If there is empirical evidence of the LTV, why does mainstream economics reject it?

If there is empirical evidence of the LTV, why does mainstream economics reject it?

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unironically postmodernist ideology.

because "mainstream economics" is a political construct

because of the memes

because economists are porkys pawns?

bourgeois lies

because of ideological bias towards the right wing, ESPECIALLY in anglo countries. The whole point of economics as a field is to apologize for capitalism not actually describe how the economy works and how to run a business, thats what business and finance are for.

Read the foreword to Capital

ish pure ideology *sniff*

Because it hasn't been as useful for economic models so far? Even if there is empirical evidence for it (which seems doubtful), economists have done a lot of work based off subjective preferences and utility that they're not ready to throw out yet.

Oh I mean it's pure bourgeois propaganda … sniff… ideology and so on and so on.

according to pasinetti and shaikh there is, but it's not 100% accurate, there's an average 7% different according to pasinetti

...

There was some image floating around on Holla Forums that attempted to show empirical evidence for the LTV, but also showed that Sraffian cost of production as a predictor was even more accurate. Which then kind of throws into question why we even need the LTV?

I just don’t see why the LTV is necessary for leftism as a whole, marxist or otherwise. Why should we obsess over it so much?


Economics does *try* to explain how the economy works, though. They may try to defend capitalism, but their arguments only apply to markets.

Exploitation and tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

But exploitation makes sense and can easily be explained without the LTV, why bother? The tendency of the rate of profit is a contested tendency as it is according to a friend of mine who was really into Marxist econ.

LTV is just stuff left over from Marx's 1844 Hegelian obsession + Adam Smith.

If there is empirical evidence of psychiatric drugs killing people, why does mainstream psychiatry still promote it?

Can someone explain why the LTV is considered relevant to a pricing mechanism?

Socially necessary labor time in Capital's only printed and read version, volume 1, is the quantity towards which market competition drives towards as the real price. It explains both why things can exchange, as well as why prices are not arbitrary and eventually settle on an average in the long run.

It makes sense, however it's unnecessarily complicated by tying it to labor time.

...

"mainstream economics" is theology not science

Okay you idiots. Here's a grand idea, how about you actually /read/ marx?

Ever thought of that? I literally cannot believe people don't understand the meaning and significance of the law of value.

No need to be so rude. Can you explain this law of value? It doesn't make sense to me. It makes sense to talk of a law of capital, but not a law of value.

The "value form" concerns the triad of commodities, value, and money. The only law that makes sense is to say value only exists as commodities that exchange. What Marxists call the law of value is really the law of capital, meaning the law of self-expanding value which exists only in one unique form exchange between an owner of means of production employing labor-power.

Please do.

1) Those who work deserve the fruit of their labor
2) Workers' wages are less than the mass of revenue made from their mass of products.
3) The capitalist keeps the excess (surplus) revenue and does not distribute it to workers.
4) The capitalist did not do all the work for the share of the revenue they claim
5) Workers produce, and it is their products that go to market and are valuable as commodities
6) Therefore, the capitalist is clearly claiming the fruits of labor they did not do and is exploiting the workers.

You don't need value anywhere, let alone a LTV to make the rational claim that capitalists are obviously squeezing their workers as the source of their bags of money. The difference of the mass of wages and the mass of revenue, the idea that ownership is based on labor, and the idea that one should get as much as one labors.

The owners of capital deserve profit for risking their investment and allowing labourers to work.

Lol. They dont do anything out of charity. Its in their own self interest. The capitalists use the fear of starvation to force workers into a bullshit contract. Theres no reason why it would be necessary to rely on the capitalists to obtain limited access to the MOP. Why cant government give the workers the tools instead and let them keep all the value they produce

If I was in a clown circus and my job was juggling running chainsaws, you bet I too would deserve more than you juggling bats.

The LTV is not about who deserves anything, just as the story of price difference is no such story. It's about where what is deserved comes from: the labor of the worker. No work, no commodities, no sales, no profits. No one will argue this. Are sure you've read Capital?

Exploitation is not a moral thing, it's a technical thing. Marx knows this but uses the term because he wants workers to get mad about it. He doesn't say the workers deserve the fruit of their labor, but he knows what connecting labor and all value implies to the common person even if it isn't implied in his own theory.

Because that's socialism, not communism.

what the hell..

You're not explaining anything here buddy.

You're not asking anything here. Are you the one who asked to begin with? If not, then I'm not going to worry over it.

Your premise was that exploitation is occurring and it hinges on:

This is what was challenged in your story. You decided to employ commonsense, commonsense was then employed against you. You decided not to refute it.

You then said:

Which means you are calling upon the LTV to explain exploitation.

What was your original claim?

So do you want to try again?

I am. Your "explanation" of exploitation begins with "workers deserve…". That is no explanation.

user, look at the post again. Value was not invoked, not implicitly either.

Ownership, claims of ownership, money amounts: wage costs and gross revenue from sales. No work, no goods, no profits. This does not mean anything about value.


Sure it is. It is defined in the conception of what makes property legitimate, or do you disagree that they who make things are the only legitimate owners? If I make a chair, isn't it mine? If I grow a tree, isn't it mine? If I make a painting, isn't it mine?

The LTV, on the contrary is itself no explanation. Labor is the source of all value, ok. Now what? That doesn't tell me who should own the objects, or who should divide the mass of revenue. Trees grow fruit and we take it. Workers work more than what they get in return, what of it?

Do you want to try again, user?

I misread what you said then. A correct meaning would be that you didn't answer the challenge, simply restated your position.

No work no products, sure but that means nothing. No capital less products. I await for you to account for this.

Why? Marx doesn't. It's called a "Critique of Political Economy". It's already given that these are the justifications given and accepted, and the critique is taking these to their logical conclusion.

Marx never made a moral argument that workers should own what they produce. He says they don't own what they produce, and their labor goes beyond what they get in return. You need to only recognize the difference of wages, no need for an inbetween mediation of this as some metaphysical spook of labor time. The labor part of the LTV doesn't explain anything, since Marx has to already qualify it as SOCIALLY NECESSARY labor time. Labor time itself is of no value without socially being needed/wanted. So does labor explain value? No. Social exchange explains value.

Does doing more work than needed explain exploitation? Only when we can say the worker 'should' be getting what they aren't. If you don't do that, user, all you're doing is telling us that water is wet. Marx never actually explains why this is exploitation, and he even says that according to bourgeois morality this is fair. This is only exploitation in a sense of giving more for less, but not on deserving. It's exploitation by an assumed inequality, and a false one based on the very facts Marx himself knew.


Indeed, no capital, no products. Know what that does imply? That capital is the source of labor in capitalism. Value posits its own reality in workers and objects. What did you think, user? It's idealism.

I think what Ayşe means is this: The LTV is said to explain exploitation and/or prices, and does that in a very convoluted and indirect way. But you don't need to theorize about how prices form in order to understand that exploitation occurs.

Suppose a gang breaks into your home and takes some of your stuff. Suppose further that the gang has some very sophisticated bylaws about how to distribute the loot among them. Do you really need to understand the details of these bylaws to come to the conclusion that you were robbed? When you got fleas, I suppose it doesn't hurt to research in detail how fleas live, but you don't need to do that in order to know you have them and you also don't need that (though it might help you a bit) in order to get rid of them.

See, you're doing it again.

Wouldn't supply curves starting not at 0 but at cost of production be basically necessary and sufficient for the LTV to be correct?
if it is, I don't see how that couldn't be true except in cases like Amazon and Uber where firms subsidize markets to gain market share.

Not quite. LTV works from averages, yet your curve would have to start lower than the average cost of production, as there are always a few producers out there who have newer machinery and can produce at a lower cost than the average, and typically sell at lower cost to capture market share while they have the advantage.

I'm saying the fact that they don't get the complete revenue doesn't show anyone that their labour goes beyond what they get in return. Capital augments the products of labour, the question of distribution on a first approximation should reflect this. You have given no way to account for this.

You don't realize you're making a leap because you are presupposing all the results produced in Marx, but we're not talking about Marx. We're talking about establishing exploitation without the LTV or law of value.

It should be telling that you feel the need to fall back on it at every juncture. Just redact what you said.

All I'm saying is you need coherent theories. People think the law of value is some kind of fan wank nonsense but if it were false then any decent materialist would know the project of communism is a waste of time.

If the LTV is wrong, then landlords aren't parasites? I don't see how that follows.

...

WTF why is always retards arguing with these ancap retards about the LTV smh.

Hey OP if you weren't a retard you would just read capital to understand the LTV. None of these brainlets can condense it for you.

The LTV can explain the specific equilibrium price of any non-monopolised commodity without using the market forces. Can you? No? then stfu and read a book

Because it leads to uncomfortable conclusions, like capitalism being based on exploitation.
Which doesn't make for very good ideology.

The LTV doesn't really make sense and it's very different from Adam Smith's understanding of it. Marx's conception is a lot closer to David Ricardo in the sense that they were both trying to explain the same phenomenon. Ricardo wanted to explain the rate of profit, but he needed long term equilibrium prices to do so. Well to know long term equilibrium prices, he needed to know the profit rate… so it was circular. So he assumed that the long term equilibrium prices were roughly proportional to the labor inputs. Smith ltv was based off how much labor a commodity could "command" in the marketplace… only in a precapitalist society was it also equal to the amount of labor that went into its production (because capitalists and landlords also have to make their income).

Marx comes in and invents a metaphysical notion of value that really was never in Ricardo's or Adam Smith's work. And when Ricardo used it, it was to solve a calculation problem.

Wrong.

arx's theory of value doesn't explain equilibrium prices, or at least, it doesn't explain them directly. As per Volume III equilibrium prices are equal to the cost-price (c+V) of the commodity plus the average rate of profit. Price and value are only really equal at the level of society as a whole.

This arises from competition between capitals. Competition tends to establish an average rate of profit, since a higher rate of profit in one branch of industry will lead to more capital investment in that industry, increasing production relative to demand, and a lower than average rate of profit will lead to the opposite. This is a problem for the theory of value, because a strict relationship between price and value would mean that, given a constant rate of surplus-value, industries with a lower than average capital composition (that is to say, a lower rate of constant to variable capital) would have higher rates of profit, which obviously isn't the case. If it was, it would produce some weird phenomena, capitalists would probably tend to invest in industries with lower organic compositions of capital, which contradicts the tendency stated by Marx for the organic composition to rise (which is a thing that actually happens) bringing about a fall in the rate of profit.

This leads to the problem of 'transforming' values into prices of production. The problem is not just a mathematical but a theoretical one. If long run prices can be adequately explained by cost-price plus the average rate of profit, the question arises as why we even need a theory of a value which needs to be 'transformed' into real prices in the first place. A lot of commentators, starting from Bohm-Bawerk onwards, have claimed that there is a contradiction between the model of capitalism Marx gives in Volume I (where prices are for the most part equal to value) and the model he gives in Volume III (where prices are equal to their 'price of production'), and that the theoretical constructs of Volume I are basically useless - a product of Marx's naive enthusiasm for the classical economists perhaps, or of a certain moral and sentimental belief in the value of human labour, or perhaps a conscious recognition that the theory of value must somehow be maintained in order to maintain the theory of exploitation, which was his real concern.

The important thing to bear in mind is that fundamentally, Marx's value theory is not a theory of prices but a theory of the social relationships of capitalist production. There's even a letter where he weighs in on the value controversy, claiming that even if you skipped the first chapter, his description of the social relationships of capitalist production should be enough to help you understand the meaning of the theory. Marx was aware of the transformation problem as early as 1847 in his Poverty of Philosophy, and describes the essential procedure of transformation in the Grundrisse, ten years before the publication of Volume I. It is not a case of a Marx who elaborated a theory in Volume I which he then later ran up against difficulties with, but a case of the fundamental difference between the Marxist and Ricardian understanding of value.

The movement of classical political economy up to Ricardo was a move towards an ever more rigorous reduction of the various categories of economics to value, the substance of which is human labour in the abstract. But classical political economy never examined what Marx calls the 'value-form'. Commodities don't just walk around with the labour time it took to produce them marked on them, they walk around with a price, their value is always expressed in the form of the relationship of one commodity to another.

But this is a circumstance that is utterly peculiar. It is evident that commodities, as inanimate objects, cannot really have relationships with one another, only human beings can. What Marx the undertakes is to examine the historically specific form of society in which the products of human labour take the form of value, and the relationships between people take on the fantastic, but prosaically real appearance of relationships between things.

In every form of society, it is a requirement that human labour time is apportioned between various activities. Even Robinson Crusoe on his island has to divide his time between foraging for food, hunting, building a shelter and so on, for example. In capitalist society, this division of human labour is accomplished through market exchange, "The effect is the same as if the different individuals had amalgamated their labour-time and allocated different portions of the labour-time at their joint disposal to the various use-values."

Or as he expresses it in the Grundrisse:

The reciprocal and all-sided dependance of individuals who are indifferent to one another forms their social connection. This social bond is expressed in exchange value, by means of which alone each individual's own activity or his product becomes an activity or a product for him.

Time rules man. "Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's carcass." (Poverty of Philosophy) In a society of mutually indifferent individuals, all producing in isolation from one another, the social character of their labour can only express itself in the form of value relations. The form of appearance of value, as a relationship between commodities, is a necessary form of appearance. Exchange is not a process in which the producers relate to one another as real individuals, it is a process in which they relate to one another as owners of commodities, and each commodity represents for its owner nothing other than human labour in the abstract.

Because Ricardo and Smith could never step outside bourgeois society to see it's historically specific nature, and the conditions in which the products of human labour become 'values' in the first place, they could never solve the problems that the theory of value throws up with regards to the discrepancy between value and price (a discrepancy which is more than just a question of oscillation around a point of equilibrium, but has to do with the fundamental nature of competition under capitalism, which always reduces profit down to an average rate).

Marx was not a Ricardian. His theory of value is, in some sense, essentially the same as his theory of fetishism or alienated labour.

Sorry for the rushed thoughts, Reddit isn't a great platform for these kinds of discussion. I remember that Lucio Colleti's essay 'Bernstein and the Marxism of the Second International' has a discussion of how Marx's value theory is essentially the same as his theory of fetishism.

LOL you dumbass, it does explain the equilibrium price. The equilibrium price of any reproduceable commodity is the price of production, it's specific market price is privy to market forces but the eq. price is the deciding factor for the range of possible market prices.

ULTRA BRAINLET

Next time edit whatever you steal.

It doesn't directly explain its price of production.

What was even the point of this comment? I honestly hate most of you guys.

someone link this nigger empirical studies of the LTV

Wow this place really is being raided by reddit ultras
reddit.com/r/Ultraleft/comments/6strl7/r_e_a_l_w_o_r_l_d_あなたは馬鹿を読む/dlgtwm6/

WTF are you retarded?
L I T E R A L L Y google prices of production you fucking imbecile

equilibrium price of commodity = unit cost of all inputs + average rate of profit derived from competition

Economics 101 teaches that in a perfectly competitive market, equilibrium prices would be reached for all commodities. But they never explain why the apple costs $3 instead of $80 or $800. LTV explains why the fucking eqilibrium price which market prices are derived from are what they are.


R E A D. Y O U. B R A I N L E T.


I linked all those empirical studies last thread don't feel like it tbh, if they can't utilize the internet to find empirical studies on LTV themselves, then they're not in the intellectual realm to understand it.

None of those things are directly related to value. Those can in fact all be explained without referencing value.

Shaikh memes pls

This thread is an absolute logical desert.
Exploitation is literally "you make something, it makes this much money, you don't get your money back". You don't have to be a theoretical bruiser to get this.
It doesn't matter how you explain the cost, it is independent of this. A lot of the counterarguments were dumb too, but I can't be asked to go through them.

Ok then explain what determines the specific equilibrium price of commodities, and if you say supply and demand then you're an idiot

the 'free' market, everybody

You make something with tools someone lend to you.

You thus get a percent of your work since without these tools, you couldn't create shit.

Copying isn't stealing, but one should refer to the people one quotes. So that was by Zanthorus. I remember that guy being a pretentious twat on RevLeft and Libcom five years ago. He was apparently obsessed with making the impression of being intelligent and getting a good karma score to the point that he pretended to have read stuff he had not. He shilled for Kliman's TSSI without understanding the disagreements over it TSSI is shit btw and spread a lie on some hipster forum (RedMarx) where he claimed Paul Cockshott, of all people, to be a co-op shill. I'm not sure whether that was because of malice or the typical windbag method of learning about authors through second-hand accounts (who might also saving time by relying on second-hand accounts, summaries of summaries). Well, looks like he has actually read a bit since then, it looks like a decent post.

The means of production and … labour are what creates shit?????

Who woulda thunk it Xddd

Who gives you the right to own the "means of production"?

correct, and it would be great for society if those tools were available to individuals instead of being artificially scarce because that would allow people to be more productive and thus have more of their needs/wants fulfilled.

it's also important to make sure people who make better tools are rewarded, but the current mechanism to do that just creates a rentier class and makes things artificially scarce. also, ability to advance is just as if not more important than drive to advance to overall advancement, and that ability is sapped given the artificial scarcity of private property.

Who gives them the right to own it? Oh yeah wait a state that protects private property, huh really mkes u think

Those tools are already available to individuals, you can buy them you know?


I don't think the concept of people owning stuff they bought is newer than the state.

I buy a hammer in ancient tribe, I lend that tool to another groid, but that hammer still belongs to me.

Its the PRICE of producing the commodity plus the average rate of profit. I could also say that supply and demand are at equlibrium because the price is where it is.

The matter of "value" is the most nonsensical shit there is.

Value is literally subjective, your 3 hours work hour can mean $50 or $20 depending on the boss.

property is theft

How you typed that post made it hard to understand, I'm not exactly sure what you are saying. If you meant, "You are lended tools to work, the tool lender is paid with some of your labor because you worked with their tools". This is nothing like actual Capitalist-worker relations, as the tool lender does not own the labor of the tool worker, among other things. It doesn't effect the theory of Exploitation. I want to respond, but your comment is making it hard to relate the ideas I have to what you said.

ITT brainlets
read a book nigger

It's saying your labor is utterly replaceable, if you don't want to do that job, someone else can do it with the lended tools.

Go shove that shit up your ass.

It's like saying you need to read da Bible to know God's real.

Utterly banal.

ownership is also utterly replaceable

Then I wonder what's actually "theft", as in the act of taking something that isn't your.

Not for the one who don't have the tools, no.

Do not respond to "value is subjective" posts. Such people do not know what they post of.

t.

Elaborate?

How is value NOT subjective?

You think a piece of gold is inherently valuable?

t. you gotta read Marx in order to conjure up value

Marx doesn't consider value objective in the way you're thinking, value is a social construct of capitalist society. You are making an argument from semantics confusing one definition of value with another.

Then again, that nigger has a point.

You would learn more from that game than reading Marx.

theft is the act of appropriation, thus the proprietor is a thieve


it is, the proprietor's property claim can be replaced for another claim

unironically listen to this debate
youtube.com/watch?v=6oQ02sTO6PM

Value is not objective in any sense, even in the capitalist society.

There is a reason why someone shit is literally somebody's gold, in the case of fertilizer.

brainlet

Huh? Thieving by my definition is taking someone else's stuff without them knowing.
By which arbiter?

If a firm sells a good below a certain threshold (how much money it takes to produce it), they'll be drained of money, whereas if they sell for that amount or more than that, they'll receive money. The opinions of the firm or their consumers are irrelevant; the survival of the firm depends upon selling for above that threshold, or else finding enough opportunities above that threshold to compensate for dipping below.

you're not even listening to the argument. I just said marx doesn't consider value objective

A lot of word for something that can be said for:
"Hey I want a 🍔burger🍔 for $3"
"Nah, I want it for $1.5"
"There you go".

I really don't think that is what user said, but you are actually wrong with labor being replaceable. Not entirely, but somewhat. Again, I'd like to critique it but I can't even really understand the point you are trying to make to critique. You have an argument but the claim isn't there.

That certain threshold is not objective.

If the value of monetary changes, it already changes the whole thing.

your definition is subjective, mine is objective, thus my definition is the correct one

by which arbitrier is your property yours?


brainlet

Well, OK, Marx is right then, considering it isn't objective.

...

By which arbiter?
The government.
Yeah, they will, when they want to close the shop and there are still some 🍔burger🍔s.

Jesus, it's like you guys have never been to a market.

It certainly isn't when the value of said materials are subjective.

See dude, gold prices fluctuate too.

The owner is even more replaceable. Mr laborer dies -> owner has to get in touch with another one. Mr owner dies -> his tool doesn't care (what a tool).

OK, start to argue any times.

Shit's gonna get wilder when they literally replace human labor with automation.

Except the owner can pass the tools to his sons, his friends or partners, depending on who he chooses because he owns the equipment.

The labourer doesn't own shit. His only choice is yes or no.

how about listening to this:

and coming back once you've heard the whole thing. it goes over the whole argument from semantics LE VALUE IS SUBJECTIVE thing pretty well

by the objective fact that when appropriating something, which is the act of claiming ownership over something, not just merely using it, you are stopping others from making use of it. I do not need a judge to prove this fact.

thus the logical outcome is that the government is ought to be abolished

so basically they won't

brainlet

I want to argue, I clearly haven't btfo the post I replied to, and I had some great ideas, but I can't connect them to his post because he hasn't applied his seeming critique to my post.
TL;DR I can't argue cuz don't know what do.
Unlikely, and will still fall under similar rules.

lmao

and at that moment, the next owner will be as much of a thieve as the original proprietor

How about no? Go play the Guild and come back and talk to me.

Because its empirically true

I'm sure that it's pretty common that a thing that is assembled from several produced parts is not cheaper than the sum of the parts and I would say there is something technical and objective to that relationship.

you can chose to stay in denial

OK lets make a deal If i go play that game, you listen to that debate and we both come back here after. 3 2 1 … go

I claim the ownership of it because I pay for it, the fact you use my toothbrush doesn't make it your, it just makes you a thief.
If the government is abolished, we can always depend on pure violence to maintain properties because word of laws cannot protect things anymore.
Except they can and they have did.
Thus proving that "objective" capital relations also fluctuate each day and is no way in fact objective.

Well, your whole job is just to put things into shit.

There are robot arms that can already do that.

The thing is you are just cheaper.


Except capitalists actually do shit lower than its production prices in order to make up loss, it's a viable strategy when your products are a mess.

So in actuality, the "true" values of the products don't mean anything.

I love how the argument goes like,

You seem to mistake "objective" for "constant". Temperature fluctuate everyday; it's objective nevertheless.

OK, have fun user.

The Guild is a pretty autistic merchant simulator, you might learn a thing or two from it.

Academic Agent, please read a fucking book. I'm pretty sure you're still butt blasted from when Jack raped your ass in that debate.

stay mad kid

Do elaborate on what you are saying, cuz "read x" and "watch X" are absolutely banal responses. If you can't even articulate your point, do not bother.

I have no knowledge regarding temperatures so I will not argue on that field, but know that there's no objective price of gold, and it means different values depending on which people you ask, for example: a businessman in America, or some tribesmen in Africa.

Go play that game, kid.

The makers of that game know more about making money than Marx did.

sorry to hear you fell for the bourgeoisie scheme

I don't want to use your toothbrush

basically, the proprietor is not only a thieve but a violent agent

nope, the fact that it's price is lower doesn't mean it's value is lower, those hamburgers sold at a discount are not sold at a loss, they are sold, again, at a discount

it seems like you are conflicting basic terminology

nope, again, conflicting the terms, the idea of subjectivity depends entirely on the value judgement given by an individual, the price of gold doesn't fluctuate based on the subjectivity judgement of an individual. the objective value of gold isn't and doesn't have to be a fixed quantity either, the value of gold changes, but it still remains objective, subjective values can remain a constant aswell.


yup, and based on the objective value of the commodities needed to produce a fully automated robot that can do the same amount of specialized work as I do, such robots will always be impossible :)
basic thermodynamics

you are conflicting the term discount and loss, learn basic economics

lmao kiddo, go learn a thing or two about thermodynamics before trying to argue about value

fucking amateurs

Pretty sure Engels knew more about capitalism than the makers of that game considering he literally owned and ran a textile business for decades.

Go listen to that interview nigger

Good. I'm gonna buy some for $0.01 tomorrow then.

Such as paying for things?
But somebody else will, and that toothbrush still belongs to me.
Said violence is used to deter the violences that will be brought on him if he dares to not "share" his stuff.
It does mean that though, in fact, stores have sold goods at a loss to make up for cost, it's either that or they have nothing.
The price of gold fluctuate based on the subjectivity judgment of the market, which are made of individuals, not some sort of God.
Specialized work? What is your job? I don't think if you are some kind of master engineer, you would whine about not being paid enough.
Do in fact learn basic economic yourself, a discount can mean a loss.

While it is true that value only matters so long as humans exchange with each other, and in that way it is subjective, production processes involve real things that aren't subjective like materials (which are extracted by human labor) and human labor. You cannot just arbitrarily set the value of a commodity, in order for exchange to mean anything you have to base values on some thing which is objective, or at least real to everyone in society. For Marx that is socially necessary labor-time. The qualifier "socially necessary" implies some subjective judgement about what is socially necessary (someone has to want something for it to be valuable), but labor is a real process and a really important one considering most of the population is going to be laborers.

Same goes for money-commodities like gold and silver - their supply is limited by real factors like rarity, and because they are used as money (and accepted as such by governments and banks) their demand is nearly infinite. It wouldn't matter if the money-form were some other commodity, the only thing that matters is that once a money-form is agreed upon by society it takes on a very real value, regardless of whether I value gold or silver for its use-value or not. Fiat money like we use today is a little different since it's not really a commodity, but I don't think you're intellectually equipped for that discussion.

Value has as much to do with thermodynamics, as much to do with gravity.

You will be surprised, considering Engels wrote shit about family while the Guild teaches you how to open and maintain a small business. In the renaissance era.

Get it for free, go dig it up.

Labor values are subjectives, as well as material values.

Today you work for $20.
Tomorrow you work for $10.

Today a piece of bread costs $2, tomorrow it costs $1.

Get better argument.

I know, that's why I said it's the commmon way it is, that a thing that is assembled from several produced parts is not cheaper than the sum of the parts. I didn't say it's always like that. So your hot take is that the very notion of the average, of the typical case, of the normal, is not something that you believe in; even though you of course rely on these notions every day like literally every other human who isn't in a coma, you know something that our ability to communicate at all fundamentally depends on, and that you rely on at this very moment while you are typing?

so this is just bait then. WE HAVE ARTICULATED THE POINT, in the very things we have written! do you honestly think this is the first time we have had the 'value is subjective' argument? that we have never heard this argument before? that we were born yesterday? This argument has been addressed multiple times, and we're linking you sources explaining that. Do you want me to copy and paste all of capital here just because you're too much of a lazy faggot to literally click a link? cuz ill do it. This is old, The reason we write books is so we literally dont have to have the same debate like 700 times. Arguing with you is as pointless as arguing with the guy who still believes in alchemy or the flat earth theory in 2017.

If by any chance you have a shred of intellectual honesty left, and you genuinely want to learn what the left thinks before disagreeing with it, please actually read some theory by leftists. Otherwise you are outing yourself as a nothing but a fedoraposting contrarian who probably gets off on winning internet arguments. here:
marxists.org/archive/mandel/1967/intromet/index.htm
Seriously. this shit is as annoying as a toddler who keeps asking why. Educate your illiterate ass, then come back with critiques that are actually interesting, other that the 'LEL VALUE IS SUBJECTIVE" argument which has been BTFO multiple times.

the reason people are laughing at/dismissing you is because your argument is LITERALLY a MEME. /thread

No I'll go get it in a jewelry. Value is subjective so, since I don't really need gold anyway, I should have it cheap. Amiright?

>it's the commmon way it is
D'oh. That word means common in Mumblenese.

Okay, so it's not common? Who gives a shit, the fact it happens at all means values of a product is subjective, and so are your labor times.

You are in fact wrong, because while gold might be considered not valuable for you, it's not valuable for someone who sells gold, because they do that shit for a living.

Labor's value (or more specifically, the ability of a worker to labor) has a definite value based on the cost of labor's reproduction - i.e. the commodities necessary to maintain a laborer and his family, and to keep them in a condition where they are able to work. If all of the capitalists agree to pay the workers below the value of sustenance, then workers start dropping dead and there are eventually no more workers. Are you too fucking dense to understand this? The value of labor is not the wage itself, that is a tautology and Marx says as much in Capital.

Also, gee I wonder why the price of bread tends to remain stable every time I go to the supermarket, and why prices generally remain stable and, when they do rise due to inflation, the rise happens in almost every store I go to? Get a better grasp on reality, you fuckwit.

I just want you to articulate your point.

Simply do that.

He agreed with marx on all his economic writings and edited capital vol 2 after marx died.

But the jewelry doesn't need gold: they're trying to sell it.

Oh, so since it's not valuable for anyone, i can have it for free? Nice.

stop lying, no one wants to use your toothbrush, girls don't even want to kiss you, whats makes you believe anyone would like to use your toothbrush???

one cannot be violent against the proprietor, as he was the first to commit the violent act of appropriation, that's merely an act of self-defense against theft and violence in the form of appropriation

brainlet, if stores have to sell stuff at a loss to make up for their cost of production, then it means that the original value judgement these commodities ha was not based on subjective values, but on an objective reality based on their cost of production and expected rate of profit

yeah, and the market has to account for the cost of producing, mining, transporting and so on each one of the gold bars sold in this same market. after all the prices on a market are objective

my job is irrelevant to the conversation

no, a discount is the act of selling a percentage of commodities at a lower price than the original one, after the initial sales have covered the initial cost, a loss is selling a commodity at a price that does not cover this initial cost.

lrn economics brainlet

No, the value of labor is utterly subjective because you can promise to pay someone this sum, and end up cutting that sum in half.
So this is the mythical value? The objective cost of money where they can get by? Really? Because that's subjective as well.
Geez whiz, it's like there is a goddamn corporation trying to control price in order to attract customer or anything.

But still, when it increases, it increases and there's naught you can do about it.

Yes, you can have my shit for free.

You want it?

Considering Marx wasn't an expert in economic himself, maybe Engels is just as deluded as Marx?

you'd be surprised then brainlet, because gold exist due to gravity

forbes.com/sites/samlemonick/2017/10/16/stars-collided-to-make-your-gold/#39cc98e92efb

read this kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/

you can't, because a thieve is making a property claim over the mine

It's yours my friend, so long as you have enough rupees.

Ok, heres the point. The whole point of the LTV, from smith to ricardo to Marx, is that there is a correlation between price and labor content. This is undeniably empirically true there have been studies done (although I won't link them considering how you hate sources) showing how 95% of the variation in prices can be explained by differences in vertically integrated labor content. This was even admitted by Mengeror Bohm Bahwerk, cant remember atm in his critique of Ricardos version of the LTV, that there was a rough correlation between labor content and price. The classical political economists thought it was so obvious that they didnt even bother to justify it. The LTV is actually one of the most well supported empirically theories in economics.

it seems like money is an unaccurate way to measure value, as such fluctuations do not come from the objective nature of value

hmmmm

maybe we could use something else to measure value??? like time

didn't some german jew philosopher by the name of Marx realized this 200 years ago???

...

Somebody will use my toothbrush if there's no toothbrush around, I guarantee it.
Is the act of buying things violent?
It actually means the store decides to lower the goods values in order to make up the cost for its production, which is subjective as well.
The prices on the market are not objective as they can be negociated.
True.
Total bullshit, a discount, as said, can be a way to make up for initial cost if the products being total bust.
True.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to tell someone to read the whole of Capital, you basically bury people with a wall of text. You wouldn't read a whole book by Mises because some asshole on the internet tells you that. But it's fair to point people to shorter introductions or discussions as some people have done ITT.

Good point. It's silly to claim both that value = price and that value is subjective. The price of some mass-produced item at one time and place is the same for its customers. Does anybody seriously believe they all evaluate it like that? The relation between that subjective evaluation, the maximum price you would pay, and the price the customers do pay is much weaker, it is merely that the price is no higher than the maximum evaluation. For one customer it might be waaay above the threshold where he would decide against buying it while for another it might be almost too expensive.

Jesus Christ you are literally worse than a retarded man. Food costs money, without food people die. At a bare minimum, wages must be enough for a worker to feed themselves through the mechanism of exchange. This is a real constraint that governs the value of labor, which is turn governs the value of everything else that is produced by labor. You can hypothesize a world where the value of labor is brought down to the barest of sustenance and laborers are grown in Matrix-esque hives and fed soylent, but if society has come to that you have more obvious problems than capitalism. Even in such a situation though, the cost of labor is something real and not something arbitrary.


Then you're basically conceding my point that value isn't subjective? I sure wish everything I want out of life could be valued at whatever I want.

I will prove you wrong and why.

A smartphone in America and China, made of the same labors, same materials, yet the smartphone in America costs more because labors cost more in America than in China.

Despite the fact the labors in both places are the same shit, proving that even time-wise, labor values are subjective.

That's like saying that the fact that humans can have more or less than two legs makes it wrong to classify them as bipedal.

There is no labour value. What there is is labour power value. And American labour power is objectively more expensive than Chinese one.

there are more than enough toothbrushes around

Is the money used to buy things,backed up by violence? if so, yes

it actually doesn't mean that, the cost of production isn't subjective, or is he going to tell it's providers that he suddenly decided not to pay them? is he going to stop paying taxes or his electricty bill?

it doesn't matter if they can be negotiated, the negotiation takes into account it's objectivity, an objective value is not a fixed entity, the market negotiates based on objective value judgements.

no, that's selling at a loss brainlet. a discount if the act of selling commodities after the initial cost of production and cost of sale have already been covered, in a way to gain market share and force competitiors to lower their profits


labour in america is more expensive due to objective reasons

Whether you have legs is subjective.

No that example doesn't really work and here's why: the smartphone would never be made in America for the reasons you just listed. There's a process of competition which drives companies to seek cheaper inputs, so the price for all smartphones would eventually be the chinese price simply because the company which makes it with american workers and makes a phone that costs $14000 would go out of business, so the chinese phones would be all thats left on the market.

also nice reddit spacing faggot

First-world laborers just get to keep a bigger share of the surplus-value generated (but never more than the total surplus generated). First-world factories have to comply with more laws and shit, whereas China is literally Porky paradise. What said basically.

lel, right wing economists are truly deluded

Money is literally subjective, so what's your point?
Or a worker can work two jobs, or 3 jobs, this minimum wage have not always existed.
How and why? The boss decides how much to pay the workers, not the workers themselves, it's literally arbitrary.
Actually, it means it's fucking arbitrary, since the governments can price it at anything they want, as long as the buyers want to buy it.

Uh, I don't think that's an accurate comparison?

No, labor in America is materially the same as China.

It's things like laws and civil rights that make them more expensive.

Is the act of sucking my dick violent? (I am putting a gun to your head, but let's leave that unnecessary detail out.)

and? that still means labour in america is objectively more expensive, you just said so, it is more expensive because of laws and civil rights, giving it's price difference an objective reasoning

brainlet

do you want to suck dick or something?

Just like there are more than enough means of production around?
No, it's not backed by violence, I have this money, I exchange it with your goods, now my money becomes your and I own your goods.
The cost of production is subjective, as the labor time can be negociated, as well as the cost for materials.
Doublethink, if it can be negociated away, it's not objective.
An objective value is a fixed entity though, in case of temporature.
Selling at a discount and selling at a loss is not mutually exclusively.
Such as?

Whether a nigga needs to eat is subjective. It is merely because of socialist government regulation and propaganda that people believe they need to eat.

No, they aren't objectively expensive, they are in fact subjectively expensive because laws and civil rights are literal social constructs that can be changed by the government.

If tomorrow, the government takes away those rights, the exact same worker would get pay less for the same work he does.

You simply don't understand what "objective" and "subjective" mean. You don't need to read Marx; what you need to read is a dictionary.

mutability is not subjectivity

Objective
dictionary.com/browse/objective

I do think you guys need to read a dictionary yourself.

Or this

Laws are not objective!

Who owns land and who doesn't is based on democratic consensus among several billion people? One day, all the people came together to democratically decide about that?

So? The point is wages are generally different in different countries, the whole last 30-40 years of companies moving to the third world is because of wage differentials, and btw the reasons for those are a hell of alot more complicated than 'civil rights' even in mainstream economics

Yes?
Evidently, since all people hate thievery.

Value is not money. The money-commodity can be literally anything, or it could be accounting credits of some sort (fiat money). The money-form, when it exists, is just an agreed-upon expression of price, and prices are related to (but not equivalent to) the value of a commodity.
Try living without food or water, and try living a decent life without shelter of some sort. Go on, I dare you. At least it would mean that eventually we won't have to respond to your shitposts any more.
Exchange-value is, so far as human societies engage in exchange, objective within that framework. That's why we have fucking commodities markets, and that's why the price of food is generally consistent over space or at least shares similar proportions.

I didn't talk about a minimum wage, I talked about the wages necessary for a worker to survive and reproduce their labor, and for the labor pool as a whole to reproduce and expand itself. That has to happen regardless of how many bosses a worker has, if they are to fulfill their needs purely through capitalist exchange. The workers generally don't have a plot of land where they can grow their own food, if they did we'd be talking about a different kind of economic system.

And if the boss pays less than sustenance levels, their employees either die or need to find an extra job that will cover the cost of sustenance. Then there needs to be food and commodities for the children so they can grow up to work as well. Are you too retarded to understand this? It's not about the individual boss's power that's your so hyped about, it's about capital and labor as a whole.

Muh ebil gubmint! Also price is not value, you fucking idiot.

So the point is that labor values are subjective, and while labor time is objective (3 hours means 3 hours), it doesn't translate to any objective value.

"If I do X and get caught I'll go to jail" or "Someone is going to give me Y or I can raise hell in the courts" are objective statements. Whether they're valid highly depends upon the current moment in time, but they're not based on people's opinions or feelings on the matter.

WTF

basically, there is no reason to believe al the means of production should be owned then, as we could simply follow the thought of line of having ownership for use, so that everyone can use them

then how is it that I can't make my own money?

again conflicting terms, see

but I understand why you are, you are a brainlet that does not understand temperature, and thus don't understand energy

without understanding energy you will never understand economics

see

well you could say that, temperature after all is fixed to certain variables, temperature will be lower if there is no sun, this doesn't mean temperature is a fixed quantity

it is, even your subjective theory of value proves so
see


it doesn't matter if they were imposed by the governemtn, they exist and objectively affect the cost of labour.

I can either leave an icecube to melt under the sun or melt it faster by blowing it with a torch. it doesn't matter if I was involved, it is an objective reality that the ice cube melted due to the heat

if this nigger is literally so dumb he thinks laws are 'subjective' then i really don't know what to say. Subjective means its just your personal interpretation. I guess you think laws dont exist if you dont belive in them. SAGE THIS NIGGER TO DEATH
literally read ANY economics book dumbass, even a right wing one

You pay people with what?
You buy material with what?
What does that have to do with anything?
And that's bullshit, if a wage cannot sustain you, you work two wages. No one has an obligation to keep you alive.
This is true, and lot of workers do die, or they find second jobs.
And these children survive on subjective wages paid by the bosses as well.
Except it's the boss who controls the capitals, and the boss do it subjectively.
I'm not the one who's anti-government here.
As said, you pay your workers with what? You buy materials with what?

acting purposely dumb after being corrected is the go to defense mechanism used by brainlets

It does, empirically tho. Just because there's a process of competition where some people are above the average and some below doesn't mean prices dont statistically 'cluster' around labor content

no one has the obligation to respect property rights, unless there is a violent government that defends the property claim of the bourgeoisie, in which case, government is ought to be abolished

Hell yeah

So basically, no toothbrush should be owned? Whoops.
Because society doesn't accept to use your money, you can print money and austitically play pretend with yourself.
Not really, since negociation means the prices of value literally change when they should be in fact fixed, unlike temperature.
The fact there is no sun is observant without any observer, the value of money means nothing to a wolf, for example.
Wut, how?
Laws aren't objective, sorry.
Laws in fact do not exist, human laws do not exist for wolves, the fact human laws can affect the cost of labor means the cost of labor are subjective, just like human laws.

I mean, if I respect your property, you respect my property is all.

What's to stop me from violently taking your wallet for example?

A literal t-34

And that again is bullshit because labor prices are bullshit.

As said in the example of America and China.

Same hour, same kinetic energy, different values.

Who build that T-34?

I understand energy very well. When engineers make something, and they have a specification about energy usage, and they measure it and it shows a bad result, they should negotiate in a subjective way about their subjective feelings about it, until the subjective value is corrected to fit the spec. For instance, if a rad plane design doesn't work out because gravity is a little bit too strong on this planet, let's just negotiate a different slightly less strong gravity to make it work.

At this very moment, top economic experts (you know they are smart because their salaries are high) are renegotiating some terrible climate change data provided by climate scientists (who are sadly often amateurs when it comes to the science of economics). This will make it much more convenient to meet those pollution targets.

Your argument is that property is a reciprocal obligation, but many people don't have property. A squatter without anything but the clothes on his body wouldn't just be stripped if he was caught; he would be thrown in jail and deprived of his freedom.

Please argue yourself on how laws are objective.

Please do try that.

I'm curious, can you list to me some people who don't have any property?

Maybe some deranged mad men?

yeah, who would want to use your toothbrush tho?

I guarantee you that society won't be able to tell the difference between my money and the money that is currently in circulation

temperature isn't a fixed quantity, neither is the value of commodities, the value can actually change, based mainly on the cost of production needed to be produces, I could produce to equal bars of gold, however if one bar of gold took more energy to produce, its cost of production would be higher.
but you are a brainlet that doesn't understand basic thermodynamics, so I don't see how you would be able to understand this

irrelevant

brainlet, think for yourself
if loss and discount is the same, then it means there is no need to differentiate them

of course

the energy needed to mantain the rule of law that created these laws isn't subjective, it is an objective quantity

brainlet


it takes energy to create and maintain the rule of law in america, brainlet

if you weren't such a brainlet, you'd understand it's not labour as an isolated form that awards value to the commodity

come the fuck on guys, remember to save them and post them for future reference.

So you still think the value of a laborer is his wage? That is a tautology as I have explained before and will probably have to explain several more times before this is over.
You said yourself that money is arbitrary, and to an extent that is true. There is nothing that prevents a society from changing the universal unit of exchange from gold to silver, or grain, or fish, or whatever. But that doesn't change the underlying exchange rates, that 1 coat = so many bushels of wheat, etc., that you can find in any classical economics text or Marx's critique of political economy.

...

the right is unironically this retarded lel

thanks homie

sadly we live in a society that requires private property to live

as Schopenhauer said, I have no moral duty to act the way I think

no, you cannot have my wallet, but if we someday manage to transform society into a post-property one, then you can have for sure that I will personally give it to you

The same one who wants my "means of production".
Please do try that then.
Temperature is a fixed quantity, as exits whether you exist or not, while value exists in one mind. For you, that costs $4, for me that costs $2.
It proves the objectivity of temperature, unlike values and laws.
Because discount does mean the goods having decreased prices compared to its initial prices, loss can just mean the prices are lesser than the budget used to procure it.
Then property rights are objective, since you can use force to maintain it.
See above.

As well as a racism, feminism, fascism and all other -ism since it takes energy to create and maintain these ideologies.

you brainlet, dont you know the POWER of BELIEF? If I'm running out of fuel I will simply believe in more after all fuel is subjective, money is subjective, laws are subjective, gravity is subjective. EVERYTHING IS SUBJECTIVE AND THATS WHY CAPITALISM IS TEH BEST LELELELE OWNED. READING SOURCES IS FOR FAGGOTS, EXPLAIN IT TO ME ON AN IMAGEBOARD OR YOU LOSE HEHE OWNED LOLL!!111!11!

you're all caught up in "ought" when we're talking about "is". what the law is at any given point is a question of objective reality. it can change, be distinct from it is as on paper, be misinterpreted by you, but the fact of the matter is when you make economic decisions based upon the law they're not merely about your personal preference, but about material conditions.

the soviet states of AMERICA
and this song will play:
youtube.com/watch?v=U06jlgpMtQs

Again, value is price, and it's why Marx's definition of value is nonsensical.
A coat can mean a bunch of synthetic fibers now, or even furs, even that alone means Marx is wrong. And you procure these with money, thus their values are also subjective.
People also generally like having their own stuff, privacy, not shared by others.
And? Do you expect everyone to just stop making food when the damn bosses eat the food too? What is your point here?
The bosses control the capital, and whoever control the capital control the market.
The law of value do not exist in the real world.

false

I can't, there is an objective punishment if I do so, thus proving my original point

nope, the temperature of an entity only exist insofar as that entity exist

we are not talking about value judgements inside your head, but of value judgements in the real material world

you might want to believe that a red hot bar of steel is at the same temperature, but the objective reality is other

nope

so if there is a budget then it means it's price is fixed to something, thus making it objective

good job contradicting yourself again brainlet

yes, property rights are objectively theft

and?

...

A law is never an objective reality, because it can be misenterpreted by you or even the government.

You can in fact break laws without knowing you break it.

Right. I mean if standard climate-change models are real, how come we haven't all died from your hot air.

brainlet

I imeediately thought of this clip:
youtube.com/watch?v=tZzksZ3mSsU

Wrong.
No, it's not that you can't do that in the same way you can't fly on your own, you fear the retribution from the government in doing so, thus you fear society, not something objective.
But laws don't, an entity that exists will have a set of temperature (at least in the known material world), laws just spring up from nowhere in a community.
Laws do not exist in the real material world, laws can be interpreted and broken.
A red hot bar of steel is hot, no matter if you think it's hot or not.
Yes.
Except the budget is based on the price, which is subjective as well since it's based on monetary values.
No, they objectively exist by your definition.
And that means every immaterial things are real.

The punishment exists only within said community.


t. Holla Forums

they literally are, don't believe me, how about robbing a store then explain to the police that it doesn't count because you don't believe in those laws

I mean, the fact the police and everyone abide by these laws do not mean the laws exist.

… you're so retarded it literally hurts. Sage

Though, it's funny how a board that memes Stirner and how races ain't real do believe that laws are real.

Explain?
Is God real because billions of people believe in him?

the state (what you mean by the "government") cannot misinterpret the law; what it says the law is is what the law is. there are exactly the same consequences for violating a law the state interprets "correctly" and that it interprets "incorrectly". in some cases, the state cares about consistency and will let you off if it feels it's misinterpreted the law but whether it has or not is ultimately left to the state itself. read Schmitt.

-Andrew Jackson

So you're arguing that fluctuations in supply and demand change the equilibrium price of a commodity? That a loaf of bread in America is so much more valuable than a loaf of bread in Somalia? Marx's conception of exchange-value quite explicitly doesn't equal price. If you're going to talk about Marx's theory, you have to work from Marx's concepts, and either prove that Marx's concepts are fallacious on their own terms or that Marx's conclusions are flawed. If you want to say "VALUE = PRICE!!!111" you're no longer engaging in a meaningful criticism of Marx, you're just asserting something completely different because you feel like it. If your different theory is supported by evidence and reason then by all means propose your alternative theory, but I just demolished your notion that value is price and I'm just some jagoff on /leftypol.

So you're retreating to some autistic muh property argument because you can't win on your original point that "DURR THE BOSS HAS NO OBLIGATION"? No relevance to the original question.

If I were in charge of Uber I sure wish I could magically conjure up profits instead of posting hugeass losses quarter after quarter.

Not comparable, God may or may not be real, but the effects of religion are certainly real BECAUSE people believe in it

States have misinterpret the laws in favor of people who have a lot of money or influence actually.

So…next?

lmao ppl don't barter for goods on a market, at any given moment in a good on a market has a fixed price, and in the long run, it has an average price. if your argument is that this actually existing price is the result of aggregate utilities, show me the fucking studies and surveys that prove it. Otherwise, we have very extensive studies that show the labor theory of value is tremendously accurate at predicting long run price ratios.

It changes its value yes.
I dunno, does it cost more? If so, then it's more valuable.
Boss has no obligation to keep his workers alive though.
If I'm in charge of Uber, I wouldn't be making dumbass decisions like not taking orders from Trump supporters.

A term can have more than one definition attached to it. Your "argument" is that it's "nonsensical" to have more than one definition. What's so silly about it is that we aren't talking about an obscure term here, or a term that has exactly one meaning in mainstream society and another one only in some super-obscure secret society.

It is entirely a normal usage of the word value when a frustrated trader says that something he sold he could only sell below value. Now, why would he say that if only the meaning of value is price among traders? If it were, nothing would ever sell above or below value. Evidently, that's not what he meant. Nor did he mean it in the sense of sentimental value or how much he would enjoy the consumption of that particular thing. He probably meant it in the sense of typical selling price, relating that to something which at least covers production cost. This was one of the definitions in normal usage of the term in the time before Marx, and it still is.

Except they do.
Go to any market, or a particularly poor one. They tell you 300, you tell them 150.

Go to wal mart and negociate over shit i dare you

The merchant is frustrated because he pays more but he gets less.

This does not prove the existence of value, since it's all about prices, and prices can be negociated away.

that's because the laws as they are on paper are utterly meaningless; what matters is how the state behaves, and the state can and does act to protect the interests of the powerful. the "favor of people who have a lot of money or influence" influences state behavior, and is part of the law in any sensible definition.

You sure can if you form big contract with them.

I mean, you are working with a fabric purchaser here, we buy shit that are below market prices regularly.

So does it mean the laws are in fact subjective then?

There's no government on Earth that strictly follows the law. Not even Japan or Singapore.

This always was the weakest argument for capitalism.

But why do they own the tools?

Cuz they bought them?

you absolutely dense mother fucker, you don't even fucking know your own theory this is just embarrassing.

Bartering, haggling, negociating.

I mean, damn, that's what making a business is.

Ok, go walk into walmart right now go to the checkout counter and negociate the price of a banana. Videotape and post here so we can see your success

And yet if everyone could buy fabric at that price, it would go down. You just said it yourself, you're not buying at market price, the exact thing we are here to discuss!

And where did they get the money? What gives them the right to leverage their legal ownership of MoP to control people's direction and quality of life?

no, they're objective, since they have material consequences

you can have a totally incorrect understanding of the will of the state (that is, the law), but if you do you will be fucked over. on average, people who do follow the will of the state will fare better materially than those who don't; thus, the law is objective, since interpreting it correctly has real, material consequences, reducing the space of those who disobey it and increasing the space of those who obey it..

You can haggle all you like, it doesn't change the fundamental laws of markets. If people can haggle a price lower than the prices of production, guess what, the seller is gonna cut the supply until it's higher than the prices of production.

The buyer has a threshold price, but aside from that wants to buy for a price as cheap as possible. The seller wants to sell for a price as high as possible, and might also have a threshold price. Based on these reasonable assumptions, show how a market with two people and no subsidy (so price paid by one side = money received by the other) always results in a sale here when the potential buyer's threshold price is above the potential seller's threshold price if they both try to maximize their utility.

...

just brainlet things

Well, that sentence fragment is correct. The point is, the trader and virtually everybody else has some expectation about what prices are roughly going to be, and for prices that are pretty stable over time people tend to expect that it will remain so, and they tend to be right with that expectation. There are technical regularities in production that push exchange ratios of a lot of mass-produced stuff to be within narrow boundaries.

addendum: The resident ancap in this thread was also arguing that laws are subjective and not real, yet he argues that an American commodity is intrinsically more valuable than a Chinese or Somalian commodity of the same type. Is he then arguing that the entirely subjective and made-up laws in America add genuine value to an American commodity, even if it's the same fucking thing? Does this idiot even know what value fucking is?

Jesus Christ I don't even…

You seem to have some grasp of what's going on. As you may know, Marx begins talking about commodities, which are embodiments of value (in the sense of exchange value), and money is a universal commodity that serves as exchange medium. You're right capital IS value, a magnitude of value that qualitatively changes it. But labor theory is for value, not capital. Value is a broader category. Labor augments value (in the use sense especially) before capital. Capital can only valorize itself by using human labor (being-for-itself). This is why capital is expanding into all the domains of human intercourse it had not formerly colonized: the gig economy, the attention economy, social media, etc because capital is NOT based in itself or machines! It is based in human activity. I hope this puts you on the right track.

Can someone please explain for me what the difference is between:

exchange value
use value
value
price

in the Marxist schema? Specifically, which of these are numbers, and what units are they evaluated in? Hours, dollars, what? I know price is evaluated in dollars, and as far as I know "value" is evaluated in socially necessary labor hours. use-value seems to be a proxy for utility. Exchange value is the relative exchange ratios between different commodities, so that price is just the exchange value of a given commodity with the money commodity. Is this correct?

Gorilla, i…

pic related

watch this video series:
youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk&list=PL0A7FFF28B99C1303

Exchange value is the long run average price ratios between commodities, i.e. the ratios of exchange at equilibrium price.

Use value is a quality a commodity has, in order to be a commodity, this thing must have some use.

Value for all intents and purposes is the same as exchange value, but also entails socially necessary labor time which determines exchange value.

Price is actually how much a good sells for in terms of money.

You've basically got it.

I had thought price was a special case of exchange value. Guess not.

So things have a use value or don't, right? It's not utility.

Isn't this where the transformation problem comes in?

The transformation problem is value←>price.

well, how do you get from value to exchange value to price? Should value be considered a pair (H, E) where H is the average number of socially-necessary labor hours necessary for production and E is the exchange value in terms of the money commodity then?

Right, I'm still having trouble on value -> exchange value, but I guess this is the whole point if price is just one type of exchange value.

Correlation does not equal causation. Do you know what else correlates very well? Energy. You know who advocates for an energy theory of value? Only modern physiocrats.

It doesn't have to. The LTV also does not explain this. It says this is the case by having already assumed labor is the source of all value despite there being no theoretical reason to assume this other than that classical economists had done so because it seemed obvious.

You misunderstand what I'm trying to do. I'm showing that all that's needed to 'prove' exploitation in the same manner than the LTV does is simply that one assumes that labor creates all value. The description of this only rationalizes the claim further by providing a more detailed description. Without the LTV exploitation still can be rationalized with equally rational measures: who has the claim of legitimacy, 'fairness', rights, etc. Liberals talk about exploitation too, you know?

Marx himself can't prove exploitation based on LTV anymore than I can with assumptions. He too just assumes certain things as 'obvious' without an explanation in it. He says it's obvious that labor is the third thing because all commodities are products, but this isn't true at all. He says the proof is that if everyone stopped laboring the economy would cease, which is also false (video game item economies have no labor and completely arbitrary prices). Labor is obviously a source of value, but so are a lot of other things.

People here said that without the LTV we could not explain why a coat is twice the price of pants, but that's not true. We can know why: it simply costs less. Part of that cost can be anything from less labor to exploiting the international labor and monetary arbitrage. Competition has a pressure towards equalized rates of profit and cost of production, no need to ever call upon SNLT because it can't even explain the international arbitrage.

Exchange value is the definite exchange ration that is explained by value. 1 apple is 1 hour of value and 1 coat is 2. This the exchange ration is 2 apples to 1 coat.

There is no transformation problem. 1 hour of SNLT is spent on a pair of shoes, 2 hours on a coat. 2 pairs of shoes = 1 coat. 1 hour of SNLT to produce the money commodity = 1 ounce of gold or something like that. 2 pairs of shoes or 1 coat both cost you that much 'money'.

Where is the problem? The problem is in backwards engineering this. We don't actually know SNLT, and trying to find it by doing a backwards calculation shows little success in proving the equality of SNLT.

Ok, so value is denominated in (average) socially necessary labor hours, exchange value is the exchange ratio between commodities as determined by values (one exchanges N hours of value for N hours of value), am I getting it right?

So is price just the exchange value between the money commodity and a given commodity you are selling, or is it just a form of bookkeeping we use to track hours?

I guess I agree, but how is exchange even possible when we tend to just conjure money out of thin air nowadays?

Its complicated. If you really want to understand value you would have to watch this: youtube.com/watch?v=dGT-hygPqUM&list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7


Your forgetting about price of production.

The transformation problem debate is fallacious, empirically speaking we see perfect correspondence between long run average prices and labor values
see:

The problem is we can't express this transformation mathmatically making the LTV seem inconsistent. (really a close reading of volume 3 makes it clear when marx says C in the transformation equation he means the price of C thus the inputs don't need to be transformed)

Money is itself a commodity in the exchanges, it is merely a universal commodity.

Credit is closer to bookkeeping in that it is originally not money, but a claim on future money.


Because money is itself in no need of being produced because it is nothing but a representative idea of all possible commodities. Between an apple and a dollar, the dollar is a stand in for a future commodity that does not yet exist. While credit is based on a promise to pay later, money is the power to pay at the moment in exchange by having a social signifier of value. This signifier can itself command something to be made that does not yet exist, or it can claim something that already exists. Basically: money is the claim and duty of labor. All need money, but to get money work must be done. Money greases the wheel both ways: it rewards past labor by letting it command future labor. Money truly is not a thing itself, but an accumulation of claims on labor, and this is nothing but a social relation of people accepting each other's promise to abide by money.


Empirical correlation is not an answer. The question is a theoretical one. Many things correlate, energy is one of those that also correlates highly with price. The truth is that the transformation problem is a pseudo problem caused by the assumption of the LTV to begin with, and without assuming it it does not arise. One can also just do something else like MELT, which takes an obvious solution: just as exchange-value is the determinate form of value, and there we have no question of transformation, the same can be done for price. Price is simply the determinate form of value as such, we need not ask how it is transformed.


But prices of production don't need to be transformed. They can all be regressed to wages, and wages are regressed to nothing else than a contract to work.

Right, so basically "it's bookkeeping", and it works because we agree on it.

But it's not really bookkeeping, because with money no one is keeping track at all. It could actually be that way (block chain), but people think that's too big brother as it is.

I mean bookkeeping in the sense that it's just something we use to represent labor hours, but isn't itself a commodity since it doesn't have a value (where are the labor hours?).

I suppose, although it doesn't just keep past labor, but future labor as well.

In the video game universe, items are literally just a byte or a few bytes that are conjured into existence. If someone hacks the game they can get a gajillion super rare items in an instant.
Even in the video game economies there are such things as paid EXP grinders and paid item grinders so I dunno what your point is. Simulated universes can do weird things especially if the developers decide to make money off the in-game economy by manipulating supply of rares or whatever.
So, MMO games with lots of interference aren't a good model. Besides, I think the vast majority of MMO players don't pay money for any items or EXP because they just want to play the game.

I was thinking actual video game economies like TF2's before crafting was a thing. Items had a chance of being created, and their values were simply due to arbitrary judgments. which became accepted and generalized. Labor time did not explain any of the original money prices.

I haven't played TF2 so enlighten me. Are the prices in game currency or real-life currency?

If the items literally appear out of nowhere then their price would be regulated by supply and demand basically - and the supply is literally dictated by game code, so if the programmers want to increase supply they just increase the drop rate.

addendum: also, in a simulated universe, the real-world value of labor is nil, and everything in the simulated universe basically has no "real" exchange-value, because they're not true commodities, they're just bits of data. Basically, if you buy items for a game with real-life money, you're buying absolutely nothing real and tangible, unlike a real-world commodity.

TF2 originally had chance items. People started trading them for real world money outside of the steam store, using in game items as stand ins for money, but certain items were traded directly for money through an expanded relative form.

To say the price was determined by supply and demand is really a fancy way of saying all these real prices, and therefore value, were all completely subjective.

In the case of the game's items, the value of those particular items is essentially subjective. As I said, they're just bits of data, so they have no real-world existence and they're not freely reproducible. Imagine if every player could just create out of thin air however many items they want - would there be a market for items then?

Also in some MMO games there are literal paid operations for EXP and item/gold grinding, but these services are not really producing real commodities. In the real world, a commodity is a thing that, once exchanged, belongs to whoever bought it. It can't be hacked out of existence or wiped out when the game server goes offline. It is under real-world conditions that political economy operates, not simulated games. If we are talking about a simulated universe's economy, it would be limited to the confines of that simulated universe, with possible incursions from real life if it's one of those stupid pay-to-win games.

everyone who participates is taking a risk, but the laborers who are not able to stockpile massive amounts of money on the side are more at risk because they won't have money to cushion themselves if the business fails.