What is the relevance of the LTV or any theory of value to Socialism or politics in general...

What is the relevance of the LTV or any theory of value to Socialism or politics in general? It seems to me that whether or not value has anything to do with labor is irrelevant when you're still getting paid a fraction of the price of the item you just made, and that even if value is subjective, the fact that there's someone above you doing nothing but still profiting still shows that he's a leech.

I used to kinda feel this way too, but as I gain a better understanding of the LTV it seems more and more relevant to the socialist movement

Otherwise people will just say that Porky is working for his money by taking risks or whatever.

To disprove the retarded argument that entrepreneurs are necessary.

In order to create a better society, you need to understand the flaws in the current one.

That's why a theory of value and fundamental critique of capitalist political economy is critical for the socialist movement. We need to know what our mistakes were in order to avoid repeating them.

The LTV wasn't coined by Marx. Christians believed this to be the case a good 1000 years earlier. Smith and Ricardo who were the great economists before Marx thought the same. The reason the LTV is important is due to it being the crux of Marx's Capital. This is why mainstream economists have attacked the LTV ever since Marx wrote Capital. They are trying to slander Marx while trying to claim that Capital is completely wrong. If Capital is wrong, then capitalism isn't prone to crisis, it doesn't have a falling rate of profit, and extracting surplus value isn't morally ambiguous. By attacking the LTV they are trying to save their own hide.

As for socialism. It doesn't really matter. Socialists can still claim that hierarchy is inherently bad. They can still claim that the Bourgeoisie took the land by force. They can still claim that showing solidarity and building an economy based on such is better than capitalism. It wouldn't have the same immanent critique of capitalism, but there would still be many arguments for socialism, just less against capitalism.

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So why didn't you write an explanatory post that furthered the discussion instead of pinching off another useless shitpost?

Jesus Christ guys if you don't know you don't need to respond. The bumps are appreciated but at least say you dunno.

So essentially, if the LTV is right that means Marx is right, which means that Capitalism is inherently self-destructive, but how does the LTV prove those things you mentioned? Why specifically is the LTV needed to prove surplus value?

LTV provides the fundamental theory that explains price as it exists, so that it is shown that the trade doesnt create value as some pigs claims, but that all value and thus prices and thus profit derives from labour.

It also provided the fundamental principle around and to why a labour voucher system should be implemented and how an economy ought to be planned in the absence of money and production for exchange.

Also as others have said: LTV proves that capitalism is inherently self destructive.

The most important thing though for me, is that it strips away the smokescreen of "prices" and "subjectivity" and allows you to see the economy as it really is. People working, to create products which people want, and how their interaction, acts, production and choices come together to create the price system and how it influences the world.

Someone should try that out for real and go around threads spouting a bunch of random economic BS and claiming it's from volume 3.

Isn't vol 3 where he really elaborates on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? I haven't read any vol of Capital but I thought that was the case

It would work. Nobody reads past volume 1.

Come on guys, at least read the abridged by Ruhle.

This is dogma. Price exists outside of Marxism and muh social justice.

You are being fucking retarded right now.
Marxism doesnt "create" prices. The capitalist economy does. Marxism explains how the capitalist economy works.

The fact that there are other """theories""" on prices in capitalism isn't relevant at all. Prices are not created by theories but by reality.

Everything Keynes wrote was in vol 3. I dare you to disprove me.


What this guy said
Also, the LTV is key to the dialectical path of argument throughout vol 1. That is another reason why Capital falls apart without the LTV.
As to why it is needed to prove surplus value. Start with resources (fixed capital C). the resources have to be made into a commodity. A capitalist hires a worker to do this. The worker is paid a wage (variable capital V). The capitalist sells the commodity. He obviously sells it at a higher price than C+V, because anything else would mean the capitalist wouldn't profit from the process. This last bit is called surplus (S).
If people are willing to exchange at the rate C+V+S, then that means the value has been realized. And therefore the labor invested into the commodity has increased the value of said commodity by V+S. The argument is the value of the commodity equals what people are willing to exchange for it. If the LTV is true, then the only thing that imbued the commodity with additional value was labor, then the worker who performed this labor is entitled to be compensated with not just his wage V, but the full increase in value V+S. However, we all know that mister capitalist doesn't roll that way. He claims that the LTV is false and S is his well-deserved return on investment and not extracted surplus-value.

Et tu?

Go back to your ideas on culture war, you are a little too new to start arguing economics.

I don't think the basis of Capital is a moralism about surplus value. It is that capitalism is inherently, by its own fully functioning mechanisms, prone to crises. Because this is the case, in the long run, Capital predicts capitalism will have to collapse and be replaced.

Surplus value as exploitation can be used as a moral argument of course, but that is based on presuppositions about rights to the product of your work and such, which is something aside from Marxist political-economy. What is important about LTV in the Marxist sense, is that it predicts that capitalism is prone to crises, which says inevitably capitalism must be replaced, unless it kills us all first. I'm not sure that Marx conceived it would do such a thing, but he didn't know about climate change.

Must it be replaced by socialism? No, I don't see how that follows. so in a sense it is up to socialists to seize the remains of capitalisms collapse

This is also why Marx claimed that communism isn't about implementing socialism, but about removing capitalism.

Das Kapital has wonderful theories of how to determine the value of work (although it doesn't account for more abstract contributions to work). None of this determines market price since Marx's goal was not to create social justice within markets.

Yes and that reality is informed more by exchange value than the economics of production and barter.

Actually it does. It creates price equilibriums which the market strives towards in perfect competition, just like how other more mainstream economic theories have an an equilibrium like that.

Yea sure the economy has nothing to do with production because you use autistic models where you purposefully ignore the production of society and only look at snapshots of quantities of supply and demand.

Nobody talked about barter

Those influences set the price of abundant consumer staples like groceries but not for discretionary goods. Production costs are an overwhelming influence on price only in an authoritarian centralized economy. The cognitive dissonance of this reality is enough to drive Marxists mad with hatred over "capitalism."

Giving birth under communism is production of society, but elsewhere it's paternalistic oppression. OK I see now.
Since exchange value is so overrated why did the USSR pay its secret agents in diamonds and caviar? Does caviar really require that many man-hours to harvest?

In Marx's time "socialism" was any kind of activism that tried to respond to the social disruptions caused by capitalism, but typically in a reactionary manner. You had "bourgeois socialists" and "feudal socialists," etc, and that's part of the reason why there's even a dichotomy between socialism and communism, because socialists at the time weren't interested in creating a new world, ie, communism, but just wanted all the benefits of burgeoning capitalism but without the messy social and class turmoil.

As the decades passed though these distinctions diminished as these reactionary socialisms died away as capitalism solidified and Karl's theories gained traction.

Except they totally fucking do lad, because a car, fancy clothes or a holiday also cost labour to produce and act as any other commodity. The fact that capitalists can jack up the price of prada a bit with artificial scarcity and lots of marketing doesnt mean shit for the LTV and it doesnt have a big impact on society as a whole.
Pic related

Oops forgot your second part
See previous pic related, youre not making any sense
Eh, yes? Finding and collecting caviar costs a pretty big amount of time. If it was so easy and took fuck all time to produce, then it wouldnt be so expensive. But they are scarce. So catching fish for caviar takes lots of time.

Also I dont give a toss if you try to "insult" me by attacking the ussr or something, I dont really give a toss. And the LTV does take into account supply and demand that you praise so highly, it just explains how and why, instead of just saying "its magic".

Now ive entertained you enough, piss off and come back when youve read advanced economics.

if you understood his writing you would know that not a single bit of it is valid or pertinent if you don't accept the ltv
if you just want to read about how "capitalism is bad lmao" then you can follow the very modern ideas of saint-simon and robert owen.

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You're weasling here. How does this bit refute my point?

Is your response to simply laugh? And Marxists wonder why only triggered zealots take them seriously.

If you can read English I should be making enough sense. Communists pitch birth control to women in "capitalist" economies as a way out of the paternalistic oppression of procreation, yet under communism procreation is pragmatically portrayed as production (i.e. labor).

Sturgeons became difficult to gather when they became an endangered species. How? Because of *drum roll* exchange value!

OK smarty pants, how would you control prices?

You don't seem to be familiar with economics, Marxist or otherwise. In an authoritarian centralized economy prices are set by fiat. A small powerful group of humans deciding things is the opposite of having strong automatic influence mechanisms. It's basic classical economics that production costs rule price in markets with low barriers to entry.

Marx's labor theory of value isn't about predicting the price of goods or something pragmatic like that. What it predicts is the behavior of capitalism as a whole, which is anti-social, unstable, and doomed to inevitably collapse.

Thanks for the appeal to authority. I genuinely needed it.

Under communism technocrats unilaterally produce the statistics that are used to set prices. If you complain about the statistics you get sent to a reeducation camp, because "scientific consensus." This is far from any type of self-correction.

So you admit that this whole time you were being contrarian rather than seeking to arrive at a deeper truth.

no in a planned economy goods are sold at market clearing prices and then supply is adjusted down or up until the true labor cost has parity with the market clearing price you chode.

FUCKING READ ECONOMIC COMPUTABILITY THEORY REEEEEEEEEEEEEE

That prices in a competitive environment tend to be low and close to reproduction cost is utterly banal. It's not a logical fallacy to point out that you talk like someone not familiar with economic reasoning, it is evident from your posts. You might think that you shit on Marx, but you have only soiled yourself so far. Go read books about economics, don't need to be lefty ones.

I never said that prices had to be feasible. If an item never sells because its price is too high it doesn't mean that suddenly the price was something else that my lying eyes prevented me from seeing.

It absolutely is a logical fallacy. Dismissing someone as misinformed and then refusing to engage because his arguments haven't been freshly copy-and-pasted is typical of the conformism that results when you become a devoted Marxist. I wasn't attempting pose as an run-of-the-mill expert economist and you mistook this for a complete inability to reason. This shows your own low levels of intelligence. I'm not saying this to humiliate you, I'm holding up a mirror to your own hubris.

You are not even misinformed, you are uninformed. You never read a book on economics, you don't even casually browse Wikipedia about it. I'm not sure that you even look at econ memes, maybe you pretend to look at memes while you really only listen to some special-needs podcast by a guy giving you the tl;dr of some shit memes.
^Gish Gallop, you make up so much bullshit that it's hard to keep up with you. First of: Where did I call myself a Marxist? On the contrary, I said:
Meaning, that you are wrong in the most basic, general, trivial way somebody could be possibly wrong on an economic question. You are NOT arguing from a classical, neoclassical, or other school's position, you have NOTHING, you know nothing. Now let's pretend for the sake of argument that I actually was arguing from a particularly Marxist point of view (that point of view being that when there is a lot of competition, profits are low, do you believe Keynes or Lerner or Hayek or Schumpeter or Lange had a different take on that?), what is conformist about Marxist economics? Do you think Marxist economics = mainstream economics in the US or Europe or most of the rest of the world?
You post like a retard and pointing that out is Le Fallacy of not assuming that you are secretly super-smart about things you don't even talk about? Yeh, I guess you are emotionally intelligent (that's PC language meaning you are an unbearable fagot). Why are you even here? You can have an anti-left position, but you have to actually present your case. How did you come here? Where are your parents? Did you flee from the YT comments section after getting assraped by Sceneable? Well, too bad Club Penguin closed down, but you have to go somewhere else. How about… offline? You can come back in a year or so, but you have to do some reading.

No it's not. It's actually the exact opposite. Capital DOES NOT work dialectically with the LTV. The reason is that the LTV is an external injection into the logical theory and Marx really screws up a lot of things because of his own fetishization of labor according to his own pre-conception of what economics really is.

Surplus value is easy without the LTV as SNLT. Labor IS the source of value for industrial capital, but is itself not value. The labor which generates more value is the labor process posited by value itself. Buy labor-power—>consume its labor in production (as
the labor process as the self-expansion of value)—>sell for profit above prices of production.

In part the LTV is true, but nowhere do you need SNLT. The value generated in production is indeterminate, and it is only determined in the sphere of exchange, thus no factor of production such as SNLT can have determinative effect. Costs of production, however, DO have determining effect of setting an objective ground price necessary for reproduction of the production process. Even this price of production, however, has no determining power over buyers such that they must recognize the value it requires to be profitable.

It's not only about prices, but also about prices.