/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17092756]

I'm reading Das Kapital, and his theory of value just seems wrong. 20 linen = 1 coat, but isn't that subjective to the society? If everyone starts to think that coats are amazing, then it might be 40 linen = 1 coat. And if there is some objective value based on the amount of labor put into the commodity, why should we care? That is not how most people look at value. I understand what he is going for, but it just seems obviously wrong. I've heard some defenses of LTV, but they all seem to exist in some philosophical vaccuum that does not matter at all in the real world.

Are there any good books, videos, or articles that could successfully defend it? I am sympathetic to Marxist theory, but this has left me disappointed.

[Anonymous No.17092768]

>>17092756
Yes. Volume 3 of Das Kapital discussed this in detail and sees Marx abandoning the LTV for a more abstract theory of value.

[Anonymous No.17092781]

>>17092756
>but they all seem to exist in some philosophical vaccuum that does not matter at all in the real world.
???

[Anonymous No.17092821]

>>17092781
Well, it's thought that that's precisely why Marx chose that version of the LTV for Kapital, it was useful in illustrating the effect of wage theft and exploitation in greater detail. What's often missed is that Vol. 3 is a counter argument against Ricardos LTV and some outlining of Marx's Abstract Theory of Value

[Anonymous No.17092837]

>>17092781
I watched this youtube video trying to defend the LTV. If I remember correctly she was trying to say that even if some object (let's say like an old comic book) was held to be more valuable than a commodity that had more labor put into it (let's say a bike), it wouldn't matter at all. The bike would still have more value, even if everyone would be ready to pay more to get the comic book. I get the logic behind that, but it does not seem to matter at all in real life.

I dunno

[Anonymous No.17092881]

>>17092837
Well, Marx said that an item must have a socially relevant and accepted value for the labor that created it to be valuable. Your comic example goes for any system. Collectors will pay what they want for niche items such as that. The labor would be the store employees labor in running the shop that sold it, or the individual collectors labor would be him collecting it. They/He would be entitled to the profit made from the value one was willing to pay.

[Anonymous No.17092972]

>>17092881
That's true, but my problem is that there might be a store where employees work hard to sell these collector items for let's say 100 dollars. There is obviously labor put into that because the workers would be, as you said, running the store, etc. But then if some person finds a rare comic book in his attic, they can sell it for the same price without putting as much labor into that.

[Anonymous No.17092998]

>>17092972
Yes, Marx doesn't seek to destroy luck or even make every transaction equally fair. Only to ensure that the majority of the working class is entitled to the majority of the profit that his labor creates

[Anonymous No.17093038]

>>17092837
Correct. Thats why LTV is essentially debunked or at best irrelevant to the real world. There are numerous logical fallacies in LTV. Not theeast of which is that you could use two different methods:one modern and fast and precise, another antiquated and difficult and imprecise, to make the same end product. In the end, the product(s) is the same value even with different amounts of labor put into it. Especially true if the two or more methods produce an identical end.

[Anonymous No.17093236]

>>17092756
Read Michael Heinrich's An Introduction To The THree Volumes Of Capital, it helps a lot.

[Anonymous No.17093417]

>>17092756
Read closer then, because Marx does explain himself.

Marx is saying that at a given place, at a given time, if there is a generalized system of commodity exchange there will be a standard ratio at which everything at the market exchanges.

This shouldn’t be in any way controversial. If it *wasn’t* true then it would be possible to find situations where you can make money purely by buying linen from Alice and selling it to Bob. You can find “Dutch Book” situations where you can accumulate money by purely circular buying and selling. Marx points out the obvious, if there was a situation like that it wouldn’t take long for Bob and Alice to find each other and cut you out of the cycle, or demand a better price.

Marx would say that maybe early on you might be able to sell stuff circularly and make money, but once you reach a stage of generalized commodity production that sort of thing isn’t an important factor in explaining how people make money.

One thing that goes towards proving this is that in the past people would haggle over prices, in effect have a person to person contest over what they each believed the value of a given object to be, whereas today all stores in the western world list fixed, nonnegotiable prices that a buyer can either accept or not.

And to be clear Marx isn’t saying that the ratio at which two commodities trade is forever fixed. There are numerous factors which would change the ratio of exchange between linen and coats. If a new technology allows coats to be made twice as quickly then they will tend towards a ratio of 10:1 rather than 20:1. A bad cotton yield might make the amount of linen that can be made in a year less, and that too would raise its value relative to coats. The point is that while that ratio can change at any given moment in time and place there is a specific fixed ratio.

The consensus among the leading scholars is that Marx doesn’t have a ‘labour theory of value’, in the same way Smith and Ricardo did, where we understand labour as “creating” value.

The classic refutation of the idea that Marx had an LTV is Diane Elson’s “The Value Theory of Labour”. For more recent treatments I’d recommend chapter 3 of Michael Heinrich’s An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital, and “Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of Value” by David Harvey (linked below)
http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/

[Anonymous No.17093488]

>>17092756
When you go to a supermarket to buy, say, potatoes, you do know how much are they going to cost, right? You don't haggle each time. It's the same way for a capitalist producing some amount of wares. He does have an estimate how much money he will get for them. Otherwise he couldn't plan anything.
You probably didn't ever try read the book though, cause Marx explains this thing quite clearly several times.

[Anonymous No.17093490]

>>17093417
Thanks for this!
also for the recommendations .>>17093236

[Anonymous No.17093667]

>>17092837
I agree that that is the position of something like Ricardo’s LTV but that not something Marx would agree with.

I think one genuine limitation of Marx’s theory is that it’s fairly narrow. He’s only trying to explain a fairly restricted set of economic activities, and a person who gets Marx knows you need other kinds of explanations to cover things not in that domain.

Marx’s theory specifically is about generalized commodity production and exchange, and everything outside of that he has nothing to say about. Two sorts of things Marx has nothing to say about would be the pricing of unique works of art, or the pricing of items at a yard sale.

An individual work of art isn’t a commodity in the same way a hammer is, and the difference relates to the fact you are buy ‘the’ object rather than ‘a’ object of a given type. To get technical, the labour Rothko put into a given canvas can only be viewed as concrete labour, and *cannot* be incorporated into the real abstraction of ‘abstract labour’, and therefore it isn’t a commodity in the marxist sense. It’s forever and always just Rothko’s #6, and will always be bought and sold as such, never just as ‘a painting’.

With all the stuff at a yard sale, it’s the aspect of production that is missing. For you it’s just a collection of already existing items you already had on hand, and once they are sold you aren’t engaging in another act of exchange to replace your sold items with new items you are acquiring with the intent of further selling. In other words, your yard sale is outside the bigger system of generalized commodity exchange. Because it’s outside that system there are no forces baring on your prices other than your own whims, whereas a store that is engaged in generalized commodity exchange is subject to given input costs as well as the pressure of competition.

I would argue that the person who made the video you watched is missing a very important aspect of Marx’s thought in Capital if she’s trying to use the example you mentioned. Marx’s method relies on the idea of abstracting from how actual economic activity already exists in the world as it already is, and not from sort of toy model examples like Robinson Crusoe. He doesn’t start with “two men, one with corn and one with wheat”. He starts with the already existing fact of a general system of commodity exchange.

[Anonymous No.17093847]

>>17092756
YOu must understand the trade in the contextof the dialectic of exchange value which leads to value-form. This structures through the market the fluctuations of prices through their mean prices in different industries, this decides the allocation of money-capital.
The subjective explanation is completely idealistic and metaphysical itself. Yet i see this connects with the difficulty of abstraction as a notion, subjective is meant by some as arbitrary and thats part of the problem in some people reading marx. What is subjective is what is most far away from the concrete, as the here and now is the most empty and abstract as hegel shows

[Anonymous No.17093883]

>>17092756
>I am sympathetic to Marxist theory

You will never be a woman

[Anonymous No.17093888]

Reminder that Marx himself admitted labor theory is only theoretically valid and will never be used in any system of market transactions.
Marxists (and especially crypto-Marxists and tertiaries) haven't read any of Marx and don't know any of his theory, which ends up enabling the "durrr but its not REAL gommunism" mental gymnastics.

[Anonymous No.17093937]

He did not believe in it by the end
He only uses it as a way to measure "oppression"
Still retarded, modern Marxism is mostly Althusser, Marx himself is only a figurehead

[Anonymous No.17093963]

It's incredible seeing supposedly intelligent marxists discuss price discovery. It's such a simple thing but can't be done properly without a capitalist market for supply and demand info. Some communists have proposed "shadow prices" aka market prices used behind the scenes to allocate goods efficiently. That could actually work I think, but you all put so much responsibility on Marx to have gotten in right on the first try because you worship him like some kind of infallible God. Meanwhile you haven't even made it to volume 3. Really embarrassing. You make the alt right Hitler youth look intelligent and open-minded

[Anonymous No.17093994]

i stopped reading on like the third page when he assumes that two values have to be equal to a third constant and then he assumes that that must be labor

[Anonymous No.17094026]

>>17093994
Communists and anti-communists both put too much value on Marx's ideas. His contribution is class reductionism. Everything else was a shot in the dark. There is so much more communists could accomplish of they stopped trying to out-Marx each other like don't fundamentalist Christians.

[Anonymous No.17094036]

>>17094026
Marxists look at other vectors of oppression, like race and gender. There's plenty of literature on this.

[Anonymous No.17094046]

>>17094026
I'm kind of interested in alienation but I don't want to have to wade through hundreds of pages of shit to get that

[Anonymous No.17094049]

>>17094036
>other vectors of oppression, like race and gender. There's plenty of literature on this.
Sophism

[Anonymous No.17094057]

>>17094049
Why?

[Anonymous No.17094113]

>>17094057
>Marx was totally wrong about economics so lets linguistically invent new categories to apply the same logic to
>then we can align it with Marx's political eminence
>this is somehow not busted in the exact same way as the economics AND revisionist junk

[Anonymous No.17094637]

>>17093883
This was actually a relatively good thread, where people were having a real discussion, but then you came :(

[Anonymous No.17094831]

>>17094637
Dilate or the wound will close

[Anonymous No.17094840]

>Daily reminder that Marx never worked a day in his life

[Anonymous No.17094843]

>>17094036
>Marxists look at other vectors of oppression, like race and gender. There's plenty of literature on this.
nope. those are radlibs, even if they think they are communists

[Anonymous No.17094847]

>>17094840
Based

[Anonymous No.17094851]

>>17094831
lmao, chill dude

[Anonymous No.17094867]

>"They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work"

Great system Kamerad!

[Anonymous No.17094897]

>>17094637
Fuck off back to your Leddit echo chamber you shitter.

[Anonymous No.17094933]

>>17094897
>wanting people to leave because they hurt his feelings
>says that other people are in an echo chamber

[Anonymous No.17094983]

Why do lefties have this delusional idea that Marxism/Communism is lgbt friendly?

[Anonymous No.17095175]

>>17092756
>20 linen = 1 coat, but isn't that subjective to the society
What do you mean by subjective? Different societies have different levels of technological development and such but that's not "subjective" in the sense you mean probably. The question is if long run exchange ratios are the result of individual utility or something else.

>If everyone starts to think that coats are amazing, then it might be 40 linen = 1 coat
Obviously demand in reality always fluctuates but theoretically it's possible for all supply and demand to be in harmony.

>And if there is some objective value based on the amount of labor put into the commodity, why should we care
That's the entire point, Marx starts with that premises and draws conclusions about social development... and commodities don't have objective value, the value is a consequence of external temporal factors.

>>17092972
Marx is getting at macroeconomics. Individual prices really fluctuate and the price anything sells at at any time is complex but all prices in the aggregate get constrained by real value. Land obviously isn't the result of labour but always has a price.

[Anonymous No.17095722]

>>17093888
Could you give a citation for that? I've never come across that in Marx nor ever seen it mentioned in anything I've ever read about him.

>>17093937
Which texts are you referring to?

>>17093994
It doesn't exactly reflect well on you to assume he never gets around to explaining himself in a book that is literally 1000 pages. Over the span of the first 7 chapters he shows conclusively why labour has a special position compared to all other inputs, he doesn't assume it at all.

[Anonymous No.17095732]

>taking Marx seriously

No, thanks.

[Anonymous No.17095809]

>>17092756
>I'm reading Das Kapital
There's your problem

[Anonymous No.17096199]

>>17095722
Usually you give argumentation and then draw a conclusion from it, you don’t start with a conclusion then spend 1000 pages justifying it but ok

[Anonymous No.17096527]

>>17096199
Incredible you can read 0.3% of a book and still speak about it as if you know literally anything about it.

I really have no idea what you could possibly be expecting Marx to cover in literally the first three pages.

Also on the dichotomy you’re giving; a good book absolutely will state up front what the conclusion is, and then the body of the book making the case for the given thesis. I’d fully argue a major problem with Marx is that he absolutely is a writer who gives sequences of arguments who’s conclusions lead to further development. There is so much conflict in interpreting Marx exactly because he *doesnt* just give us his conclusions and he even says as much in preface to the French edition. He in fact sarcastically criticizes the French public for ‘always wanting the conclusion first’ and tells them to be more patient because “there is no Royal road to science, only those who face arduous climbs can enjoy luminous summits”.

In the first few chapters Marx will explain the assumptions he’s making, and also explain to you what the consequences of making alternative assumptions are.

And it’s really only the first three chapters that deal with the development of his conception of value. The first seven give the total meat of the theoretical part of the book. The rest is getting into the weeds on issues like technological change, piece wages vs hourly wages, struggles over the length of the work day, fixed vs changable capital and so on.

But seriously, the answers to nearly all your problems are all answered in just the first chapter. If you want to say anything about marx, please, at least read *just the first chapter*.

[Anonymous No.17096621]

>>17096527
Alright jeez

[Anonymous No.17096705]

>>17092756
Gee ya think! I worked really hard on fucking you so you have to enjoy it.
she doesn't

[Anonymous No.17096707]

>>17092756
Marx is like Freud, wrong about everybody virtually everything but he gave a basis for better ideas and theories to spring fourth

[Anonymous No.17096720]

Leftism doesn't work and has been thoroughly refuted already.

[Anonymous No.17096729]

>>17095732
Absolutely based.

[Anonymous No.17096779]

>>17094983
Trotskyists will literally do anything to appeal to "the people" to lure them in.

[Anonymous No.17097259]

>>17093038
I don't agree with LTV but Marx specifically adresses this. Value is socially necessary labor time as an average across all of industry. It's the reason why Marx would say that banging a wall with a hammer for 40 hours doesn't imbue the wall with value.

[Anonymous No.17097550]

>>17092756
You are reading Marx, what did you expected? Something smart?

[Anonymous No.17098026]

>>17092756
https://www.academia.edu/2733004/The_empirical_strength_of_the_labour_theory_of_value
And Paul Cockshott.
Re-read Marx, or read the wikipedia page. LTV only applies for goods made by producers first time (not second hand market), or reproducible, tradable goods.

[Anonymous No.17098039]

>>17093667
Fantastic post, can't convey my appreciation enough so I will just say thanks. Would you recommend any secondary literature on Marx that helped you really get the full extent of his immanent critique? I get part of the big picture, and I forced myself through Capital 1 when I was younger but I'd like to brush up my understanding in line with the perspective of your post before I just go tackle the primary texts again (don't have time right now).

[Anonymous No.17098086]

Unless you're a devout turboautist Marxist you can figure out how to generalize his social theories and pry them away from his retarded economic framework