We've got a pie. It represents the total price for which the capitalist managed to sell his product. Now Marx says we cut the pie in the following way: The capitalist should get back what he invested in terms of raw materials and tools. The rest is the value added by the workers. (of course, the capitalist then pays the workers less than this value added, and appropriates the rest as "profit". That's what pissed Karl off) I know from experience that this argument is really tough to use on dedicated apologists of capitalism. They quite simply disagree: "No! That is not how we ought to cut the pie!" and they cite all the usual justifications for why the capitalist deserves more pie: Effective management skills, initiative, the financial risk he is undertaking. It is clear to me these are all poor excuses. "financial risk", for one, is a purely an artifact of capitalism itself, that is, it is only risky to undertake investments because of the structure of capitalism ( I can expand on this if anyone asks ). Not to mention that having enough resources with which to take risks is a huge privilege. However, I've begun thinking: Just because the capitalist way of assigning value is demented and cruel does it mean it is objectively wrong? Can we assert objectively that LTV is the 'correct' way of assigning value?
(just trying this one more time because I didn't get any responses from marxists last time.)
Youre conflating a ton of different ideas into one. The Ltv is a very specific and complicated economic question that doesnt have absolutely anything to do with how "pies" or anything the like are distributed. The question is essentially "is the amount of value of socially necessary goods determined by completely subjective human evaluation or is it directly determined by the amount of labor put into the good and nothing else?" Its not an argument for or against any political economy simply a description of the way goods get their value.
Bentley Williams
Also Marxs explicitly says the same thing as you have concluded. Going about arguing against Capitalism from morality is not good and marxs advises against it. Capitalism is doomed to implode via declining rate of profit that is unavoidable.
Luis Kelly
>tfw no giant golden Lenin head Feels bad, man.
Carson Peterson
>objectively Are we going to get universal unanimous agreement on anything? No.
Jack King
If you don't follow a labor theory of value, you get vaginal eggs, an excessive amount of clothes, shitty food, trinkets etc produced. If you don't believe in the labor theory of value, it means you agree that exchange value should subsume use value. If you believe the previous statement, it means you're a retard.
Jackson Stewart
>Capitalism is doomed to implode via declining rate of profit that is unavoidable. Any day now...
Jayden Morris
It won't happen. Capitalism has a way of finding sources of subsidies to keep that from happening. The environment was one of them, the health/time of workers is another. When robots fully hit, something else will appear.
Asher Anderson
Transform socially necessary labor hours into prices or GTFO.
Kayden Taylor
Thats marx's whole point when robots are fully automating labor you have 0% profit and capitalists will stave since labor values have dropped to 0 there is no lanor left to exploit.
In fact the real capitalist saving method has been to shift to much lower tech and labor intensive peoduction in order to increase exploitation and profit.
Adrian Gomez
Prices and socially nessisary labor have been proven to be correlated. What is your point?
Joseph Allen
The declining rate of profit has been more or less constant. The only thing that has stymied the decrease was outsourcing (which marxs predicted). Once theyve run out of underdeveloped labor to exploit things are going to get bad.
Ayden Morales
Marx's labor theory of value isn't a normative theory of who deserves what proportion of profit.
Julian Butler
This. Its also not exactly Marx's theory
Grayson Mitchell
Backsourcing has actually been the trend for the last couple of years. And no Marx didn't predict outsourcing it was a thing long before he was ever born. I highly doubt it will ever become a real problem and even if it does. Why not? Man should always strive further and if some people get left behind fuck em, that is the natural order of things.
Fucking left-wing primitivism.
Carson Garcia
"value" for Marx is something different from market price and "surplus value" is different from profit. No Marxist can tell you what's the real "value" of any given product or what's the real "surplus value" extracted by any particular capitalist. His theory has never been translated into actual math.
Daniel Ortiz
>proven to be correlated This would surely be a revolution in economics if true, I imagine the authors are all at the New School though so it's the equivalent of people at George Mason "finding" that Mises was actually right about everything.
Aaron Davis
Value is the amount of socially necessary labor hours required for the production of a commodity, commodities are valued in hours in Marxism.
Aaron Hall
>it is only risky to undertake investments because of the structure of capitalism this might be the most retarded apologetic ive ever heard
Xavier Moore
Google search surplus value
And he wrote a three volume book on the topic if you actually cared to know. You can just keep putting quotation marks around his terms instead though.
Irk it was done by analyzing different market sectors profits and then looking at then showing they were totally related to gross labor input. I dont remember if it was a cockshot footnote or a cockshot study but either way.
Camden Bailey
>Value is the amount of socially necessary labor hours required for the production of a commodity
I know. And how are you supposed to calculate that, exactly?
Christopher Nelson
post hoc; markets do as good as they can ex ante.
Juan Hernandez
Why is subjective bad user? If we learn through interpretation, how can something truly “objective” exist?
Leo Parker
Also you can define profit in Marxism. Profit is defined to be the number of labor hours that a capitalist sells a commodity for minus the hours worked by the laborers they employ.
Matthew Harris
Give me a formula. Average of the summation of hours for all commodities of a particular type in all companies? He never defines his concepts mathematically so that people can actually test his theories. Even post-hoc we don't know the "value" of anything.
Lincoln Morales
Economist here. Wealth redistribution in all forms has been proven time and time again to be economically detrimental. Let me guess. You go to a university, right? You're a college communist. It's not unusual. But think about this. If you claim that "rich people" or the "bourgeois" need to have some or all of their wealth taken and given to others, keep in mind that the very fact that you are at college at all means you yourself are infinitely richer than the majority of people on earth. Would you want someone forcefully taking YOUR wealth away? Didn't think so. Get a job, faggots.
I think redistributing wealth away from the rich is good because it prevents them from engaging in left-wing activism.
Jackson Gonzalez
Communism doesnr have snything to do with wealth distribution. Its about property ownership.
Adrian Butler
yeah gonna have to go with this one
Logan Myers
>Give me a formula. There isn't one, but something like bankruptcy or even unsold inventory is a dead giveaway
Hunter Myers
>declining rate of profit Wow, what an absolute genius Marx was for predicting that resources are in fact not infinite. >Once theyve run out of underdeveloped labor to exploit things are going to get bad. Yes, the market will adjust itself accordingly. People will have to be more frugal and conscientious with their purchases. You act as if the world will stop turning or people will be cannibalizing one another like it were a failed communist establishment.
Ayden Rogers
Curse the day that brainlets added the word subjective to their vocabulary.
Nicholas King
Tell that to people that support Marxist theory. It's usually just a lazy cop-out for those who don't like to think for themselves or reason out their own beliefs.
Jason Jackson
SNLT is just the average amount of time it takes workers of average skill and productivity to reproduce a commodity at a given time and place. it's an abstraction; it's not calculable. >He never defines his concepts mathematically so that people can actually test his theories. the theory generates testable predictions that can be confirmed or disconfirmed regardless of whether or not we can calculate value.
Noah Lee
There has to be a balance between enough profit as a motivation for the capitalist to begin, and enough pay for the workers. Neither can get anything without the permission of the other.
Joseph Torres
Understanding subjectivism is a further step towards knowing the postmodernist as the enemy.
Nicholas Baker
Define postmodernism and please tell us a few postmodernist books you’ve engaged with.
