Has any bourgeois economist actually, seriously engaged with this bad boy?
All they seem to do is point to specific problems of Marxist-Leninist states or claim that his theory is irrelevant for some minute mistakes made by every other classical economist.
No, all they have is memes about the LTV because they conflate value, exchange value, use value and price on purpose.
Those distinctions are false.
Keyens?
No they are not.
t. hasnt read marx
Make the case for the distinction without begging the question by taking them as a-priori.
Marx barely wrote about what communism would be, only about what it would not-be.
Value as in the hours it took to make is a concept that is not equal to the price you pay for it. The usefullness of products doesnt reflect the price either.
Which goes against what you said earlier. Marx criticized capitalism and said it was unstable and that its contradictions would lead to its eventual replacement by another system. He proposed communism to solve the problems he saw.
Nice reddit spacing faggot.
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Which doesn't lead to the conclusion that time invested is a value in itself. Use value is not an economic concept.
He proposed communism as wish-fullfillment. He never elaborated on it beyond "it will make everything right, because that's how I define it".
No value can be found in it's essence. A product doesn't have an essence.
It makes sense to state a shovel that costs 10$ doesn't have 10$ as it's use. This distinction is a truism without any relation to value in the economic sense at all. Digging isn't a value.
Why, because certain economists don't consider it so? Marx was an economist, and it's a concept in Marxian economics. Other schools have similar conceptions to the amount of use an item has, either to society or to an individual.
What exactly is the problem with that? Marx didn't consider it his task to show the exact methods of organisation of such a society, however he showed that it was an inevitable stage of history according to the movement of class relations.
The essence referred to here is the utility of the product, for example the utility of a coat is to clothe a person (however it may have other utilities, these utilities are defined by society which the commodity exists within in general).
It can be, if society deems it so. It can have a use value and an exchange value, just as driving around can have a use value and exchange value. For example, racecar driving is a form of entertainment, its use value is to make people happy and its exchange value is the cost of the ticket to go and see that commodity (in this case a service) being performed.
This is exactly what OP is talking about. You don't engage because either you don't understand it or just don't like the reality of Marx's (correct) conclusions. Instead you just make up retarded strawmen and try to divert attention to failures of past socialist states.
oh man now you're getting ME confused
Are acts commodities?
Only if they are reproducible, so my example probably wasn't great. A troupe of actors doing the same play again and again would be. A taxi driver's ride would be. A server hosting provider would be.
The focus is mainly on services. Things like artwork (which are collectors items) probably aren't, because the point is that they are unique and non-reproducible. So the amount paid has nothing to do with the labour expended to make it.
Not that guy, but stop trying to force the "reddit spacing" meme.
I've used chans since 2008 and I frequently space like that. It looks nicer/cleaner.
can someone explain why Marx defines profit as the difference between paid and unpaid labor
I've only ever taken high school economics, but I always thought profit was the difference between a product's real value and its price.
fuck, meant to say a product's COST and its price
No.
Marx says that commodities are sold at their value in Value, Price and Profit. Profit, or surplus value as is more commonly called, is the value added by the labourer to a commodity to be sold that is taken by the capitalist for himself.
So for example I fabricate plates. The materials that will end up becoming a plate are given to me, and I do the process of molding it and all the labour related to it's fabrication. So the capitalist takes this plate, sells it for the the total value which includes that added to the materials before I worked on it, and the value I myself added to it. He pays me, for example, half of the value I added to it, the rest he pockets for himself.
but why does he assume that? isn't the existence of price gouging evidence that price isn't necessarily indicative of the true cost of a product?
You have to go back.
Then, why are you taking about "shovels" ? Shovels are just a bunch of atoms put together, but we humans conceive them as objects that help us move different kinds of connected atoms, be it soil or dirt (which are also imperfect human perceptions).
Of course, you can use a shovel as a weapon or even a percussion, but in a capitalist market, they are sold mainly as tools for a specific purpose : digging. Therefore, I would say that their essence in the capitalist framework is "a tool specifically used for digging".
And even in a hypothetical future socialist society, the value we would give to shovels would be primarily considered according to their quality as digging tools.
Digging isn't a value in itself, but it is often a step in a goal-oriented activity that allows us to ensure our survival and make our life more conformable or interesting (e.g. planting potatoes and installing utility poles)
Things or acts that help us to do this are valuable, and if they are valuable, we can give them a (subjective) "use value".
That's something I've not studied so far since I am just taking up his works, but I've seen this called super exploitation.
Well go on them chum, tell us how these distinctions are tricksy and false?
You realise a great many societies have existed without "price" but no society has existed without use value
Here's a troll thread I made on Holla Forums a few years ago
archive.4plebs.org
Lemme dig through the archives and see if I can find something older.
I don't know if they are bourgeois, but google Anwar Shaikh and Steve Keen.
In order to debate a theory in an intellectually rigorous way, you need to do one of two things.
1) You need to disprove one of the assumptions or axioms of a theory.
For example, "human beings are self-interested rational actors" might be an axiom of capitalism.
or;
2) You need to challenge the logic that is used to come to a conclusion.
I.e. If human beings are self interested and rational, and trade freely with one another, each side will only engage in a trade if they perceive that what they are getting is better than what they are giving up.
Now, you can engage with that argument because the axioms and logic is clearly stated. Marx generally doesn't clearly state his axioms and his arguments, and tends to engage in "what ought to be" arguments rather than "What is" arguments - and "what ought to be" arguments don't really follow the same rules as "what is" arguments.
So do people engage with Marx? Sure, they have done so many times. There are a few theories of marx's (the labor theory of value for example) where he is specific enough to get pinned down and has been well disproven.
However, mostly Marx is not specific enough about things to really be engaged with enough to change anyone's mind on the matter.
Most Marxists would probably also accept this axiom.
And you really clearly have never read Marx if you think he was some sort of utopian talking about how things "ought" to be. His work is systematically rational and analytic to the point where it could accurately be called scientific.
Then they're as retarded as the cappies that invented that meme.
Marx had an agenda, he was not scientific. Things that didn't suit his agenda were glossed over or massaged so they didn't contradict his assertions.
Steve Keen (Post Keynesian, so not mainstream but still bourgeois in style of economic analysis and aims.) gave him credit for M > C > M and brings him up a bit.
But apparently doesn't really understand the way Marx uses the LTV. (He's got a quote to the extent of "Marx is great, Marxists suck" in the context of relevancy to capitalist economics.) So I dunno if that counts.
He did do a paper called "A Marx for Post Keynesians" so maybe there's something in that: keenomics.s3.amazonaws.com
Not an argument.
Not an argument.
Seriously though, I agree that the homo-economicus argument is stupid because I'm currently destroying myself by drinking alcohol, and I often make non-rational choices when I buy food, but your dismissal of Marx's theories could be summarized as "He was wrong".
Make some effort instead of confining your ideas into boring rhetorical forms.
Supply and demand deterimine prices in marx.
you should send him shaikh's book. or just this paper scribd.com
What's this?
money -> commodity -> money + even more money
basic cycle of capital
labor on the other hand is
commodity (labor power) -> money -> commodity (food, clothes, etc)
Isn't labor power supposed to not be a commodity?
labor power is a commodity and it's the only commodity which can be purchased consistently for less than its value (via class exploitation / private property)
It is defined as one in the most basic of his works.
Is that really related to the example?
Marx discusses this.
What?
"Labor is a commodity" is one of Marx's central points. Under capitalism, labor is treated like any other commodity. Very importantly, it is fungible, because the rise of automation and unskilled labor means factors like physical ability and experience become far less significant. Any worker can perform about as good of a job as the other.
soros
It's a good one
feels good man
good job comrade but soros is really influenced by marx
also kaletsky is kinda
most of his theory was an analysis of capitlaism, not a positive vision of socialism, in terms of sheer volume.
you should try actually reading the guy before making uninformed statements
Even before Reddit was a thing I always thought it looked like shit.
you need a cleaner stylesheet