Is Marx's labor theory of value just an analytical treatment of theoretical long term prices as opposed to any kind of...

Is Marx's labor theory of value just an analytical treatment of theoretical long term prices as opposed to any kind of empirical claim about the behavior of prices in the market? And if so how do you account for the causes of prices in the long term vs. the short term?

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IT'S DA JEEEEEEWWWWWWSSSSSSSS

What do you mean? My friend recommended this site to me. He said it was a good place to discuss politics.

I was just wondering about the scientific basis of reconciling the forces of supply and demand with LTV. You guys seem pretty savvy on this board, I just thought you could help me figure it out.

I wish you would simplify your question, but from what I understand, the labor theory of values of goods is rather a temporal theory. With technology, labor is continuously getting minimised. Plus the theory does not know anything about outsourcing and other modern tricks. In the long term price will always drop.

I hope this answers your question because I didnt even know that theory existed.

Marx's LTV actually makes sense to some extent. Technology is the product of labor, land is only useful via labor, and a person produces something of value through labor, so to some extent the value of a particular object can be reduced to the labor put into it.

The only problem is that it ignores that labor is not always useful. It doesn't matter how much labor you put into something if nobody wants it; an airplane is worthless if nobody wants to fly it.

So it's not an analytical treatment of long term prices. It's just as bad at predicting the exchange rate of a commodity in the long term as it is in the short term. In both the long term and the short term prices are ultimately determined by the supply vs. the demand

Read Mises "Human Action" for a discussion of LTV and start for the non-falsified theory value: subjective value.

> Marx's labor theory of value just an analytical treatment of theoretical long term prices
Exactly. It's consistent with modern game theory of value equilibrium, for the case of completely stabilized market. That said, Labour theory of value isn't practical, or essential in Marxism itself.

All you really need to know about the labor theory of value is that it is nonsense. I could elaborate but it seems unnecessary.

The guy above suggesting Mises knows what's up.

Marx's labor theory of value implies that contracts between the employer and employees don't exist.

There is absolutely nothing more useless and unfounded in Economics other than lolberts. While Marx's LTV isn't very successful, he was a fundamental influence on Keyensian theory, and his analysis of overproduction crisis and consumer market meltdown, as well as measures against it, is fully valid and brilliant. Lolberts are just wining about how calculus is against muh chaotic human nature and never suggested anything that had any sort of validation or practical usage.

LTV is pretty useless on macro scales, it only has any value in explaining why sellers might be reticent to price their goods at a market rate.

IE "what no i wont sell this chair I made for less than £1500, it took me 400 hours to produce!"

>he was a fundamental influence on Keyensian theory
Really? This is interesting, can you recommend anything to read about the connection between Marx and Keynesianism?

>reading Marx
>Economists don't read Marx or Mises except as literary diversions. If you do choose to read Mises, read him as an author of cosmopolitan middle class pseudoscience the same way you read Marx as an author of lower class pseudoscience, or Strauss as an author of upper class pseudoscience.

Consumers determine what prices will be in a market. You can pour all the effort you want into labor but it is worthless if nobody will buy.

>The only problem is that it ignores that labor is not always useful. It doesn't matter how much labor you put into something if nobody wants it; an airplane is worthless if nobody wants to fly it
Best answer..

>connection between Marx and Keynesianism
Not directly, of course. Noone used Labour Theory of Value for much at all. More so by the Soviet Union and the New Economic Policy.

>connection between Marx and Keynesianism?
Keynes was a commie and hung out with The Fabian Society

I didn't ask about LTV in Keynesianism, you said Marx was a -fundamental- influence on Keynes. I haven't heard that assertion before, so I'm interested in how Keynes was influenced by Marx, if you have any good books or courses to recommend.

Some socialist at some point will post the Cockshott paper claiming that LTV is true. I suggest that you read at least the final section (A Final Note) of this eprints.gla.ac.uk/47872/1/47872.pdf

(Cockshott's response here bnarchives.yorku.ca/496/2/cockshott_cottrell_valle_baeza_2014_the_empirics_of_the_ltv_reply_to_nitzan_and_bichler.pdf )

Well, I may have overdone it. There is clearly no direct impact of Marx' theory on Keynes.

All the posters in this thread know each other

Oh, ok.

>The only problem is that it ignores that labor is not always useful. It doesn't matter how much labor you put into something if nobody wants it; an airplane is worthless if nobody wants to fly it.
That's why Marx EXPLICITLY states 'socially USEFUL labour'.

See
This counter argument is a strawman. Marx is only talking about useful labour, not just random shit.

And thus labor is no longer the thing producing value, but is simply valued based on supply and demand reaching an equilibrium point.

More explicitly, socially USEFUL labor is completely determined as useful by, you guessed it, supply and demand

And what is supply and demand? A proxy for human needs and wants. You're retarded. You're not refuting Marx with this argument.

>Marx is only talking about useful labour, not just random shit.
Usefulness is a spectrum, not a binary

Needs and Wants is just another name for Demand, so its a proxy I guess. But Demand itself isn't sufficient to determine the value of something. Supply is the other part of the equation that lets us determine the value of something. You're not refuting me by giving it some random name.

The only way to ‘know’ labour values is the neoclassical way: by revelation. Whereas neoclassicists assume that prices reveal utils, Marxists assume that prices reveal socially necessary abstract labour time. And that is it.
As they stand, the quantities of utils and labour values exist not as empirical observations, but as religious-like visions.

>Usefulness is a spectrum, not a binary
This is a major problem with any portion of Marxist theory. Individual humans differ, sometimes a little, sometimes alot. This makes markets to complicated to manage. Needs and wants determine demand.

>Values are defined in terms of hours of socially necessary labour time, but in most empirical work direct labour hours are proxied by the wage bill.
>Values are defined in terms of utility, but in most empirical work factor utility is proxied by dollar income flows.
These both assumptions lead to the same correlations between the aggregate dollar sales and the aggregate dollar costs of different sectors.

The Labour theory of value is not a prescriptive economic theory. You are not supposed to run an economy with it. It's descriptive. It's an explanation of human economic activity.

You are talking for this trap
Marx is not creating an economic theory to be applied and used. He is analysing economics. Marxism isn't a theory in opposition to capitalism or some other economic model. It's an attempt to scientifically describe the laws and motions of an economic system, namely capitalism. It's a form of analysis. And it goes beyond just mere economics. See historical materialism.

You are falling for this trap*

You are all retards