Come get your slop

  • Straight_Depth [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Which prominent Marxist economists have rejected the LTV? Serious question, I genuinely do not know

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      LTV? From the handful that are currently relevant none of them that I heard but I could be wrong.

      There is some "debate"(not really only if you are stubborn) in other areas mainly because Harvey in general sucks and he rejects the theory of Marx's falling rate of profit as the source of capitalist crisis, despite the evidence collected so far.

      • Straight_Depth [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        he rejects the theory of Marx’s falling rate of profit as the source of capitalist crisis, despite the evidence collected so far.

        Lol, fr? What does he think is attributed to this? Like even committed capitalists and liberals understand this mechanism.

        • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Too many people on the left buy the financialization idea i.e somewhere around the 1980s the financial institutions dominate the economy so much that their well being determines the fate of the economy, that wall street is the main problem because it is too much of a parasite on the real "industrial" economy and if you could control or regulate Wall street then "industrial" capitalism would go back to working just fine.

          This is very appealing to many because mainstream economists also like this theory, it means the problem isn't capitalism itself but some small part of it that can be fixed. But this is also extremely anti-Marxist theory as while finance capital does exist and it is undeniably a problem, the falling rate of profit(and the empirical evidence) shows capitalism will suffer from crisis despite financial capital and there is no return to the golden age of the 50s anymore ever.

          There is more on MR blog here if you are interested. Harvey also debated about the law of value too.

    • StellarTabi [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I've never seen a coherent description of why it's wrong aside from a thinly veiled "my tribal flag says I disagree."

      It come across like saying Newton's work was debunked because it doesn't describe some quantum obscurity despite it obviously still being useful and correct.

      Or it's like saying Newton's work is debunked because the earth is flat. I can't tell you if the competing theories are actually better, but I don't think they're proven.

      Or that mushrooms are debunked because it's low in iron.

      There's a lot that's interesting to read, but you'll probably only see people cheering their team's chants in that thread.

    • CptKrkIsClmbngThMntn [any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I think most Marxists would agree it's a poor determiner of price, at least nowadays, and for classical economists there's no such thing as value as distinct from price, so they probably see that as a gotchya.

      • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        It's literally not supposed to predict prices though, as a concept? Not under capitalism at least. It's just a recognition that people doing stuff is the only thing that makes commodities with use values that can be exchanged for cash. The common denominator is making stuff. When your resource extraction occurs at the barrel of a gun, of course it's unrelated to price. But of course, the value of a phone is indeed the socially necessary labor time to mine the rare earth minerals, process them, ship them to component fabs, ship components to assembly fabs, code the software, design the hardware, etc. The part of this that is least abstracted is the resource extraction because technological innovation has not made it a cheaper capital investment to develop fully autonomous mining rigs when your former colony is just sitting like right there nearby and you have their guys that own the guns by the balls.

    • jackal [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Haven't read him but I believe G. A. Cohen didn't like the LTV and tried to divorce it from Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation. He also didn't like dialectical materialism and thought it was metaphysical BS thrown in by Marx.