Why didn't Marx, while he was alive, address and nip Marginalism in the bud?

Why didn't Marx, while he was alive, address and nip Marginalism in the bud?

Menger published his seminal work in 1871. It was a clear attack on the classical labour theory of value - why didn't Marx defend it? Marx had 12 years before he popped his clogs and he wasn't aware of Jevons, Walras OR Menger? Seems unlikely…

Other urls found in this thread:

socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/why-marxs-labour-theory-of-value-is.html
thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/05/29/excessive-credit-rentier-capital-and-crises/
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm)
marxists.org/archive/mandel/works/marxist-economic-theory/marginalists.htm)
socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.nl/2015/03/klimans-explanation-of-marxs-labour.html.
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I dont know, ask him.

How the fuck are we supposed to know? Read his mind?

Guess Marx was a hack then and didn't really believe in his work enough to defend it against what spawned the Austrian School and the Neoclassics

oh well lol maybe next lifetime

Marx wanted a revolution, not internet debate points. He knew that the bourgeoisie would do anything to discredit him, he just wanted to convince the proletariat.

Didn't he lose interest in writing about topics that solely relate to economics towards the end of his life and did other things?

The former is widely considered a joke and the latter is quietly despised for being extremely flawed in spite of being the dominant ideology, so I guess Marx had better priorities. :^)

defend it against subjective theory of value?
subjective theory is already self defeating
plus I honestly don't understand why maxima that you can't compare utilities is so widely accepted
if this were true marketologists would be without jobs

He didn't have to; he's already been proven wrong many times over; here's a good overview socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/why-marxs-labour-theory-of-value-is.html

This place has seen a huge rise in tetchy, bitchy, petty little comments like this. When did we go from the good theory board to the pretentious high maintenance little bitch board? Sort it out. Pretty much no reason to be a sarcastic asshole for this post. If somebody asks you a question about theory or history, you answer them if you know, if you don't, keep your bitch mouth closed. It doesn't need to open, you don't need to spread negativity.

Faggots.

take a breath comrade
I agree with you that these dumb filler comments get little done, and they generally act to shit up the board
but remember, this is still an Holla Forums image board, and sometimes this dumb shit is inevitable in our neighborhood

Yes there is. He asked what personal reason Marx had for not debunking one of the thousand theories people pumped out. We cant know, dickhead. If you find notes of him writing about it, call me, until then, piss off and stop asking stupid questions.

almost like it was exactly this kind of information the poster was looking for or some wild shit like that.

Retarded fuck

Through market competition
Negative labor? And even if the labor value of a specific commodity was nil(?), services like that are identified by marx as not producing surplus value, but being taken out of the surplus value of capitalists (finance for example)
(4) there is no reason why free human wage labour should have a special power that animals, slaves or machines do not have, as I point here.
Because animals, slaves, machines, don't purchase commodities on the market, slave economies always had wages laborers in the mix purchasing commodities. even if they were external to the production of certain commodities (they weren't, even slave plantations always had over seers and free men directing the slaves or doing higher-order tasks)
(5) modern fiat money refutes Marx’s theory of money and also his labour theory of value, since money must be a produced commodity in Marx’s theory but has long since ceased to be, as I point out here and here.
Marxians are split on this. Some would say fiat currency represents the collapse of exchange value, which marx predicted as being necessary when capitalists could no longer pay labor the cost of labor in exhange value (the global crisis of the 70s)

Keynsian explanations for the crisis hold no water. Consumption by consumers never dipped before the recession, but profit then investment did fall, the marxian prediction of crisis

That article literally just takes Marx and ignores every Marxian economist afterwards. You know, there are people like Nils Fröhlich who proved the core assumption regarding value empirically.

he probably did right something that refutes marginalism's premises without explicitly refuting marginalism, idk
Either way, margianalism is based on false premises-> the percentage of production of every individual producer approaches the limit of zero, which is clearly false
and the explanation of profit as equivalent to risk makes zero sense. Why don't risky investments necessarily produce the highest profits? Unless something besides risk is the driving factor of profit. Risk explanation of profit is clearly a moral claim, not a scientific hypothesis.
And supply and demand cease to explain prices after they meet. Supply and demand factor into marxian theory as to why individual prices bounce around their labor values, but labor values explain why they always trend to a particular point. And there IS empirical evidence that prices of commodities fluctuate around their labor values

Here's a blog critiquing Keynesian explanations for crisis: thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2017/05/29/excessive-credit-rentier-capital-and-crises/

woah woah, but if we have to consider the contribution of economists after marx, then we can't pretend their are no responses to the criticisms of a dead guy

It was sarcastic because he never wrote a book about "people I am not going to refute and why".

We don't have to consider economists past Marx.

But Marginal Utility was very much around during Marx's lifetime. I just find it odd that he never thought to address it head on. You don't see any mention of Jevons, Menger etc in letters until Marx had passed and then Engels makes a passing comment in DasCAP3 preface.

Considering how much Marx read can we really believe we wasn't aware of these people?

Marx never did directly address any marginalists, but he did indeed address marginalist ideas:

" Nothing is easier than to realize the inconsistencies of demand and supply, and the resulting deviation of market-prices from market-values. The real difficulty consists in determining what is meant by the equation of supply and demand.
[…]
If supply equals demand, they cease to act, and for this very reason commodities are sold at their market-values. Whenever two forces operate equally in opposite directions, they balance one another, exert no outside influence, and any phenomena taking place in these circumstances must be explained by causes other than the effect of these two forces. If supply and demand balance one another, they cease to explain anything, do not affect market-values, and therefore leave us so much more in the dark about the reasons why the market-value is expressed in just this sum of money and no other." (marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm)

Many Marxists afterwards did too like Bukharin

"Whenever the Böhm-Bawerk theory, it appears, resorts to individual motives as a basis for the derivation of social phenomena, he is actually smuggling in the social content in a more or less disguised form in advance, so that the entire construction becomes a vicious circle, a continuous logical fallacy, a fallacy that can serve only specious ends, and demonstrating in reality nothing more than the complete barrenness of modern bourgeois theory." (The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, Chapter 3, Section 6)

and Mandel

"

It is, moreover, unable to explain how, from the clash of millions of different individual "needs" there emerge not only uniform prices, but prices which remain stable over long periods, even under perfect conditions of free competition. Rather than an explanation of constants, and of the basic evolution of economic life, the "marginal" technique provides at best an explanation of ephemeral, short-term variations." (marxists.org/archive/mandel/works/marxist-economic-theory/marginalists.htm)

Marginalism is just the projection of Ricardian rent theory onto the rest of the economy. (Since Marx was very familiar with Ricardo, I figure you could make an educated gues what Marx would have said about them from collecting his comments on that part of Ricardo.)

To make marginal productivity as a concept "work" in the context of reproduced stuff, it is necessary to add the short term qualifier to your "analysis", where short-term isn't a year or a week or a day or any particular period, but rather whatever time span is short enough for whatever part of the economy you are talking about to have a huge non-variable component, so that hasty changes bring additional output only at rising costs per unit. That short-term assumption alone is not enough to guarantee rising costs, the production before the considered hasty change also needs to be rather optimized for the exact quantity before the hasty change.

What usually happens in the real world is that unit costs stay where they are or go down when a biz expands production, and the reason a biz doesn't expand, expand, expand, is that they don't expect to sell many units more at moderately lower prices.

It makes sense to do this though, "zooming in" to a particular state and treating the more "sluggish" variable costs as essentially fixed is a lot like differentiation - what is the economy "locally" like when we are arbitrarily close to a certain configuration, and so on.
Assuming, of course, that the prior assumptions are valid.
So are you saying that treating certain variable costs as fixed isn't enough to construct an acceptable "short term" because movement along the short term supply curve is itself sluggish?

Kek.

Shoutouts to that time Andrew Kliman went into the comments and wrote an entire essay BTFOing one of his articles and it's still the only comment he's never replied to.

Found it: socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.nl/2015/03/klimans-explanation-of-marxs-labour.html.

>So are you saying that treating certain variable costs as fixed isn't enough to construct an acceptable "short term" because movement along the short term supply curve is itself sluggish?
I mean that they don't optimize everything for a very precise quantity to be produced, they have a buffer and can change quantity within some range without much hassle. Only at the upper bound of that range do things begin to look like the neoclassicals claim, and if those operating the factory expect production to continue in this higher range, the buffer is increased again. It's not practical to plan without any redundancies.

I see, so you have to consider production as a statistical process, where a producer chooses a "neighborhood" of production possibilities to produce within, rather than a single point?
Is this an "econophysics" idea?

I mean that a literally existing business in the real world in reality really does not hyper-optimize as that means having no redundancy whatsoever. If your production is a chain of many parts with the weakest link determining how much you produce in the end and some of these absolutely necessary parts of the chain have only one or two people in it that know how to do these particular tasks, the whole process is interrupted when somebody has the flu. Likewise for machines and tools that are absolutely necessary. Real world factories have buffers. They have more tools than the number that would be needed under the assumption that none of these tools break or get lost or stolen and they have more people than would be needed under the assumption that nobody is ever ill and that everybody works as much as physically possible. Machines do usually not operate 24/7 at the highest speed they are capable of. There is redundancy everywhere. A slight increase in output is possible and trivial and as there are still idling resources you don't really have rising per unit costs until your increase has gone so far that it has brought into use most of the buffer, and if the new level becomes the norm, additional machines and people are brought in, so you have again some redundancy.

No, I understand. "Optimizing" from a business standpoint has to mean accounting for the randomness of daily life, and not just abstract productivity. Retailers often pay a flat rate for the muh privilege to "charge back" a variable number of defective/broken/mishandled items to the manufacturer/distributor and so on

What I mean is this idea reminds me of statistical physics, and since I haven't really gone through the empirical marxism list, I'm not sure if it relates somehow to the sort of analysis those guys make with the "econophysics" metaphor. But in any case, I guess I'm just curious if you could talk briefly about or link to something on how people can/have tried to explore this idea quantitatively.

Fiat currency is a short of exchange value, the guy has point there, but even if true, it is something that Marx could not have possibly predicted, as it happened in Western economies 88 years after his death.

Derivatives, Synthetic products and credit swaps are a sort of follow up of this Capitalist logic, of nothing but thin air being backing "the value" of these as exchange products. It is something which Marx could not have possibly predicted, though as 2008 showed, falling rates of profits (in some sense, toxic assets, withdrawal of payments etc) proves the Marxist Crisis Theory still holds, even with fictive Capital.