There’s this new video by a good YouTuber - Value by Unlearning Economics. There was also an article by Ben Burgis for the Jacobin which argued the same.
Is it possible, as both these people argue, to separate Marx’s critique of capitalism from his theory of value? To keep the former and discard the latter?
Edit - I’m not siding with the video or with Burgis, btw. I think Marx’s value theory is correct. I’m just looking for people who can shine some light on this new(?) phenomena of leftists speaking out against LTV while trying “save” Marx’s critique of capital. To me, that just seems like a pointless and hopeless endeavour.
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In my experience 90% of the people who claim to have “debunked” the LTV are conflating value with price.
True.
As far as I understand it, value vs price is like capital vs money, they’re closely related but they’re not the same thing at all
Every single one I’ve ever had it out with quite literally made arguments addressed by Marx in the very first chapter of Capital.
Many such cases
Maybe a half dozen, although two were actually the same person on different platforms who didn’t realize they were arguing with me twice. That one was a shame though, because they were the face in my Shadowrun game for a solid year and I liked them as a person, even though they have terminal chauvinist brainworms.
If you ever have the question “is X Marxist theory correct” please just read the theory, the LTV is literally the first chapter of Das Kapital and is the easiest to understand
I am currently reading it! Marx is such a good, but dense writer. I tried reading some “introductions” and “explanations” by others but tbh, it’s just better to read him directly.
The video goes in-depth about testing the theory and concludes there isn’t any empirical proof for it. Not so much challenging it on philosophical grounds.
I would suggest then reading the text again very carefully and potentially even delving into Value, Price and Profit.
Also this title has big :bait: energy
I would actually say read VP+P and Wage Labour and Capital before reading Capital. It gets across 90% of the main ideas from Marx that you’d want to explain to a friend or co-worker to try and set them down the commie path.
Plus they’re much shorter and easier to read.
It’s one way of framing reality that has a lot of utility and explanatory power (how economies function on a large scale, how economics interacts with power between classes, for example). Subjective theory of value has some utility and explanatory power as well (why a specific item sells for a specific price at a specific point in time, for example). If someone is outright rejecting LTV, rather than accepting its limits or adapting it, they’re probably doing so out of ideology more than anything (and/or they misunderstand it).
Funnily enough, the site tagline just told me to go read Synopsis of Capital.
LTV is already empirically proven and Burgis is a hack. There’s no reason to make such a concession. It’s like “Marxists” who still concede to the Mises’ and Hayek’s economic calculation problem even though it has been technologically solvable for about 50 years now.
Do you know where I could find reputations of the economic calculation problem?
Walmart
wdym?
The idea that an economy can’t be centrally planned because it’s too computationally difficult, or really any other objection, is disproved by the monopolization of retail, logistics and production Walmart achieved reaching the scale of a nation state. They became the sole provider of goods in swaths of the US. At this point, to do communism you’d basically just have to take over Walmart.
“Vertically integrated” is just the politically correct term for “centrally planned”
