Empirical Evidence for the Labor Theory of Value/Theory of Surplus Value?

[Catmatic Leftist]

Is there any Empirical Evidence for the Labor Theory of Value/Theory of Surplus Value?

[$lim_$weezy]

Here's a thread I found in the economics forum. It seems to be what you're looking for.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/empirical-strength-ltv-t122470/index.html

[ZeroNowhere]

Well, most empirical studies seem to take the labour theory of value to mean that individual prices tend towards values, which is quite clearly not how Marx interpreted it in texts like Capital, Wage-Labour and Capital, etc. I suppose that you could take Kliman's study of the declining rate of profit as empirical evidence, in some sense.

[Catmatic Leftist]

Here's a thread I found in the economics forum. It seems to be what you're looking for.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/empirical-strength-ltv-t122470/index.html

Looks like I have to brush up on my math. It's been quite a while since I took calculus...

[Broletariat]

The LTV is a definition, so uhm.... kinna hard to prove like that.

[$lim_$weezy]

Yeah empirical evidence would be in the form of correlation between price and labor time, which is supposedly about 95% the case. Thus really it would be a reason why the transformation problem is not really a problem, I think?

[Catmatic Leftist]

The LTV is a definition, so uhm.... kinna hard to prove like that.

How would you go about proving it?

[Broletariat]

How would you go about proving it?

You can't prove a definition, Zanthorus once posted this.

" The idea that labour is the substance of value comes out more clearly when we examine the historical preconditions for the existence of value relations. For individuals to produce exchange-values, the products they produce must be use-values not to themselves but to other individuals, that is, social use-values. Labour which creates social use-values is social labour, and presupposes a social division of labour which forces individuals to rely on the production of society to satisfy their needs. However, only in certain instances of the social division of labour do the products of society appear as exchangeable values. These instances are where the various branches of the social division of labour carry out production independently of one another and for private account. In such instances, the products of labour become social through the medium of the value-form. Value serves as the substance which undertakes the natural necessity common to every society of apportioning out the labour-time of society to different branches of production in order to serve social wants. As the medium through which labour becomes social labour, we can see clearly that the essence of value is labour. In fact, to say that the substance of value becomes a tautology, which is equivalent to saying that the substance of social labour is social labour."


You'll notice he ends in a tautology, which must necessarily happen since the LTV is a definition.

[Savage]

I think this excerpt from The Life and Death of Stalinism is actually quite relevant,


Marx is sometimes criticized for failing to prove the labor theory of value. In fact he made no attempt to provide a “proof” from abstract first principles; the real test was practice. His justification for using the theory was based, first, on its correspondence with economic reality, as we will see in discussing wage labor; and, second, on the laws of capitalism’s motion and development that he derived from the law of value. No other theory has been able to explain capitalism and, most important, its historical changes, with anything like the success of Marx’s.

The theory that value is based on labor time was not invented by Marx; it was the common understanding of the classic bourgeois economists. It allows capitalist apologists to declare the system’s basic principle to be equal exchange: that is, that commodities of equal value can be
exchanged for one another. By this ideological self-justification capitalism presents itself as a society founded on equality — despite its great extremes of wealth and privilege,

Capitalism also claims to be the embodiment of economic freedom: owners of commodities are free in the sense that they have the right to find buyers of their choosing on the market in order to obtain the greatest possible value in exchange. It was no accident that “liberty” and “equality” were watchwords of the great French bourgeois revolution, or that the idea of democracy was entwined with the spread of capitalism.

[Sputnik_1]

I have a question that is related... What about added value like brand, advertisement, sponsoring etc? Can it be considered added labor value as well? After all behind those things there are working class people as well (graphic designers, public relations manager, photographers etc.) or is it called in a different way?

[ZeroNowhere]

Marx is sometimes criticized for failing to prove the labor theory of value. In fact he made no attempt to provide a “proof” from abstract first principles; the real test was practice. His justification for using the theory was based, first, on its correspondence with economic reality, as we will see in discussing wage labor; and, second, on the laws of capitalism’s motion and development that he derived from the law of value. No other theory has been able to explain capitalism and, most important, its historical changes, with anything like the success of Marx’s.To be honest, this seems a bit close to a functionalist evasion, which treats the theory of value and view that value is only condensed labour-time as akin to a sort of useful fiction, or a model arbitrarily come up with which has to be compared with others through its results rather than being itself immanent by nature in capital. I don't think that this has a particularly firm basis in Marx's own presentations of the theory of value, where he presents it as something true in itself, and the basis for his subsequent derivations (indeed, as itself developing in form through these derivations), rather than as confirmed retrospectively by what could be derived from it. He also, of course, doesn't attempt to justify the theory of value on statistical grounds of price-value correlations, and the reason why he would leave out something like this if it was so fundamental to proving the theory of value is uncertain. The 'facts on the ground' may make it clearer, but they are not in themselves justification for such a theory, which posits itself to be necessarily immanent to commodity production and hence must be analyzed as such.

In any case, what is essential to Marx's presentation of value is not that different things of equal value must have an equal price, but rather that it makes sense to speak of things of inequal value exchanging at all, and hence also of two products of equal value. Indeed, as per Engels, "Production may occur without exchange, but exchange — being necessarily an exchange of products—cannot occur without production." That value exists can't be derived from induction, but rather analysis (as Engels points out, induction cannot establish necessity). The category of abstract value is, of course, present not only in the political economists, but also in Hegel and even Aristotle, Marx's point being that it makes no sense to speak of such value except in cases where products are exchanged, or commodity production forms an established social institution in the form of the market. Marx then develops this in such a way that value successively realizes itself, in a manner mirroring one of Hegel's categories, through the successive modes of money (itself going through various moments), capital (the apotheosis of money as money), the state, the world market, and so on. Value, then, does not have abstract being, but exists only in this flux and development; like truth, it is realized in degrees and through limitations. And, ultimately, like the Hegelian concept, it is based upon human activity; this, however, gives its development the form of alienation, as opposed to materialism, where human activity is not so hypostatized.

[A Marxist Historian]

Is there any Empirical Evidence for the Labor Theory of Value/Theory of Surplus Value?

The basic empirical evidence for the labor theory of value is simply that capitalism works at all.

The capitalist free market allocates labor in such a fashion that by and large, with various exceptions and irregularities, the right amount of human labor is allocated to the right departments of the productive process so that you tend, not always but tend, to have about the right amount of goods produced to meet the needs of society.

Therefore the labor theory of value must be essentially valid, as if it were not, this would not be the case.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

I have a question that is related... What about added value like brand, advertisement, sponsoring etc? Can it be considered added labor value as well? After all behind those things there are working class people as well (graphic designers, public relations manager, photographers etc.) or is it called in a different way?

In a capitalist society, that's all socially necessary, as without it the commodities could not be sold and the whole system would come to a crashing halt. Companies that don't spend on advertising don't sell their product and go bankrupt. The *socially necessary* labor for advertising does add labor value to the product.

So the answer is yes.

-M.H.-

[Catmatic Leftist]

So basically, Marxists treat the LTV as axiomatic and a self-evident truth?

[Broletariat]

So basically, Marxists treat the LTV as axiomatic and a self-evident truth?

No, it's a definition.

The relationship one enters into when trading is simply called a Value relationship, and what is happening is an exchange of labour, so the essence of the relationship is labour and we call it Value.

[A Marxist Historian]

So basically, Marxists treat the LTV as axiomatic and a self-evident truth?

Pretty much, for reasons explained in my previous posting.

If they don't, then they are not really Marxists, as they don't follow Marx's ideas. They could be some other kind of socialists, with a good smattering of Marx's ideas in their thinking, but they can't be Marxists, as the LTV is the very foundation of Marxist economic theory.

They'd be like "Darwinists" who don't believe in evolution.

-M.H.-