A Question for Marxist

Does anyone genuinely understand Marx's labour theory? And I mean really, is there anything about Marx's value theory that is coherent enough to establish a consensus?

There is no consensus on the first 3 Chapters of Capital, which are probably the most important to his analysis of Capitalism.

What "abstract labour" is depends on the Marxist you ask. For example, Isaac Rubin and David Harvey say it's realized through exchange, but Marx indicates that it exist in a commodity producing society prior to bringing the commodity to exchange.

Then, how does 1 hour of complex labour become equal to 5 hours of simple labour? It isn't training, because Marx mentions that bricklaying is "complex labour" when a society is physically weak since it requires someone strong. So it seems it has to do with the relative complexity of the job, but there is no social process defined to explain complex labour.

And most importantly: how has capitalism still persisted when exchange is not commodity exchange since money is no longer a commodity. Since there is no way for value to move through the society, labour has effectively stopped being the source of value. In fact, any labour that produces a good that is traded for money has produced no value.

I'm genuine curious. the LTV just seems incoherent to me.

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therealmovement.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/how-fiat-currency-killed-marxism/
bookzz.org/book/815020/ba4b5c
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I am not qualified to answer your question OP but have a free bump.

Well the problem with Marx is that he is a philosopher before being an economist. An Hegel's pupil on top of that. As a consequence, he use and create a lot of concepts for expressing his thought, which leaves openings for different interpretations.
I'm currently struggling to get Capital

This is a good question. I'll answer in sections


Well, Marx kind of contradicts LTV a lot throughout Capital including in some kind of important principles, so not really, but (not being a marxist myself) I would think they mostly agree that it is a rule of thumb rather than a set law.


I think you've misunderstood here. It's not that is requires a social process, but that it is about the "training" required for the job (which isn't well defined, but in terms of bricklaying in a weak society one could see how the strength needed would require some sort of "training")


I think this is best explained by a quote of Marx himself, a famous one, of capital being in itself "dead labour". So you are right, money has no labour value in and of itself, but it feeds off of the value of labour.

It's pretty incoherent IMO

LTV is fucking shit, go for neo-marxian economics OP

You are not taking in consideration that Marx lived in England and in the XIX century.
You are looking at what he wrote through the perspective of a XXI century person.
You have to read about how was the times he was living to better understand why did he reached certain conclusions.

The LTV is unfalsifiable and therefore not a science. :^)

The secret is that Marx was an angry NEET sponging off his friend. No one agrees on what he meant because his writings are an incoherent mess meant as a long-winded excuse for being a parasite.

There's a good reason these threads never receive replies.

did you have a stroke?

Forget about The Capital and go read Wage labor & profit its the streamlined version of the same thing

Why not just read Karl Popper instead? Brilliant post-Keynesian with sensible views imho

I broadly understand Marxist economics (reserve army of labour, means/mode of production, wage labour etc) but some of the finer points regarding the LTV/SNLT are baffling.

this


stop

How many volumes of Capital have you read? 4? 5?

I'll quote the passage on bricklaying, it really doesn't seem like training is the condition of complex labour.

I also found this by Marx.

So either Marx predicted the collapse of the gold standard 100 years earlier and Marxist scholars are just obscuring labour theory, or it was just a coincidence.


Marx was trying to formulate general laws of capitalist production. Laws that would hold so long as it was capitalist.


Go back to /liberty/, I've been trying to make my way through Capital and I respect a lot about Marx's approach and I think his philosophical insights are invaluable to our society today. Right now we're talking his analysis of Capitalism.


I'm not baiting. I've been trying to understand labour theory for several months now. How it should be applied theoretically changes depending on who I read, and Marx doesn't substantiate a lot of arguments since "labour being the source of value" was a fact of political economy in his time.


Poppers views on Marxism as a pseudoscience don't interest me since he had the same issues when he tried to formulate his own social science (the rationality principle I believe).

Oh.

What do you mean? I used to be a Marxist but the contradictions in labour theory are becoming more and more apparent to me. I even have a PDF rebuttal to Popper I saved.

You are the one baiting friend. Making post without a dearth of substance so that I'll defend myself.

You were the one who said shit about baiting.


fken RETARD smh

So Rebel, what I've discovered is that this breakdown based on exchange value is something that is completely consistent with labour theory. Since money is the universal commodity, the producers of money don't need to "exchange" their commodity to realize profit. In other words, they don't have as much of an incentive to try and deskill and create a further division of labour in the production of the commodity since the commodity is already guaranteed to go into circulation since other commodities depend on it to express their value in it. In other words, more capital will be generated since more value is being produced in all the other industries than the one gold industry is producing and this will eventually lead to rapid inflation and the inability for capitalist to price goods properly. So while other industries have more incentive to engage in capitalist production, producers of gold produce it within a framework more similar to the simple commodity exchange Marx talks about. therealmovement.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/how-fiat-currency-killed-marxism/

I think I'm getting the jist of this, need to give it a couple more read throughs.


I think this is an interesting way to approach Bretton Woods, but my questions about abstract labour and why commodities that lack a value can express themselves in commodities that have value still linger in my mind. I hope a Marxist here can set me straight.


This is true. I can't find a coherent definition of abstract labour. I can give you all the material I've downloaded and what qualifies abstract labour differs between Kliman, Harvey, Bukarhin, Engels etc. Why don't you answer my questions?

Probably because
isn't a question. It's just a criticism from someone who has a collection of material they've read yet can't make sense of.

If you have bothered to read the question dishit you would've seen that I asked "does anyone genuinely understand marx's value theory?". I was presenting the reasons I don't understand it and why I don't think most people understand it.

No I understand it, it seems incoherent. If you're going to just go "you just don't understand" instead of explaining it, you have no right to be calling anything a "bait thread". Maybe I'd understand it if Marxist scholars weren't obscuring his meaning with multiple "true" interpretations that all seem to be faithful to the material in one way or another.

You sound angry.

I do understand it, I just think it's incoherent.


Tell me what I'm missing, and if you can't point out anything I'll elaborate on my critiques and subsequent request for clarification.

That is a cop out and you know it.

How do you read through Capital, with Marx's own footnotes, and still make this mistake.

Reverse the entire order of your heartfelt greentext.

Yeah me too. His theory of value serves to illuminate why certain behaviours happen in a Capitalist commodity (de-skilling, social division of labour, crisis) but it's these first 3 chapters that everything is predicated on that are the hardest to grasp.

Marx says that exchange value can only take place by commodities expressing their value in each other.


So money is the universal equivalent, and it's through this universal equivalent that all other commodities are measured against each other. But money in Marx's argument in Chapter 1 can only do this SO LONG AS IT IS A COMMODITY. The universal equivalent is a COMMODITY.

At this point, you're not actually asking a question to answer, but your phrasing of how money comes into being frames your problem, which is (failing) to view various forms of labour as they are historically supposed. Probably why you've got this abortive statement:


Labour in its abstract determination can exist prior to its being leveraged from forms of common ownership. This is because the exchange relationship precedes capitalism, and is not exclusive to it.

You haven't actually asked a question and have simply scattershotted some half-baked criticism you've heard from a mentally immobilized retard. I wonder who.

Marx qualifies "value" as the expenditure of abstract labour. Now, I apologize for not being to clear. I don't understand in Marx's argument at what point abstract labour becomes value. Is it when the commodity is exchanged? I understand Marx said value as a measure of abstract labour is particular to the capitalist mode of production.

Another question: how does the fact that a commodity contains labour lead to simple commodity exchange being the result of exchange based on the abstract labour embodied in them?

This is what I mean, and what I don't understand and which leads me to believe that the divergent interpretations about the role of abstract labour in exchange stems from incoherence in the theory and not misinterpretations. Abstract labour plays a critical role in exchange but it's never explained at what point "value" becomes commensurable if abstract labour is unquantifiable. It just seems irrelevant to exchange, and thus so does value. Can you explain?

...

Your use of abstract labour here implies that you haven't fully understood what it is as a category.

bookzz.org/book/815020/ba4b5c
Chapter 1 of Limits To Capital will answer all your questions.

I've read Harvey's companion to Capital on Chapter 1, as well as watching his lectures online. It really didn't clarify anything on the first three chapters, but I better understood concepts like "capital as value in motion" and how this relates to part 7 of Capital. I'm just defining abstract labour like Marx defines it.


My question is at what point the exchange of commodities is predicated on this unquantifiable, and intangible labour (even if it is material) rather than utility.


kek no. Do you have any problems with Jehu though? I've found his analysis on Bretton wood to be illuminating.

What do you fuckers do that is actually right? Name one thing.

No, I actually think his blog is really interesting. It's better than reading most "leftist" authors who are just social democrats or whatever.

The Limits To Capital is not Harvey's companion. Go and read Chapter 1.

Why do you even post on this board? Your ideology seems to be Post-keynesian posturing with ironic Christian characteristics. How is this not capitalism?

I don't think that's fair, why do you consider Austrian economics to be superior to Post-Keynesianism. Even if you disagree with Marx, Keynes borrowed much more from him than he did any Austrian economist. His "liquidity preference" is just a rip off of Marx's hoarding, and Marx's explanation is superior to Keynes's "lol he just keeps it XD".

I don't, observe. I said "marxist economics is shit compared to post keynesianism….or even fucking austrian economics". I prefer post keynesianism but austrian > marxian.

Marxist philosophy, interesting though it was, is nothing more than a shaky groundwork IMO. It lead to good things like neo-marxian economics and more widespread class consciousness, but I think that would have happened without Marx tbh. A huge portion of his material is, unarguably, outdated. And for a writer that was concerned with the mode of production of history, that's important given that he didn't predict modern modes of production.

Keynes was also going to use Marx's explanation of M-C-M' to refute Says Law but opted out of doing that because he didn't want to get accused of being a Marxist.


Okay, I'll read it and report back.


What do you think of his criticisms of modern Marxist scholars, including those like Kliman.

I know you consider Austrian to be superior to marxian. My question is why you consider Austrian to be superior to Austrian, not if you do. You stated that very clearly in the post.

Oh come on Rebel. For someone who's supposedly digested Marx, you should know he was against teleological views on history. We're still in Capitalism, and he actually did predict the collapse of the gold standard within capitalism as I pointed out in , so give credit where credit is due.

*marxian

Superior is a stretch, I suppose, but Austrians I am convinced carry out their logic to the conclusion, even if they have flawed assumptions. On the other hand, Capital seems just utterly filled with holes and contradictions to me from start to finish, ESPECIALLY volume 3. I don't believe I need to go into detail as to why given the extensive work on it.

Yes but his theory should therefore be adaptable to history. It only seems to be Debord and Luxemburg who were up to that challenge, why were the rest of marxists so on board with not challenging the old theory and updating it for the modern times? As marxists this should be the question you should be primarily concerned with.

I give credit to the collapse of the gold standard. I am not acting as if Marx had no merit. I have higher standards for marxists, which is why I don't see a need to point out what Marx did right every 5 minutes on a predominantly marxist board for you guys to get the argument

It's clear you haven't understood a word of Capital because of posts like these.

I've only read Volume 1 so, if you may, can you please point out some of those contradictions for me?

Regarding the rest of your post, why are you criticizing Marx for something Marxist do?

My father is a hot sauce manufacturer. I can eat a raw habanero and enjoy it.