Mud Pie?

[Kingbruh]

I just heard the Mud Pie argument against the Labor Theory of Value, what are your guys' thoughts on it and how to combat it?

[Kill all the fetuses!]

There is nothing to combat. It's a straw-man created by those who have no clue what they are talking about, who haven't read a single word by Marx. Mud pie is not useful to anyone, hence, it doesn't contain neither value nor exchange-value, nor is it a use-value or a commodity to begin with. So if you spend a lot of time producing a mud pie, you don't produce a commodity with a lot of socially necessary labour-time embodied it in, but instead you just prove yourself that you are a fucking moron.

For something to contain value it must be a useful thing, then it has not just labour-time, but socially necessary labour-time embodied in itself etc etc etc

[DOOM]

That's because not all labor creates value. For labor to create value it needs to be useful, this means that there needs to be actual demand for mudpies. Marx says that in the first few pages of Das Kapital.
But let's take this further. Another point most critics of Marx make is that if the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor invested in its production then Computer A, which has the same amount of constant capital but more labor-time invested in it than in Computer B, should be more valuable than Computer B.
This is wrong too. That's because exchange values are expressed in the market. Now because of the competition that arises in the market, values balance out to what is called "socially necessary labor-time" (the average amount of labor that needs to be invested in the production of a commodity).
So if you produce below the SNLT you're more productive and thus make surplus profit (note: this isn't new value).

http://i59.tinypic.com/149cg9g.png
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UltE6U4t8Vc

[Red Star Rising]

In what way is the labour that goes towards mud pie socially necessary?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

In what way is the labour that goes towards mud pie socially necessary?

It isn't, generally. Perhaps you are able to convince someone to buy your mud pies - in that case they become commodities, use-values exchanged on the market. The labour theory of value is an explanation of how the prices of commodities are formed - in this case, they oscillate around the exchange value of the commodity (mud pie?), determined by the average, socially-neccessary (so the time the workers spend standing around waiting for the shovel to arrive, for example, does not impact the final price) time that an unskilled labourer would need to produce the commodity.

The competing explanation, that prices are essentially subjective and formed on the basis of individual whims, would entail a wild fluctuation of prices, which is simply something we do not see happen.

[Kill all the fetuses!]

The competing explanation, that prices are essentially subjective and formed on the basis of individual whims, would entail a wild fluctuation of prices, which is simply something we do not see happen.

I would be the first to say that we should ignore the marginalists etc., but if we make arguments against them, then we should be sure to make arguments that are in fact true. For instance, this argument that you bring against marginalism is pretty much the equivalent of the mud-pie argument made against Marxists - it's nothing more than a ridiculous straw-man.

I think it's much better to bring forth the fact that marginalism has been conclusively, mathematically disproved decades ago during Cambridge Capital Controversies. All of the contenders, including the marginalists themselves participating in the debate and outsides as well, conceded to the fact - it is simply beyond dispute. One can read about the details and technicalities of the debate, but the fact remains a fact. So I think that is a much stronger argument than any other word-play about values, subjectivities etc.

[Tim Cornelis]

I heard a better variant of the mud pie:

"The value of labor comes from the goal it serves, not the other way around. Am I supposed to value Auschwitz because social labor went into it? No. It was an evil that never should have happened. Likewise, murder, rape, and battery involve the expenditure of labor time; am I supposed to value them? The labor theory of value is reductive and misleading, erroneous and uncritical [implied 'checkmate!']"

:crying::crying::crying::crying:

On an article pointing out exactly such a strawman of the LTV no less!

[Rafiq]

It's that these philistine bourgeois ideologues can't help themselves but bring moral connotations to words like "value", no less can they do so with "exploitation" or "dictatorship". They have to reduce our tradition to their narrowness in order to even translate, fathom a semblance of meaning of our theory.

This is owed to the fact that bourgeois ideology is incapable of sustaining a scientific designation of the last refuge of all that is holy and mystical: The social.