Comment by thiagoharry
2 years ago
You are completely wrong. This stupid example of digging holes is dismissed even in the first chapter of Das Capital if I'm not mistaken. First because if you do not provide use value (like digging useless holes), you cannot produce exchange value. Second because what really matters is the social necessary labor to dig the holes, assuming that there is a market for this. You will just waste money paying people to dig holes if we live in a world with technology to use backhoe excavator.
Economy is not a natural or exact science. There is a mainstream. But this does not mean that there is no valid inquiries and theories outside mainstream.
The market does not always choose to use the maximum amount of automation for everything. For example, a small business may rationally choose to wash dishes by hand rather than paying for a dishwasher. Are their meals more valuable (because more labor intensive) than the big restaurant across the street that does own a dishwasher?
You are the one defending the LTV, not me. If value = labor, but not when that would be silly, it's a bit like saying F = ma, but not when that would be silly. No serious scientist would accept this formulation. You would be laughed out the room.
After millions of deaths, environment devastation, and political repression, Marxism deserves to be laughed out of the room as well. I hope it will be, some day.
The exchange value produced in the business with or without the dishwater would be exactly the same if they are from the same society. It is not the individual labor, but the socially necessary labor that is counted. Moreover, value is also entirely different than price.
I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the parent comment: LTV does not work like described by that comment. You can not even properly criticize something if you do not understand it.
The moralist excuse to forbid or negate certain knowledge is also silly. Depending on where you live (USA, Europe), you probably post these comments in a society built (and perhaps even mantained) by an even larger kill count, but I never will use this as a way to refuse or negate discussion or knowledge.
I never said we should forbid discussion of Marxism. I just think it should be treated the same as Nazism, with which it shares many similarities. The general pattern of "find a minority, say that they are the source of all problems, argue for dictatorship so you can solve the problems" is clearly present in both. This is called "vanguardism."
I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor did not produce a different amount of value. Your response has just been that "socially necessary labor" is different than "labor." But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not. Indeed, we have many examples of socialist governments deciding that it's not "socially necessary" for certain groups of people to eat at all -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, or der Hungerplan in Nazi Germany.
2 replies →