Let's discuss the labor theory of value

People were prepping for the war long before it started; buying weapons, stockpiling, etc. Everyone knew it was coming. Same with WW2, there's a significant rise before the war starts.

I have a few questions I've meant to start a thread for but I'll post them here instead.

Is the theory still relevant today?
Are there any good critiques of it?
Would leftist ideology have to be rethought if the theory was to be disproven?

The TSSI does a pretty good job at making sure it is logically consistent
Most of them are from Austrian economist, so not really. One of them is like "the entrepreneur has to wait to get a return on his investment so that's factored into his labor time".
No just Marxist ideology.

Can recommend this book for anyone looking to refute most criticisms of the LTV: amazon.ca/Reclaiming-Marxs-Capital-Inconsistency-Dunayevskaya/dp/0739118528?tag=ca-skim0x1342-20

Even if you don't go Marx, and you go, for example, Ford, it's the same.

The more automation the less wages. The less wages the less Purchasing power. The less power the less profit.

Why do you think great depression happened? Too many products, not enough jobs, products become stock and the people go hungry.

Ain't Capitalism great?

If you're interested in falling rate of profit etc, there's several good talks/lectures on the topic by Andrew Kliman on Youtube

youtu.be/JBbanHC_roA

Lol, no. What you're describing is just basic Keynesianism. The falling RATE of profit is a distinct phenomenon from a fall in gross profit.

Given s = surplus value (profit), c = constant capital (fixed assets like machinery), and v = variable capital (labor), the rate of profit is defined as s / (c + v). There is a crucial difference between constant and variable capital. You cannot exploit your machines in the same way you can exploit your labor. You can pay your workers less wages or force them to worker harder for the same wage. A machine on the other hand, has a fixed upkeep / maintenance costs, etc.

As time goes on, with technological advancements and need for growth in a capitalist economy, the investment in constant capital increases relative to variable capital, while variable capital tends towards 0. This means that all other things being equal (namely your profit), the rate of profit will always have a tendency to decrease.

So, one way or the other, capitalism has an end and LTV is always relevant.

You can talk like a human you know.

Real question, what forces s/c to go down when v hits zero?

am i just misunderstanding keynes or is the marginal efficiency of capital just a way to sneak the TRPF through the back door?

If am correct, it doesn't go down, it remains stable. And stability in capitalism means economic stagnation. So, not v = no s = no profit. And no profit = no growth = loss, crisis, famine, war, the horsemen of the apocalypse…

I was under the impression the Great Depression happen due to buying on margin and the government refusing to bail out banks or offer any sort of welfare.

Yes I love Kilman. He wrote the book I recommended in .

How could variable capital(the price of labor) hit 0?
S goes down because more of the work is done by machines which depreciate. s/(c+v) which Marx says can be more accurately represented by s/v is just to determine the rate of exploitation. If S=5 and V=5, the surplus value is 100%.

No, that's the after effect.
The cause, as usual, is overproduction and not enough consumption. You then need a WW to destroy production and get consumption going again by rebuilding europa and having the 50s until capitalism goes down again and you have to create credit istead of raising wages… the rest is history.

V goes to 0 once everything is fully automated.

Then S/V = S/0.

So, capitalism divides by zero and we all get sucked in a black hole.

As v goes down and c increases, the fraction s/c decreases

Kalecki and Sraffa wrote some things about the tendecy. Sraffa, though, is pretty hardcore with his writing and Kalecki is a bit easier.

What do people think of Bohm-Bawerk's Karl Marx and the close of his system? I'm in the third chapter right now and he's kinda wrecked marx already.

How can this be correct when the capitalists have been in the middle of record profits for the past 15-20 years?

Why do you think this is worth reading?

I'll pretend you're not an idiot for a second and humor you.

"how so"

profit is not the same thing as the rate of profit

this board is hopeless lol

The rate of profit is profit per investment.

...

bukharin's economic theories of the leisure class shows how Bohm-Bawerk is nothing more than a hired prizefighter for the bourgeoisie

why does this matter if his work has received academic praise against marxian economics?

...

wages =/= profit.

Profits are today the largest they've ever been. Just look at the growing gulf between rich and poor. I don't need some 200 year old dead white guy to tell me this.

Thank you for clarifying, all the jargon in these papers is a bit confusing.

Because the universities are the handmaidens of the bourgeoisie and the primary defenders of the Capitalist system.

Economics today seeks to justify Capitalism as it becomes nothing but a passing around of notes and bonds and stocks backed by the flow of oil and weapons around the globe.

In economics, it is seen as irresponsible to sit on a large hoard of cash; it must be invested to keep the system (read:charade) going. As there are countries that export oil (Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia), they need to be able to invest their money somewhere, otherwise there will be another glut and crash. The United States buys oil with money printed from bonds and uses/stores it. The Saudis and the rest of OPEC take the money and invest it in the financial markets of the First World that have the capacity (NYC, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and increasingly Shanghai and Macau) to take their money and reinvest it in various companies, like for example, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Coca-cola, etc.

They make their products, we get our wages, we buy products, like gasoline, plastics, basically anything using petroleum-based products. Even our food is based on chemical fertilizers. Our money goes to various oil companies, weapons and military/intelligence personnel are deployed to keep anyone from disturbing this system as it spirals downwards, and we can't do shit about it.

The weakness in this system is the lack of real goods to meet the demand for increased prices; consider the drop in oil prices the Saudis engineered and the subsequent mass closure of the Bakken oil fields in 2015-2016. Americans demanded politically a more independent country from Saudi oil and when that happened, prices went down to kill potential competitors.

The fact is that sooner or later we won't have supply (rigorously rated, potentially profitable areas of investment) meeting demand (cash) FAST ENOUGH to keep the system from falling apart through lack of capital which is the lifeblood of profit-based business. For all practical intents and purposes, there is no major business that is entirely privately owned, and those that exist this way are anomalies or are critical chains in this system to the point that touching them would be politically dangerous(publicly traded corporations vs Koch industries).

In any case, economics in universities exist to obfuscate the political arrangement of the trades by spending massive amounts of time generating quantities and formulas and expected values that really don't reflect the political situation on the ground by the people doing the trades. Also that is why insurance exists, but that is another matter entirely.

Addressed in the book I posted

Most academic economists are just people who were too dumb for theoretical physics or pure mathematics but want to feel like they're studying a quantitative field. Every time some of the assumptions in e.g. trade and immigration models are relaxed, the empirical data shows that the opposite of what they said would happen, happened. Macroeconomics in particular is really fucking bad.

Let's say we have a completely automated factory making products. After purchase of the material, everything is done by machine.
V = 0
But presumably this could still be sold for profit. If S > C then they'd be generating net profit, apparently, out of nothing.

That didn't really answer my question.

thanks lads

Oh no wait that isn't the transformation problem.

Good example of someone misrepresenting Marx to try and beat him. Marx already clarified that all commodities must be socially useful(determined by demand) or they're worthless.

Furthermore, labor adds value to products.

He picks one particular occupation where compensation directly from the customers exceeds compensation by the employer and will leave him with his full compensation of labor. This literally only applies to jobs you get the majority of tips from. When I worked in a kitchen I was getting shit tips, maybe $50 every two weeks if I worked 24 hours in the week.

So the function of the capitalist presupposes the function of the capitalist? Why is it necessary that the employer provide the materials? That function could be removed and the labourer would still do his job the same.

General equilllirbrum was proven completely wrong and never happened even before the Great Depression and Keynesianism replaced Austrian economics.

You could sell it for a profit initially but as the technology become widespread in that market you wouldn't be able to sell it for profit as competitors would put their profit to near 0 to compete.

Machines have upkeep cost, so you have to be charging the full amount to upkeep them and not less for more like you can with an employer.

So s/v only applies to wage labor. s/c is value that depreciates over time. If we got to a point where everything was s/c capitalism would collapse.

Paul Sweezy's book: The Theory of Capitalist Development is a pretty good intro into this tradition.

Wolfi (Insert German last name here) says that this is basically true for all economic science, including Marxism which justifies capitalism on historical/dialectical grounds. And then I realized why anarchists can't into academia :(

Doesn't that depend on there being comparable economic competitors who can't be sunk by various means?

The LTV is the explanation of value in a market economy. So yes if you were the only one selling that commodity you could theoretically sell it at whatever price you want but that's irrelevant to the LTV which assumes a market.

time preference is truly the height of sophistry. he was using cod psychology to explain the nature of production. the mind boggles

Fair enough.

to be honest i think capitalists will destroy the market before they let profits hit zero

Marx was just putting out a theory for the "Rent" theory which basically said that capitalism "rents" the unsustainable parts of capitalist production onto something else.

Ricardo said it was population, Marx said it was labour. Even if neither is 100% correct, I think that the renter theory is completely valid. It's like touching something in a dark room - even if you can't tell exactly what it was, you know it's there.

Austrian economics are sophistry to the umpth degree.

So can any of you explain why you hold such disdain for Austrian economics? I was under the impression that a lot of the economic wealth generated in times of booms, were a result of austrian principles.

No, that was a result of Keynesianism. Austrian economics are shit and were dropped after The Great Depression happen. Austrian economist literally said "no don't do anything you're fuckiing with the divine force of the free market" and there was little to no recovery going on before Roosevelt introduced the New Deal which was such an economic success he was elected 4 times in a row. Neoliberalism, which is a largely Austrian creation, following its initial move from Germany to the United States has been a complete utter failure bring the contradictions of capitalism to rear their ugly head.

Austrian economist literally reject using the scientific method to reject their theories. This shows you how garbage they are.

to analyze their theories*

How are you gonna have profit unless you sell products?

You also don't need a 200 year old dead guy to tell you this.

Why does white matter?

Oh! You mean like EU and austerity? Ye… Great bombs come from austrian pricinples.