/lit/ - Literature

where the fuck did that thread go? i just finished chapter 1

its no that hard you know

>>10620096
then explain to me why the labor theory of value makes more sense than the market theory of value cause i dont get it

>>10620135
it's idealism rather than an actual economic theory just ignore Marx and Marxists

>>10620135
Can I get the short on these two theories?

>>10620135
It doesn't
And everyone economist knows that

>>10620153
LTV - The cost of things is proportionate to the difficulty/duration of labor required to produce a good or service
MTV - The cost of all goods and services has no inherent value, but only the value to which consumers place on it

LTV might say that diamonds are expensive because they are both difficult to produce and arduous to mine while bottling water from a lake is relatively easy to produce so has much lower cost
the MTV rebuttal is that if you're in a desert the value of these things are switched, you'd pay millions for water if you were dying of thirst and pay hardly anything for a diamond since it's worth is wholly reliant on you first getting the water

I really can't do a good job explaining LTV since as I said, I don't really think I understand it

>>10620184
Oh I see, they are trying to create two completely seperate philsophies to try figure how to incorporate them both to their full potential.


LTV is a more subjective judgement in my own eyes.

>>10620096
now get a job corrupting the youth and whine about oppression from your ivory tower

>>10620096
>tfw you realize humanity is a history of material forces
>tfw you the realize materialist dialectic based on modes of production isn't transcendant or valid
>tfw you realize capitalism was caused by random immanent overdetermination
>tfw you realize subjects are the free subjects of immutable structures of ideology
>tfw you see your neo-marxist legacy usurped and crumbled by idiot workers in 68
>tfw you strangle your wife because she loved you

>>10620184
ltv sounds like bullshit desu

>tfw I finally understand Marx

>>10620195
nah, MTV is the modern liberal view (and I don't mean that in the 'liberal = leftist' sense)
As I understand it, it was a response to marxism's LTV which was itself kind of a critique on John Smith's (probably the world most famous capitalist) Utility Theory of Value (which is also btfo by the market theory of value)

>>10620184
Marx differentiates between exchange-value, use-value, and labor-value
He also never said that labor was the sole determining factor in the price of a commodity, so the LTV as you have defined it is not something Marx would have agreed with, and it's actually a pretty common misreading of his concept of labor-value

>>10620135
it doesn't. That's why no one has used it since 18 fuckning 80

>>10620209
It really is, since it's based off of time. Yes everyone values their ideas of time differently. This is why the 9-5 job is laughed at. (Not realizing they use the same system).

Now how do two men with different values, ideals, and needs agree upon a same an equal time system?

They can't unless one holds more bartering power (MTV system).

>I finally understand marx

>>10620135
>explain to me why the labor theory of value makes more sense than the market theory of value
Nonsense question. The two terms exist independently of one another.

>>10620209
>>10620214
yea, ltv sounds like bullshit to me too, but now 'marxist' economists would point you to the power theory of value which is really just the MTV but opposed to private property because it's 'institutionalized exclusion' and leads to inevitable and ever increasing economic inequality as long as the markets are relatively stable (which is true tbqh)

>>10620184
>MTV rebuttal is that if you're in a desert the value of these things are switched, you'd pay millions for water if you were dying of thirst and pay hardly anything for a diamond since it's worth is wholly reliant on you first getting the water

you're using MTV definitions of value to substantiate the MTV claim and defending it reliant on ideal conditions of axioms but using a non-ideal market (in your case, a market with two participants, a guy dying of thirst and presumably some guy with water), an ideal market has many agents and many providers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Distinctions_of_economically_pertinent_labor

>>10620240
>power theory of value
that's the real one

>>10620228
>i discuss literature on 4chan

>>10620248
>tfw no friends

>>10620246
if you're talking to non-marxists, nobody is going to think the definition of value is 'the 'socially necessary abstract labor embodied in a commodity' but will rather think of similar concepts to Smith's Use/Exchange definitions - if your point is that in a market place with many water sellers and many men dying of thirst, yes, the price would likely go down b/c of competition between the salesmen but the MTV still applies, just more elastically based on the two groups proportions

>>10620265
>tfw labor theory of friendship

>>10620268
>hink of similar concepts to Smith's Use/Exchange definitions
Smith's theory of value is a social/labor one

https://adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2014/01/adam-smiths-limited-labour-theory-of.html

>>10620272
Yes my friend. :)

I love you hombre even tho I don't know you...


I feel you.

>>10620117
This. Marx is only "hard" to read because he's dull and repetitive (not to mention having to go through information and statistics that became basically irrelevant by the time he published it) and his moralistic bullshit is only compelling to people who already agree with him.

>>10620282
And Smith's and Marx's theories are outdated by around 140 years

>>10620106
>>10620356

>>10620135
It doesn't, Marx was wrong about that one.

>>10620401
I think the only reason he's perceived as difficult is because rightists make him seem like some impenetrable mastermind who laid secret codes meant to undermine all of Western society when really you can tell by the number of his influenced that he's not that difficult

>I finally understand Marx

>>10620644
No we don't. That's the frankfurt school/post-structuralism/whatever other buzzword. Marx is just a boring and repetitive writer

>>10620654
This seems more accurate.

>>10620654
can you stop posting this it's not funny or original

>>10620403
from "Speech Delivered by Karl Marx before the Democratic Association of Brussels January 9, 1848"

>https://www.panarchy.org/engels/freetrade.html

>"...in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade."

this is Marx talking about neoliberal globalism in 1848

I so still support Marx's general ideas, but the hardest part of all of this is the implementation. Labor theory of value is simply not true, but that doesn't mean that some contents from Marx aren't still applicable like alienation.

>>10620207
this, completely. althusser was the only real marxist to come out of france, the only one dedicated to advancing a scientific critique of capitalist society, the only one uninterested in sloganeering and flashy "insight." sartre, like it or not, is a close second, which speaks more to france's intellectual paucity than to althusser's or sartre's ingenuity. as for the frankfurt school, adorno earns notable mention for a real effort to the think the limits of bourgeois ideology, but in the end, he remains comfortably trapped in those limits. the same goes for derrida—these writers, each their county's most radical thinker of philosophical negativity, in the end is only a symptom for a society that holds negativity at bay within philosophy.

>>10620686
>Labor theory of value is simply not true

it isn't 'true' or 'false', the theory of labor is an axiom in defining value in the context of a larger economic system, i.e. 'Google's success and utility has been built on manipulating the labor value of autistic spectrum people incapable of building similar businesses by themselves due to social skills'

>>10620686
>Labor theory of value is simply not true
Yeah it is. The alternative (which I would call "Subjective Theory of Value", not "Market" per se) makes no sense at all.

>>10620701
Oh yeah, because DeBeer totally depends on the amount of hours workers use to create sell able diamonds.
There can't be no intentional aberrations in the market, right.

>>10620644
I've never heard of a right winger who has ever read him (or at least pretend like they have) call him impenetrable or anything like that, it's always leftists who say that because it makes them feel smart for reading hundreds of pages of fluff.

>>10620644
whatever these faggots in here might want to say, I agree with you. It' not that difficult, and it's even arrogant to pretend to know how the economy actually works.

>>10620686
>The only decent concepts from Marx are the ones he derived from Hegel
Sounds legit

>>10620135
The labor theory of value says that all commodities have two values, the quantifiable value created by labor, and the market value. The market value is what turns a commodity into a fetish, because its value is determined by its relation to other commodities in a system of exchange, completely disconnected from the value created by quantifiable labor

>>10620847

>>10620184
>in a desert the value of these things are switched, you'd pay millions for water if you were dying of thirst and pay hardly anything for a diamond
Yeah, because water being DIFFICULT to find in a desert has nothing to do it.

>>10621080
If water came with natural neon signs and was very easy to locate but still scarce it would still be expensive.

>>10620184
this meme explanation of the LTV again, LTV is only applied to commodities, Marx does say SOCIALLY necessary labor
Which means that LTV takes into account labor only once it has entered the Market, spending 6000 hours making a cake according to your understanding would mean that Marx is positing this cake is worth millions, I'm sure you realize this is pretty stupid, your cakes value is compared to the socially necessary labor time that all factories put into making that same cake.
This diamond water meme is the most pathetic strawman perpetuated in the internet
Marx criticizes capitalism and markets, being stuck in the desert with no water has fuck all to do with socio-economics

>>10620687
Adorno's work is mostly on aesthetics though, not sociology. He's still the only thinker I've found that has come anywhere close to explaining what art is really doing.

>>10621117
how much is a cake worth

>>10621100
I've only just started reading on account of this reading group another Anon has got, and I'm way behind.

But my very weak understanding of Marx's perspective (not my own) is that the LTV applies to analysis of the commodity. And the commodity is defined as an object of exchange that has a universal common value with other commodities.

In other words, it doesn't matter how valuable water is to you alone. That's personal "use-value". What's interesting is how that water exchanges in a desert society (with neon signs pointing to the water). So if a person needs so much water per day to survive, and the water location is easy to find but scarce, then it becomes a question of how much labor it takes to harvest and bottle all known water springs reliably to satiate the total population of the desert society, as well as the labor embedded in guarding that precious water from thieves.

In an average workday, how much time in labor of the day needs to be spent matching the market demand (yes Marx presumes markets) of gathering water that could be spent doing other things of value? Then weight that X amount of time sunk in to water gathering against a commodity of exchange, like desert tents, that took Y amount of labor time, not gathering water.

>"A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use-values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others, social use-values."

>"Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."

>>10620673
What the fuck is the relevance

>>10620701
That's why basically all economists have been using it for 140 years

>>10621566
Economics is a worthless pseudoscience (and so is Marxism)

>>10620659
>Marx is just a boring and repetitive writer
When I read The Manifesto it totally sounds like he is standing next to me at the bus stop shouting the same shit over and over.

>>10621574
Microeconomics is unironically practically flawless, it's macro that is pure trash

>>10621566
>why basically all economists have been using it for 140 years

yeah cause history since the 1800s has worked out great right

>>10621599
Fiscally? Objectively yes. Morally? No, but you're delusional if you think the left has anything to provide in 2017 to prevent that.

>>10621598
>Microeconomics is unironically practically flawless

whenever your field now also encompasses game theory you're no longer in microeconomics land

>>10621598
It's unironically actually the opposite

>>10621603
>it's another "economists taking credit for what scientists, labor rights activists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and inventors contributed to society" episode

>>10621614
Are you fucking retarded? Like seriously? Is this some kind of fucking joke? Did you seriously and unironically just mean what you said? Kill yourself. Kill yourself right fucking now.

>>10621607
Micro has barely changed in a hundred years kiddo, and for good reason

>>10621621
t. economist leech

>>10621624
This actually hurts me realising that I share a board with such a complete and utter retard

>>10621603
income != wealth, even the dude farming potatoes in the midwest during the 1800s owned his own land

>>10621628
Someone is mad as fuck lol

>>10621628
t. 1st year econ undergrad

>>10621640
Oh yes anon subsistence farming is so great

>>10620272
(you)

>>10621650
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/jobs/9418690/Farmers-forestry-workers-and-fishermen-happier-than-the-rest-of-us-ONS-happiness-study-to-find.html

>>10621648
Not really
>>10621646
You can't unironically defend how completely retarded his statement was anon.

>>10621655
That's not subsistence farming you moron.

>>10620096
tfw society understands Marx

>>10621656
I don't need coz you aren't even defending yourself, sperging out like a autistic child

>>10621677
I don't need to defend whatever the fuck this >>10621614 is

>>10621661
Not him, but it nevertheless underlines the point that modern urban life is pretty soulless and miserable even if some of us have a few comforts and some measure of stability a subsistence farmer can't really achieve.

>>10621688
>if I ignore other arguments, I win
Okay

>>10621693
Except that I literally acknowledge this >>10621603

>>10621694
His argument is so retarded. Economists make positive statements about interactions within society, they don't fucking build buildings and invent inventions. If an economist tells you that lowering the tariffs will expand our economy by 0.2%, it's still the society itself that is growing, economists are merely guiding it. They want to use analysis to make conditions for innovators, scientists, business owners, etc thrive, of course it's still those people doing the thriving

>>10621713
But economists don't control the economy with such precision as you described. At best you have established economists to be necessary but not sufficient, whereas those people described earlier is sufficient.

>>10621727
It's a stupid point to begin with. I just posted a graph that showed, objectively, people are getting fiscally wealthier. Economists haven't controlled the economy, but they have had a substantial impact on recommending policy and an intellectual defence of things like capitalism, for instance. With more influence on policy results would almost certainly be better

>>10621739
Which as the other anon so eloquently put it, this progress is due to those people's works.

>With more influence on policy results would almost certainly be better
Which as I already said, even if true only shows that they are necessary but not sufficient. Repeating yourself isn't helping your case.

>>10621764
Can I just point out that the statement I was arguing was
>yeah cause history since the 1800s has worked out great right
Which has been objectively debunked. Considering he was talking about Marxism than a great deal of the success credited to all these people does in fact belong to economists, because without them it's certain they wouldn't have been able to succeed at anywhere near the same capacity

>>10621739
>With more influence on policy results would almost certainly be better
You appear to think that their motives are entirely altruistic.

>>10621781
Oh yes the economists are bought and paid for by the ebil bourgie's (who apparently don't realise the rest of the social sciences are heavily influenced by marxists and thus they've run a muck)

>>10621791
>a muck
>singular dirt
Kek

>>10621791
the very fact that modern economics posit private property and capital accumulation as a priori makes marxism as politically incorrect as it gets the field

>>10621809
> The first recorded use of the phrase to run amok in English dates from the 1670s. The word amok is from Malay amuk, “attacking furiously.” The expression as we use it now usually means “to run about in a wild manner,” As a noun, amok can mean “a murderous frenzy.”

>>10621811
Well yeah, but it's not because there's an evil capitalist paying economists to hide your work. It's just that their work is shit. Capital accumulation for instance got btfo by Acemoglu. There's still plenty of research on things like Co-ops, for instance. I mean, seriously, marxism has contributed basically nothing to mainstream economics, even the bloody austrian school has had a real impact on the field

>>10621779
>only guage used in economical terms
>thinking economists were Marxists' greatest obstacle
>still think economists are sufficient
Yea you are totally a mad Econ student

>>10621812
But it wasn't spelled either of those ways.

>>10621817
I'm unironically not. It's just an example because, retard, if you read the thread that's what we were talking about

>>10621822
shutup fag

>>10621823
>makes 3 'I literally can't even' posts
>still insisting he isn't mad

>>10621825
I just said I'm not an econ student, I'm not really mad although I will concede that I am typing like I am

>>10621829
That makes it even sadder to put economists on such a high pedestal despite not being one

>>10621841
Valuing intellectuals is important anon, especially when they get attacked by retard leftists like yourself

>>10620135
They coincide. Market forces govern short-term changes between prices, while LTV establishes the bottom-line cost of production.

Regardless of supply or demand, nobody is going to sell watches for less than the cost St which they're produced. Sale at a loss only happens because of parallel product lines or tax fuckery.

>>10621868
There is a difference between valuing and worshipping. You are no better than Nu-atheists worshipping science despite not actually doing it.