ALB
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The return of the “war economy” which, under the term “permanent arms economy”, the old IS group (Tony Cliff, Mike Kidron, etc) and others claimed had supposedly saved capitalism from collapsing?
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.
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.
I fail to understand how this view clashes with my reply #230406.
Maybe you can’t understand this, but everybody else can.
Marx’s view (or definition, if you like) is that “value” is not a material thing that can sensed by the senses. You can subject a use-value offered for sale to examination by a microscope and you won’t find an atom of “value”. Value (on Marx’s definition) only becomes observable as “exchange-value” when a commodity is exchanged for another commodity. Value, for him, is not a material thing but is a relation between things (and ultimately between those who produced them). A use-value that is not produced for sale has no value.
You have a different definition (nothing wrong with that in itself). You seem to be defining it as some sort of “stuff”, something that can be perceived by the senses that exists independently of whether the use-value is exchanged or not. As you said in #230406:
“I can’t see why the ‘value’ of a commodity should be ‘unappreciable’ by senses of the sensible.
I am not sure exactly what it is that you think can be perceived by the senses as “value” in a free-standing use-value destined to be exchanged as a commodity.
So we have two different definitions of value. To judge which is the more useful we need to see which can explain better the workings of a society where production for sale is predominant.
Dear Mr Prakash
While I appreciate your attempts to defend my theory of value, I must point out that in that translation of a passage at the beginning of section 3 of Chapter 1 of Volume 1 of my major work, Das Kapital, I was talking about value not the use-value of a commodity.
Yours respectfully
Karl Marx
From France 24:
“He said the Azot chemical plant was being shelled, with fighting around the area. About 800 civilians have taken refuge in the plant’s bunkers, according to the tycoon whose company owns the facility.”
When is an oligarch not an oligarch? When they are a tycoon.
From 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/
Not an atom of matter enters into the reality of value. We may twist and turn a commodity this way and that way — as a thing of value it still remains unappreciable by our bodily senses.
He doesn’t tell us how inflation will be prevented in his workers’ co-op market economy. As a market economy there will still be money, but who will control the money supply? The workers coop running the Federal Reserve perhaps.
He blames profit-seeking private enterprises for causing inflation by raising prices, but wouldn’t his workers coops producing for the market also have an incentive to charge what the market will bear?
It appears that German intellectuals have been discussing the same subject:
I know that the group behind this site are not the most reliable, being one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism but is what they say here true?
“In the aftermath of the DSA’s meeting, what Chretien tellingly referred to as “our government” agreed to send Ukraine $40 billion in military aid. Every single DSA member of Congress, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, voted to support the aid package. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders, who are not technically DSA members, also voted for the bill.“
He is certainly still opposed to electing people to take technical decisions. But in episode 12 of his podcast series Revolution Now! (2 December 2020) he does speak of “economic democracy” but it seems to be limited to taking part in designing the system:
“In a future economy that’s truly efficient, it will be truly integrative and you will have an economic democracy where people participate through CAD systems and design, as I touched upon the prior podcast. They will engage a network like Amazon, and such robust infrastructure that Amazon currently possesses would be utilized for efficient and sustainable design production and distribution and recycling.”
This would seem to be a change of language from what he was saying ten years when he didn’t even mention the word “democracy”.
What about the workers?
https://www.epsu.org/article/ukraine-attack-dismissal-rights-pushed-under-cover-martial-law
Here’s what the Zeitgeist Movement has to say on this. They seem to be siding with the “cyber communists”.
“Two people are born every second on this planet, and each one of those humans needs a lifetime of food, energy, water and the like. Given this fundamental need to understand what we have, the rates of depletion and, invariably, the need to streamline industry in the most efficient, productive way, a Global System of Resource Management must be put in place. It is just common sense. This is an extensive subject when one considers the technical, quantitative variables needed for implementation. However, for the sake of overview, it can be stated that the first step is a Full Global Survey of all earthly resources. Then, based on a quantitative analysis of the properties of each material, a strategically defined process of production is constructed from the bottom up, using such variables as negative retroactions, renewability, etc. (More on this can be found in the section called Project Earth in the ZM lecture called “Where Are We Going?”). Then consumption statistics are accessed, rates of depletion become monitored, distribution is logically formulated, etc.. In other words, it is a full Systems Approach to earthly resource management, production, and distribution, with the goal of absolute efficiency, conservation, and sustainability. Given the mathematically defined attributes, as based on all available information at the time, along with the state of technology at the time, the parameters for social operation within the industrial complex become self-evident, with decisions “arrived at” by way of computation, not human opinion. This is where computer intelligence becomes an important tool for social governance, for only the computation ability/programming of computers can access and strategically regulate such processes efficiently, and in real time. This technological application is not novel. It is simply ‘scaled out’ from current methods already known.”
Peter Joseph on the word “socialism” from a tweet the other day:
“Folks also need to stop using the word Socialism as an activist foundation because it is antiquated and lends to perpetual misinterprrtation. Better to simply speak of the train of thought behind public health and sustainability. The logic of a new social system is self-evident.”
