
How do you quantify and qualify the labour? Why is some labour good and other bad and how do you measure it’s goodness or badness?

go back to /pol/ you faggots

>>12277941
labor isn't measured in terms of "good" and "bad." if labor is not necessary in the production of a commodity, it doesn't create value, for Marx.

>>12277952
You keep begging the question. When marx says ”necessary” how does he benchmark it? Does he keep a list of goods that necessarily require labor input? Does he have a principle akin a function for determining the needed labour?

>>12277961
well socially necessary labor time is just the average amount of time taken by a worker of average skill and productivity at a given time and place in the reproduction of a certain commodity. this is an abstraction. he's not using "necessary" in its literal meaning. the SNLT may very well be higher than the bare-minimum necessary amount of labor-time needed to produce a commodity.

>>12273698
its almost like communism has been tested on a scale unlike no other in human history and the results have been incredibly consistent. Theres not much to it beyond that. Sympathy and collectivism has consuming aspects, governments taking the mommy position to orchestrate equity just leads to the monopolization of power and therefore corruption of it. Its kind of annoying to keep going back to socialist literature because some people wont pick up the pattern of failure and not see the flaw in its logic and misunderstanding of human nature. I wouldnt call Karl Marx or many socialists particularly oriented toward the scientific method anyway, many tend to be postmodern and deny the concept of truth or facts in the first place. Its all power and social constructs, so they can ignore the evidence as it is merely an illusion imposed by those in power to maintain their monopoly and suppress attempts to change the status quo.

I have met alot of postmodernists in uni, professors as well. They seem to believe there is no difference between fact and propoganda, to where they are one in the same thing at the same time. I cant really understand it fully because im not some fucking psychologist and I can just make these basic observations.

>>12277980
the value of a good is based on how much labour was put into it measured based on the averager worker productivity. But certain labour is not valuable, like shitting out caviar or burning down a house. When asked why certain labour is bad and others good the response given is that there is no such thing as good or bad labour and that its measured based on how much work was put into it

Unless im very confused this is circular logic

>>12277992
what does the labor theory of value, a theory of capitalist economies, have to do with communism?
>>12277994
I think you're too hung up on the idea of "labor creates value." Marx is just saying that there is a theoretical unobservable that governs the rate at which freely reproducible commodities exchange for each other in capitalist economies, and that this unobservable (what Marx calls "value") is determined by the socially necessary amount of labor time
required to produce a commodity. it's not a metaphysical claim. Marx doesn't think that all labor creates value, so I'm not sure what your objection is.

>>12278011
My problem is that he makes this abstraction called ”value” which definitely smells metaphysical, which is ironic coming from a materialist. I have no problems with abstractions but to me it seems a lot more likely that goods dont have objective value in them selves but is rather dictated by the demand of society and humans

>>12278025 I can assure you that it's not a metaphysical claim. For Marx, value is socially constructed and therefore mutable. "value" in the theory really doesn't operate any different from how any theoretical unobservable operates in any other scientific theory.
>I have no problems with abstractions but to me it seems a lot more likely that goods dont have objective value in them selves but is rather dictated by the demand of society and humans
here, you're using "value" in its more conventional sense - that is, to mean utility or desire. Marx isn't claiming that labor-time determines either of those things, so your view wouldn't be at odds with the theory.

>>12278011
the book, and by extension all of his work, have all been practiced, tested and disproven. Its like your saying what does individualism have to do with Ayn Rands economic beliefs. Karl Marx was wrong about capitalism the same way he was wrong about everything else, all of his beliefs are interconnected. I dont need to repeat what everyone else in this thread has already said, stating that the mans a sham of an intellectual and that hes wrong from the base up is something new unless you want to continue the circular arguing going on in the thread.

>>12278078
I'm saying that OP made a thread about the labor theory of value, and you responded by talking about how communism is a failure. I don't see how the failures of communism have anything to do with the labor theory of value, unless you're just taking this thread to be a general Marx thread. when you say something like this ("the book, and by extension all of his work, have all been practiced, tested and disproven") it leads me to believe that you think that Capital is a book about communism, when it's actually about capitalism.

>>12278078
It's really weird when you talk with science terms but you don't grasp scientific methodology at all.
You don't do a single test and you don't let your test be affected by external factors. This is very basic stuff and it worries me that you might apply such an empty abuse of science to hard sciences too. You know Saturn was proven to not be where Saturn is until it was proven it was? That's how it works.

The value of a produc is the raw materials cost plus labour.

Well it's one of the fundamentals. If you can't sell your product for at least that price, your business is doomed. There comes in supply and demand, and how desireble a product is.

You take the example of a watch. A watch kost X, and every body needed a watch. So they would sell. Nowdays everybody has a watch on their phone. So you won't be able to sell watches on demand alone. You need a watch that people desire. People will buy things they desire even if they don't need them. That is something karl marx forgot. But still you'll need the product to sell for more than the raw materials and the labour.

>>12273698
Marx couldn't conceive of risk even though he had a gambling problem, you don't need to take him seriously as an economic critic just enjoy the historical meme and feel superior to teens and most nonstem grad students as you read his work.

>>12278140
>That is something karl marx forgot.
luxury items aren't a meaningful part of the economy, taking them as a consideration in a general theory is as dumb as thinking it's a wise investment of your personal money.

>>12278140
>The value of a produc is the raw materials cost plus labour.
not the constant capital inputs' COST but their VALUES.
>People will buy things they desire even if they don't need them. That is something karl marx forgot.
how did Marx forget this?

>>12278147
how did Marx ignore risk?

>>12278170
>Labor generates value
>Capital owns means of production
>Capital benefits from labor
Except for all those times capital gets spent, labor makes money, and capital doesn't make any profit. Risk.

>>12273763
Or maybe the people who harvest the caviar don’t know how to market their caviar?

>>12273780
Value is abstract. Why do people take Marx seriously in 2018?

>>12278192
Because boomers got tenure and hold the cushiest jobs in existence teaching humanities courses at major universities

>>12278108
I grasp it perfectly well and you have no evidence to suggest otherwise, youre just being smug and pretending to be concerned. You dont even know what tests Im talking about, you think im reffering to a single test? Im reffering to the hundreds of failed attempts to implement his ideas throughout all of the years, and time and time again contrarians come along to attempt to suggest that perhaps it wasn't a good enough test the last time. When did I even say science anyway? The tests are pattern recognition, because you cant scientifically test if some vague idea that you cant even call a scientific theory in the first place. Its all conjecture. If you want the counter conjecture, scroll up. Theres no point repeating what everyone else has already said. My point is exactly that theres a hell of a correlation between Karl Marx and catastrophic failure and a lack of credibility. You seem to be to one failing to understand something very basic. Theres nothing more to be said here besides insulting the others character or troll. Good sign of when to let a thread die.

>>12278182
Marx's theory of exploitation isn't an ethical one. or, I should say, you could disagree about whether or not the capitalist deserves surplus value, but that wouldn't have a bearing on the accuracy of the theory in describing where profit originates in the capitalist mode of production.
>>12278192
>Value is abstract.
Marx agrees!

>>12278202
>people who grew during the cold war are really into marxism
>american college doesn't constantly produce neoliberal think tanks
your persecution complex is really weird

>>12278219
You're the one with the imaginary think tanks

>>12278217
OK. The value comes from at least some amount of random chance, and is not entirely given by the worker.
The capitalist deserves the profit.
Cool to find out that marx would agree with me on this.

>>12274208
Suffering does disprove Christianity though

>>12278227
>OK. The value comes from at least some amount of random chance
don't know what you mean by "random chance."
>and is not entirely given by the worker.
Marx doesn't think that value is solely produced by the workers that the capitalist employs, but by human labor, ultimately, as the value transferred to the final product from constant capital inputs are themselves a product a human labor.
>The capitalist deserves the profit.
don't see how this follows. but regardless, it's not relevant to the accuracy of the theory.

>>12278227
>The capitalist deserves the profit.
the capitalist deserves a profit.
why would he deserve all of it? the laborer is risking their health, well being and the time it took to develop their skills.
there is risk in both parts and both loose if they fail.

>>12278250
Capitals risking all their capital, probably worth more then the workers health and well being and time.
>Loose

>>12278239
>Suffering does disprove Christianity though
Perfectly on cue. Nobody who as actually read any Christian thought would think such a thing

>>12278239

>>12278712
>Christian
>thought