Marxism is kind of like the chiropracty of economics. Just because Marx can explain everything and point out contradictions doesn't mean they are true.
QoL is still in an upward climb. Average lifetime working hours is still marching down. We've peaked out on literacy and child mortality and preventable diseases with available technology.
You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production - but I can almost assure you it will not be from people following Marx's flawed analysis. It will be from people who understand either classical or keynesian economics, or whatever new understanding come from it, and apply them towards actual functional policies.
I mean, just look at actual literacy stats and you will find we have a ways to go on this. A frankly absurd number of people in the UK are functionally illiterate. Same in France.
Yet there are drug and mental health crises, and there are families whose quality of life hasn't improved since the last recessions. I don't believe that progress is so neatly linear, and the Hegelian philosophy behind Marx attempts to capture that, IMO.
Labor theory of value does have issues, but I don't think it can be so neatly dismissed either as alternatives appear to have vague criteria for what contributes to value.
Value being subjective and fluid is exactly what makes modern society function. I may value having lots of children. You may value not having lots of children. Expecting there to be an objective universal value on everything is a fool's errand.
I trade my time at work to sit at a comfy desk and type for money, and that is work. And I will negotiate for more time and money so that I may spend more time lifting heavy things at a gym. Funnily enough that is leisure and it costs me money. It is in the asymmetry of needs that we create excess value by working for each other taking care of the things they do not want to do for themselves.
Labor theory makes no sense in how people actually choose to go about their lives. Which is why modern economics is so focused on how to just maximise as much generic utility out of a market. And it is usually Marxists who are actually the most obsessed about counting up the little green slips of paper that don't mean anything.
You reference Hegel, but it is specifically his idea that progress is inevitable. Which is exactly why I reject Marx. Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed. But Marx was a leech who counted on his friends for his subsistence and others to actually test his ideas. Progress is only made by intentional and planned efforts to deal with problems rather than just criticize and shake your fist at society.
> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.
Okay, but this is not at all what Marx himself said. Marx was philosophically opposed in all of his writings to answering even the most basic questions about what a communist economy/government would look like. In his mind he was only proclaiming the inevitability of such a system. In fact, he regularly dismissed anyone who asked these types of questions as serving the bourgeoisie.
But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.
> Okay, but this is not at all what Marx himself said. Marx was philosophically opposed in all of his writings to answering even the most basic questions about what a communist economy/government would look like. In his mind he was only proclaiming the inevitability of such a system.
No, the point is that he's not talking about a particular system. The famous soundbite from The German Ideology:
> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Communism, for Marx, is the thing that beats capitalism, and he's only willing to make claims about it that he thinks follow from that. He believes it will lack the features of capitalism that undermine its long term stability, and do a better job than capitalism of accomplishing the things that a mode of production needs to do to win out over others (namely, producing things), but anything more than that cannot be predicted decades-to-centuries out. Things will need to be administered, but they're not going to be administered by him, or in circumstances he can predict.
Consider feudalism. An educated Frenchman in 1700 could reasonably think that feudalism was on the way out, that it would probably mean the displacement of the aristocracy by the emerging bourgeoisie, that it would not have a patchwork legal system built out of a thousand years of accumulated hereditary agreements and local precedent, that it would professionalize government to some degree, that it would do a better job of maintaining a professional military, and so on. But they had no chance whatsoever of predicting the structure of the Federal Reserve, and it would be insane of them to claim otherwise.
Consider that Marx wasn't Marxist-Leninist although I think he was pro state. Anti-statist socialists like Kropotkin thought about some kind of decentralised planning. You could even have market as a distribution mechanism, but without capitalism through some variant of market socialism or market Anarchism.
> But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.
Marx was, I think, of a very different mind about revolution than many of his later followers: I suspect that to Marx, a “socialist revolution” was more like the Industrial Revolution and less like the French (or, perhaps more to the point, Russian) Revolution.
Marx wasn't against providing concrete steps addressing coherent real issues adapted to the conditions in particular places (see the program for the German Communists that is often presented as an appendix to the Communist Manifesto). But the utopian end-state society was, in Marx’s view, rather far off.
This is exactly right, and Marx opposed revolutionary efforts in pre-industrial Russia (e.g. the Russian Revolution). He did advocate Russian support of revolution in Germany, but saw no use in revolution in pre-capitalist society.
> Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable
You're taking ideas out of your pants and putting on Marx's mouth. At least be honest and say you never read him and hate his ideas without knowing what they are.
I find the subjective argument too abstract for practical use. All the subjectivity in the world must come to head with reality and how it can be enforced in reality. I am of the opinion that logistics wins wars, and labor theory of value, with its flaws, is able to provide a sense of direction for me to act on. Maybe I can bet on an asymmetry of needs with someone wanting to raise a family with me if I was unemployed and they did all the work, but I have the impression that a partner would appreciate me being able to help with the work too.
Labor theory of value is incredibly easy to dismiss. Value is about what people will pay for things, not how much work they took to make. Bam there we go.
You just dismissed you incorrect idea of labor value theory. Go back to read about the subject. To "disprove" Marx you should at least read his damn book and show that you know what you're talking about.
this is a typical misinterpretation of the labor theory of value. it's not the silicon valley "I Am Adding Value" SaaS ideal.
the free market assigns the value created by laborers. it's as simple as that. the buyer wouldn't get this value in their life, at a price the market decided they pay, without the work of the laborer. the value wouldn't be created without the laborer, or any of the capital or tools that it took to create labor (since labor created the capital and the tools). much like machines, it's labor all the way down.
I didn't misinterpret shit. The amount of work something takes too create has very little to do with its value. Labor theory of value would be a joke if it wasn't so popular for some reason. Instead it's actively disinforming people
> it's labor all the way down
This is completely orthogonal to value. Sure things wouldn't exist without people to make them. That doesn't mean that the labor it takes to make something constitutes its value.
if you actually look at the inputs and outputs of entire industrial sectors, rather than individual firms, you generally find a very high correlation between the price of labor as input and the price out the output of that sector. like >96% for the uk as found by cockshott and cottrell in their 1995 paper
This kind of shallow dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn’t spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx remains one of the most relevant and influential theoreticians amongst people who do spend a lot of time thinking about economics.
For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal could only be posted by someone who hasn't spent much time thinking about economics, or thinking about why Marx was popular not for his economic thoughts but for his sociological/political ones. Someone being popular doesn't make them right, but Marx was right about many things. Just not about labor theory of value.
> This kind of shallow dismissal of my shallow dismissal of a frankly idiotic idea that doesn't deserve a deeper dismissal
The labor theory of value was accepted wisdom prior to the late 19th century: it originates with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It's wrong (or more accurately, not a good conceptual framework) but it's not obviously wrong, let alone "idiotic".
This is misleading. Adam Smith presented this as a possible solution to an economic paradox at the time. But later philosophers came up with much better solutions:
There's no reason to believe that Smith wouldn't have latched onto the much better solution. So being hell-bent on the incomplete answer from the 1700s is a unique peculiarity of Marxist theory.
> But later philosophers came up with much better solutions
Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.
How much is a glass of water worth? Should it change if it takes me 5 seconds or 5 years to procure? Using labor theory to assign value makes no sense and is not a workable model for anything for anything other than justifying Marx's own circular logic.
Marx discusses how skill (and factors like machinery, etc) factors into value in Capital vol 1. The idea isn't that any labor on any endeavor creates value at a constant rate across all individuals and all time.
Marx has some concept of "socially necessary" labor, but it doesn't really make sense because it wants to treat skill as some kind of simple multiplier as if we can assume that a modern doctor's labor is some simple multiple of a random medieval peasant's labor in diagnosing an illness, which is just a silly and oversimplified model.
Honestly it reminds me of like Marx's non-rigorous "eh whatever" approach to dividing by zero in his mathematical work. While one can define division by zero in non-standard analysis, that involves some actual rigor in how your treat it according to your definitions, not just shrugging your shoulders and doing it.
What you're getting at vis-a-vis highly skilled labor is known in Marxist economics as the labor reduction problem, and it's complicated (enough so that I wouldn't do it justice trying to elaborate the approaches in the time I have to respond). Marx died with it unsolved and it's a matter of discussion to this day. But you're conflating that problem with the concept of socially necessary labor, which is different and actually addresses the problem you posed (in Capital Vol 1, in the difficult early chapters). In order to produce value, the labor must be socially necessary, and the labor of any number of unskilled workers towards a highly complex problem (eg, treating a rare cancer) would not be socially necessary. It doesn't even have to be that complex. I don't have the skills necessary to make a wedding cake, and any attempt I make to do so would be so inept that it wouldn't be socially necessary labor.
Can't speak to the division by zero, but it doesn't come up in any of Marx important work. His mathematical manuscripts don't have any significant relationship to his work on political economy.
I mean, economics is a mathematical profession. It's hard for me to take his storytelling about things like the freedom of hunter-gatherers and such seriously when I know he wasn't rigorous in the things that are easier to check. Never mind the, err, implementation problems in basically every attempted revolution until somewhere around the point where the Nordic states found a way to subsidize it with resource extraction and found a voluntary version.
It strikes me as incurious to dismiss an entire field of thought because there were errors in a mathematical manuscript, especially when you clearly don't understand the fundamental concepts (I don't mean this as a dig. You just haven't learned them.). Marxism isn't the writings of a long dead guy in England in 1860. It's a living, breathing school of thought that's evolved significantly since then. What you're doing is akin to finding an error in Smith or Ricardo's [edit: unpublished manuscripts, not completed work] work (of which there were many) and using those errors to dismiss all of orthodox economics.
The revolutionary approaches have not succeeded thus far, granted. There is a branch of Marxism about revolution, but what we're talking about here is a description of capitalism. Marxist revolutionary activities have nothing to do with how potent that analysis is.
I spend a lot of time thinking about economics, and spend a lot of time surrounded by people who also spend a lot of time thinking about economics, being an economist. The labour theory of value, along with every other objective theory of value, was abandoned by economists more than 100 years ago, because it failed to explain how and why economic agents assign value to economic goods, which is what economists are interested in.
No it's not. For one, it can only assign values to things which are actually exchanged. When you look at things on the scale of states, this isn't always a possibility. You can't put the ISS on craigslist and see what it sells for.
Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world.
> How can y'all be so damn certain you're the best in the world when five minutes worth of Googling is enough to completely destroy all your arguments?!
Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb?
> Are you arguing that Germany is not a capitalist country? I was collectively speaking about the capitalist world.
Even then, assuming we're not just talking about the US, it's a stretch to say "we" peaked out. We have a lot to do before anyone can make that claim, the problem is that in most countries politicians have been bought off by rich elites to lower taxes and reduce public spending (which has been done especially to education as that's the easiest), so there is no tax base left to fund what needs to be done.
> Uhhhh, maybe read the comments a bit more clearly before jumping in. Do you always just jump in on random threads to say Americans are dumb?
Germany like many other Europeans would absolutely be considered a socialist country by most US standards (holding no distinction between socialism and social democracy).
This is a big part of the confusion, intentional as far as I can tell, generated by people trying to eliminate taxed, regulations, and worker protections in that they can flexibly do things like point out how Sweden is wonderful and has no minimum wage, so we should do that too, when the reality is inverted with successful universal collective bargaining guaranteeing everyone much better wages -- something that would probably get the national guard rolled out if US workers pushed for presently.
Specifically for the US and Germany literacy results, I see a difference between these and past methods of measuring literacy. In the first link, the most basic sample question required the user to interpret a simple table. The second and third level questions required users to navigate websites, including a task of finding the correct link to navigate to the correct page of a site.
I think this establishes a great point that we have an ever changing society with growing demands, where we now need to consider much more than just reading words. Internet literacy is a huge barrier, and it’s great to see it getting measured and accounted for as countries continue to adapt education to the changing times.
>You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production
What an absolute load of crap. Economics as a whole is barely a science, at best a toy, and that multiple pathways exist is not an indictment of any theory. Marx's observations hold true all these years after, alongside the progress we've had.
You clowns would take a system as complex as, oh, simply the whole of human activity and try to reduce it to a few simple laws. Sorry, despite what you learned online, "supply and demand" is not a fundamental law of the universe. This is not physics. There are no simple answers. There aren't even proper answers. Every school of economics holds on barely by a thread. "Assuming a rational actor" is the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" of liberal economics.
I do not agree with the upper comment that economy is not a science. It is just a human science, where you could have different schools of thought based on different philosophies. But praxeology is indeed an example of something that is not science, as it rejects the scientific method and the empirism.
If economics is a science, how do you run an experiment?
Let’s say you want to see how phenomenon X scales as a function of population, and create a model X(p)
How do you set up N identical scenarios and, ceteris paribus, vary the population? You cannot.
Two separate nations are distinct systems. Setting up 2 identical factories next door, one with 100 staff and one with 1000 staff would be a monumental waste of effort, and what if the geographical separation, or airflow, or cloud cover, or… affected the experiment?
Let’s say you run a single economic experiment. How do you reproduce it? How does your counterpart reproduce it?
You do not create experiments. You create models that try to explain the world and check your model predictions and what happens in the world. When the two disagree, you update the model and try to explain what went wrong. As you cannot make experiments to check, it is inevitable that you will end with more than one model for different school of thoughts. As is in all academic disciplines that are part of humanities. This is not like in the natural sciences where you can agree with a single model. Nonetheless, this is better than having no empirism or scientific method at all and having models built based on some logical axioms treated as the ultimate truth, as some unscientific parts of the economy do.
Moreover, in the natural sciences, you also cannot perform experiments for some parts of cosmology, for example. Nonetheless, you keep creating models in the hope that they would allow you to discover and predict more things and to interpret better the universe. If they do, your model clearly shows some benefits, even if in the future with more powerful technology, it could be disproved. Economy do not need to be so different than this.
>Nonetheless, this is better than having no empiricism or scientific method at all and having models built based on some logical axioms treated as the ultimate truth
Like theories built on mathematics or logic?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not shilling Austrian economics and I disagree with most assumptions of pure rationality, but I think an axiomatic approach to human decision making is not necessarily a bad thing. I’m sure preferences and biases have some mechanism we can quantify and explain from first principles.
QoL is still in an upward climb. Average lifetime working hours is still marching down. We've peaked out on literacy and child mortality and preventable diseases with available technology.
You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production - but I can almost assure you it will not be from people following Marx's flawed analysis. It will be from people who understand either classical or keynesian economics, or whatever new understanding come from it, and apply them towards actual functional policies.