/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>1899897
Oh, forgot to add

I have refuted it before.

>>1899907
How?

>>1899908
I don‘t feel like telling you.

>>1899910
brainlet can't defend labor theory of value kek

>>1899910
Another win in the battle for truth

>>1899900
<The difficulty for those who see the potato as the primary determinant of fries is the indisputable fact that different sorts of potatoes contribute to different extent to fries. Thus five small potatoes contribute less to this hypothetical fry substance than five big potatoes. The defenders of Potato Theory need to find a kind of potato which all other types could be reduced to and which than would serve as a common and universal measure.
Sisters Of The Potato, how do we respond to this?

>>1899897
Hi, I'm naively assuming that you come in good faith. Please see ch.3-4 of pdf and respond to me when you've read the refutation of your position.

>>1899946
if we take your retarded potato, we can assume the LTV is analogised as thus:
more potatoes → more fries
more labour-time → more value

to be clear, the labour-time taken to create a product results in its exchange-value, whereas the market value of a product is given by its socially-necessary labour-time.

a problem arises because even with the same socially-necessary labour time two different commodities can have two different values.
x potatoes → y fries
x special/"skilled" potatoes → y+n fries

so, we have:
x labour-time → y value
x skilled labour-time → y+n value

skilled labour-time → f * labour-time
(see Sesardic's proof for why calculating f using market prices is contradictory)

are you starting to see the problem with your analogy and the theory in general? Based marginalvaluetheorycels stay winning I guess…

LTV is a stupid fucking idea that both Ricardo and Marx refuted, because it was a stupid fucking idea. Anyone that still supports it suffers from belief perseverance, and should be forced to read every volume of Das Kapital again.

>>1899952
I'm currently reading it but is this just going to be about the transformation problem? Because this isn't about that, in fact Sesardic talks about that problem at a later point in his book. This is specifically about the circular reasoning used to explain how labour can be the origin of all value.

>>1899959
Interesting levels of cope here good sir. Are you implying that Marx did not support the idea that the equilibrium market price of a good is determined by its socially necessary labour time?

>>1899960
By your dumbass logic, Americans should be hyper enthusiastic about purchasing new expensive cars. But yet, the average vehicle on the road is at its highest.

>>1899958
>more potatoes → more fries
You made labor disappear. Somehow potatoes planted (themselves), dug out (themselves), cut (themselves), and fried themselves without any labor input, lmao

>>1899960
Uploaded book in entirety addresses pseudo-scientific conceptions about the LTV. You can not just "skim it".

>>1899960
>I'm currently reading it
Keep reading it, you pseud!

>>1899960
>the equilibrium market
Literal pseudo-science addressed by Paul Cockshott.

Get, I guess

Fuck lib "scientists"

>>1899900
It is not circular. We do not know that one kilometer of difficult stretch counts as two kilometers of easy stretch because of the price but because a simple worker would have needed twice the time or you would have needed twice the simple workers to do it in the same time or you would have needed a "complex" worker (whose output is twice that of a simple one) to do it in the same time.
You can perfectly compare different kinds of labour by comparing their outputs; it's a pure mathematical proportion or ratio, with no reference to value or price whatsoever.

>>1899958
Aren't you mixing up exchange value and value here

>>1899960
>I'm currently reading it but
You are being currently overwhelmed by FACT and REASON!

>>1899900
OK I have read it and it is very confusing. You need to explain what he means by skilled labor. Is he talking about labor that requires a lot of education and training or is it labor that is generally perceived as difficult.

I've only read the first section of the first chapter of Capital, so I probably can't. Monitoring thread.

>>1900003
>you can perfectly compare different kinds of labour by comparing their outputs.

Well, not necessarily. The question is, how are you comparing their outputs? If you are making reference to their market value to determine how much simple labour is incorporated into them, then this is of course circular, given the fact that the amount of simple labour incorporated into them is, according to LTV, supposed to determine their market value.

>>1900199
skilled labour is something which generally requires more training.

>"But not all labour is a mere expenditure of simple human labour-power; very many sorts of labour involve the use of capabilities or knowledge acquired with the expenditure of greater or lesser effort, time and money. Do these kinds of compound labour produce, in the same interval of time, the same commodity values as simple labour, the expenditure of mere simple labour-power? Obviously not. The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value—perhaps double or treble — in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The values of the products of compound labour are expressed by this comparison in definite quantities of simple labour; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on behind the backs of the producers, by a process which at this point, in the development of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained."
- Engels, Anti-Duehring Part II Ch. VI

>>1899995
I literally just went through all the mentions of Boehm-Bawerk and they're all about the transformation problem, retard

>>1899897

<>…. but labour depends on value
A strange opening since labour does not depend on value, and no marxist would say such a nonsensical sentence
>The next difficulty for those who see the labour invested as the primary determinant of economic value is the indisputable fact that different sorts of labour contribute to a differing extent to value. Thus five hours of labour by an unskilled worker produces a much lower value than five hours' work by a specialist. The defenders of the labour theory of value need to find a kind of labour to which all other types could be reduced and which would then serve as a common and universal measure of value.
>Marx claims that all other types of labour can be reduced to unskilled or simple labour:
>"More complex labour counts only as intensified, or rather multiplied simple labour, so that a smaller quantity of complex labour is considered equal to a larger quantity of simple labour." (Marx 1982, vol.1, p.135)
>It is easy to see, however, that no reduction to a common measure is achieved by saying that complex labour counts as simple labour. This can best be seen in the analogy put forward by Boehm-Bawerk (1921, pp.388-389). Let us assume that some-one determines that the price of a railway ticket in a certain country should be dependent exclusively on the distance covered. Let us also assume that a particular stretch of track was especially difficult to build and that over this stretch the journey is twice as expensive. In such a situation, the person who established distance as the exclusive criterion for the cost of the journey could continue to adhere to his assertion and apply a method of reasoning analogous to that of Marx. He could say: 'On the said stretch of track one kilometre in fact counts as two ordinary (or 'simple') kilometres, and thus my initial assumption that the kilometres travelled are the only factor determining the fare is still true.'
A piece of track that was twice as difficult to build, ergo it took twice as much people hours and material, has cost that is twice as high. Inventing a strawman to try and make it seem absurd is idiotic. If something takes twice as much labour and material to build and maintain then it is twice as expensive, there is no slight of hand as they accuse marx of doing here. The thing they try to attack is the fact that skilled labourers, for example, those that can build and maintain a railroad on a mountainside as opposed to a flat field, need to be trained. The cost of their training, in a purely competitive economy, is reflected in their value. Under a market economy, where the workers bear the cost of their own education, that is paid out to the workers. Because if they didn’t, why would anyone take on several ten or hundreds of thousands of debt, and spend year of their life not earning an income, just to be paid the same?
Nevermind that the initial cost of the building is not that only cost in a fare, but operation costs as well. If this was a serious, genuine critique, the deprecation costs and operation costs would be named, rather than strawmanning an example that doesn’t even work under neoliberal logic.
>Despite this verbal justification, it clearly recognises that there are other factors besides distance influencing the price. For one kilo-metre of railway does not count as two simple kilometres because it really contains these two kilometres in some way. The words "counts as" simply indicate that one kilometre of the journey on the more difficult stretch is, for one reason or another, twice as expensive.
One reason or another being it needing twice as much work to build and maintain perhaps? IE twice the labour?
>How, then do we know that one kilometre on this stretch counts as two kilometres? Simply by the price! The circularity is now quite evident. First there was the attempt to find a sole criterion that would explain the prices of railway tickets, and then there was the conclusion that they depend exclusively on the distance travelled: but this distance is, at least on some stretches, measured not in metres or kilometres but by how much more it costs to travel on these sections than on other less difficult sections. In short, the following happens: the distance travelled is established as the independent factor which alone determines the cost of the journey, and how long a distance is (or how long it "counts as") is determined by reference to the cost of travelling over that stretch.
Apparently the writer lives in a world where companies get given prices for their commodities, their fare prices, directly from ~god~ the invisible hand himself. Meanwhile in the real world, prices for journies for, for example, trains, planes, buses, are determined by the labour cost, the deprecation costs (vehicles are made by labour), fuel costs (fuel is made by labour), etc. If a journey in a competitive market is double the price as another, then there is an underlying reason for that, that being a doubling in labour and material costs.
>The same kind of circularity is contained in Marx's reasoning. He established the number of hours of socially necessary simple labour time as the common criterion for the value of all objects, believing that a given number of hours of complex labour could always be reduced to a greater (multiplied) number of hours of simple labour.
It can
It is, however, quite clear that complex labour does not "contain" simple labour in any comprehensible meaning of the word. What would it mean if we said that five hours of a skilled engineer's labour contained 10 hours of the labour of an unskilled worker?
It does. It would mean that it takes, on average, for all labourers providing the same complex labour on the market, at some point, it took 5 hours of unskilled simple labour to train and prepare them to do 10 hours of complex labour. An engineer needs to be trained. A firefighter needs to be trained. A soldier needs to be trained. Lets take the soldier example. If a soldier working for Blackwater or Wagner provides, on average, 1000 hours of PMC work over his lifetime, until death or retirement, then is there only 1000 hours of total labour encapsulated in those 1000 hours? No! And we’re not even talking about equipment or food. That soldier had to be trained, for many months, and continues to need training in the downtime. The trainer put in labour, as did the soldier during bootcamp, during which both were paid. All that invested training time is indirectly paid for by the people purchasing that labour. That is why you don’t pay just 30 bucks for a logo designed by a graphic designer made in one or two hours, but you pay for their years of training. And if those costs become too high, as we have seen in real life, companies start to promote a higher influx of graduates into that field. Microsoft, Apple, Google, convincing politicians and the public that “everyone needs to be able to program” is just a ploy to put downward pressure on a sector of the economy in which labour are temporarily undersupplied and thus the employees can demand more wages for less upfront investment.
>What Marx most likely had in mind is that the value of the product which a skilled engineer produces in five hours is on average the same as that of the product which an unskilled worker produces in 10 hours. However, he was then guilty of precisely the kind of circularity we encountered in the case discussed above. If the number of hours of simple labour spent is taken as that which explains the value of an object, then it is logically impermissible to refer to its value when determining how many hours of simple labour are "embodied" in a product. That Marx did in fact commit this inept virtus dormitiva fallacy is clearly shown by the passage in Capital where he explicitly refers to price in his attempt to "reduce" complex labour to simple labour. (Marx 1982, vol.1, p.305)
404 Not able to find anything about complex or simple labour anywhere near that page. Again, the author operates from the basis that prices are unknowable and at the same time natural, not based in anything. Anyone who actually runs real businesses, rather than ideologues filling books with useless ink in academia, would scoff at the notion that you cannot make decisions on what prices ought to be, and which production is most profitable. Prices in real life are based on costs, in the way that you always try the highest price possible in the market, and just not produce anything for which the profit margin, ie price minus labour and material costs, is lower than the other options. Supply and demand in a perfectly competitive market, when taken to its logical extreme, results in prices that perfectly line up with its total labour value, complex labour taken into account, because ultimately it is labour costs that determine the costs of our most primary resources, and every other price is made up of those costs plus their own labour costs. Labour theory of value is nothing more than the acknowledgement of the clear reality that there exists, as of yet, no section in the economy that can create more of itself using only its own end products. There is no fully automated farm that can, directly or indirectly, create more corn year after year just from corn. No automated coal mines that create coal using nothing but coal. It all requires labour. Yet, labour is the one thing that can produce more of itself from only itself. A simple hunter gatherer hunts, or rather and gathers more food and clothes every day than they need for sustaining itself and its replacement population. Or rather, they have the possibility to, they work for 5-6 hours a day, and they would if they had the means to store their surplus, but often cannot. Farmers can, and thus start generating surplus, to create more shit to make making shit simpler, like inventing a better plow, building a mill, etc. And a factory workers only needs for work a few hours a day to produce enough monetary value to sustain his existence. All of almost all the extra, the surplus, the surplus value he produces, is taken by the capitalists to build more and more factories. 3 Hours of labour a day allow you to eat and sleep and clothe, so you can work the next day, all the rest is labour that essentially is newly created out of thin air. There is nothing in our economy yet that has the ability to create more of itself perpetually growing the surplus, using only the products of its own process. No electricity that by electricity alone makes more electricity. No coal that makes more coal by itself alone. No wheat that creates more wheat by itself. But labour can, it can create more of itself using less of itself.
If this is the best LTV critics can do, then you can rest assured they never had an argument to start with.

>>1900376
Oh yeah and perhaps more fundamentally:
There are two economic actors that make decisions in a capitalist economy. Labourers and employers. Both try to optimise their costs to a minimum and their gain to a maximum. No process can happen without labour, it all depends on it in every step. Labourers only have their labour time to optimise for. Thus the economy optimizes on labour, leading to, in a perfect market, equalibrium labour prices over time, if allowed to play out without interference. In a perfect market, the average hourly wage of programmers on average has becomes equal to their training costs plus their on paper hours worked in employment. And if all wages are, essentially, the same, then all of the economic activity is the same, because any change that would disrupt the balance, such as a gold rush, would be undone just the same.
For example, during a gold rush, suddenly the return on investment of the labourers gets much better, because gold is suddenly much easier to dig up compared to before the discovery, which leads to its costs being much much lower than its current market price. The increase in competition over the gold and the reduction of availability of labour elsewhere will drive down gold prices and drive up other prices, until, in the end, equilibrium is restored again.

Labour determines value because labour determines what is produced, because labour is optimised for by the class of economic actors fundamental to all productive processes.

>>1900376
>A strange opening since labour does not depend on value, and no marxist would say such a nonsensical sentence

If you had basic reading comprehension you'd realise it's titled that because that is the argument he's making, it's not supposed to be a summary of a Marxist position.

>The cost of their training, in a purely competitive economy
So you're making the argument that the ratio between skilled and simple labour can be deduced by examining the education that went into training the skilled labourer?

On a slightly different note, I think you're misunderstanding the analogy. The train analogy is supposed to represent a theory (in this case it would be called the Distance Theory of Value) which claims to be able to explain the value of something with reference to a single metric, i.e., distance in the hypothetical and labour in the Marxist case. The question is posed because for some reason two tracks with the same distance have different values, much like how two commodities with the same labour time can have two different values, see >>1900364 for a source.

>If this was a serious, genuine critique, the deprecation costs and operation costs would be named, rather than strawmanning an example that doesn’t even work under neoliberal logic.

Again, you're overthinking it. Marx does factor in capital costs as past labour, but this is necessarily distinct from the difference between skilled and unskilled labour. Even if we were to factor in capital, depreciation and land costs into our hypothetical train analogy, even Marx and Engels would agree there would still be some discrepancy when it comes to skilled and unskilled labour.

>One reason or another being it needing twice as much work to build and maintain perhaps? IE twice the labour?

The point isn't applying the LTV to a railway-track scenario. Again, I hope I'm making this clear but this is supposed to be an analogy between LTV and another hypothetical value theory, not an application of LTV to a hypothetical situation.

Your later arguments are too seethe-filled my boy. Yes, I understand that you're making the argument that the prices of production can all be determined by labour, and that as the equilibrium price in a competitive market is the price of production, the equilibrium price is determined by labour. However, the precise problem occurs because labour is measured in time, and two things produced in the same amount of time can have different values. If you're arguing that this discrepancy can be explained with reference to education costs/educational labour time, then you're just committing another fallacy → those educators would themselves be educated. We could continue the argument to infinity, because all education requires prior education.

>>1900385
>If you had basic reading comprehension you'd realise it's titled that because that is the argument he's making, it's not supposed to be a summary of a Marxist position.
Perhaps you should have posted the book instead of two short pages then.

>So you're making the argument that the ratio between skilled and simple labour can be deduced by examining the education that went into training the skilled labourer?
Correct.

>On a slightly different note, I think you're misunderstanding the analogy.
I have not. Complex labour is perfectly calculable and has clear material causes for anyone who lives in real life rather than in austrian fantasy castaway novels. If the best he can come up with is "haha imagine if i said this trip is twice as much because of distance even though that doesnt happen in real life haha imagine that marx is so dumb" then he should make better analogies.

>Marx does factor in capital costs as past labour, but this is necessarily distinct from the difference between skilled and unskilled labour.
And you accuse me of lacking reading comprehension? I litterally addressed complex labour directly, go read the soldier example again.

>Again, I hope I'm making this clear but this is supposed to be an analogy between LTV and another hypothetical value theory
Making up analogues to how price is actually determined to how much milk the ceos drink does nothing but show how unserious the author is. I explained in detail how prices come to be in real life, LTV is not some a-priory made up thing, it is based on statistics and deduction based on real life economies.

>Your later arguments are too seethe-filled my boy. Yes, I understand that you're making the argument that the prices of production can all be determined by labour, and that as the equilibrium price in a competitive market is the price of production, the equilibrium price is determined by labour.
Cope and buy better arguments with your magical railroad then.

>If you're arguing that this discrepancy can be explained with reference to education costs/educational labour time, then you're just committing another fallacy → those educators would themselves be educated. We could continue the argument to infinity, because all education requires prior education.
This is not a fallacy lmao, gosh this accusation is so fucking dumb and austrian brained.
Lets start off with the fact that the perfect models that model perfect economies in perfect competition are only a good approximation of reality, just like any theory of value. In fact, the entire economy is always an approximation of perfect distribution of labour, because it is full of disturbances, assymetrical or missing information, lags in price signals, etc.
Then, lets start off that no, actually, the existance of teachers does not need teachers to have existed since the beginning of reality. People who have had no formal education but developed methods and skill through experience can and do teach in real life. There exists teachers now, and there have not always, yet you claim all educators need to have been educated to infinity, that is just not reality.
Lastly, because models are approximations, you dont need precise results to to the picosecond of labour time all the way back to the times of the supremacy of Ur. The economy only cares about the now. When computers, meaning people who manually do calculations, became absolute, the effort invested in their training, that labour time, was lost, similarly to companies going out of business, factories burning down, etc. If all you need to do is calculate a good enough approximation of labour value of products, then you can do that to the microsecond per product, much higher accuracy than the data you can realistically base it on, in about 15 iterations of a super simple linear time algorithm. Hell, you can do it by hand. You can calculate labour costs, as well as the value of complex labour, since that too is just a product, using only the known production formulas in natura, with no prior prices being neccecary.

Write down all formulas. Write down a tabula of al known values for all products. Calculate a new value using the known value of the current iteration. Write it down in the next iteration. Do it for all. Repeat another 15 times and you will get close enough to the true value in an asymptotic fashion for all intends and purposes.

>>1899900
>let us assume that … price of a railway ticket … should be dependent exclusively on the distance covered
<let us also assume that a particular stretch of track … twice is expensive

Amazing.

Investments should pay off, that's why two tracks would have a different ticket price. In short, price of labor + price of equipment = ticket prices along the whole period the investment is paying off

>>1900394
Oh yeah and before you accuse me of
>Oh you say complex labour is just made of education huh? I dont see that in real life
We currently see this development once more, with people educated in vocational "untrained" or "low skill" manual labour making more than many college or university trained people, with less upfront cost to boot.
Additionally, we saw this in europe in the 60's and 70's, which caused the neoliberals to actively import masses of unskilled people from halfway across the world to undercut unskilled wages, which were becoming higher and higher given the increasing accessibility of higher education.
The equalibrium of unskilled labour is further undercut by the outsourcing of said labour abroad to cut costs, which made unskilled labour in europe come into direct competition with unskilled labour in dirt poor colonial nations, while skilled labour remained isolated and thus unaffected.

The equalibrium of wages is a historic fact, even under neoliberal orthodoxy of supply and demand, because labour is just a commodity to be bought and sold, and those producing labour (workers) make the same economic choices as the capitalists in that they want maximum gain for minimum return. There is a strong tendency where I live for people to not go to college and rake up debt but instead go into trades which has a much shorter training time and often makes more money than half the university graduates.

>>1900376
>Anyone who actually runs real businesses, rather than ideologues filling books with useless ink in academia, would scoff at the notion that you cannot make decisions on what prices ought to be, and which production is most profitable. Prices in real life are based on costs, in the way that you always try the highest price possible in the market, and just not produce anything for which the profit margin, ie price minus labour and material costs, is lower than the other options.

That's not true for small shopkeepers such as self-employed who don't realize their own labor spent, and various kinds of glorified food stalls. The price they put is essentially random, hence the retarded understanding of economics

>>1899900

>let us assume that tickets should be priced exclusively on the distance covered
this is ABSURDLY RETARDED

>>1900394
Ok, let's do the calculations ourselves then. But before that, I would like to point out that just because the person making these arguments comes from the Austrian school doesn't mean the arguments are in-and-of-themselves Austrian arguments. I am not an Austrian-school economist but I think basic logical arguments work whether or not they come from someone you theoretically agree with (that is, in fact, the purpose of logic). Another thing I'd like to point out is that nothing I'm saying is in any way attempting to disprove the idea that labour can be undercut, or that educational costs increase a worker's desired minimum wage, as you seem to imply here >>1900400. What I am saying is that the central assertion of the LTV, that equilibrium prices are determined by labour-time, is irrational. Those two things are not mutually inclusive: there are many modern economic models which can explain the former without the latter.

So, we'll take the example of a miner and an accountant. They each do 8 hours of work and by the end of it one mined some ore and the other has calculated some assets. As Engels writes:
>"But not all labour is a mere expenditure of simple human labour-power; very many sorts of labour involve the use of capabilities or knowledge acquired with the expenditure of greater or lesser effort, time and money."
With this knowledge, we know that although the miner and the accountant each spent 8 hours working, this does not necessarily mean that they spent 8 hours of simple human labour-power. So, now I ask you, how do we know how much simple human labour-power each worker spent?

>>1900406
slight revision, since the accountant doesn't really produce anything. We'll assume that there is a miner and a jeweller. The former mines some iron ore in 8 hours and the latter makes 2 diamond bracelets in 8 hours.

>>1900406
>But before that, I would like to point out that just because the person making these arguments comes from the Austrian school doesn't mean the arguments are in-and-of-themselves Austrian arguments. I am not an Austrian-school economist but I think basic logical arguments work whether or not they come from someone you theoretically agree with (that is, in fact, the purpose of logic)
If you make arguments that are that of the austrian school of economic thought then your arguments are of the austrian school. If I repeat chinese phrases even though im from europe i still say chinese things. This is not a way to discredit you, I did not even look if the author was affiliated with the austrian end of things, but his arguments are that, and so are your responses.

>What I am saying is that the central assertion of the LTV, that equilibrium prices are determined by labour-time, is irrational.
The book you posted to try and say this does nothing to help you in this, as I've shown.

>With this knowledge, we know that although the miner and the accountant each spent 8 hours working, this does not necessarily mean that they spent 8 hours of simple human labour-power. So, now I ask you, how do we know how much simple human labour-power each worker spent?
Both expended, at least, 8 hours of simple labour, because they worked 8 hours. How we know how much the actual value of their complex labour is?
Take the average career length of an accountant and miner, take the average labour cost to train one to be that, divide training cost by career time, you now have the complex component per hour, add the one hour of the actual work, and you have the total simple labour time encapsulated in the hour of complex labour.
Though with what I explained that already here >>1900394 I expected you to be able to figure that out.

>>1900407
Doesn't really change the example much, the discussion whether or not accountants are part of "productive labour" is another discussion in its entirety.

>>1900413
Note that all these calculations, however imperfectly done, are done implicitly by the capitalist system. For example, if the state or market does not put downward pressure on labour costs through increasing supply, larger companies will start their own in house training programmes, which is simply calculated into the cost of the bussiness.
Similarly, if the labour becomes dedundant, they are just fired and the workers have to scramble to retrain themselves or relocate to where they are wanted. See the whole coal mining issue in the USA.

>>1900413
>take the average labour cost to train one to be that
In doing so, you're using something other than simply labour-time to calculate the value of a good - you're using market prices. The cost of training is the complement of the price charged by a trainer.
I will also add that Marx himself does not agree with your method. He says:
>"The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom."

Finally, while you claim my arguments are Austrian, I dispute that. Marx's LTV is committing a classic problem present in a lot of philosophy, viz., transforming qualitative differences into quantitative differences. As he says:
>"Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour-power."
Problems with this act of trying to quantize two qualitatively different activities are present in Mill's "Utilitarianism" as well, viz., lower and higher pleasures.

While you can repeat that the market is doing these calculations all the time, that is specifically my point. It is the market which compares qualitatively different things and quantizes them in terms of money. But Marx's LTV is supposed to explain how the market does these things, and so cannot appeal to the market in its explanation.

>>1899897
why is there an identical thread on soyjack.party…? is this spam?

>>1900445
explain yourself faggot

>>1900425
>In doing so, you're using something other than simply labour-time to calculate the value of a good - you're using market prices. The cost of training is the complement of the price charged by a trainer.
Ah I see where you're confused.
The economy is a continuous process, and as I said, imperfect. The logic of free competition constantly drives prices closer to their labour value, as I have laid out here. And this is then disturbed by technological or political shifts, disasters, monopolies, what have you.
You are entirely correct in observing that the monetary cost of the education in an actual economy is not exactly equal to value. Similarly, the price of a commodity is not exactly equal to its value. That is because of these disturbances, they are equalibrium prices. This means, that if an education is much more expensive than its "true"/labour value in monetary terms, this has an impact on the wages in the real economy. But just like how this price has an impact on wages down the line, the high price of this education is also subject to competion. If the price is substantially higher than the value indicates it must be, then either it is super profitable (a lot of extra money is made by marking it up, perhaps it is a monopoly), the wage costs of the educators are super high (which then in turn leads to competitive preassure for people outside the field to become educators) or the material costs are very high, which just moves this problem one level down, which can not go on forever because the economy is finite.
Labour theory of value seeks to explain the true value of commodities in a perfectly competitive market. Just like all economic models, reality will not allign perfectly with this model of the economy. However, unlike those other theories, labour theory of value is the only theory that makes quantatative, disprovable claims that can be tested and disproven. All other economic theories make no testable claims, they never provide any formula or method to determine price, they only concern themselves with describing causal relationships (ie, price goes up demand goes down, money supply goes up interests go up, etc).
If you have information about large scale economic production in many sectors, then LTV can predict what aught to be the prices observed, and you can see if that happens or not. It also shows on a more fundamental level which changes will have what effect. Compare it to "matter attracts matter" by newton vs the theory of the graviton particles currently being researched. Sure you can critique gravitons as a concept, but what austrians litterally say is that you can never know why gravity exists because ?????. Read up Mises.
With LTV, we *could* calculate the exact true value of the miner or accunts labour, though, even without any a-priori prices, as I have explained here >>1900394 on the end. With just the in-nature pre-requisuits, meaning, x amount of pens, y amount of math teaching hours, z amount of electricity, w amount of building space for an hour, for all the economy, you can calculate with higher precision than your source data the true value without needing a powerfull computer. Lacking such information about everything, because we assume, in LTV, that prices *more or less* equal value, and they keep a tendency towards it, any unknown values can be substituted with price. For example, if you were the soviet planner and needed to import electronics from japan or something, you wouldnt have the production information, but you would still get a good enough, and provable or disprovable outcome, if you ran a calculation.
A model seeking to explain the source of prices without disturbance, like LTV does, can do it purely based on the statistics of production without prices. LTV explains internally why the market exhibits this behaviour, and then posits, at the end, a generalised economic law saying "labour time = value ~= price". The market in real life always has delays in price signals. A disturbance in manufacturing in china only has knock on effects a few months later in europe, for longer or shorter than the original disturbance. In fact, research has shown that with each step in the supply chain the effect is amplified, yet it still takes time. The market due to profit maximisation always seeks to optimise itself and thus trend towards this equalibrium, but unlike the LTV model which seeks to describe the whole system as a whole, in real life individual companies only act on the data visible and relevant to them. So if oil is suddenly expensive because of a speculation bubble even though its value says its prices ought to be lower, companies will act on the price, not the value, and perpetuate this price signal, introducing more disruption. This does not undermine a systems theory that explains the underlying material reality that afterwards re-alligns the prices back down again.
Because ask yourself, is there a reason gold is more expensive than drinking water? Why? Is it because of magical prices stuff or is it because making drinking water is much less work and effort than finding gold in the ground.

>"The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom."
Yes. They are determined by a social process, education, training, people making decisions about which education to persue or whether or not to make a carreerswitch. And this all "appears fixed by custom" meaning that it seems "natural" and "self evident" to us that a doctor or programmer or bridge designer makes more money than a factory worker or nurse, but it is not self evident, it has a clear cause that is most of the time not the direct concern of producers (especially not during the time of marx when "large corporations" were, to us, fucking small, and there were no googles and microsofts with near market monopolies able to expend money to invoke a shift in the labour market).

>Marx's LTV is committing a classic problem present in a lot of philosophy, viz., transforming qualitative differences into quantitative differences. As he says:
>"Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour-power."
Problems with this act of trying to quantize two qualitatively different activities are present in Mill's "Utilitarianism" as well, viz., lower and higher pleasures.
The important point here is that while tailoring and weaving are fundamentally different activities and not substitutable by each other in their qualitative aspects, they are both done by people. In a market. To sell stuff. To make money. And a tailor can become a weaver and vice versa. They are reducible to abstract "doing a job for money". But Marx expends several pages, if not whole subchapters, explaining this in the exact chapter you cite from, so I advice you to read that again if you missed it.

>But Marx's LTV is supposed to explain how the market does these things, and so cannot appeal to the market in its explanation.
LTV describes how the market works. All I have set out is just an explanation of individual acts in the market that collide with profit incentives to lead to the outcome we see. At no point do I do any handwaving (which austrians such as the author do, they refuse to try to explain price and/or value entirely).

>>1900425
>In doing so, you're using something other than simply labour-time to calculate the value of a good - you're using market prices

And? You do realize that LTV describes market relations first and foremost, and beyond-the-market planned economy as well?

Arguing about LTV is largely futile because the opponents are ideologically driven and have a petty boug mentality of either "I own a shop and don't care about my labor time" or "buy low and sell high" or "I live with me mum". If it doesn't click with intellectually, they just fall back on gut feeling of above mentioned life situations.

>>1900446
some retard ctrl+v'd my thread over there, idk what to tell you. I made a post asking wtf was happening. tbh it was probably you, so fuck off.

>>1900448
I generally agree with your wall of text that equilibrium prices will emerge in a market. The LTV states that these equilibrium prices are proportional to labour-time in a commodity. I understand all of that. However, that doesn't at all answer the problem raised by Sesardic: Marx correctly identified that in some cases, this proportionality rule doesn't hold. Again, see >>1900364 for a source.

In other words, equilibrium prices are not always proportional to labour-time. To resolve this, what we can call real labour-time, i.e., the amount of time that passes on a clock, is differentiated from simple labour-time, i.e., the common unit which expresses value. The problem is that simple labour-time is completely uncalculable without reference to a market. You say we could calculate any price:
>"x amount of pens, y amount of math teaching hours, z amount of electricity, w amount of building space for an hour, for all the economy, you can calculate with higher precision than your source data the true value without needing a powerfull computer. "
But this is simply not true. When you say "y amount of math teaching hours", you're referencing real labour-time, not simple labour-time, and it is the latter which must be known to calculate value.

The simple labour-time is only calculable with reference to the real labour-time and a market to quantify prices, as you so agreed with here >>1900413

To simply reformulate, the LTV asserts proportionality between value and labour-time. But when this proportionality is broken, it asserts simply proportionality between value and simple-labour time, and states that in different societies at different times the proportion between real and simple labour-time is variable. This enough is clear support in favour of a subjective theory of value, but to add insult to injury Engels actually states that this relationship between real and simple labour-time "can only be stated but not as yet explained."

>>1900454
It's meant to explain markets, not simply describe them. Specifically, LTV is a statement on how the equilibrium price in a market is a function of labour-time. If this function makes reference to some parameter besides labour-time then it should be obvious that the LTV is not doing what it's supposed to.

>the opponents are ideologically driven and have a petty boug mentality of either "I own a shop and don't care about my labor time" or "buy low and sell high" or "I live with me mum". If it doesn't click with intellectually, they just fall back on gut feeling of above mentioned life situations.

I don't really understand what you're saying here. I think it's quite clear that both Bawerk's and Sesardic's objections to the LTV are rooted in theoretical disagreements rather than dogmatic/ideological prejudices.

>>1900454
>and beyond-the-market planned economy
Managerial capitalism is "socialism"?

>>1900470
>LTV is a statement on how the equilibrium price in a market is a function of labour-time

LTV is a statement that money is invested for the purpose of getting back more money, and that "more money" comes from labor. Petty boug, in opposition to both communists and capitalists, however, think that "more money" comes from "enterpreneural spirit", simple "buy low sell high" or some shit like that. It's purely the result of petty boug mentality. People who actually engage in production and have to deal with wage labor very much tend towards LTV.

>equilibrium price in a market is a function of labour-time

So much buzzwords. What other parameter is there? "Rarity" is also labor-time - it's harder to find, and finding is labor-time. With Chinese weaponizing caviar fish farms against American fishing industry, price of caviar has dropped - quite an obvious example, no?

What else you people see as a parameter?

>>1900480
>managerial capitalism
Dude, one company in a world market which can usurp the whole government in a small country is not "managerial capitalism". Saudis are not managerial capitalism, neither is South Korea or some offshore country, it's simple capitalism

>>1900465
>In other words, equilibrium prices are not always proportional to labour-time. To resolve this, what we can call real labour-time, i.e., the amount of time that passes on a clock, is differentiated from simple labour-time, i.e., the common unit which expresses value. The problem is that simple labour-time is completely uncalculable without reference to a market. You say we could calculate any price:
>>"x amount of pens, y amount of math teaching hours, z amount of electricity, w amount of building space for an hour, for all the economy, you can calculate with higher precision than your source data the true value without needing a powerfull computer. "
>But this is simply not true. When you say "y amount of math teaching hours", you're referencing real labour-time, not simple labour-time, and it is the latter which must be known to calculate value.
I've tried to explain several times already. If you know the formulas in the form "x amount of pens, y amount of math teaching hours, z amount of electricity, w amount of building space for an hour, for all the economy", there is an algorithm to approximate the true exact perfectly precise value within picoseconds. You can just set all prices to zero, calculate value, fill them back into the price, then repeat it, with each step you get closer to the mathematically exact value (though you never reach it, which isnt neccecarily bad). For the mathematically inclined im sure there is a way to calculate the true exact value somehow but for all intends and pusposed we dont really care if a car took a picosecond longer to construct, the inaccuracy of our information is larger than that.

>the LTV asserts proportionality between value and labour-time. But when this proportionality is broken, it asserts simply proportionality between value and simple-labour time
I think you misunderstood how marx wrote Capital. He started out explaining his theory with simple models, in the very first step equating all labour and price to value, then later expanded his explanation to explain the full depth of the model after explaining the basics. Its like when you learn to do physics and they say "you can ignore air resistance for this exercise", but air resistance still exist in the full models, they just dont include in in the first step of explaining the model, because thats not didactically usefull. LTV never equated value directly to all labour time, and complex labour is not some sort of escape hatch handwave to try and fix up a shoddy model, it was part of it from the get go, but you dont start out with complex numbers in year 1 of math class.

> and states that in different societies at different times the proportion between real and simple labour-time is variable
To be more precise, the relation between complex and simple labour time is determined by the specific amount of labour put into the training and indirect maintanance of the people performing the labour. For example, over time with perfect competition in a perfect market and no bariers to entry in jobs or education, wages for heavy manual labour rises because your body gives out sooner so you need to save up for early retirement.
>This enough is clear support in favour of a subjective theory of value
Genuinly, what are you on about.
>but to add insult to injury Engels actually states that this relationship between real and simple labour-time "can only be stated but not as yet explained."
Good thing we do not live in 1877 then anymore eh? Marxism has progressed beyond what two old dead dudes wrote down 150 years ago.

>>1900470
> Specifically, LTV is a statement on how the equilibrium price in a market is a function of labour-time. If this function makes reference to some parameter besides labour-time then it should be obvious that the LTV is not doing what it's supposed to.
It does not make a reference to something besides labour time, you are just unable to understand recursive functions for now.
Look at the picture i attached. I created a tiny model economy, with fomulas only referencing labour time. You can then calculate and get closer and closer to "true value" with a simple recursive calculation. Just for you, I even threw in a circular requirement, where mining iron requires processed iron, like exists irl, with oil workers requiring petrol products for production, and the like.
Without any reference to pre-given prices, we can calculate the value, because with each step the impact of cascading unknowns is lessened.

>>1900494
Heres the same example but I added complex mining labour.
See? At no point do we need pre-given prices, you can mathematically calculate it from just labour time and proportional inputs.

>>1900500
Here is it again but without accidentally using wheat instead of flour for bread.

>>1900500
the whole problem is that you're assuming the value of complex mining labour. You've just set the complex component = 0.5L. The question is how you actually calculate this ratio. You claim you can use education costs but like you point out all prices are set to 0 at the beginning, so at the beginning mining labour would be equal to simple labour and your whole simulation would be based off of that incorrect premise.

>>1900689
Bro if you don't know what the fuck you're talking about then stop talking.
It's a model economy in which I filled in random numbers for how much it costs to produce stuff, and just like how I pulled out if my ass that 1 unit of water costs 0.4 units of labour I pulled out of my ass that one hour of mining labour requires half an hour upfront work to create it.

If you don't know how math works that's your problem, there is no "simulation", those iterations aren't economic years, it's a calculation. This is a standard method for getting the costs in an interconnected system with lots of interdependent linear formulas. You could use far more complex math to get the same answer as you get at calculation 20 instantly, it would just be incredibly complicated and math intensive to do it that way.

You can't come here and talk a big game about how LTV is wrong if you don't even understand the basics of econometrics and basic linear optimisation methods. There is centuries of literature and you're still stuck at failing to grasp that doctors need to be trained and that training and their student loans are reflected in their salary. You are stuck at abstractions of saying tailors and weavers are incomparable when they clearly are not. "You can't compare apples to oranges" when you clearly fucking can, because even though qualitatively they are different, they have fundamental properties which make them comparable. They are products of labour, they fullfill nutritional and psychological needs. And weavers and tailors are both work the same people can and do do, some for sale in a competitive market, by the same group of people who will and do switch to the more profitable one.

>>1900689
>>1900713
You're basically this picture

>>1900713
lol, absolutely nothing about this has anything to do with econometrics or linear optimisation. You've literally made a spreadsheet using basic algebra. You really can't be so snide when you continually refuse to engage with the question. How do you calculate the ratio between simple and compound labour? Why would you make a whole spreadsheet but fail to answer the most critical question?

Tailors' and weavers' labour is incomparable a priori, we need a market and subjective valuation to compare them - that's my point. Your point is that you can calculate any equilibrium price with a set of measurements of an economy, namely, labour time and number produced. To be fair, it is a simulating - you're simulating market prices using labour times. No need to be so aggressive, I didn't mention anything about years.

If what you say is correct, and educational costs aka educational labour time adds to simple labour to produce complex labour, then we will necessarily have to go back to the days of Ur to do simple LTV calcs to estimate equilibrium market prices. Nothing you've said or shown has disproven that so far.

>>1900744
I should have known better than to engage with austrians who cannot fathom how capitalism works and just say "it's all subjective man"

>>1900765
cope and seethe retard.

>>1900768
"Cope and seethe" is dumbass for "I lost" :3

>>1900778
egoist flag, opinion denied

>>1900798
bro, other anon, but like, you said that the theory doesn't work, the guy showed you by simple arithmetic calculations that it did, and then you go and say "no, you can't do that, your initial premisse is incorrect".

>Tailors' and weavers' labour is incomparable a priori, we need a market and subjective valuation to compare them
but you responded to
<You are stuck at abstractions of saying tailors and weavers are incomparable when they clearly are not. "You can't compare apples to oranges" when you clearly fucking can, because even though qualitatively they are different, they have fundamental properties which make them comparable. They are products of labour, they fullfill nutritional and psychological needs. And weavers and tailors are both work the same people can and do do, some for sale in a competitive market, by the same group of people who will and do switch to the more profitable one.

how does that doesn't respond your statement about tailors and weavers?

from >>1900713

>>1900744
>If what you say is correct, and educational costs aka educational labour time adds to simple labour to produce complex labour, then we will necessarily have to go back to the days of Ur to do simple LTV calcs to estimate equilibrium market prices. Nothing you've said or shown has disproven that so far.

<Then, lets start off that no, actually, the existance of teachers does not need teachers to have existed since the beginning of reality. People who have had no formal education but developed methods and skill through experience can and do teach in real life. There exists teachers now, and there have not always, yet you claim all educators need to have been educated to infinity, that is just not reality.
Lastly, because models are approximations, you dont need precise results to to the picosecond of labour time all the way back to the times of the supremacy of Ur. The economy only cares about the now. When computers, meaning people who manually do calculations, became absolute, the effort invested in their training, that labour time, was lost, similarly to companies going out of business, factories burning down, etc. If all you need to do is calculate a good enough approximation of labour value of products, then you can do that to the microsecond per product, much higher accuracy than the data you can realistically base it on, in about 15 iterations of a super simple linear time algorithm. Hell, you can do it by hand. You can calculate labour costs, as well as the value of complex labour, since that too is just a product, using only the known production formulas in natura, with no prior prices being neccecary.

Isn't that the proof? Wdym it doesn't "disproven" what you said?

Also do you have any "critique" of Paul cockshot?

I think OP is gone now, he said "cope and seethe" and left.

>>1900494
>>1900821
point to be made: it's not going to be exact labor value issue, it's going to be an average to reproduce something taken out of the market. It also inherently is going to suffer from rounding issues because we simply don't pay for things using a $0.000000001 value coin. So this
>there is an algorithm to approximate the true exact perfectly precise value within picoseconds
is nonsensical. Actually it's just flat out nonsensical because you combine the words "approximate" and "precise".

>>1900932
is like, derivative thing right? Like it is close, but not that close, but it will get there. There was that guy, i believe, newton something, he did the calculation, and many, many other great things, but one great thing that he did was the derivation thing. Very, very american guy

>>1900960
i believe you mean "asymptote" there but honestly it's closer to ending up with the understanding of thermodynamics than gravity.
You do not need to understand the energy of every particle to get a temperature of a bulk matter.

>>1900385
Yeah I think the others misunderstand the point of the "distance theory":
1. Some ratio of measurements regarding two things is claimed to be equal to the ratio of a different measurement method regarding the same two things.
2. Counter-examples are easy to find, and this is readily admitted by everybody.
3. The discrepancy is "explained", by fixing one of the ratios, using the other ratio as the standard.
Such a fixing procedure can make any measurement ratios equal, so the theory looks vacuous.

Maybe this is not fair to Marx and there is something missing, but it certainly fair regarding many Marx explainers.

My stab at it: The above argument makes a binary assumption: Either a theory about ratios has no empirical discrepancies and then it works or there are discrepancies and then there is a procedure that seems to fix it, and this procedure can indeed "fix" anything, and so any theory with discrepancies must be ridiculous. But this is not how most scientific theories for predicting stuff (say, the weather) are judged. There are different sizes of failure. So, if the fudgery required to make labor ratios equal to price ratios is less extreme than for other inputs, this means something. (Unless you are doing philosophy I guess, but I'm no philosopher, thank God.)

>>1899900
>let us assume value is something different from what it is
>checkmate gommies!
also it's actually possible Marx is wrong - that there is no distinction between "simple" and "complex" labour power. both add the same amount of value. it's just that "complex" labour requires training, which adds value to the labour power itself, increasing its value and therefore its price, and consequently the value and price of commodities produced by that "complex" labour power. that is, the "complex" labour adds the same new value as the "simple" labour, but also some of the value already added to the labour power itself gets transferred to the commodity

The thing people miss is that marx assigns 2 forms of Value which pertain to a commodity, where use-value is its qualitative (subjective) aspect and its exchange-value is its quantitative (objective) aspect.
Use-value as the "substance of value" pertains to the qualities of the object therein, which is also said to be historically contingent. Exchange-value by contrast is the magnitude of Value which gives physical presence in purchase of the commodity.
Value *is* subjective where it is given by use-value. This is why marx says that before commodities arise as a product of exchange, there were only use-values in the appropriation of Nature by Labour. Labour thus creates Value(s) by its nature, since this is its determinate object.
Likewise, exchange-value only attains to usefulness for the capitalist if his product is sold. So in capitalism, Value has its ends in the commodity, not in itself (or where rather, labour finds its own product in the commodity).
So marx is only being self-evident.

>>1901319
That's not true. I'm confused about it, now, after reading anons post.

>>1901319
most assume LTV means more labour = higher price (as per OPs accompanying text), but it works retroactively, where what is sold must comport to a certain anount of labour given to it which is returned in the worker's wages.
Labour does not esteem Value in itself, but all Values must still point back to Labour as its origin.
The use-value of a thing diminishes (as per marginal utility), yet its exchange-value is the object of the capitalist's intercourse with the market, which is given as imperative.
You can sell a useless thing for cheap, yet you cant build a business off of that (which is the general issue of merchant capital's self-depletion), and WHY Labour-Power must be invested in, in the first place - to make money from useful commodities.

>>1901122
The issue with "distance theory" is that it is making some kind of arbitrary fixed decision on what you're going to be charging on. Marxists do not choose labor to be the source of value. Value arises spontaneously as a result of the natural properties of labor.

"Labor is value" is like arguing that the properties of the CPU on your motherboard is a determinant of your computer's processing speed.

>>1901339
>most assume LTV means more labour = higher price (as per OPs accompanying text), but it works retroactively, where what is sold must comport to a certain anount of labour given to it which is returned in the worker's wages.
it's dialectical

>>1901291
holy shit gommies are so retarded they will post a memeshit image even though I did not use any stupid "mud pie" argument to counter the LTV.

I will pose the same question to you: if you think that the "simple labour-time" of the training is what adds to value of "complex" labour, how do you account for the fact that this labour too must have been trained and thus would be worth more? How would you calculate anyone's "simple" labour, considering everyone must be trained at some point to learn a skill?

>>1901122
interesting point! however, I would disagree that something as important as circularity of reasoning should be diminished to a "not so important problem". It cannot be that the labour ratio is made to equal the price ratio through fudgery: the whole purpose of this theory is to determine price ratios via labour ratios. The irreducibility of the two kinds of labour indicates there must be some other thing, other than labour, which is an equally important determining factor. To explain, we can consider Mill's hedonism argument. It goes something like this:

As a theory of well-being, we will assume that pleasure is all that matters for someone's wellbeing. In other words, well-being is only a function of pleasure, nothing else. This is known as a hedonistic theory of well-being. The common counter-argument is this: if pleasure is all that matters for a good life, then surely someone must be content living, say, 1,000,000 as a pig as opposed to 30 years as a human, because the total amount of pleasure accrued by a pig in 1,000,000 years must surely be greater than a human in 30. Mill counters by saying that we can preserve the hedonistic theory by introduce qualitatively different pleasures, i.e, higher and lower pleasures. Pigs can never experience higher pleasures while humans can, thus in the 30 years we experience these higher pleasures whereas in the 1,000,000 years a pig never can.

Of course, we must remember the original claim: all well-being is a function of pleasure. If we are now distinguishing between different kinds of pleasure, it seems we concede that there must be something other than pleasure which must be making the difference. Alternatively, if higher pleasures are simply equivalent to some ratio of lower pleasures, there must be some number of years where living as a pig would supercede living as a human are we are again forced to choose to live in an immortal pig's body and brain rather than carry out a human existance. Thus, by introducing two qualitatively different kinds of our base unit (pleasure) our theory falls apart: either they are qualitatively different due to some other third thing, or they are actually just multiples of the other.

Of course, it seems Marx chose to go with the "they are just multiples of eachother" path: if we know this cannot be allowed due to circular reasoning, then we are forced to choose the other option: there is some other thing which distinguishes two qualitatively different labour-activities other than some imagined complex labour-time.

>>1900831
>>1900824
>>1900821
How is what he said disproving what I said?
If educational labour time adds to simple labour time to produce complex labour, then it doesn't matter if people have no formal education or haven't developed refined skills to teach. Their labour-time is still adding to simple labour. Their primitive nature is essentially irrelevant.

Also, no, he did not do simple calculations to prove me wrong. Please explain how anything that the spreadsheet showed challenged any of my arguments.

And (finally), let's examine this statement: both tailoring and weaving are products of labour and fulfil nutritional and psychological needs. Ok, that's great - doesn't have anything to do with the labour theory of value though. The critical question is: how do we determine which is worth more than the other? I concede that my original statement, "incomparable a priori", is too strong: what I should've said was that they cannot be appraised a priori without a market and subjective valuation. In other words, we cannot say which is worth more to society than the other. And, again, nothing about them both being products of labour or fulfiling psychological needs or being things the same person can do disprove that notion.

>>1902898
This is why marx appeals to "subsistence" in the reproduction of simple labour. "Necessary" goods fulfil the needs of his being, which is the minimum price of goods in comparison to wages.
Youre right that you cant "price" a good from the bottom-up based on the labour imported, but the (re)production of goods still pertain to the (re)production of society itself, in the worker.
This is why labour-power is the primal commodity of the capital process; its what everything else hinges on - so what is the price of labour-power? The cost of necessity.

>>1901927
Yes, but its dialectical within the logic of the commodity also, where Value is always indirectly attained by consumption (where capitalist consumption always implies overproduction). Where exchange-value is esteemed, use-value is sacrificed (just think of capitalist waste), and where use-value is promoted, exchange-value suffers (look at the poverty of the soviet union).
But these aspects of production also necessitate each other by the class relation in commodity production.
Proletarian consumption (C-M-C)
Capitalist production (M-C-M)
proletarians are only productive where they *consume* "productive capital" - the means of production

>>1899897
The Austrian School "attack" is a facile one an entry level philosophy student could dismantle, or anyone who is honest and approached the system in the same way classical political economy did. They're playing games with the infinitesimal and insinuating ad nauseum that it doesn't work, without regarding what a market actually is - that it is something overlaid on a real world, rather than a material phenomenon in of itself. That was always understood for political economy to be sensical, and one of the arguments from Capital is that political economy is a pseudoscience, basically. Of course, political economy was never really a science to begin with, and when there was a mathematical and scientific view of economics, it did not arise wholly from political economy. That was abandoned after Marx rather quickly.

There are so many flagrant errors against sense and reason in the Austrian School framework, but they care not, because it's a litany of insults to intelligence, from people who did not understand British political economy and had a case of Kraut s'pos'das and wanted to make reality a racial truth. Typical Germanoid insanity.

>labor theory of value
Isn't really the point. There are arguments against the law of value raised that aren't facile, then and now. The most common is to dispute that labor as a social relation is valued at all, or was ever equalized in principle. What is really valued is the stability of the state and city. The human beings are external to it. Only the contract and legal person is relevant to the concept of free trade, because free trade was never premised on a humanistic conceit about capital or anyone involved in this arrangement of society. The human subject could be replaced with an abstraction or any machine appropriate to the task and the working of stock would be the same. Smith's claim did not even place a mathematical value on labor, and Ricardo's assumptionw as a violent assumption. It was also one where Ricardo made clear that any complex society didn't actually work that way, and that even a primitive society would have developed a sense of something that doesn't enter commercial exchange. This is what Marx was critiquing as it was, rather than inventing a straw man, and Capital would be understood as if you were familiar with classical political economy rather than grasping at quotes like a retard.

The point of placing the fount of value in labor was a moral claim rather than a material one - that it was human labor that was contested and the only reason why we had this thing called money or currency, and there have been various forms of money throughout history. Marx makes a point of this, which no one refutes or rejects with any seriousness, because it was basic to this question. The labor is valued more because it is a thing to be commanded, rather than the labor itself having any particular quality. The machines and things that are employed for labor are morally the same, but those distinctions are irrelevant because technology by definition was understood as something made by human beings. You'd have to make a leap that wasn't yet made - that technology itself was the object of interest, rather than stock or things. Part of Marx is making that claim - that "dead labor" of machines becomes more prominent. But, it would be easy enough to circumvent the worker altogether, and in practice, this is what happened. Labor had no ability to bargain with their condition and never would. They were entirely at the mercy of the favored classes, so far as they were consigned to the social class of labor.