An Incontestable Argument for the Law of Value
- This topic has 220 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 1 week, 1 day ago by
.
-
Posts
-
It is clear that your labour theory of value is not the same as Marx’s but is what in #230437 is called
“a “labor theory of things that have value,” which is very obviously true! Regardless of what value is, no commodity that has value has ever been the product of anything except some combination of (a) the nonhuman natural world and (b) human labor.”
In fact you stated that this was your labour theory of value in the opening sentence of your post starting this thread:
“It’s the fact that we know of nothing valuable that happens to have no labour embedded in it that appears an incontestable argument for the law of value discovered by Marx.”
And, later, refer to
“my thesis that we know of nothing valuable that does not contain some labour.”
By “valuable” you mean have mean “has a market price”:
“No value means no market-value, hence no market-price. Things without value are not bought or sold in a market”
So your theory is: Everything that is (or could be) bought and sold contains some labour.
The author of the article referred to in #230437 thought this is obvious. Marx didn’t as he thought that exceptions were virgin land and honour and conscience. But you say he was wrong about this in regard to the honour and conscience as in your view they will contain an element of human labour.
Also, the classical Labour Theory of Value is not simply that everything that is bought and sold contains “some” labour but that their price depends in some way on the amount of labour they contain.
That Marx didn’t agree with your theory is not a good argument against your theory. But it is a MIGHTY argument against your claim that your theory is “an incontestable argument for the law of value discovered by Marx”.
The MIGHTIEST argument against the Prakashian Labour Theory of Value that everything that is bought and sold contains some labour is virgin land (and sea), and plots on the moon and on asteroids.
If you are prepared to accept these comparatively rare exceptions your quest is over. You have found The Truth. The trouble is that it is not very profound. We already knew nearly everything that is bought and sold is the product of human labour.
‘That Marx didn’t agree with your theory is not a good argument against your theory. But it is a MIGHTY argument against your claim that your theory is “an incontestable argument for the law of value discovered by Marx”.’
So, what you view as ‘not a good argument’ is ‘a MIGHTY argument’!!!
‘The MIGHTIEST argument against the Prakashian Labour Theory of Value that everything that is bought and sold contains some labour is virgin land (and sea), and plots on the moon and on asteroids.’
Would like you to elaborate, with specific instances, on your ‘MIGHTIEST argument’, namely, your claim that things like ‘virgin land (and sea), and plots on the moon and on asteroids’ that do not contain any human labour are ‘bought and sold’.
No, not really. You can easily check for yourself on the internet whether land that has never had any human labour mixed with it can be and has been bought and sold. You are the one who wants to demonstrate the absolute validity of your rather trite theory that everything that is bought and sold will be found to contain at least some human labour.
You’re evasive. Such behaviour is outright unbecoming of a COMMUNIST who must always stand for the TRUTH. Recourse to silly tactics like evasiveness is expected from people that are devoid of the backbone needed to stand up straight with their heads held erect before the TRUTH.
Hey DJP, what prevents you from citing pointblank an instance to support your position? What’s your purpose really? Do you want to know the TRUTH? A true TRUTH seeker doesn’t behave thus. They’re always STRAIGHTFORWARD.
Hi robbo203, I’ve responded to your point. Have you got any other points against my stance on ‘value’? Really curious to know!
Hi DJP, are you sure that you’re Not suffering from the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’? So far you’ve lamentably failed to present a sensible argument in this debate on my view of value. You’re also lamentably lacking in the STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS that constitutes an essential attribute of a guy endowed with BACKBONE. You’re so INSIGNIFICANT. You should feel ashamed of yourself.
Marx thought, mistakenly, that some valueless things (virgin soil, honour, conscience, etc.) may have prices and be bought & sold like commodities. Nevertheless, Marx did Not say anything to the effect that useful products of labour meant for self-use do Not or cannot have value or that useful labour may not always create value. Marx seems to have failed to consider the fact that useful products of labour (or products of useful labour), be they meant for the self-consumption or sale, have got value, hence price (money-value). Evidently, there’s No basic distinction between useful products of labour meant for self-use and commodities. Therefore, the view that useful products of labour meant for self-use are Not commodities is devoid of any logical foundation.
Examples of saleable useful products of labour meant for self-use are numerous: residential houses, female cow-calves reared for milk, male calves bred by domestic cows, private cars for self-use, vegetables & fruits from plants grown in house gardens or roof-tops, puppies from pets, etc.The view that things produced for sale alone are commodities adds up to the silly view that products of useful labour turn commodities just when they’re offered for sale or the view that commodities originate during exchange in the market. Workers in a factory labour to make useful things because they’ve been asked to make them by the capitalist to whom they sold their labour-power the use-value (labour) of which belongs, as a result, to the capitalist. Factory workers do Not make anything for sale or self use. In fact, the manufacturing-unit workers are Not involved in the selling business. Thus, it follows that factory-products are Not commodities until they’re brought to the market. The question is, do they possess value? Does the labour of factory workers create value? If products of labour turn commodities in the market or during exchange, one may justifiably claim that human labour has Nothing to do with value. If the value of commodities originates in the market, both the Smithian and the Marxian theories of value prove wrong, as I see it.
Two short books might be useful here.
Andrew Klimans’ “Marx’s Concept of Intrinsic Value”
https://files.libcom.org/files/kliman.pdfand
Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit”
http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdfFrom the current issue of Jacobin magazine:
“But Cohen believed that rank-and-file socialists who think the LTV is obvious are moved by something other than Marx’s technical claims about value. Instead, what moves them is something like a “labor theory of things that have value,” which is very obviously true! Regardless of what value is, no commodity that has value has ever been the product of anything except some combination of (a) the nonhuman natural world and (b) human labor.”
https://jacobin.com/2022/06/karl-marx-labor-theory-of-value-ga-cohen-economics/
Later, Andrew Kliman argued against both the GA Cohen argument, and what he considered even worse, the version given by Ben Burgis: https://marxisthumanistinitiative.org/economics/marx-systematically-exploited-by-burgis-marxs-exploitation-theory-vs-g-a-cohens-plain-argument.html
It is true—almost trivially so—that no socially valuable thing exists without human labor applied to nature. In that limited sense, the intuition attributed to rank-and-file socialists is not wrong: without labor, there are no socially useful goods. But this obvious truth is not Marx’s Labor Theory of Value, nor is it what the theory is trying to explain.
Marx was not simply saying that “labor creates valuable things.” That was already known long before him. The Labor Theory of Value is an attempt to explain why, in a capitalist society, the products of labor take the social form of values that can be compared, exchanged, and expressed in money. The issue is not the physical origin of things, but the social form labor takes under capitalism.
When Cohen suggests that what really moves socialists is a vague “labor theory of things that have value,” he shifts the discussion away from the core problem. Marx’s analysis is neither moral (“workers deserve everything”) nor a technical accounting exercise. It is historical and social:
– labor becomes abstract,
– products become commodities,
– and relations between people appear as relations between things.
From this perspective, the Labor Theory of Value does not need to be ‘obvious’ or intuitive for socialism to make sense. What matters is not proving that labor “creates everything,” but understanding that value exists only in a society based on production for exchange, and that it would disappear once that social relation is abolished.
Socialism, therefore, does not rest on a moral theory of labor. It rests on the recognition that value itself is a historically specific social form, inseparable from capitalism. When that form is overcome, the very question of “what creates value” ceases to be central.There is a short piece in this month’s Socialist Standard on the Labour Theory of Value:
That 2022 article sets out GA Cohen’s argument that you don’t need the concept of “value” to explain how workers are exploited. At one level this is true. In a society where those who don’t work live in luxury while those who do just get by, it is obvious that the latter are exploited by the former. You don’t need any theory to tell you that. But you do need one to explain how and how to end it.
Cohen’s theory is basically that the workers are exploited because what they produce is not controlled by them but undemocratically by some minority. This suggests that the way to end this is for workers to have democratic control over what they produce. It provides a theoretical justification for “workers control” — but of what? Of what is produced for sale. The way out is workers’ cooperatives producing for a market not socialism.
The Labour Theory of Value introduces the concept of “value” as the form wealth takes in a society producing goods and services for sale. Value expresses itself as exchange value (price) and so is tied the fact that articles of wealth are produced to be bought and sold. Exploitation results from the fact that the wealth workers produce as value belongs to the employer as part of the class of those who own the means of production. Part of this value is given back to the workers as their wages; the other part is kept by their employer as “surplus value” which economic forces subsequently divide into profit, interest and ground rent.
You can’t properly explain how capitalism works without a concept of “value”, as the form wealth takes when it is produced for sale. And it leads to the conclusion that value will exist as long as goods are produced for sale.
So, in Cohen’s scheme, workers would still be producing value and still be forced by the operation of the law of value to allocate part of it to accumulate as more capital. They would be democratically exploiting themselves.
The Marxian version of the Labour Theory of Value leads to a different conclusion — to socialism as the common ownership of the means of production and their (democratically controlled) use to produce to directly meet people’s needs. Production directly for use replaces production for sale with a view to profit. Wealth ceases to take the form of value and “value”, and so “surplus value”, disappears.
ALB wrote: “This suggests that the way to end this is for workers to have democratic control over what they produce. It provides a theoretical justification for “workers control” — but of what? Of what is produced for sale. The way out is workers’ cooperatives producing for a market not socialism.”
But couldn’t ‘democratic control over what they produce’ also imply ‘and what they consume/distribute’, and no market sale?
Or does Cohen specifically exclude ‘distribution’ from ‘democratic control’, and specifically argue for ‘market distribution’ and workers’ cooperatives?
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.