Capitalism, Marxism and Related Matters

dHarry

Well-known member
Hold up, wait

Before we consign Marx & LTOV to the dustbin of history, consider Karatani's Transcritique which claims that Marx critiques the flawed, but not simply wrong, LTOV, and arrives at a more useful theory than even contemporary economics.

Apologies for the long quotes from Shaviro discussing this here, but here's a spoiler from the last paragraph which might encourage you to read through it: "It is not Marxist political economy, but neoclassical economics, that reduces everything to production and to utility, and thereby ignores the structural and material importance of the delirious, ungrounded flows of finance capital that constitute the largest part of economic activity today."

I'm no economist, but the following seems like a powerful argument for Marx's relevance (I've left out the comparison of Marx with Kant, where terms like Antimony and transcendental come from, transcendental being Kant's term for something that acts as a structural condition for knowledge, not a transcendant condition outside reality):

Karatani argues that Marx’s “critique of political economy” operates precisely in the Antinomy, or parallax, between the labor theory of value, on the one hand, and Bailey’s (and the neoclassical economists’) positivistic dismissal of value theory altogether on the other.
[...]
according to Karatani, Marx rejects Ricardian essentialism (the labor theory of value in its classical form), but also insists, against Bailey’s (and later, neoclassical) nominalism, that a “transcendental reflection on value” (6) is necessary in order to make sense of capitalism as a system.
[...]
How does one get from the abstraction of “value” to the actual prices of individual commodities, and from the abstraction of “surplus value” to actual profits? It’s well known that Marx’s mathematical model for making this “transformation” is flawed; and that indeed the problem is mathematically intractable — the equations can only be solved under very special, limited, and unrealistic conditions — which is why Marx, like Ricardo before him, was unable to solve them.
[...]
The basic point is not to correct Marx’s mathematics — which cannot be done, given the presuppositions of the problem — but to question those presuppositions themselves. The whole problem of transforming values into prices itself seems to depend on the idea of capitalism as a closed, synchronic system in a state of equilibrium — which is what most economists, classical and neoclassical alike, in fact presuppose — but elsewhere in Capital Marx argues that such a view is entirely inadequate, since capitalism is a process that necessarily unfolds in time, and that it is never in a state of equilibrium. Crises, Marx argues, are endemic to capitalism. They are not (as neoclassical economists assume even today) mere aberrations or temporary departures from the norm of equilibrium. Rather, crises are intrinsic to the movement of capital, they are even what pushes it forward. Crises are unavoidable because of the temporal factor. If anything, crises and business cycles are the norm; equilibrium is a fictive idealization, an abstraction: and not even a very useful one.
[...]
Marx’s Volume 3 involves an Antinomy between 1)the grounding of price in value, and of profit in surplus value (Thesis: Ricardo); and 2)the independence of price from value and of profit from surplus value (Antithesis: Bailey). In this Antithesis, price is determined relationally, and independently of any notion of value, by supply and demand; while profit, from the point of view of the individual consciousness, is simply “price of production minus cost price” (241), and labor-power (sometimes today renamed, in neoclassical theory, “human capital”: quite a wonderful catachresis, since — by a mere shift of terminology — it simply spirits away the entire difference between capitalist investment, and workers selling their labor-power as a commodity) is just another input into production costs. Anybody who has read Capital knows how much time Marx spends criticizing the latter set of assumptions. But the criticism is necessary, precisely because these “ideological” assumptions do necessarily exist as “objective illusions”: for they constitute the actual manner in which individuals confront the market as buyers and sellers, consumers and owners. As for the other side of the Antinomy, the Thesis: the Ricardian labor theory of value is also an objective illusion, insofar as it is understood as an empirical actuality (something we encounter within experience) rather than as a transcendental condition of experience. We only encounter “surplus value” in and for itself in the way that we encounter time, space, and causality in and for themselves. They are conditions of experience, rather than things that we encounter within experience.This is why, Karatani says, “Marx’s labor theory of value and Ricardo’s are fundamentally different”; for Marx, “it is not that input labor time determines the value, but conversely that the value form (system) determines the social[ly necessary] labor time” (244). And, “while for the classical economists, labor value is just a replacement of the equilibrium price that is established within a unitary system, Marx began his whole analysis from manifold systems, and hence came to need the concepts of social and abstract labor value” (227-228).

These considerations lead Karatani to emphasize the importance of circulation, and of money, within Marx’s analysis of capitalism. There’s long been controversy as to why Marx begins Capital Volume 1 with a discussion of the commodity form and of money (and of commodity fetishism), before he gets to the theory of surplus value. Louis Althusser even advises readers to skip these chapters when reading Capital; Althusser sees them as a Hegelian throwback, and as a distraction from Marx’s main argument. Karatani, to the contrary, argues for the centrality of these chapters to Marx’s entire project. Indeed, for Karatani these chapters are the site of a rupture (what Althusser calls an epistemological break) with Marx’s earlier, more tentative theories: because they are the place where Marx develops the crucial notion of the value-form: “all the enigmas of capital’s drive are inscribed in the theory of value form… Value form is a kind of form that people are not aware of when they are placed within the monetary economy; this is the form that is discovered only transcendentally” (9).

The theory of value-form turns on the dual nature of commodities: that they are at once both use-value and exchange-value. This sundering is only possible because of the role of money. Money is a universal equivalent, a special commodity that stands in for all other commodities. As a result, there is a radical “asymmetricity… inherent in the form of value” (200) between money and all other commodities.
[...]
The core problem in Marx’s Antinomy of value is that both sides ignore the actuality of money as universal equivalent. For Ricardo and the classical political economists on one side, and for Bailey and the neoclassical school, down to the present day, on the other, money itself is considered to be of no importance. For Ricardo, money simply measures the labor inscribed in commodities as their value; for Bailey, value is relational, but he pays no attention to money as the medium in which these relations are expressed and worked out. “Bailey overlooked a simple fact — that commodities cannot be exchanged directly” (194). Both Ricardo and Bailey see money as transparent, in the same way that traditional metaphysics sees language as transparent. Even today, as Doug Henwood puts it in his fine book Wall Street, “in (neo)classical economics, money is held to be neutral – a mere lubricant to trade, but not a force in itself”; economics builds “paradigms that often ignore money and finance completely, or treat it as an afterthought.” Marx, to the contrary, insists on the opacity of money and finance. As a universal equivalent or transcendental form, money does not merely put external terms (objects sold as commodities) into relation; it molds and alters those terms by the very fact of equating them (money as universal equivalent is what transforms things into commodities in the first place). Similarly, financial speculation — such as is overwhelmingly present in global markets today — is not just an illusion distracting us from the “real” economic activity that takes place in production. Or better, financial speculation is an illusion, but a transcendental one: its illusoriness is itself an objective force, one that drives the entire process of production and circulation. It is not Marxist political economy, but neoclassical economics, that reduces everything to production and to utility, and thereby ignores the structural and material importance of the delirious, ungrounded flows of finance capital that constitute the largest part of economic activity today.
 

vimothy

yurp
Even today, as Doug Henwood puts it in his fine book Wall Street, “in (neo)classical economics, money is held to be neutral – a mere lubricant to trade, but not a force in itself”; economics builds “paradigms that often ignore money and finance completely, or treat it as an afterthought.”

I'd be careful before paying to much heed to Doug Henwood. He has his moments (as does LBO) but he's pretty from being an actual economist. Macroeconomics is, ahem, pretty concerned with finance and money. Even regarding economists themselves, the above is simply not true, in my experience. Go to the most popular economic blogs on the net -- Mark Thoma's blog, Yves Smith's blog, Brad DeLong's, Dani Rodrik's, Angry Bear's, CR, Krugman's -- they all discuss money and finance probably more than any other topic. Hard not to in today's clilmate, I suppose.

Also, it's been a while since I read any Marx. Does he regard "this sundering" as unique to capitalism, or is it present in all cultures -- the human condition, if you will?

And I'm intrigued as to what, if you regard (or agree with) the transformation problem as fundamentally unsolveable, you are going to do instead?
 

dHarry

Well-known member
I'd be careful before paying to much heed to Doug Henwood. He has his moments (as does LBO) but he's pretty from being an actual economist. Macroeconomics is, ahem, pretty concerned with finance and money. Even regarding economists themselves, the above is simply not true, in my experience. Go to the most popular economic blogs on the net -- Mark Thoma's blog, Yves Smith's blog, Brad DeLong's, Dani Rodrik's, Angry Bear's, CR, Krugman's -- they all discuss money and finance probably more than any other topic. Hard not to in today's clilmate, I suppose.

Also, it's been a while since I read any Marx. Does he regard "this sundering" as unique to capitalism, or is it present in all cultures -- the human condition, if you will?

And I'm intrigued as to what, if you regard (or agree with) the transformation problem as fundamentally unsolveable, you are going to do instead?

Well, obv money is, ahem, pretty important to economics - Marx-via-Karatani's point is that money is not a transparent medium, but something that changes the nature of exchange.

The sundering in question is of the commodity form within the money-capitalism system - not sure how that could be the human condition? (unless you're thinking of something like Deleuze & Guattari's insight that capitalism is the nightmare of all previous society forms, because of its seemingly infinite capacity to proliferate, something that was somehow warded off even when conditions were favourable for it to develop? but you're probably not!)

What to do instead is, presumably, use the insights to better analyse how capitalism works.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
I was thinking also that Mark's statement was getting at something else that is particular about Capitalism. That at some very fundamental level in our understanding of economies, of the world even, an error has crept in, a fallacy, a false assumption.

There is truth to this, but I don't think Mark's posts (or indeed Marxism) goes to the root of the problem. It is easy to see that many of the problems Marxists attribute to capitalism, are also prevalent in pre-capitalist societies.

The two real issues seem to be the scarcity of certain resources, and the lack of trust between humans which originates in humanity's emergency out of the dog-eat-dog world of the animal kingdom. This lack of trust is still visible everywhere in contemporary human behaviour, and wars over resource access, like the ongoing Iraq war is but one example.

Due to technological development we can now feed humans easily and with little labour input for the first time in history. This abundance of food from the mechanisation of agriculture), together with social innovations (all not coming out of the Marxist tradition) like health insurance, pensions, unemployment benefits ... has pacified humanity to a considerable degree. Choice quote: "If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million." (See this text.)

Are you saying that even though disproportionately large amounts of money that continue to grow are owned by individual entities, it remains in circulation?

Yes.

Take Bill Gates as an example. He does not sit on a heap of gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck. His wealth, or so I assume, is in Microsoft shares. His wealth is thus tied up in the production of software that fuels much of the contemporary world. It is (re)invested. It is productive. The figures of his wealth that are quoted in support of his fabulous wealth are thus largely fictional. The combined price of his shares is but an expectation of how much he would earn if he sold all his shares based on today's price of a single Microsoft share. But at Gates' level, Microsoft shares are not liquid. If he sold all his shares in one go, the share price would collapse.

This would be a form of madness, since the whole hinge of Marxism rests on its efficacy as an economic theory. As Lenin put it: "Marx ism is powerful because it is true.

I disagree, one can disentangle various features of Marx analysis: a theory of monetary value, a theory of history, an account of the dependency of economic on scientific progress, a theory of politics, ideology, revolution, preproduction of inequality, epistemology ... and find them convincing to varying degrees. The main attraction of Marxism in general seems to be in its ethical impulse, in the realisation that there's something wrong in how this world is organised, and that the problem is fixable. But good intentions are not much and I don't think that revolutionary politics are the way to go.

Finally, since no-one seems able to offer a convincing defence of the LTOV, or Marxist theory in general,

Nobody seems to be able to offer a convincing defence of key features of quantum mechanics either, and yet it's the dominant theory of sub-molecular behaviour, because there is nothing on the horizon that could rival its successes.The question of what economic value is, and how it relates to prices is far from being solved. Marginalist approaches also often ignore the question of risk, or the communicative function of monetary exchange. Clearly, in many economic situations, the amount of labour that goes into a product has a strong influence on prices. Clearly, there are also important prices, like that of an oil future maturing in 5 years hence, where this is different.

There is an underlying epistemological problem: what does it mean to explain (economic) values? Usually scientific explanation is tied up with prediction (and the mechanism allowing prediction needs to be simpler than the system to be predicted to be of any use). But the complexity and the reflexive nature of markets (which are about expectations of human behaviour) makes it unlikely that good and simple predictions about prices are obtainable. But then how can we have a solid theory of prices/values?

is it worth asking at this point why, in the absence of logical grounds to support it, it should still enjoy such prestige today

  • Because there is poverty and injustice in the world.
  • Because the poor and those who deem themselves to be victims of injustice (i.e. everybody), assume that if the world would be organised slightly differently, they would not be poor/victims of injustice.
  • Marxism is a convenient framework (socially and theoretically) to discuss poverty and injustice.
  • Alternative approaches to economics/social theory do not always address the issues of poverty and injustice adequately.
That point about it being impossible to imagine anything outside the present order is born out here so regularly these days it's depressing.

This is confused on two counts.
  • How could you make this statement, except if you had (or imagined) the ability to imagine something outside the present order? (Somewhat of a cliche argument, I know.)
  • Marxism is not -- contrary to its often repeated self-description -- "outside the present order. It is very much part of it. Communist parties have been around for more than 100 years. They were ruling substantial parts of the world population for a long time. Communist discourse is everywhere and totally stable, in the sense of not changing, or changing only marginally. Hence Marxism is very much part of the structure of society and the most interesting question is: what function does Marxism have in the reproduction of society.

it has become apparent that no other system of organising resources has worked even nearly as well and the only Marxist response to this situation is to say that the wrong question is being asked [...]. This could well be the case I guess but I think that the onus is on the people insisting on this to demonstrate it - not just say it could be happening but show that it is, otherwise is's nothing but paranoia or wishful thinking on the part of those who don't want to face the fact that the basis for their philosophy is flawed.

That's exactly right, and my position also. It would be so easy for lefties to demonstrate the superiority of their ideas for social organisation. Just form communities that practise what you preach. Mennonite communities like the Amish, pariah countries like North Korea -- for better or worse, or historical slave communities like Palmares, demonstrate that it is perfectly feasible to achieve a near perfect isolation from surrounding market economies. There are enough Marxists around to do a similar thing with Marxist economical organisation. I concede that the isolation would not be perfect, but the superiority of Marxist economics should be robust under various environments, otherwise it is unlikely to be correct.

NB: I have included Palmares as an example, as a warning to myself,knowing very well that the Brazilian landowners ran several extremely violent campaigns against it which eventually lead to its downfall, because they did not want to see free ex-slaves to succeed, thus endangering
their slave economies.

"It is not Marxist political economy, but neoclassical economics, that reduces everything to production and to utility, and thereby ignores the structural and material importance of the delirious, ungrounded flows of finance capital that constitute the largest part of economic activity today."

But that is nonsense. In no way does the flows of finance capital constitute the largest part of economic activity today. The largest part of economic activity today is in building cars, ships, houses, producing food, computers, organising health-care ... An interesting question is: how does the general perception that "the flows of finance capital constitute the largest part of economic activity today" come about? I can envision the following reasons.
  • Financial transactions are easy to observe because the are explicitly quantified.
  • Some financial transactions are spectacular, worth millions or even billions, which brings attention.
  • It is easy for critics to go on about the absurdity of modern economic organisation by pointing to financial transactions, since the audience does not understand what these transactions are for and what their economic value might be, while at the same time harbouring resentment against those who pocket the substantial transaction costs (bankers).
And I'm intrigued as to what, if you regard (or agree with) the transformation problem as fundamentally unsolvable, you are going to do instead?

Every time you buy or sell something, you solve that problem.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
Marx-via-Karatani's point is that money is not a transparent medium, but something that changes the nature of exchange.

Of course money changes the nature of exchange. It generalises, simplifies and extends the reach of exchange. That's the whole point, and was one of the poitns of the original thread.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
How could you make this statement, except if you had (or imagined) the ability to imagine something outside the present order? (Somewhat of a cliche argument, I know.)
Maybe I do. :p

What I mean is that discussions about the er, 'ontological hegemony' in a forum situation often fall prey to sticky assumptions and arguments about definition, not to mention prejudice, bias and agendas, if that's not the same thing. In other words, the very same issues of repetition and reproduction we would seek to address. 'Outside' possibly not the best choice of term in this context, our disagreement a case in point? ;)

Doing a search on some of those terms I just found this paper which looks to be rather pertinent actually:

Cave! Hic Everyday Life: Repetition, Hegemony and the Social - Antoniades, Andreas
The paper aspires to bring everyday life and social repetition under the spotlight of political theorising, and examine their emancipatory potential. To do so it engages with two competing understandings of hegemony in radical political theory; one based on transcendence and social antagonisms and the other based on immanence and everyday life. The main thesis of the paper is that in order to understand the ontological foundations of hegemony we need to shift our focus from social antagonisms and hegemonic representations onto social repetition. The paper starts with an exposition of Laclau’s radical theory of hegemony and its limitations. It then develops a counter ontological reading, an ‘ontology of social repetition’, based on the work of Maurice Blanchot and Gilles Deleuze. The paper concludes by examining what kinds of agency are present in social repetition, and how these can be translated in social action and strategies for social change.

http://www.allacademic.com//meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/7/9/4/3/pages179435/p179435-1.php

PDF here.

BTW, elgato if you are reading I think this might also be relevant to what we were talking about on the Public Enemy thread a while back...
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
Maybe I do. :p

What I mean is that discussions about the er, 'ontological hegemony' in a forum situation often fall prey to sticky assumptions and arguments about definition,

Yes, conversations tend to have thematic attractors. The discussions in the music section are a case in point: as threads grow in length, the (alledged) class position of musical audiences becomes a focal point for many posters.
 

vimothy

yurp
Well, obv money is, ahem, pretty important to economics - Marx-via-Karatani's point is that money is not a transparent medium, but something that changes the nature of exchange.

Sure, sure -- but are economists ignorant of that?

The sundering in question is of the commodity form within the money-capitalism system - not sure how that could be the human condition? (unless you're thinking of something like Deleuze & Guattari's insight that capitalism is the nightmare of all previous society forms, because of its seemingly infinite capacity to proliferate, something that was somehow warded off even when conditions were favourable for it to develop? but you're probably not!)

What I mean is, what about (for instance) this?

64.jpg


Or these?

70007558.JPG


Or this?

WAMPUM2.jpg


Or even these?

What to do instead is, presumably, use the insights to better analyse how capitalism works.

I'm not sure that there's much point in looking to Marx for that. I was thinking more of insights to better construct an alternative rather than just a 'critique'. That is, if you're not going to use money, what are you going to do?
 

josef k.

Dangerous Mystagogue
"The main attraction of Marxism in general seems to be in its ethical impulse, in the realisation that there's something wrong in how this world is organised, and that the problem is fixable. But good intentions are not much and I don't think that revolutionary politics are the way to go."

  • Because there is poverty and injustice in the world.
  • Because the poor and those who deem themselves to be victims of injustice (i.e. everybody), assume that if the world would be organised slightly differently, they would not be poor/victims of injustice.
  • Marxism is a convenient framework (socially and theoretically) to discuss poverty and injustice.
  • Alternative approaches to economics/social theory do not always address the issues of poverty and injustice adequately.




There is clearly some truth to this. On the other hand, there is a sense in which a similar point could be made about Christianity, or really any religion. And this is, of course, an old canard about Marxism: that it is really in truth just another religion. But I'm thinking that Marxism has a specificity which sets it apart from this category. Two or three points I would make:

1) Marxism has always been a strongly intellectual theory. It has always appealed to intellectuals, it has always, in some sense, been dominated by intellectuals. When you look to the leaders of the great Communist parties, very few came from what would be called a working class background. The possibility is thus raised that the real subject of Marxism is not the proletariat, but rather the intellectual, understood - whether tacitly or explicitly - to control them.

2) There is some justification for this hypothesis in the works of Marx himself. He speaks at one point (I think in "A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law" but I may be wrong) of "philosophy as the head and the proletariat as the heart" of the real movement of communism. The first point here is that there a certain rhetorical advantages (though perhaps ultimately limited ones) which accrue to intellectuals who take on the mantle on speaking either on behalf of others, or else, on behalf of the Good, or Justice. Foucault was attuned to this point, to the horror of Chomsky. But I leave the question open of whether it is identifiable among contemporary Marxists, or self-proclaimed Marxists. "I am not merely an academic, or book lover, or a music journalist, or dreary latter-day scholastic. I am a fighter for justice."

3) Marx's metaphor is not just also philosophically intriguing. What is suggested here, in some sense, is a kind of solution to the famous mind-body problem. That solution is, in fact, the real movement of communism, which joins together the head and heart. For whatever reason, I can only here think of a bowel movement, but then, I am vulgar like that, and don't really know what this thought means. But the general point is this: Marxism sought, as perhaps its primary goal, to submit the world to the rule of reason. In this way, it presented the notion that it had solved the problem of theory and praxis - the famous last theses on Feurbach: the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it. Change it how? Through the writing of manifestos, the publication of books, the activation of others in the service of the cause, all via the form of a certain kind of special discourse, and language. For my own part, it strikes me that at least one question of Marxism is this mediological question: was Marxism right in the solution which it engendered to the problem of how writing impacts back on the world? I think that it wasn't, but has no more to offer at this time.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
There is clearly some truth to this. On the other hand, there is a sense in which a similar point could be made about Christianity, or really any religion. And this is, of course, an old canard about Marxism: that it is really in truth just another religion. But I'm thinking that Marxism has a specificity which sets it apart from this category.

While I do agree that my first two points are also applicable to religions, my other two points are not. No religion of my acquaintance offers interesting theories of political power, revolution, markets, money, political strategy etc.

Marxism has always been a strongly intellectual theory. It has always appealed to intellectuals

That's true.

The possibility is thus raised that the real subject of Marxism is not the proletariat, but rather the intellectual, understood - whether tacitly or explicitly - to control them [...] 2) There is some justification for this hypothesis in the works of Marx himself. He speaks at one point (I think in "A Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law" but I may be wrong) of "philosophy as the head and the proletariat as the heart" of the real movement of communism.

To find the subject of revolution, that's what Marxists do most of the time. Currently British Marxists seem to think it's disaffected Muslims. Anyway, The party line on the matter of intellectuals running the show is that the proletariat is too opressed to be able to run a successful transition from the current state of affairs to a post-revolutionary paradies, but in that paradise, the dominance of intellectuals over workers will vanish because this class distinction will have withered away.

Krushev was certainly no intellectual. He could not even read or write properly, at least that's what I have heard.

Change it how? Through the writing of manifestos, the publication of books, the activation of others in the service of the cause, all via the form of a certain kind of special discourse, and language.

No, the change in Marx happens by way of a revolution. Writing manifestos and similar activities are just support activities for bringing about the revolution.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
I'm not sure that there's much point in looking to Marx for that. I was thinking more of insights to better construct an alternative rather than just a 'critique'. That is, if you're not going to use money, what are you going to do?

That's right. Interestingly though, the aforementioned Karatani discusses a novel exchange mechanism (Local Exchange Trading System), which sets him apart from most contemporary writers in the Marxist tradition.

Recently, there is has been a shift in the use of money away from the totally anonymous medium of exchange: tax-fraud, money laundering, drug money, money in support of organisations that are deemed terrorists are problematic for many governments, and significant flows of money are beginning to be tracked. Hence money becomes "information-richer". Given our vastly increased number-crunching capabilities, I can envision that in the future all monetary transactions will be tracked and that tracking data will be public. This would be a gigant leap in terms of transparency. It would be possible for anybody interested to value all financial positions of a JP Morgan, say, by just going to some website, downloading the relevant data and running a Monte-Carlo simulation. It would then be much harder to hide debt, and a credit crisis like the present one would be unlikely.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
In the sense that it's not Marx's or the Marxian transformation problem, though I do agree with you that it is basically solved every time transactions occur. It's a semantic point, and not a very interesting one. I shall shut up.

I think there's is a very interesting problem: although we do solve the aforementioned problem everytime we decide to buy something, the question remains if the mechanism we use to determine what price we pay is perfect, or if it could be improved. Since we don't usually have direct access to our own decision making process, interesting methodological questions arise as to how our own processes function. The study of decision making is a fascinating field between psychology and sociology. The relatively new field of behavioural economics investigates economic decision making, often with a neo-classical bias. Results in behavioural economics suggst that human decision making is often far from the simple models of classical model, vindicating many of the criticisms from the left, though this vindication happens at a much improved scientific level. Since there is no reason to believe that the decision processes humans typically use are innate, one can asks questions about better decision making processes, and game theory is a field that seeks to define what it means for decision making strategies to be good or bad, and tries to design better strategies. The brand new field of algorithmic game theory has discovered that the design of optimal strategies, or even approximations of optimal strategies, is often very difficult (and hence it is also unlikely that a market (a form of approxiation algorithm) can find optimal strategies).
 
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D84

Well-known member
I might be going off on a tangent here but I don't see how any "debunking" of the Labour Theory of Value is supposed to affect the validity or otherwise of being for or against Capitalism, by which I mean the dominant social system that exists today however you'd like to call it.

Does Arthur Daley stop himself before pocketing the money that was supposed to go to Terry and think whether doing so would conform to a Labour Theory of Value.

In fact I would argue that if you put the LTOV to most people in the business of exploitation and profiteering, they would tell you that that is exactly how they view their role in the economy.

Why else would our capiltalist <del>slave</del> share-holding forefathers have gone and continue to go to such efforts to undermine, infiltrate and sometimes even machine-gun unionists?

And whoever has experienced working for such people (ie. everyone who's worked for a large corporation and put up with all the cant that goes along with it) would agree that they have been exploited for the material benefit of their distant masters. It's not rocket surgery. It's a fact.

The whole system of share-holding in corporations is about maximising profits for a small class by whatever means.

Does the validity or otherwise of LTOV invalidate the fact that the class system and imperialism are healthier than ever?

Of course it is a fallacy. How could anyone justify the amazing income and power of a very small class? Exploitation and profiteering are nonetheless facts and thriving.

Capitalism is a flawed system. Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that one of the concerns of Marxism: exposing its flaws and internal contradictions etc? As dHarry quotes above, it thrives as it lurches from one self-generated crisis to the next.
 
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IdleRich

IdleRich
"I might be going off on a tangent here but I don't see how any "debunking" of the Labour Theory of Value is supposed to affect the validity or otherwise of being for or against Capitalism, by which I mean the dominant social system that exists today however you'd like to call it."
Yeah, I agree with that, I think it's easy to get bogged down in one specific detail of the argument and miss the bigger picture.
 

3 Body No Problem

Well-known member
Capitalism is a flawed system. Please correct me if I'm wrong but isn't that one of the concerns of Marxism: exposing its flaws and internal contradictions etc?

As pointed out many times in this thread and the thread it is a continuation of, "exposing its flaws and internal contradictions" is not particularly interesting. Everybody knows, and nobody denies that the organisation of the world leaves a lot to be desired. The point is not to whine, but to propose something better, and to give convincing reasons why the proposal is better. A flawed theory of value isn't particularly convincing way to start, and the historical record of millions of people murdered by Marxists is a really good reason to be sceptical that anything useful will come from this corner.
 
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