Anyone want to help me out in a thread in GD

[white_wolf]

So, in this thread: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021022999

A poster replied with this:

Last edited Thu Jul 26, 2012, 09:05 AM USA/ET - Edit history (2)

Sorry, but Marx is just plain old, flat wrong. All of Marx stands (or alas falls) on the Labor Theory of Value. And LTV is wrong. For the uninitiated, LTV says that prices - ALL prices - come from the amount of labor required to produce the item or service. According to LTV, supply and demand DO NOT generate prices. Only the amount of labor contained in an item or service.

LTV is demonstrably false. A quick trip to the mall easily provides examples showing the fallacy of LTV.

Classic example. Consider the wages of A-Rod vs Michael Phelps. Does it take more labor to be an Gold Glove Major League infielder or to win 8 Olympic Gold Medals?

The fact is that A-Rod makes Waaaaay more than Phelps is that lots more people want to pay to see A-Rod play baseball ( to boo him or cheer him) than are willing to pay to watch Phelps swim. Hence LTV is wrong. And without LTV, all of Marx is fiction. Interesting fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

It looks to me as if he is confusing value with price which as I understand the LTV are not the same thing, but this I'm not sure. Anyone want to help?

[Starry Messenger]

1. He's voicing a classic libertarian "refutation" of Marx.

He's not confused so much as on the wrong website, although economic right-wingers usually manage to hang out here for a long time if they stick to anti-Marxism.

Though I usually don't like wiki, there's a good overview of the several "alternatives" to the LTV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_the_labour_theory_of_value

BOG PERSONS reply there on the thread furnishes the best refutation, the "mud pie fallacy".

Here is an expansion of that: http://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/05/13/law-of-value-3-das-mudpie/

If individual value and social value diverge what does this mean? Some people think that Marx held that individual value had to equal social value, that if I spend 15 hours making a sandwich then this has to be the value of the sandwich. But this is not at all what Marx argued. Marx wanted to show how individual values become social values in a market society. Unlike other forms of production in which we labor directly for use, in a capitalist society we labor to produce value. Yet society must still use the products of our labor. We can’t all make the same thing or all make useless things. Labor must be apportioned between the right tasks in the right proportions. Value is the mechanism that does this since value is the only connection between individual laborers. Marx sought to explain how value acted as a force for the regulation of individual labor, turning individual labor into social labor.

[The fact that social value differs from individual value is not a defect to Marx's analysis. It is the mechanism by which value asserts itself. How else could labor be apportioned between tasks in a society where labor is only indirectly social? The very fact that we have a field called economics in the first place is because the transformation of private labor into social labor is a mysterious, invisible one, it's law-like properties hidden behind constant fluctuations of market prices.]

The fact that we discover the social value of our individual labor in the market creates the illusion that it is the market itself which is creating value. We bring the objects of our labor to market and there they are turned into money, making it seem like the subjective decisions between buyers and sellers are what create these money prices. This is what is being insinuated by the Mudpie argument: that it is the subjective valuation of the usefulness of a commodity that determines its value, not the labor that goes into it. Yet this is an illusion, a fetish created by the fact that our labor is indirectly social.

Yet contrary to what some vulgar economists want you to believe individuals are not free to buy and sell commodities at any price they want. This is because exchange is not just a fleeting, isolated contract between two individuals. Each exchange is part of a vast web of exchanges which unites the productive labors of society. [close-up of two people exchanging, zoom out to their other hands being exchanging with others (duplicate image), zoom out to reveal of vast network of the same images all linking hands..] This is what it means for an individual’s labor to become social. When this happens, society acts back upon the individual, disciplining their labor to make sure that they are doing socially useful labor at something near average productivity.

[BOG PERSON]

2. wouldnt a quick trip to the mall prove LTV correct?

why would manufacturers flock to low-wage regions if the amt of surplus labor they could wring out of the worker didnt determine their profit margins?

& why do ppl always use *entertainers* (athletes, movie stars, musicians, etc) as an example of LTV being wrong? entertainers aren't wage-earners, nor are they involved at any level in the production or circulation of commodities

[Starry Messenger]

3. You'd think so. Also, how did he go from the mall to entertainer?

Baffling.

Do you think people use entertainers as an example because those people are "special" and are rewarded by money for being so "unique". It seems like a hidden fear of socialism being a leveller of human endeavor, like people who are afraid that their own snowflake specialiness would go unnoticed in a society without class.

[BOG PERSON]

4. thats probably a big part of it

the other part i think is that maybe they are sort of unawarely aware that communism is necessarily the end of the Spectacle, or the reign of images, of the *representation* of life by media, which is the only thing that gives late capitalism its dazzling colors.