See posts #127 and #128, eh, why don’t you, since you’re suddenly so concerned for evidence. Even Hellestal, bless his heart, is admitting that it works for the things Marx wants it to do. He think’s it’s “not surprising,” but that’s such a wussy non-complaint that I’m buying him a beer for it some time.
And, of course, it’s almost as much Adam Smith’s and David Ricardo’s theory as it is Marx’s. But you knew that, didn’t you.
The point is that the “labor” part of the Labor Theory of Value doesn’t explain anything, and is therefore an unnecessary complication.
What a bizarre question.
Do you understand that people do not exchange things of equal value? No one spends their time in line at the bank changing their five dollar bills for singles and back again. If the Labor Theory of Value says they should, then the LToV is wrong. Because they don’t. That’s an observed fact.
We don’t exchange things of equal value, because the effort of making the exchange gains you nothing.
I have an apple, and I hit it with a hammer and make it into mush. According to the LToV, you should be willing to exchange your whole apple for my mushed apple, because I put labor into it by hitting it with the hammer. But the observed fact is that relatively few people prefer apples that have been hit with a hammer to whole apples. In order to explain this, Marx needs to introduce things like use value and exchange value.
The difficulty is that the use value and exchange value can be used to explain the phenomenon without any reference to the labor of hammering apples.
So you have one theory that explains observed phenomena, and another with an unnecessary complication that doesn’t. Theories that explain the world are better than theories that don’t. And Occam’s Razor points us away from introducing unnecessary complications.
Regards,
Shodan
You’re making a claim about “almost literally the only thing that Marx… is trying to do”. You’re making a claim not just about what’s in the book, but what was in Marx’s head, what his purpose was, what he was trying to accomplish in this section of the book. In this particular section, where he introduces the LTV, you are making a claim about his particular goals, what he’s “trying to do”.
I hope you understand that you’ve given no one any reason to believe you on this claim.
In particular, I don’t agree with you on this claim. Not even slightly. In order to establish what Marx was trying to do, I cited the book in numerous places. I tried to back up my position about what he’s trying to do, by pointing out what he exactly says. It’s something very different from what those papers are trying to do. I can point to at least three different things, off the top of my head.
First: The papers that were cited above actually look at data in order to compare different interpretations of where prices come from. Marx doesn’t cite any direct information about relative labor amounts and relative prices at this particular moment (when he’s trying to set up the LTV).
We don’t need to see a modern correlation coefficient for him to be doing the same thing. It would be sufficient for him to have a chart, or even a verbal explanation, that conveys estimates of relative labor amounts required in different industries, along with the relative price levels of those commodities. (Even more sophisticated would be an attempt to compare his own idea with other people’s. All three papers do that, with varying degrees of success.)
But he doesn’t do any of that.
Quite the opposite. He takes his explanation as given. He assumes from the beginning that his theory of relative prices is correct, and he makes purely verbal arguments, without any directly cited data, in order to do that. I don’t personally mind that metohdology at all, as long as he is equally open to verbal arguments in response. But as I explained in my OP, at length, he actually spends huge sections shoring up his version of the LTV from attacks on previous version, most especially Ricardo’s, and he eventually creates a beast sufficiently inured from reality that he can manage to defend it as a tautology. (The tautology will later be absolutely essential to him, above and beyond the data he doesn’t cite in this section, because his later moral argument is built on top of it.)
Second: The papers above would still work without any assumption of cause-and-effect. If I’m comparing IQ to wages, I can do that with no causal claim. I can point out, hey, there seems to be a relationship between the two that shows up. But just pointing out the relationship doesn’t mean one is driving the other. I can get a nice relationship between ice cream consumption and the murder rate, but that doesn’t mean dairy products cause blood lust. Maybe higher-paid jobs develop people’s skills to the point that they do better on tests. That’s a possibility.
But if I start bringing new ideas into the discussion, such as that there is an underlying process in people’s minds called “intelligence” that’s proxied well by this IQ thing, then that’s more than just running the numbers on the relationship. I’m bringing in the underlying idea to push a causal angle, that this underlying “intelligence” has some bearing on why people on average who carry more of this underlying trait do better on average. Introducing an underlying concept, beyond the more superficial relationships, is only important when you’re getting into real cause-and-effect type shit. Which is exactly Marx’s purpose.
He doesn’t stop at comparing relative amounts of labor time with relative prices of goods as they’re traded in the markets, and then stroke his magnificent beard while saying, “Hmmm, maybe something’s going on here.” He’s doing way more than that. He’s bringing that underlying idea into the picture, forcefully and from the beginning. He wants to talk about VALUE as a distinct causal process.
There is no reason to create a new underlying notion of VALUE created solely by labor unless you’re reaching far past a potential relationship in the data toward a final unraveling of the causation. And he doesn’t even stop there. He claims further that labor is the sole source of this VALUE. He claims further (falsely, as I’ve already explained) that the only characteristic that “commodities” have in common is that they are products of labor.
He’s not testing an idea against the data like the papers do. He’s gone well past identifying a relationship. He has made the positive claim that the only property that unites commodities together – the only necessary condition – is their being products of labor. I spent a very long time in the OP both identifying that particular claim, and then criticizing it at length. This is to introduce his notion of VALUE.
Third: This is just a basic fact about writing a book, but Marx didn’t write chapter one in isolation, on its own, with an attitude of aw-shawks kicks dirt alls I’m tryin to do is this one little ole thing.
No one believes that. Not even you believe that. Marx wrote the first chapter to set up his later moral claims in his theory of EXPLOITATION (Dun-dun-DUUUUN.) It is at that later point that his tautology of value becomes the equivocation of value. If VALUE is just some nice relationship pulled randomly out of the air to predict relative prices, then it doesn’t matter beyond that. But if VALUE is more than just the cause of relative prices, but a fundamental entity that is stripped away by the eeeeeevil capitalists, then he’s got the major cause for complaint that motivated the writing of the book.
The problem with the claim that Marx’s goals are extremely limited, that “almost literally” the only thing he’s trying to do is set up a relationship between relative prices and labor, is that Marx himself contradicts that claim on several different levels.
That is why this sentence:
And this sentence:
contradict each other.
The “value of commodities” is itself a theoretical construct in Marx. It is not part of the data. It’s not what the papers cited above are trying to measure. It’s the exchange-value (Tauschwert) that comes from data. It is relative amounts of labor (Arbeitszeit) that comes from data. VALUE is a theoretical/philosophical/moral construct that does not come from data, but it is intended instead to explain the data, the underlying “intelligence” that pushes the other pieces.
It carries more weight than a simple relationship. It carries causal heft. But it carries more weight than causal heft. It carries an inherent moral component, and the moral component is what he’s actually after. (This is all in my OP, BTW.) In order to state that VALUE comes exclusively from labor – by ignoring all those other necessary conditions – his actual purpose is not just to describe relative prices but to build a moral argument. He wants to swing his Hammer of Morality, and to give himself a lame excuse to do that, he needs a deeper concept than a correlation in the data. So he makes up the theoretical notion of VALUE (Warenwerte or der Wert einer Ware), which is something else, something deeper, something that gets “crystallized” in a deep philosophical fashion into the commodity itself. He talks about the products of labor being a “gelatin” of accumulated labor time.
The creation of this theoretical construct is right there in the beginning. The purpose is not to explain data, as you claim. The purpose is much deeper and more self-righteous.
You’re now trying to sell people on the notion that Marx’s goals were extremely limited in the part of the book when he’s introducing the LTV. I don’t believe you. I can’t put myself in the place of any readers of this thread – the primary audience for my posts – but I doubt that anyone who reads this thread carefully, or the early parts of the first volume of his book carefully, would have any reason to believe you, either. I don’t know that for sure, but I’m making my arguments built on the bones of specific excerpts. The OP even gives a short history of the development of the idea.
Rather than your interpretation, I think instead that Marx’s own words provide an excellent clue about what he was trying to accomplish, for reasons I’ve outlined.
I described the sorts of properties we want from a language. They are as one might expect.
When a particular formulation is better than another, it’s better for specific reasons. Arabic numerals and Roman can both describe numbers. They can both accomplish exactly the same job. But Arabic numerals are better for many different reasons. Writing out algebraic problems in equation form, rather than as word problems as the ancient Babylonians did, is a better language to describe those equations. It’s better for a specific reason.
I don’t go around stating blindly that one particular formulation is better or worse, without immediately pointing out under what criteria we should be evaluating how one is better or worse. My specific point above is that modern value theory works better not only under a broader class of non-commodities, but that it also works better under the same subset of goods that Marx restricted himself to. It works better because it describes more aspects of reality more precisely, in a way that is easier to manipulate inside our heads. Not only does it apply more broadly, but it’s more precise even when restricted to the same context Marx wanted to talk about.
People who rely on archaic language are more likely to make mistakes. That is one prime reason why the way we describe things changes over time.
No, it won’t.
There was no ideology that chose Arabic numerals over Roman. It was their more direct usefulness that won the day, but you wouldn’t be doing math “wrong” if you stuck to the IVLCDM formulation. You could express the same ideas. It would just take longer, and it would be harder for people to understand.
People who like to rely on archaic language, abandoned for more than a century by professionals in the field, are much more likely to make basic errors in their reasoning. The language itself can lead them astray.
Reality does not bend to the words we use.
I could start using Marxian terminology, and it wouldn’t change the equations I program into a computer to model an economy. It would change only how I would try to talk about the output of the program to other people after it had run. Now, it’s absolutely true that people of different ideological persuasions tend to favor different languages. But reality does not bend to our choice of language. We can only try, whenever possible, to have our language bend toward reality.
Which is to say, as I have said before, we can try to adopt a language that illuminates reality rather than a language that obscures. No formulation is perfect, but some are more prone to error-riddled thinking than others. Roman numerals are hard to use. One of the characteristics of a superior language tends to be that the people who work most in that area – e.g. mathematicians working with numbers – tend to quickly adopt the language that allows them to think most clearly about real-world issues.
I notice, BTW, that you’ve had some serious troubles getting people to understand points you’ve been making since the first page.
I agree with this. That’s exactly the problem.
The very moment Marx starts complaining about capitalists “exploiting” workers, he’s using moral language to naturalize his absurd definition of value. And this was, of course, his intent from the very beginning.
The entire system is built for that purpose. He begins his book with that purpose in mind. As he soon as he posits VALUE as an underlying thing that exists as a “gelatin”, or “crystallized” in commodities – this VALUE coming only from labor and not any of the other necessary conditions common to all commodities – he’s already laid out his entire game plan. The overwhelming majority of people who cite Marx are going for victory by connotation, the same way Marx did. The discussion gets convoluted in an inferior language, and all that’s left is disputes about words instead of focusing on which kinds of countries tend to do better for their poorest people, and which kind don’t. The moral layer, smeared inexpertly on top, occludes all that. VALUE comes only from labor, and capitalists must therefore extract surplus VALUE, and therefore that’s bad.
That is the core argument.
Marx’s writing style is very much like a modern partisan blogger. It’s no surprise whatever that he was a newspaperman in the revolutionary rags of his day. That exact style of writing still exists today, the same high-quality and witty writing style covering up the poverty of silly ideas. He gets the cheap thrill of swinging that Hammer of Morality. He sets up his conception of VALUE because his earlier tautology can later be equivocated, meaning that VALUE is something that can be stolen by people who are up to no good.
This extra philosophical/moral dimension of VALUE is not inherent in a Labor Theory of Theory. Not even remotely. Ricardo was a classical liberal, and he also believed in an LTV, and he tried to use it to explain relative prices. But he didn’t swing the Hammer of Morality, because that wasn’t his purpose. The exploitation angle is only sprinkled on top if there is some ridiculous philosophical basis for doing that. That extra layer of high dudgeon that Marx brought is an unnecessary embellishment to a pure LTV, which is only trying to explain relative prices in markets.
But this embellishment was standard for Marx, whose purpose was not describing reality but rather hitting people over the head with his Hammer of Morality. This same reliance on the hammer is also standard for basically anyone I’ve ever seen who claims to like the LTV today. It’s not enough to claim that relative amounts of labor do a decent job in explaining relative prices, as Ricardo tried to use the idea. There must be some underlying philosophical/moral construct, which must then be naturalized. People then pull out the more intuitive but very different moral language of theft, oppression, expropriation, and exploitation – and they use the LTV as their excuse for doing that. VALUE has been stolen.
People who naturalize the language in this way often give themselves a post hoc justification for their connotation-laden expressions. To pull a convenient example:
This is the specific appeal of the LTV.
And the poster of that specific example, immediately after arguing from connotation, tried to justify that language as the most natural to use for the context.
I didn’t specifically remember that quote. But I’ve just seen enough Marx-inspired “arguments” to know how they always go. So I went fishing, and there it was in the OP.
I stand completely unsurprised.
It’s so typical it is entirely unremarkable, and it’s the exact mirror image of “Austrian” thinkers on the internet. They, too, tend to reach almost immediately for their own Hammer of Morality. Many of them (tho of course not all) prefer making detrimental moral judgments of others to attempting to describe reality as it is. It is a typical characteristic.
You can claim that the LTV gives a decent prediction of prices in a particular context. That’s true. It does. You cannot reasonably claim – not in my own estimation, and I doubt neither in the estimation of any careful reader of the available materials – that Marx’s purpose in his early chapters was ONLY to establish this relationship in the data, most obviously (again) because he doesn’t cite any relevant data there. He’s creating a philosophical/moral term that goes beyond the data. That is his purpose, but that term is necessary for his later moral bludgeonings of others.
There is a better way to approach issues like this. There are also better theories of value, which can illuminate matters more precisely according to the criteria outlined above. For another example of that…
This is very important.
I am going to write this as simply as I can.
I never said that they were the “same” commodity.
They are obviously different commodities.
That is entirely the point.
The two types of carpets are made with exactly identical amounts of socially-necessary labor. They have exactly identical amounts of VALUE “crystallized” and “congealed” within them. This means that their exchange-value should be exactly identical according to the basic LTV. Naturally, the higher-quality carpet is a “different” commodity. That is not the issue. The problem is the exchange-value, which should be:
1 good-carpet = 1 shitty-carpet
That exchange relationship is supposedly going to come from the relative amounts of labor that went into them, which is identical. The relative price should be one-to-one, since the VALUE is one-to-one. Each one requires the exact same amount of labor from the exact same quality of workforce. The question is: Would they sell at the same price in reality? No. No, they would not. Can an LTV account for that difference? Not any basic LTV. Even Ricardo’s version – which incorporated capital by the amount of labor that went into the machines – would have major trouble with an example like this. A modified (long-run equilibrium) LTV might make a stab at it, using a roundabout process. But so what? A modern theory of value could also have a long-run equilibrium, but it would also describe the immediate effect from the creation of newer, higher-quality carpets. This is, again, the same point I’m trying to make about the language we should use to describe reality. Better languages tend to be broader, more flexible, and more precise.
A modern value theory wins in this context for these specific reasons.
You have relevant questions about the OP, and I’ll try to get to them.
But before that, I want to concentrate on the ordinary, intuitive, everyday use of the word “value”. Because that is the use that modern economists use.
Value is just what people like. It’s not some deep philosophical construct, at least not on its own. We’re dealing with the normal, everyday definition. We’re just going to use basic reasoning to ride out that everyday reasoning to various conclusions. And in everyday terms, we don’t value everything equally. We prefer some things to others. This is, I believe, obvious. And the fact of the matter – using a normal, everyday definition of the word – is that there is no particular reason to engage in any trade whatever if a person values good X equally with having good Y. (There is also no particular reason NOT to engage in the trade. That’s what indifference is all about.)
To say that the vast majority of trades are between goods of different values is to state something utterly obvious – again, if we’re using a normal everyday definition of the word. And modern economists do, in fact, try to use just this simple straightforward language. It’s useful to rely on intuitive phrasings whenever possible.
Now, let’s put it the other way. If we try to claim that two goods that are traded in markets are mysteriously of the same VALUE… then what does that mean? Seriously, what does it mean?
If it means merely that their relative prices/exchange-values are equivalent, then we’re just using an old term perversely for an old concept that already had a term. It’s inherently confusing to use an old established word, with obvious intuitive meaning, and then start saying no-no, the VALUE is equivalent. That makes no intuitive sense. The value is clearly not equivalent (using intuitive language) when I do my purchasing. I wouldn’t bother with any effort making any purchases if the value were equivalent, because I’d be indifferent to my situation before and after. I make purchases not when I’m indifferent between the two states, but when I see a chance to gain more from the purchase than I lost from what I gave up. I make purchases when I see a chance to have greater value.
This is not a conclusion. This is definitional, as Blake said. It’s not a logical conclusion to anything, it’s how we’re setting up our language. But it’s definitional in a nice, straightforward, everyday sort of way. The reason we stick to the intuitive language, whenever possible, is that it will turn out to be more flexible and precise. It’s easier to do that than claiming that transactions are between equivalent VALUES, which is going to lead to all sorts of problems.
We’re not always going to have the possibility of relying on the intuitive language. But when we do, we should. The alternative is not appealing. Again: What does it even mean for two exchanged objects to be of equivalent VALUE? If we’re saying that their relative price matches, then we’re not saying anything new, we’re just perverting old intuitive language in ways that aren’t helpful. We’re just overloading this old concept with an unnecessary counter-intuitive old term. Of course, there is the possibility of something more going on. We might make some deeper statement: two “commodities” exchanged in the markets have the same VALUE (when their exchange-value/relative prices match up) because they have the same amounts of relative labor crystallized within them. That would be a deeper statement.
The problem is that it won’t be precisely true. Approximately? Sure, in many contexts. But it’s still messy because it leaves stuff out, such as in the hypothetical example above where we can clearly see a case where two different goods, with exactly identical VALUES (congealed labor) will nevertheless have different prices (a non one-to-one exchange value). It’s easy to come up with examples where each object has the same VALUE (congealed labor) and yet the objects still do not have a perfect exchange-relationship that matches the relative amounts of labor. It will often be close, yes, for many kinds of industries. A strong correlation. But it won’t be identical even in situations where the theory would demand that they are identical.
It won’t be identical because there are other things going on in the world. Rather than concentrating solely on labor, to the exclusion of other necessary conditions of production, we should prefer a language that can deal with this other shit that can happen in reality.
Hi Hellestal, sorry, before I start taking this post apart to see what we can do about it, I’d just like to ask if you’re game to continuing the conversation–I realize its a tax on your time. I’m game, but at several points below I already see fundamental and what I think are insurmountable philosophical differences, and that always makes discussion a bit awkward…if you don’t want to go on, let me know.
Now, having said that, I think you are misunderstanding what I was pointing out. I was not saying that Marx was using data to derive the same conclusions as the papers do: I was saying that Marx, to quote you, sets “the limited context of “commodities” produced by mass-manufacturing processes with employees” and claims that the “the LTV does a good job” in these circumstances.
It develops from the logic of the book—it’s very hard to prove this, really, without reading the book and agreeing that that is its structure. How can I convince you?
No, he doesn’t, that’s correct. He does not empirically derive anything much at this point.
You keep persisting in calling something about the LTV a tautology, and I’m still not sure what. Nor could anybody tell me how its circular, so far. You’ve certainly claimed it’s tautological, but it’s not. The steps are not, after all, “value is explicitly defined to come only from labor, therefore it comes only from labor,” but rather “if then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour” (128), and therefore “all these things now tell us is that human labour-power has been expended to produce them, human labour is accumulated in them. As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values-commodity values.” (ibd.) Labor is the source of value not because labor is the source of value, but because in the relation of exchange, it is the only non-reducible element, and therefore the one which is left standing to determine exchange value. You may agree or not—but it’s not tautological.
First of all, it’s not true that Marx says labor is the sole source of value. That’s because value always thinks both exchange and use value, and use value, as Marx points out, “are combinations of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour” (133). In the exchange relation, Marx says, use value plays no role (you probably differ). Second, I don’t see you explaining why the deduction that all commodities have in common only labor is wrong. Is this a reference to your WHOO!-theory, or to the issue you have with Marx not figuring in the risks of capitalists or their intellectual work? Because, if it is the latter, you presumably do know that Marx gets to some of this later in the course of his work, but doesn’t, here?
No, he’s not testing an idea. But you’re still wrong in your summary, or, at least, you are obscuring through your choice of words what’s at issue. What do you mean with “unites commodities together”? Labor does not “unite commodities,” it makes them commensurable. Labor is merely the remaining property common to all commodities and the source of their value. It’s not the only necessary condition for them to be commodities: for that, they must be in a relation of exchange on a market, for example.
I don’t believe that? Yes, I do believe that. I believe that the progression of his argument leads Marx to say, at this point in his argument (like a couple dozen pages in), that his modified labor theory of value works really well for the conditions he’s discussing, and that’s that. And then, because he thinks it works really well, it lets him discuss, as I’ve said above, surplus value, exploitation, the inherent instability of the capitalist system, and so on, sure. It’s the purpose of the book, after all, to explain why capitalism is an exploitative, failure-prone, and highly problematic system (without denying its constructive powers, its historical necessity, or the problems it produces for capitalists). So?
Yeah, so? It’s a theoretical construct, yes. It’s why we call it the theory of value, not the fact of value.
You keep insisting on “all those other necessary conditions” You’ve listed them, perhaps (still not sure), but you’ve certainly not established them: nor have you sought to think about whether they might not be amenable to inclusion in the LTV. What would you like to talk about? Machines? Intellectual endeavors? Investments? The point of all of these is that at their bottom lies labor. Marx is adamant that you must realize this: there is no magical stuff in commodity production that escapes having been, at one time in its long chain of being, been produced by labor. Marx is not saying that it’s all the individual laborer’s brawn in the sweatshop: but ultimately that machines, capital, and even your ability (free time, education) to think intelligent thoughts are the “products of past labor,” as he says later.
And hey, look here—I’ve not actually claimed this!
I’m not trying to sell anything. I’m saying that’s the progression of the argument. You may disagree, that’s fine. I think you’d be wrong.
I’ll take your word for it, but again, one wonders what it means to do “better” here, and how such “better” performance is to be evaluated free from ideological lenses.
It’s a meaningless counter-example. Roman numerals and Arabic numerals express the same things, and one of them is simpler than the other. Marx’s value and your value don’t express the same thing, and so to make a choice between them as being better becomes difficult to justify on the grounds of simplicity, and a choice between them on the grounds of superiority becomes difficult to disentangle from ideological preferences. Who gets to judge what “exploitation” is, for example?
Some professionals, perhaps even most professionals (certainly not all professionals), brought up in a profession that has abandoned Marx’s system, and not to put too fine a point on it a profession that’s always been entangled with politics, prevailing ideologies, and so on. That’s fine, I’m not complaining, I know that it’s difficult to see one’s own orthodoxies from the outside: but that doesn’t mean they are not there. Nor does a century’s worth of saying Marx is wrong make Marx wrong.
Nonsense. Of course it does. What’s the reality of George Washington’s treason? What’s the reality of exploitation? What’s the reality of poverty? What’s the reality of conservatism? Reality bends to our words all the time—in point of fact, even “reality” is just a word.
You’re preaching to the choir. That’s always easier than to tell the choir why it’s singing the wrong tune.
Huh?
What is “victory by connotation”? I’d say the overwhelming majority of people who cite Marx want a better, more equitable, fairer, and more liveable society, by the way…I mean, I’d be happy to have an ego that lets me make claims about the “superiority” of my language absent evidence that it actually is superior (or a finely honed sense of how that superiority could be proven)? Also, what does this have to do here?
I realize you don’t LIKE Marx, or Leftists, apparently, or thinking about capitalism as anything but the bestest possible system, and I’m happy because that makes clear the ideological position from which you are coming in your faulty critique here: but it’s not really the issue.
Really, Hellestal? I explicitly write “more useful,” and you read “only natural”? I can’t help you, then. I’m explicitly framing exploitation as a choice of words here, because it illuminates something that is otherwise hidden.
I’m sorry I have political beliefs, then? What? What’s the issue?
You get to say they are better? I think they are not better. I think Marx’s way is better. Who adjudicates this dispute?
That’s for the process of exchange to find out. Marx explicitly says: “As exchange-values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labour-time.”
You’re presuming your own conclusions. This is not Marx, this is not even economics. If you’re saying that if a shitty carpet and a great carpet are manufactured using the same labor inputs and then exchange equitably on the market for one another, shitty labor appears as valuable as great labor, sure, tha’s a truism. It’s no different from saying “one coat=one boat”. But you’re simply presuming this equitable exchange, an exchange which, as Marx is continually at pains to point out, will need to happen before you can discover the exchange value of your commodities. Why would anybody make your exchange? They wouldn’t—they’d want a rebate on the shitty carpet, or not buy any shitty carpets, period, and then either the shitty carpet would cease to be a commodity, or it would not trade 1:1. It’s like saying: if I exchange a dollar for your yacht, that would mean it’s worth a dollar, right? Sure: but you wouldn’t give me your yacht for a dollar.
And finally, and incidentally, this is Marx on your sixfold productivity raise in the other post:
“If the values of all commodities rose or fell simultaneously, and in the same proportion, their relative values would remain unaltered.” (146)
With regards to why it’s circular, I’m pretty sure multiple people have pointed out why it is. It’s not hard to see.
Well since that exchange is not made, obviously after the fact it can be determined that your labor was not socially necessary. For if it were the exchange would be made as value was added. But since value wasn’t added it can’t be socially necessary.
You’re *pretty *sure, that’s great. I would still take it as a kindness if you explained it to me, especially if it’s not hard to see. Or if you quoted that example of this being pointed out that most convinced you. I fail to see it, and that must make me a bit dull; and so I’d appreciate a clear and simple outline of the theory’s circularity.
I’m especially interested because this
is quite a bit garbled…it’s quite as bad as pal Shodan’s slightly dull repetition of the same, long dismissed (but it seems you guys always only read your own posts, rather than the replies) “hey, let’s spend some labor cutting up the Monet!” argument, and you seem to think something was proven? Please, *please *explain.
The “cutting up a Monet” argument was dismissed, but it was not addressed.
Labor does not create value apart from the exchange value. Only socially necessary labor creates value. How do we know the labor was socially necessary? From the exchange value. And therefore the labor theory of value introduces an unnecessary complication - that there is any labor that affects value apart from its exchange value.
If X = 1 and X + Y = 1, then Y = 0.
The “socially necessary” part of “socially necessary labor” means that value = exchange value. Because only thru exchange can you determine what is socially necessary.
Cue another round of “but you haven’t explained it!”
Regards,
Shodan
It’s been explained. Not going to jump through hoops to point out and quote what has already been written in this thread. That’s a very silly game. You appear to be choosing to not understand the examples of circular definitions. This is similar, at this point, to debating a religious zealot.
Which is fine because at some level everything comes down to some form of faith. The way my mind works evidence is preferred to circular rhetoric. If I see evidence that the LTV works or is non-tautological at its core I’ll come back to this thread and concede I was wrong.
It was addressed, plenty of times. But let me go through it one more time:
First, let’s understand that any individual exchanges used in my examples here are already attempts to make the theory more intuitive: Marx’s theory is no at a theory of individual exchanges, but about social processes. So it’s never about YOUR apple mush or MY apples, it’s about apple mush and apples generally.
That said: I have repeatedly said that “labor” for Marx imparts value only when it makes a commodity–a thing that has use value and exchange value. All labor can make use values (such as when you mush an apple for your toothless granny), but whether or not your labor has made a value depends on the market, and the discovery of whether you have made an exchangeable commodity. Your apple mush example assumed that I “should” want to exchange a whole apple for your mushed apple, because you put labor in. You’ve got it backwards. IF mushed apples and apples both are commodities, that is, IF they relate to one another in exchange, then mushing an apple is labor that imparts value. But not just any work you do translates into exchangeable labor, and thus into value. Is that clearer?
Labor can create use value, which may remain distinct from exchange value (as when you eat the tomatoes you grow in your garden). It creates value when it produces a commodity (as when you bring your tomatoes to the farmer’s market, though again, because your not being yourself a wage, Marx is less interested in this).
Okay, so this is your hangup? Are you sure? I answered this above: you are misunderstanding the qualifier “socially necessary”. It does not modify “labor”, but “labor time”. What you appear to mean when you say “socially necessary labor” is what Marx and everybody else calls “utility”. All commodities, by definition, have utility. All labor that creates commodities is “socially necessary” in that regard, though it’s not Marx’s term.
The point is, following your sentences,
“Value is created only by the magnitude of socially necessary labor-time expended.” That is, only that labor time goes into value that is, on average, necessary to make a commodity (it won’t have more value just because it took you longer to make, if everybody else can make it quicker)
“How to we know that the labor was expended “meaningfully”? Because it has an exchange value.” This is difficult to keep straight, because the question makes no sense in Marxian terms. No labor is “socially necessary” in Marx’s sense, the words only apply to labor-time. But in your sense, as I say, it seems to mean “utility.” In that case, the answer is simple: if the thing exchanges, it must have utility. That is, we know the labor itself was what you call “socially necessary” because the thing it produced is being traded on the market: someone wants it. But again, this is rephrasing: it is not related at all to any context in which Marx says “socially necessary”. Nor is utility related to value, in Marx’s argument. So it’s given that socially necessary labor has been expended when you have a commodity, but the value of the commodity is dependent on the amount of *labor-time *expended.
And I’m not sure about what the complication is, but I hope that this time, I’ve cleared up what the misunderstanding about terms is. If not, let me know, and I’ll explain.
So you can’t explain, and you can’t discover an explanation that you’d be willing to pass on, and you don’t read the evidence provided against your POV already. That’s fine. Again, I’m just left to wonder what ever brought you to try “debating” here…
I’m not sure how your mind works. But since the evidence was provided (in three papers, which Hellestal critiqued), I’m sure your absence from here will be no major loss.
[QUOTE=Enterprise]
Let me make this crystal clear: you’re positing a situation in which all commodities in a capitalist economy suddenly can be produced with 1/6 the outlay of socially necessary labor time? Because, just to reiterate, the labor theory of value pertains only to value of commodities produced under the conditions of capitalist wage labor. If that’s the situation you’re positing: I doubt Marx has given a single moment’s thought to this utterly, utterly unlikely event; but logically, since value is something that becomes pertinent only in exchange, and since everything is now 1/6 as much labor intensive to produce, the LTV of value would find values constant in this (somewhat unlikely) hypothetical.
[/QUOTE]
This is from my reply to **Hellestal **on p. 3, and I’m quoting it here to correct it. It’s wrong (well, it’s missing a word, namely, “relative values” instead of “values” in the last sentence), and it doesn’t actually answer Hellestal’s complaint. In fact, Hellestal is right to say that Marx would say the value production in the society he describes as been reduced to 1/6. Shock and outrage!
But I think Hellestal, or possibly neoclassical theory, I’m not sure, is simply conflating two things here in his (no Marx’s) use of value: value and wealth. For Marx, laborers producing for only 1/6 of their labor time produce only 1/6 of the value, but they produce the exact same amount of wealth. Wealth, Marx says, is use values. And obviously the same use values have been produced in Hellestal’s example. Says Marx on p. 33: “An increase in the quantity of use values is an increase of material wealth. With two coats two men can be clothed, with one coat only one man. Nevertheless, an increased quantity of material wealth may correspond to a simultaneous fall in the magnitude of its value.”
So Marx is simply using two words, value and wealth, for what Hellestal (and neoclassical economic theory?) would prefer to use one, value? Does that seem right?
What is the distinction between “labor” and “labor time”?
I’m not sure Marx ever defines “labor”, actually, probably because it’s just what one expects it to be: work, though at the begining of Capital, *perhaps *more specifically that work which transforms (raw) materials into commodities, or *manual *labor. (One might want to go through Smith or Ricardo to see if they offer a definition that Marx implicitly takes over). Marx offers several distinctions (productive and unproductive labor, concrete labor and abstract labor, to name a few) which help him establish the groundwork for later steps in the argument. But labor is pretty much what you think it is: hoeing, weaving, carpentering, car-making, and so on.
“Labor time” is, well, the time spent at labor. 9-5, for example–an eight-hour labor time. And “socially necessary labor time” is the generally required time, over all producers, to produce whatever commodity it is you produce. [BTW, an addendum: in fact Marx in *Capital *at one time argues that the invention of the power-loom *immediately *halved socially necessary labor time. I think this is an error, and that my formulation in the reply to **Hellestal **is more accurate. But YMMV.]
So: in simplifying shorthand, labor=work, labor time=how long you spend at work, socially necessary labor time=how long you should be spending at work.
The reason for the distinction is, of course, that Marx is saying that not all labor produces value, and if the labor produces value, then it is in accordance to (socially necessary) labor-time, not the mere fact that labor has been expended.
An objection I should anticipate: is something like a supervising a factory, or even managing it (as a wage earner) labor? It is, but it is “non-productive” labor, in Marx’s terms: that is, it does not directly add value to the commodity, though it may be apparently necessary; in Marx’s analysis, it would figure more like the fixed capital (raw materials, machinery, transportation, and so on) that would inevitably also need to find its way into the final product’s price.
Some posters (including me) were using the term “socially necessary labor” and you objected noting that Marx only discussed “socially necessary labor time” and that the term “socially necessary” modified the time, and not the labor.
Based upon your definitions, it seems to be a distinction without a difference insofar as those posters’ (and my) objections to Marx’s theory are concerned. Unless the labor time spent is deemed subjectively “socially necessary,” as defined by producing a marketable commodity by the most efficient use of that labor, then the labor time is not considered socially necessary.
With such a subjective and free-floating definition, it is not hard for me to see why such a correlation is found. IOW, “socially necessary” is a simple substitute for market demand. Labor input is one of the costs of producing commodities in demand on the market. It is not surprising then that those items which require more labor will cause producers to demand a higher price on the market. If consumers pay that higher price, then viola!, the theory works. If consumers are not willing to pay the higher price, no marketable product is created, the labor time expended would not be socially necessary and fall outside the theory.
The theory proves that things which have already been shown to be true, are in fact true.
I have two observations on this: the first is that it’s patently ridiculous to dismiss Marx’s theory on the basis of its alleged subjectivity, when the alternative that is propounded here, by the likes of WillFarnaby, is absolutely, avowedly, and* by definition* subjective. What is the burger’s value? What I’m willing to pay for it.
The second is that if you really think “labor” and “labor-time” are not to be distinguished, then we are probably done here. But you are, simply, wrong. If there’s anything that will convince you you’re wrong, let me know, and I’ll explain. But I’ll not explain again, now, unless asked to.
I’ve bolded all the things that are simply wrong in your parsing of Marx’s theory, and not to put too fine a point on it, they have all been addressed, over and over. I’m sorry I’m apparently not capable of explaining it, but that doesn’t make this complaint any more correct.
Now, its clear from your choice of words (market demand, consumers, producers, demanding prices, and so on) that you’re fully caught in a neoclassical market orthodoxy. None of these terms are useful to think about what Marx is doing at this point. Yes, in order to understand what Marx is doing, you need to get rid of your previous conceptions of economics, at least in some instances (not least because many of these concepts were avowedly produced post-Marx to be as different as possible from Marx). This takes some intellectual openness; I’m very glad that you’ve shown more openness than most in this thread, so this is only a modest complaint. But if you ever do want to try to give this another shot, I recommend thisbook, especially its chapter on Marxism and its final chapter on which theory to choose, and why.
I will explain the difference.
Standard explanations of price have two virtues. First, they are pretty accurate all theories face some level of distortion is any real environment, but this has been demonstrated to function in the real world, and is in fact used to determine optimal prices both at a micro and macro level. Marxist theories are not useful, and are not so used.
Secondly, labor-value theory is subjective, which is why it is so problematic. Standard economic theories of supply and demand, however, are not about personal valuation. They do not care whether something is worthwhile or not - they speak about what people, in fact, do.
You are explaining it via obscurantism, which is why it goes nowhere. That this obscurantism happens to be Marxist does not change that fact.
No; these theories predate Marx. He was wholly obsolete before he was even born.
Some folks will never understand that value can’t be analytically determined in units other than what the item or service actually is. A grape is a grape. It’s surprising that this is even a debate.
I disagree. It is not what you or I would pay for a burger. Maybe we are vegetarians or are on a diet. We wouldn’t eat a burger if it was given to us. Maybe others are too poor to spend $5 on that burger and eat a $0.33 cup of Ramen noodles for dinner out of necessity.
The market value theory is not subjective at all. We can observe that viable business models exist by selling burgers at about $5, we can declare that to be the value of a hamburger in that market.
I don’t understand it, at least in the context of what we are talking about. If the labor time is/ is not socially necessary, then the labor itself is/is not likewise socially necessary. If burning a Monet is not socially necessary, then neither is the time devoted to it.
If those choice of words are not useful to Marx’s theory, then the theory was based upon a lack of information. Again, when you exclude any factor that is not directly related to labor, it is not suprising that the amount of labor into a marketable commodity is related to its value.
Take our hamburger example. If we exclude all other costs of producing a hamburger, then the business who can produce hamburgers with the least amount of labor can produce a cheaper hamburger and reduce its price. Again, controlling for everthing else in life, if a hamburger is very labor intensive to produce, it’s cost or value will be higher. What does this obvious fact tell us about the marketplace, the economy, or anything?
