Leftypol has never been able to refute this criticism of the Labor Theory of Value. It's quite sad to see an ideological cult based on refuting supply and demand just return to defining fundamental economic terms like supply and demand dressed up in fancy marxist language.
>>2232212???
People have needs, and demand those needs be met, and this is somehow a shitty "gotcha" to prove supply-demand mumbo jumbo?
>>22322191. Define "use-value".
2. If you're arguing that brand marketing and post-fordism debunks LTV, your re-education will involve beatings.
>>2232222>>2232222My definition is the same as Marx's, i.e. some tangible physical property that gives a commodity a use to fulfill some function to a person.
I can prefer strawberry ice cream over chocolate ice cream. Both have the same use value, and both require the same labor time and capital inputs to produce. If 95% of the population preferred strawberry to vanilla, Marxists would say that chocolate ice cream is not socially necessary, so it's just another way of saying subjective demand is what drives value, rather than labor inputs.
>>2232232Why not just farm both but put them in the freezer until someone requests it. Your example is literally icecream.
>>2232244Go take a nap.
>>2232244In this example chocolate and strawberry are artificial flavors with little use of their actual representative commodities, they are just flavors with same required labor to produce a unit of each.
>>2232250Central planning under Marxist orthodoxy does not account for differing preferences because it treats use-value as sufficient enough for determining "socially necessity" even though social necessity has a degree of demand baked into it
>>2232219>Marxists assert only use-value determines social necessity, doesn't account for individual preference and thus the argument that socially necessary is a function of mean labor time for a commodity falls apart as well, as two goods with identical labor-time and productivity can be demanded at much different amountsnone of this makes any sense
use-value doesn't exactly determine social necessity, you could have something with a use-value that is not sold or something without a use-value that is sold. its more that the fact something was exchanged that determines that it is socially necessary, since the act of exchange is between two people, hence social.
and labor time is measured by a clock, so it doesn't need to account for individual preference. you just have the fact that it was exchanged, and that it took a certain amount of time to create.
and it doesn't matter if two goods sell for different prices, because prices arent value, and value is not measured individually but as an average, its not just socially necessary labor time but average socially necessary labor time that determines value. thats why taking longer to make things doesn't make them more valuable, it just makes the extra time socially unnecessary.
>>2232215instead of shouting past each other, lets combine this dialetically.
yes, you are correct, demand drives the value of products. At the same time, once a good has been established as socially desirable, then we need to look towards labour to assess how it is valued in the market.
I don't think Marx is a prophet and while I think he's probably the greatest sociologist of our epoch, we can still question him, but I think reducing Capital to "labour creates value" is rather simplifying things.
>>2232364>instead of shouting past each other, lets combine this dialetically.Dialectics isn't when you "combine X with Y and get X+Y".
>yes, you are correct, demand drives the value of products. At the same time, once a good has been established as socially desirable, then we need to look towards labour to assess how it is valued in the marketYou could as easily say that supply drives the "value" of products, and that supply creates its own demand. "Demand" in the sense of which it is used in "supply and demand" does not drive value, it can merely affect the price of which fluctuates around value. The "demand" used by economists in the theory of supply and demand is very different then people "demanding" or having a use for something, which existed far before markets and prices.
>I don't think Marx is a prophet and while I think he's probably the greatest sociologist of our epoch, we can still question him, but I think reducing Capital to "labour creates value" is rather simplifying things.Nobody here thinks he's a prophet, but if people are going to critique him, they should have actually read him first. Labour isn't the source of all value, Marx states this himself, but it does "create" value in the most literal of ways. "Demand" cannot create or realize value, wants do not in of themselves create the "line" upon which price can then fluctuate around.
>>2232405Good Paul Cockshott video, highly recommend. I think OP might also be confusing the "Socially Necessary" part of socially necessary labor time to mean "necessary for society to continue functioning"
It's the labor time, on average, required to produce commodity, in a given society with a given level of technological development. It's a statistic of production. The "necessary" adjective isn't modifying "socially" but "labor time". The "socially" part is better translated as "societally"
It might be poor translation from German but it's also people just not reading what Marx is saying. he's talking about the labor time required on average in a society to produce a given commodity. That contributes to the value which is expressed as an equilibrium price, not a market price. market prices take into account post-production factors like supply, demand, monopoly. But supply and demand can only cause a price to deviate from a value. It cannot determine a value since the value is determined by production, before the market determines the price. Price is derivative of value, not the other way around.
>>2232191OP image makes no sense.
Socially necessary in "socially necessary labor time" basically means "average". Putting it back to the image, the goose is saying "how do we determine what labor is average?". The question makes no sense.
>an ideological cult based on refuting supply and demandRead Marx. Supply and demand pressures are not "refuted", on the contrary, they are part of the theory.
>defining fundamental economic terms like supply and demand dressed up in fancy marxist language.Since you're illiterate, let me translate the fancy Marxist terms for you
>supplyThe fancy Marxist term for this is "supply"
>demand The fancy Marxist term for this is "demand"
Hope that helps.
>>2232191>words words wordsffs, we vote on it.
>>2232277sort of, democratic centralism isn't exactly direct democracy but better.
An Issue are first brought up by the individual who articulates it to their comrades in whatever group they are in. This is then debated, voted on in that group and if it passes distributed to be voted on by the sister groups.
Each committee then delegates someone to vote on the next level down the tree. A central committee can also make a recommendation on the vote which is by no means binding. Suffice it to say every member of every committee is democratically elected.
The complexity depends on the size of the organization in case of world wide communism on a global issues I suspect it might be 3-4 levels deep.
>>2232191Average socially necessary labor-time is indirectly determined by capitalists within the market economy. Competitive pressure drives investment and higher rates of exploitation, which decreases labor-time, and this plays out across the entire economy over time.
Under communism this value-form does not operate, and production numbers are planned to meet human needs. How this planning is done is an open question though.
>>2232558I would hardly call subjective value by itself "political economy", something abstract like value (the measure to which someone appreciates something) is necessarily going to be subjective. the marxist commodity form is a social relation at a much higher level
this is like if, to refute the statement that "gasoline is what moves cars" you said "actually, gasoline is a mixture of hydrocarbons"
>>2232389>>2232364yeah i was gonna say something similar. the problem for me is with the word "drives" its too close to "determines". supply doesn't determine value. use-values are a second order necessity to value, because people have to want different things to exchange them, but its not sufficient for value, which requires labor time.
there is a bit of nuance with things that are exchanged as an investment, because then their exchange-value becomes a sort of psuedo-use-value, but use-value is usually defined as fulfilling a human need and 'using' it as a vehicle for profit is indirect and not really the same but highlights how detached from reality capitalist logic is, but even here value reflects snlt
>>2233965Subjective value is "incorporated into Marxism" on the very first page of Capital Volume 1 Chapter 1 in the concept of Use-Value.
>A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference.[2]Here's Marx's footnote as well:
>[2] “Desire implies want, it is the appetite of the mind, and as natural as hunger to the body… The greatest number (of things) have their value from supplying the wants of the mind.” Nicholas Barbon: “A Discourse Concerning Coining the New Money Lighter. In Answer to Mr. Locke’s Considerations, &c.”, London, 1696, pp. 2, So Marx already from the very first page of Capital Volume 1 Section 1 acknowledges that for a commodity to have Use-Value it has to satisfy a human want, whether that want arises from "the stomach" (i.e. our OBJECTIVE need for food) or from "the imagination" (i.e. our SUBJECTIVE desires)
Marx synthezies the subjective and objective value of commodities in the idea of use value, but then also synthesizes use-value which arises in the consumption of commodities by humans with exchange-value which arises in the production of commodities by humans. To Marx, Value is the synthesis of all these relative standpoints: The subjective and objective standpoints, the consumer and producer standpoints, the worker and owner standpoints.
Marx never once in all his works utters the phrase "labor theory of value." That is what scholars of Marx use to describe his theory of value and to differentiate it from bourgeois theorists who came after him. Interestingly what Marx has is a theory of value which synthesizes several standpoints, not just that of labor, and furthermore it is arguable that David Ricardo and Adam Smith also had labor theories of value, as did Ben Franklin, and many other thinkers going back to even Ibn Khaldun, but what Marx did was to resolve the contradictions in the 300 years of poltical-economy that he read. He spent 20 years studying European economic thinkers from the 1500s to the 1800s: Petty, Barbon Boisguillbert, Smith, Ricardo, Quesnay. He synthesized all their political-economic ideas into a work that was itself a critique of political-economy. This is why after Marx revealed Capital's tendency to destroy itself with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie resorted to all manner of subterfuge to create an economics that constituted not a field of inquiry but a priesthood of bourgeois class dictatorship.
>>2232593except that was the wrong answer. the adjective "necessary" in "socially necessary labor time" refers to the labor time and not to society. "Socially" is just a social average. i.e. an aggregate statistic
SNLT is the labor time necessary, on average to produce a commodity, in a given society using its prevailing methods of producing that commodity.
>>2234040[part 1 of?]
That's correct. OP is deeply stupid. Let's see what Marx says about Supply and Demand (he never ignores it, especially when it comes to the supply and demand of labor power itself, due to the phenomenon of the reserve army of labor, also known as relative surplus population):
<Little as Vulgar-Economy knows about the nature of value, yet whenever it wishes to consider the phenomena of circulation in their purity, it assumes that supply and demand are equal, which amounts to this, that their effect is nil. If therefore, as regards the use-values exchanged, both buyer and seller may possibly gain something, this is not the case as regards the exchange-values. Here we must rather say, “Where equality exists there can be no gain.”5 It is true, commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values, but these deviations are to be considered as infractions of the laws of the exchange of commodities6 , which in its normal state is an exchange of equivalents, consequently, no method for increasing value.7>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 5
<While prices fall, and capital is being displaced, the labourers employed in the production of necessary means of subsistence are in their turn “freed” from a part of their wages. Instead, therefore, of proving that, when machinery frees the workman from his means of subsistence, it simultaneously converts those means into capital for his further employment, our apologists, with their cut-and-dried law of supply and demand, prove, on the contrary, that machinery throws workmen on the streets, not only in that branch of production in which it is introduced, but also in those branches in which it is not introduced.>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 15
<In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth. These imaginary expressions, arise, however, from the relations of production themselves. They are categories for the phenomenal forms of essential relations. That in their appearance things often represent themselves in inverted form is pretty well known in every science except Political Economy Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category “price of labour” without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes i.e., the oscillations of the market-price above or below a certain mean. If demand and supply balance, the oscillation of prices ceases, all other conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to explain anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply are in equilibrium, is its natural price, determined independently of the relation of demand and supply. And how this price is determined is just the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This price which always finally predominates over the accidental market-prices of labour and regulates them, this “necessary price” (Physiocrats) or “natural price” of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing else than its value expressed in money. In this way Political Economy expected to penetrate athwart the accidental prices of labour, to the value of labour. As with other commodities, this value was determined by the cost of production. But what is the cost of production ‒ of the labourer, i.e., the cost of producing or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously substituted itself in Political Economy for the original one; for the search after the cost of production of labour as such turned in a circle and never left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market-price of labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the rate of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means of labour, &c., they never discovered that the course of the analysis had led not only from the market-prices of labour to its presumed value, but had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the value of labour-power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories “value of labour,” “natural price of labour,” &c., as final and as adequate expressions for the value-relation under consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction, while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships appearances only.>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 19
<Capital works on both sides at the same time. If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the “setting free” of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers. The action of the law of supply and demand of labour on this basis completes the despotism of capital. As soon, therefore, as the labourers learn the secret, how it comes to pass that in the same measure as they work more, as they produce more wealth for others, and as the productive power of their labour increases, so in the same measure even their function as a means of the self-expansion of capital becomes more and more precarious for them; as soon as they discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population; as soon as, by Trades’ Unions, &c., they try to organise a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class, so soon capital and its sycophant, Political Economy, cry out at the infringement of the “eternal” and so to say “sacred” law of supply and demand. Every combination of employed and unemployed disturbs the “harmonious” action of this law. But, on the other hand, as soon as (in the colonies, e.g.) adverse circumstances prevent the creation of an industrial reserve army and, with it, the absolute dependence of the working class upon the capitalist class, capital, along with its commonplace Sancho Panza, rebels against the “sacred” law of supply and demand, and tries to check its inconvenient action by forcible means and State interference.>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 24
<Taking them as a whole, the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army, and these again correspond to the periodic changes of the industrial cycle. They are, therefore, not determined by the variations of the absolute number of the working population, but by the varying proportions in which the working class is divided into active and reserve army, by the increase or diminution in the relative amount of the surplus population, by the extent to which it is now absorbed, now set free. For Modern Industry with its decennial cycles and periodic phases, which, moreover, as accumulation advances, are complicated by irregular oscillations following each other more and more quickly, that would indeed be a beautiful law, which pretends to make the action of capital dependent on the absolute variation of the population, instead of regulating the demand and supply of labour by the alternate expansion and contraction of capital, the labour-market now appearing relatively under-full, because capital is expanding, now again over-full, because it is contracting. Yet this is the dogma of the economists. According to them, wages rise in consequence of accumulation of capital. The higher wages stimulate the working population to more rapid multiplication, and this goes on until the labour-market becomes too full, and therefore capital, relatively to the supply of labour, becomes insufficient. Wages fall, and now we have the reverse of the medal. The working population is little by little decimated as the result of the fall in wages, so that capital is again in excess relatively to them, or, as others explain it, falling wages and the corresponding increase in the exploitation of the labourer again accelerates accumulation, whilst, at the same time, the lower wages hold the increase of the working class in check. Then comes again the time, when the supply of labour is less than the demand, wages rise, and so on. A beautiful mode of motion this for developed capitalist production! Before, in consequence of the rise of wages, any positive increase of the population really fit for work could occur, the time would have been passed again and again, during which the industrial campaign must have been carried through, the battle fought and won.>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25
<The industrial reserve army, during the periods of stagnation and average prosperity, weighs down the active labour-army; during the periods of over-production and paroxysm, it holds its pretensions in check. Relative surplus population is therefore the pivot upon which the law of demand and supply of labour works. It confines the field of action of this law within the limits absolutely convenient to the activity of exploitation and to the domination of capital. This is the place to return to one of the grand exploits of economic apologetics. It will be remembered that if through the introduction of new, or the extension of old, machinery, a portion of variable capital is transformed into constant, the economic apologist interprets this operation which “fixes” capital and by that very act sets labourers “free,” in exactly the opposite way, pretending that it sets free capital for the labourers. Only now can one fully understand the effrontery of these apologists. What are set free are not only the labourers immediately turned out by the machines, but also their future substitutes in the rising generation, and the additional contingent, that with the usual extension of trade on the old basis would be regularly absorbed. They are now all “set free,” and every new bit of capital looking out for employment can dispose of them. Whether it attracts them or others, the effect on the general labour demand will be nil, if this capital is just sufficient to take out of the market as many labourers as the machines threw upon it. If it employs a smaller number, that of the supernumeraries increases; if it employs a greater, the general demand for labour only increases to the extent of the excess of the employed over those “set free.” The impulse that additional capital, seeking an outlet, would otherwise have given to the general demand for labour, is therefore in every case neutralised to the extent of the labourers thrown out of employment by the machine. That is to say, the mechanism of capitalistic production so manages matters that the absolute increase of capital is accompanied by no corresponding rise in the general demand for labour. And this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the transition period that banishes them into the industrial reserve army! The demand for labour is not identical with increase of capital, nor supply of labour with increase of the working class. It is not a case of two independent forces working on one another. Les dés sont pipés>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25
<These results of the agricultural revolution – i.e., the change of arable into pasture land, the use of machinery, the most rigorous economy of labour, &c., are still further aggravated by the model landlords, who, instead of spending their rents in other countries, condescend to live in Ireland on their demesnes. In order that the law of supply and demand may not be broken, these gentlemen draw their, quote, "labour-supply chiefly from their small tenants, who are obliged to attend when required to do the landlord’s work, at rates of wages, in many instances, considerably under the current rates paid to ordinary labourers, and without regard to the inconvenience or loss to the tenant of being obliged to neglect his own business at critical periods of sowing or reaping.” The uncertainty and irregularity of employment, the constant return and long duration of gluts of labour, all these symptoms of a relative surplus population, figure therefore in the reports of the Poor Law administration, as so many hardships of the agricultural proletariat. It will be remembered that we met, in the English agricultural proletariat, with a similar spectacle. But the difference is that in England, an industrial country, the industrial reserve recruits itself from the country districts, whilst in Ireland, an agricultural country, the agricultural reserve recruits itself from the towns, the cities of refuge of the expelled agricultural labourers. In the former, the supernumeraries of agriculture are transformed into factory operatives; in the latter, those forced into the towns, whilst at the same time they press on the wages in towns, remain agricultural labourers, and are constantly sent back to the country districts in search of work>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25 >>2234040[part 2]
<It is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated in a mass, in the shape of capital, at the one pole of society, while at the other are grouped masses of men, who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Neither is it enough that they are compelled to sell it voluntarily. The advance of capitalist production develops a working class, which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature. The organisation of the capitalist process of production, once fully developed, breaks down all resistance. The constant generation of a relative surplus-population keeps the law of supply and demand of labour, and therefore keeps wages, in a rut that corresponds with the wants of capital. The dull compulsion of economic relations completes the subjection of the labourer to the capitalist. Direct force, outside economic conditions, is of course still used, but only exceptionally. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the “natural laws of production,” i.e., to his dependence on capital, a dependence springing from, and guaranteed in perpetuity by, the conditions of production themselves. It is otherwise during the historic genesis of capitalist production. The bourgeoisie, at its rise, wants and uses the power of the state to “regulate” wages, i.e., to force them within the limits suitable for surplus-value making, to lengthen the working day and to keep the labourer himself in the normal degree of dependence. This is an essential element of the so-called primitive accumulation.>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 28
<The great beauty of capitalist production consists in this – that it not only constantly reproduces the wage-worker as wage-worker, but produces always, in proportion to the accumulation of capital, a relative surplus-population of wage-workers. Thus the law of supply and demand of labour is kept in the right rut, the oscillation of wages is penned within limits satisfactory to capitalist exploitation, and lastly, the social dependence of the labourer on the capitalist, that indispensable requisite, is secured; an unmistakable relation of dependence, which the smug political economist, at home, in the mother-country, can transmogrify into one of free contract between buyer and seller, between equally independent owners of commodities, the owner of the commodity capital and the owner of the commodity labour. But in the colonies, this pretty fancy is torn asunder. The absolute population here increases much more quickly than in the mothercountry, because many labourers enter this world as ready-made adults, and yet the labour-market is always understocked. The law of supply and demand of labour falls to pieces. On the one hand, the old world constantly throws in capital, thirsting after exploitation and “abstinence”; on the other, the regular reproduction of the wage labourer as wage labourer comes into collision with impediments the most impertinent and in part invincible. […] How, then, to heal the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies? If men were willing, at a blow, to turn all the soil from public into private property, they would destroy certainly the root of the evil, but also – the colonies. The trick is how to kill two birds with one stone. Let the Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant.20 The fund resulting from the sale of land at a price relatively prohibitory for the wage-workers, this fund of money extorted from the wages of labour by violation of the sacred law of supply and demand, the Government is to employ, on the other hand, in proportion as it grows; to import have-nothings from Europe into the colonies, and thus keep the wage labour market full for the capitalists. Under these circumstances, tout sera pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles. This is the great secret of “systematic colonisation.”>Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 33Marx is deeply critical of the way political economy uses the "law of supply and demand," especially regarding labor. Supply and demand don't explain value: Economists assume supply and demand are balanced to analyze prices, but this cancels out their effect and avoids dealing with real value (Ch. 5). Supply and demand justify exploitation: The law is used to excuse how machinery displaces workers and drives down wages, rather than helping them (Ch. 15). Capital manipulates both supply and demand of labor: It increases demand but also increases supply by creating unemployment, which weakens workers’ bargaining power (Ch. 24). The law is violated when it’s inconvenient: Capitalists support or oppose the law depending on whether it serves their interests, using the state to interfere when needed (Chs. 24 & 28). Colonial exploitation depends on breaking the law: In colonies, artificial land prices are used to force workers into wage labor, bypassing natural supply and demand (Ch. 33). In essence: Marx sees the law of supply and demand as a tool that capitalists apply selectively and ideologically to maintain control over labor, not a neutral or “natural” economic law.
Note: I am referencing this English Translation
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf Unique IPs: 39