/lit/ - Literature

>>16816760
>Marx demands that the prole seize the means of production
>Most of the means of production of big western capital is located in China and other parts of Asia
>Marx demands that the western proles seize Chine

WTF I LOVE MARX NOW.

>>16816760
Economically marx is a joke, but he's responsible just a saussure of revolutionising the social studies... there's some kind of truth to his materialism; Foucault on his superb analysis of discourses as immaterial institutions couldn't be achieved without the mindset marx put upon western academia...

but if you're unironically a commie just kys

What do you mean by outdated?
>Has orthodox marxism been exhausted and its outer limits fully explored?
yes, we have been in a post-marxist era for a few decades now
>Are the insights created through marxism wrong or no longer useful at understanding the world around us?
Absolutely not.

>>16816760
The more I think about it:

This kinda explains why the russians had such a hard time in determining prices in the USSR.

They literally couldn't do it properly because the exchange value wouldn't just formulate out of thin air, but required a market so traders could come to reasonable conclusions.

So they essentially had to orientate their price systems by western imports.
Probably one of the reasons why dengists in china threw away the maoist rejection of markets as well.

>>16816815
>>Are the insights created through marxism wrong or no longer useful at understanding the world around us?
>Absolutely not.

What parts of the economic sphere can really be explained through a marxist lense if the base premise of its price theory is already fucked?

>inb4 interest rates and other state interventionist bogus is somehow branded as capitalist and esoterically linked to some obscure passage in Das Kapital

>>16816885
why are you hung up on labor theory of value when it doesnt exist in the world? Why are you fighting windmills?

You really think Marxist analysis of capital, labor relations, and capitalism have no value whatsoever when the global hegemony is liberal capitalism?

>>16816923
Define your terms here. Are you talking about dialectical hermeneutics? Specifically, provide a way in which Marxist economic analysis is useful irrespective of its theory of prices.

>>16816923
>why are you hung up on labor theory of value when it doesnt exist in the world?

because it makes up a major portion of this long ass book and i have like 3 hours of free time a day.

My question is: Is there any point in reading this from an economic perspective if the base premise is nonsense?

Is there anything in there that is worthwhile besides individual passages that get quoted religously?

>>16816923
You realize that everything Marx said about capital, class relations, etc. are all based on his theory of value, right? Any theory which does not take Marx's theory of value as its centerpiece is not Marxist.

>>16816760
Any factor that could contribute to the value of a product stems ultimately from:
1 - its availability in the market;
2 - how much demand for it there is.
Even high schoolers know this stuff nowadays but it seems that /lit/ards are too busy with their fiction to get up to date with 19th century economics

>>16816760
To animals all that matters is use value and they don't rationally calculate prices but still survive. Marx doesn't claim price is "independent" from use value but exchange value is regulated by socially necessary labour time, price just isn't a "real" thing outside of markets (on a desert island things falling from the sky would have a use but not a price). Basically all the dynamics that matter to Marx is supply side under capitalism. The prices of commodities over the long run have to do with how much labour is necessary to produce them regardless of any fluctuating price right now e.g. televisions get cheaper because it takes less labour to produce them because of investment. Markets regulate things, you have to meet the standard to survive and beat it to grow. If it takes you 100 hours to do something it takes others 20 you're going to have to find something else to do.
Obviously the supply of land is (essentially) fixed and stuff like art or anything "monopolistic" gets what is called a rent which works a little differently in price formation but that's not the central fact of capitalism but investment to produce more commodities with less labour.

>>16816994
You can also imagine a state of affairs where demand equals supply. Saying demand and supply fluctuates doesn't actually explain anything about exchange ratios or price in the abstract.

Price and value are not the same thing

>>16816760
>Could it be that this book is really outdated?
Wasn't it written when work days were 16+ hours long, children had to work too, unions didn't exist, safety regulations were a joke, etc...?
Sounds like it's still relevant for modern day America!

>>16816760
YouTubers don’t sell a commodity, they sell a service (generating a viewerbase for advertisers)

>>16816993
The grand majority of 20th century Marxists actually embraced marginalism for better or worse. In fact if you looked at any Eastern European economics journal from the 70s or something it's all mathematized and similar to anything from American academia.
You can focus on his theory of class struggle within a different context.

>>16817209
In the long run they'll all make noting because everyone can generate a hot take

>>16816760
Yes it runs on the notion of economies being industrial and nationalized autarkies. The only countries that are run like that are of course destitute shitholes. Economics has moved on far beyond Marx's foundations even, and the only place you still see him discussed is in places filled with children who have no exposure or background in real world economics. Such as here.

>>16816760
Exchange value is abstracted from *specific* use-values, not from use-value itself. So much of the early chapters are way more controversial than they should be because Marx is taking logical steps that an author today would take for granted.

In that section Marx is just saying ‘I’m not going to talk about this or that useful thing, I’m just going to talk about the totality of all useful things’.
It’s literally just ‘we are only talking about things that have non-zero utility’.

When things exchange on a market what they specifically are doesn’t matter, just that they have some specific value.

Exchange value is the ratio at which a definite quality of all commodities exchange at, ie one loaf of bread is exchangeable for 4 kg of iron ore. Imagine a spreadsheet that listed everything on the market at a given instant, and it told you exactly how many one of each could get you of every other thing. That would be the total list of ‘exchange values’ in an economy.

The original source of exchange value is Value, which Marx defines as being equal to the ‘average, socially necessary, labour-time’ needed in the production of a commodity. For Marx ‘socially necessary’ seems to be something like more like ‘the standard for a given competitive industry at a given instant in time’. The actual labour time it takes to make a specific object is irrelevant because he’s talking about averages across not just all workers at a firm, but all firms in an industry. He’s also accounting for the differences between simply and complex tasks with his concepts of abstract versus concrete labour, but I’ve already gone on too long.

>>16816760
The field of application of the law of value is limited to new output by producers of traded, reproducible labour-products

>>16816760
>So if exchange value is independent from use-value where does exchange value originally stem from?
Exchange value exist when someone produce an item not to use it, but in order to exchange it, to sell it, usually in exchange of money, with which he will be able to buy something else, approximately of the same value (labor time).
>"Let's plays" rake in the major amount of YouTube money while requiring the least effort to make. Time is a resource to allocate for the better or worse, which optimizes the value output.
This is a principle that is even clear to little children who manage their playtime.
The field of application of the law of value is limited to new output by producers of traded, reproducible labour-products.
Marx's goal was not to subsume the price of unreproducible objects under the law of value. He did not do this because of the simple reason that the law of value has to explain precisely the laws of human productive activities. In his theory of value, Marx does not treat the value of products which 'cannot be reproduced by labor, such as antiques and works of art by certain masters, etc.'

>>16816760
>"Let's plays" rake in the major amount of YouTube money while requiring the least effort to make. Time is a resource to allocate for the better or worse, which optimizes the value output.
>What is socially necessary labor time (according to Marx)
Have yet to see someone who actually knows what Marx says about value make a good critique of it.

>>16816994
>if it is the dominant opinion it is true

>>16816816
Congrats. You're getting at the calculation problem: the reason why planned economies not only have never worked but never will work. Without being able to exchange private property freely, you can't have real prices. If you don't have prices, you can't calculate the costs of production. If you can't calculate the costs of production, you can't know the best way to allocate scarce resources.

>>16816760
There is very little proletariat nowadays the closest thing to a proletariat is a child in a sweatshop.

>>16816994
>Value is created on the market, not in the factory.

>>16818190
People only hire labor because of how it sells on the market. The more revenue per laborer, the more laborers will be hired.

>>16818190
Yes you retard, no matter how much you seethe about people making products in a factory, if nobody wants to buy them, they have no value and the labor put into was useful as laxatives for the starving

>>16816885
Analytical Marxism throws away Labor Theory of Value so try again I guess?

>>16816781
Alright I could get behind this.

>>16816781
They have nukes, anon

>>16816923
If so, why don't the factories set prices of 9999999999999999 billon for their products? Yes, the factory has the first word but the customer has the last, if the factory wants to sell it has to be at a price that the customer considers reasonable, also return to /x/ schizo.

>>16818297
>Let's remove the base that supports the "bourgeois exploitation" and validates socialism.

>>16816885
Interest rates are a major topic of Capital vol 3 btw.

>state interventionist bogus is somehow branded as capitalist

I guess you must be pretty new to Marx then. At its most fundamental level the Marxian view of modern society is that private business and government are organically linked and can’t be analyzed separately from each other.

Even the most vulgar marxist understands that the state is ‘a Committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’. It’s a site where different sections of capitalists tug-o-war over the institutions of government to try to favour themselves. It’s also a site where class struggle can be depressurized by giving concessions to labour, thereby avoiding more drastic conflicts.

Essentially, according to Marx, if the state didn’t already exist then capitalists would have invented it.

If you think that’s obscure, feel free to google “Marx’s theory of the state”.

>>16818390
A more apt description would be using Game Theory and Rational Choice theory to demonstrate how exploitation and class relations may arise in the development of a market for labor instead of using a bunked labor theory of value.

>>16818204
>People only hire labor because of how it sells on the market. The more revenue per laborer, the more laborers will be hired.
So value is created before the item is even produced in the factory?
>>16818234
>Yes you retard, no matter how much you seethe about people making products in a factory, if nobody wants to buy them, they have no value and the labor put into was useful as laxatives for the starving
Then how do you explain that value is almost always equal to the amount of labor within a +10/-10% margin? Must be a coincidence.
https://www.academia.edu/2733004/The_empirical_strength_of_the_labour_theory_of_value

>>16818459
Perhaps, if companies were static entities that do not change their owners, income, workers, wages, etc.

>there is labor exploitation
Of course, but that is solved by the confrotaccion of the two involved and a mediating judge, assuming that the laws that are followed are fair.

in the end the work is a voluntary agreement that is carried out between the employer and the employee, something that the socialists do not understand.

>>16818521
So it explains why companies like ATARI, BlockBuster, Hummer have gone bankrupt?

also>>16818369

>>16818526
>Perhaps, if companies were static entities that do not change their owners, income, workers, wages, etc.
>>there is labor exploitation
>Of course, but that is solved by the confrotaccion of the two involved and a mediating judge, assuming that the laws that are followed are fair.
>in the end the work is a voluntary agreement that is carried out between the employer and the employee, something that the socialists do not understand.
I'm sorry what does any of this have to do with my post? I was just responding to a post that claimed analytical marxism removed LTV which is necessary to validate socialism? I'm not a socialist, I don't care about any of these meme ideologies because they'll never fucking happen.

>>16818329

That's a feature, not a bug.

>>16816760
He's talking about the way in which the capitalists exchange commodities with no regard to their use value. Whether they are buying wheat or steel or tulips is utterly irrelevant to them, they are buying abstracted commodities solely for the purpose of profit through exchange, not things which have an actual use.

>So if exchange value is independent from use-value where does exchange value originally stem from?

Labour, that's why it's called the labour theory of value.

>"Let's plays" rake in the major amount of YouTube money while requiring the least effort to make.

So what? Capitalists do essentially nothing yet profit hugely from that nothing. The fact that people make money which doesn't correlate to the labour they perform is one of the basic elements of capitalism.

>trite tome
ur gay

>>16818559
Value was created by making an Atari. just not enough to make it competitive against the competition. If you read Marx, you'll notice that he doesn't deny the supply and demand theory. The supply and demand theory is valid, but a market doesn't create value. The market only serve to choose which products will continue to be produced, but it doesn't create value itself.

>>16817216
Yes, but they weren't Marxists. They were people who happened to have ideologies analogous to Marxism. Just because two people have similar conclusions does not mean that the one is a devotee of the other. The only basis on which I would describe someone a Marxist is if the basis for their arguments were Marx's own. Someone who rejects his theory of labor shares no bases with Marx, who took everything from that theory.

>>16818635
>she sells her bath water

go back >>/x/

>>16818728
The field of application of the law of value is limited to new output by producers of traded, reproducible labour-products

(...)
Marx does not treat the value of products which 'cannot be reproduced by labor, such as antiques and works of art by certain masters, etc.

>>16818784
cope

>>16818947
He knew that if he did, his labor theory of value would make no sense.

>>16818526
Sadly its not really voluntary in most realistic scenarios. Which is exactly why unpleasant work but low skill jobs are so low paid. No one wants to do them but what is the alternative?

Modern welfare systems in countries other than very select places in Europe are an absolute joke. The modern conception of society is not one where we seek to minimize labor but one where labor is something everyone must do.

We automatize tasks but instead of slashing working time all it does is contribute to growth and profitability. Any firm that automates labor does it so the bottom line grows, not so their current employees work less. Why? Partly because of executive greed, partly because culturally more is seen as better and partly because we simply, as workers, have become completely neutered.

Now, most of this doesnt really apply directly in Europe, but considering Europe relies on third world labor then it doesn't really make a difference where it matters.

Leftism does not work.

>>16818521
>So value is created before the item is even produced in the factory?
There's no such thing as inherent value. Things are valued subjectively. The market gives some indication of how much society values something - weighing relative scarcity with how much people are willing to pay. Using information on how much society values their product from revenue vs cost analysis, a firm hires labor only insofar as the hiring produces sufficient revenue to justify it. While labor does create the thing society values, it does not create the value.

>>16818526
Would you be willing to read 1 paper by an analytical marxist on that specific topic? Just for the fun of it

Link is to a PDF, The Structure of Proletarian Unfreedom by G.A. Cohen

https://www.uvm.edu/~fmagdoff/employment%20Jan.12.11/structure%20of%20proletarian%20unfreedom.pdf

>>16819178
>an analytical marxist
>Cohen
kek, always

A big issue that I have with capitalism is its original sin. We might choose to believe that hard work is all you need to make a successful business and in some cases this is what happens.

But if you really analyse the source of your social and capital wealth it is very easy to date it back to colonialism or imperialism. I work hard at school, but my school was funded by whom? What are the material and social conditions that led me to that school.

Chile is a very good example of this kind of extreme disparity, 5 top schools (pre/middle/high school) make up for 0.5% of all the students in the country. There was a study from the MIT that followed students from these schools for years. This 0.5% then mostly goes to the top 2 universities in the country, making up for 19% of the students in those two universities. But the most concerning number is the following, those 19% which used to be part of the 0.5% occupy more than 49% of high ranking positions in public and private sectors. This means that if youre born in wealth, and if you are part of the 0.5% of students your market competition is extremely reduced. You will be competing for 49% of the positions against 0.5% of the people. Whereas the other 99.5% fights the rest.

What did these people to get to the position they are in? They seized the country and now they sit in the table and make sure it stays that way. Their sovereignty is not legitimate. Capitalist meritocracy is a lie, meritocracy is labor-based not capital-based.

>>16819187
Not only Jewish, but even worse, Canadian! Did you read the article or what?

>>16819040
>While labor does create the thing society values, it does not create the value.
That seems contradictory.
>>16819187
Better are jews that abolish their judaism, that goyims that want to become jews without kippah.

>>16819233
Nah Canadians aren't that bad
And no I'm just a tourist, not the guy you were talking to, I just saw that and had to chuckle

>>16819253
>Better are jews that abolish their judaism, that goyims that want to become jews without kippah.
No jews that abolish their judaism either become communists or capitalists, I don't like either of those. But gentiles who want to become jews are retarded, agreed.

>>16819253
>>While labor does create the thing society values, it does not create the value.
>That seems contradictory.
It may seem that way, but it isn't. You should point out where the contradiction is. I'm saying that while labor did create the, for example, chair, the price is determined when a seller and buyer make their exchange. Or to be even more refined, the firm owner will set prices to whatever maximizes profit. The description of why he sets the price to $10 doesn't need any more explanation than profitability and consumer preferences. Thus labor doesn't create value. But he does need labor to physically create the thing that's valued. Hence labor does create things that are valued. But labor would never be hired if people didn't value what was being created independently.

>So if exchange value is independent from use-value where does exchange value originally stem from?
how the fuck should I or Marx know? But it's obvious they have no relation, and the law of value is a pure ideality of norms inherited from past generation.

How is the LTV better if it can't account for non-traded, reproducible labour-products? I can see how Marx's construction is superior as far as the limits of the sociological dimensions of his thought in its choice and ideological-examination dimensions as well as its superior organicism, but if it can't account for all goods as easy as marginalist S&D, what's the point of a strong construction? The marginlists are pretty clear and straight with each other on that front even if they disagree on much of the rest, unlike the various interpretations of Marx's LTV.

The price something sells at tells us the value of the labour that went into production.

Communist leaders have never worked hard a day in their lives and that's all you need to know.

>>16819815
Define hard work

>>16819888
The kind of work CEOs, landlords, investors and bankers do.

Why did Marx hate freedom of speech, freedom of the press and democracy so much?

>>16819390
>But labor would never be hired if people didn't value what was being created independently
The thing is, people value what is created according to the labor time. A high end chair, like a steelcase leap, cost around $1000. An Ikea basic chair $100. It is not subjective. The steelcase leap contain way more labor than the ikea chair. From the raw materials, to the labor use to build it. Subjectivity have some influence, but it is marginal, especially in heavy industry. Only sector where subjectivity plays an important role are luxury products. But luxury products don't enter in Marx's filed of application of the law of value (indeed, they are not reproducible, due to patents, and can as such be analyzed as a monopoly).

>>16819489
>How is the LTV better if it can't account for non-traded, reproducible labour-products?
Those products are a majority.

>>16821847
>if it can't account for all goods as easy as marginalist S&D, what's the point of a strong construction?

(...)
I mean first outputs of producer of tradable, reproducible goods are the vast majority of consumption.

>>16821852
Marginalism doesn't explain how value is created. It explain, if i am correct, how prices diminish for a particular company if a particular item is less and less necessary. But it doesn't explain why products have value in the first place.

>>16816760
>So if exchange value is independent from use-value where does exchange value originally stem from?
he literally says in the part you quoted that exchange value isn't independent from use value.

>>16821866
As I understand marginalism, it focuses on how an item has value because of its use value, such as how it is edible and can thus be used to satiate one's health. It could be plucked from nature, straight from its nest in a bush or tree with almost no effort and by happenstance and it would have some use value if the person who had found it would know or want to use it for something. Of course it could also be an axe or so forth, but because there was something someone could use it for, it was worth something. I would even dare compare this use of use-value in marginalism with the sign in Heidegger's Being and Time where it just shows itself from all the various relations in the world as something that is quite relevant to one's needs, be it now or later, within that particular mood.

>>16816760
Marx was a parasite with no understanding how the world works

>>16819815
Almost everyone who idolises Marx is a privileged rich elitist, college slacker or lazy junkie

(...)
If something has less and less use value for a particular individual, it's exchange value will diminish. But it will diminish for this particular individual. Because this individual wants this particular item not to exchange it, but in order to use it, for his personnal usage, or in the production process. Of course, if i buy a hundread bottles of water, the one hundred and one, i would want to pay it less. Indeed, what should i do with such an amount of bottle of water? That doesn't mean the bottle of water valkue has diminished. Just that my personnal use value for this particular item has diminished. But someone else who don't have too much bottle of water will buy it at their rightful price, which is, around the amount of labor they contain. Marginalism only explain prices from the point of view of a particular individual or company. Not for a society as a whole.

>>16821939
I just thought about it (see >>16821977) and it seem we have reach the same conclusion: marginalism focus and the use value, for a particular individual.
Value, on the other hand, is value for society as a whole. Exchange value seem to be close (+10%/-10%) to value, in the sense that exchange value close to the amount of labor spent in the production of the item.

>>16821976
what about all those people in pakistan, peru, china, ethiopia, etc etc.

>>16818297
anals are retards, ltv is based

>>16822003
I see that yes, and what we seem to be differing on is that in what I've gleaned off of the marginalists is that in their conception of things, value is as much particular as it is societal as far as the two are connected, similarly between societies as well as countries. The various use values and exchange values stabilize at a given quantity of goods qua quantities of goods, and these are mediated between the prices which emerge out of that locality. The more that the prices between localities converge, the more that the prices are indicative of the Value, in your "for society as a whole" meaning. It then becomes a point of how much the prices are able to shift each other, thus so connecting the quantities and getting a more general idea of the value of these goods across a wider and wider range. The Value is thus attained as far as an area, be it countries or a series of countries or between regions in a country goes where the prices are freely able to merge and shift one another such that across all these interconnected polities, the price is the area's price aka Value for those freely trading bodies. The more that these are able to freely exchange and thus merge Values, the more the prices are able to say about the Value of an item in general.

Did I explain that sufficiently for you or no? Dialectic is always the most important thing in these kinds of discussions. There's almost no point if we can't attain an understanding between each other and learn from each other.

>>16821971
Marx never says the problem with capitalism is greedy people.

Imagine personalities were distributed on a bell curve, with more greedy people on one end, and more generous people on the other. Marx tells us that the fact of competition would force all firms in a given market to either go bust or further optimize their profit seeking to stay competitive. Competition will necessarily push all firms towards being as “greedy” and the greediest firm in their market.

This is also assuming that a firm being more profit optimized represents the greed of the ownership, but I’m not sure that’s a given.

Marx characterizes more in terms of innovation and technology as driving that process, rather than just cost cutting, but the principle is the same either way.

>>16816760

>"Let's plays" rake in the major amount of YouTube money while requiring the least effort to make.

This is like saying a car is easy to make as long as you've already built the factory to do it

>>16816760
Marx’s form of materialism was outdated even at the time. Just look at how he seethed when he wrote a letter to Darwin and Darwin pointed out how poorly Marx understood natural selection.

>>16818033
Planned economy will work. Paul Cockshott wrote a book on automated planned economy with floating price on goods
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towards_a_New_Socialism

Marx was a product of it's time. He was a 19th century jew that lived off Engels and others. He had valid points, and even if you don't agree, denying his work as a whole is kind of dumb since it literally influenced the course of history. Now, just the fact that he aimed for a theoretical society without a State shows that his end goal has never been achieved, nor I think is feasible. And every (so called) attempt during 20th century went to shit. Honestly, at this point I think the ideal would be a benevolent dictatorship. But even with that, if world's major powers turn their back on you, you are screwed.

Marx is a fucking faggot. There, I just destroyed all of Marxism for all eternity.

>>16816760
This is such a dumb thread.
>where does exchange value stem from?
How much someone is willing to pay for it. Thats it. It's not some mythical thing, its just, how much it gets sold for. He's just saying things get sold for more/less than they are worth and it is a long-term issue.
Regardless, I have a feeling you are going to invent reasons to avoid having to actually read Marx anyway so I'm not sure why I bother.

>>16817201
Reading Marx and the context he was writing in, yeah its just modern America.

>>16821971
not like you big boy

>>16818521
> Then how do you explain that value is almost always equal to the amount of labor within a +10/-10% margin? Must be a coincidence.
Spurious correlation as Bichler and Nitzan show.

>>16822070
Yes thank you.

>>16818033
Amazon is a planned economy and it is probably the world's most successful economy

>>16822292
Top notch understanding of how things works. You really are a true child of our era.

>>16822814
Great rebuttal

>>16822818
Ha! ReBUTTal.

>>16822791
I have a crazy theory, but it's more like an intuition, that amazon will be somehow the bridge towards post capitalism. Indeed, in amazon, there is no market. Items are even sold under their value, because what matters for amazon is the data, not profit on sold items. Data mining is one of the key of production without exchange value.

>>16822818
Darwinism is being questioned, since quite a lot of time. It might not happen like you think it does. What's more, if our society promotes darwinism, it might definitively not work like this. Junk DNA is not... junk DNA. What's more, i remember scientific article saying that human DNA cannot mathematically come from random mutations in such few generations.

>>16819029
If you think of work as slavery because you need it to lead a decently good life, consider hanging yourself up and hoping that in the afterlife you will be born in a biblical paradise.

>>16819815
stalin sure did

>>16822791
>>16822849
I tend to belive that AI will sort out the limitations of centrally planned economy. But the political issue still stands: Only an autoritharian regime can enforce that, because it still takes away the choice from the consumers.

>>16822791
>Amazon is a centrally planned economy
Amazon is a firm operating within a market economy. It can estimate the costs of various methods of production using prices determined by the market. It can set prices in response to what the rest of the market sets. The firm-country comparison is stupid. Planning calculation problems happen because you can't trade, not because all bureaucracy is bad.