The market prices are one thing, at equalibrium the excess value would be labor, the profits in it has no value.
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OTC, people pay for commodities above the price of the raw materials because that is their market price, not because abstract labor somehow inheres in it. The excess value in the commodity is profit; there is no quantifiable commeasurabllity between differences in labor hours or types of labor; prices are not determined by some objective standard of abstract labor.
Eppur si muove -- Galileo Galilei
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The market prices are one thing, at equalibrium the excess value would be labor, the profits in it has no value.
Markets fluctuate all the time; there is no equilibrium.
Eppur si muove -- Galileo Galilei
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It seems my arguments have reached this thread before me.
Essentially this. Marx's proof of the value theory is twofold. On the one hand we have the deduction made from the basic act of commodity exchange, and on the other hand there is the proof based on the analysis of the historical preconditions for the wealth of society to appear in the form of commodities. This is brought at length in Isaak Rubin's Essays on Marx's Theory of Value (Available on MIA), although the same result can also be achieved by a close reading of the first chapters of Das Kapital and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
Essentially yes, once we grasp the idea that value is a social relation of production between independent commodity producers, the labour theory of value becomes an obvious tautology. Marx himself never actually talked about a 'labour theory of value', merely value. For this same reason, the competing 'theories of value' of the Marginalists and Austrians are not actually competing theories of value, as they do not talk about value in Marx's sense of a social relation between producers, but instead talk about individual evaluations.
I actually have to agree with trivas7 here. If the prices of all commodities were directly proportional to their labour values then it would be a simple matter for the government to merely fix all prices in accordance with the amount of labour-hours it took to produce goods, in accordance with the various Proudhonist schemes of 'labour-money'. Now what this ignores is the role that price plays in the capitalist economy as a signal to the producers as to whether they are performing labour-time over that recquired by society. If this is so, their prices will be too high and people will be unwilling to pay for their goods, and they will be forced to lower their prices. In Volume III Marx reveals that the assumption made in Volume I that price is proportional to value was merely a simplifying assumption which contained the underlying assumption that supply was equal to demand in all sectors of the economy (Which of course is not true).
Last edited by Zanthorus; 29th January 2011 at 23:59.
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
So price is a means to determine where to distribute value?
There are several errors in the posts above. In Marxian economics, the value of a commodity is the average line about which the instantaneous price fluctuates. Supply and demand make the price fluctuate, but the average line represents the brief moments when the upward offsets and downward offsets cancel out. Marx asserted that this average line generally tracks with the labor time made necessary by present production methods.
its a logical argument, i.e. all things being equal, its a method used in many of the sciences.
This is not something I've worked out in detail, but from my perspective the important part of Marx's analysis is that total price = total value. Once this is admitted, then the continuation of Marx's analysis of bourgeois production from chapter four of volume I onwards follows whether or not the price of individual commodities conform to their values.
"From the relationship of estranged labor to private property it follows further that the emancipation of society from private property, etc., from servitude, is expressed in the political form of the emancipation of the workers; not that their emancipation alone is at stake, but because the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation – and it contains this because the whole of human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all relations of servitude are but modifications and consequences of this relation."
- Karl Marx -
This would appear to be more or less equivalent to saying that the amount of products exchanged is limited by the amount of products produced for exchange, which isn't too complex. If the total social use-values produced by a society were 20 doors, 2 cars and 5 windows, and each of these took 1 hour to produce, and were exchanged, it is fairly evident that the 20 doors could not be exchanged for 2 hours' product without on the other side two hours' product exchanging for one hour's, and hence on aggregate each hour of labour purchasing one hour of labour.
Otherwise, Zanthorus is right as regards theories of value. Marx does define value in terms of abstract labour, which makes it somewhat bemusing when people purporting to have read Marx claim that his 'labour theory of value' was flawed, and should be replaced with a different 'theory of value'.
No, prices fluctuate around prices of production.
That can't be true. That would mean that the most typical situation is for a company to stay in business by breaking even and not making any profit. It would also mean that half of the production continues sustainably while capitalists take a loss. The center of the fluctuation in the product price has to be a separate number that correlates with the cost of production, not the cost of production itself.
This is assuming that the workers are fairly paid would it not? Isn't that one of our biggest criticisms, that workers are exploited and NOT paid fairly for their labour?
I said 'price of production', which equals cost-price plus average rate of profit. It's a fairly well-known part of Marx's analysis in the third volume of Capital.
Does this essentially mirror what I said? The average rate of profit being the unpaid labour I referenced?
I'm unfamiliar with the term 'price of production', but then your phrase "prices fluctuate around prices of production" has common units, such as dollars and dollars. If we have common units then we have a tautology: the dollars that buyers paid the capitalist equals the dollars that the capitalist collected from the buyers. Marx is making an assertion about things that have different units. His assertion is that there is a link between something in units of hours that happens during the making of the product and something in units of dollars that happens at the marketplace for the product.
Not to be a selfish, but was my kind of rusty explination wrong? Not in like with the LTOV? Am I missing something?
Honestly, I just flat out didn't understand what you were saying so I didn't bother to comment.
bah, forget it, I better jut stay out of these marxist discussions then, stick to what I'm good at.
On aggregate, total price equals total value. Individual prices, however, fluctuate around prices of production, not individual values, due to differing compositions of capital. This is the point of Marx's examination of the tendency towards equalization of the rate of profit in volume III of Capital.
It's funny. I go on right wing sites and see leftists/centrists make reasoned impassioned debate, laying out arguments. Sometimes they are well structured and thought-out. Sometimes they are not.
I come on here and I mostly see right wingers throw out one liner assertions as if they are true merely because they said it. Rarely do I see them try to argue or defend their positions.
Then I go back to those righty sites and see threads like "need help arguing against x socialist/statist position."
They just take what their superiors give them and spew it back, line for line. For all their talk of individuality, they tend to be not very keen to individual reflection and studiosness.
Z, in Wage Labour and Capital though, he explains that supply and demand are limited by the cost of production; that when demand for a commodity is high, capital immigrates into the promising industry until there is overproduction and the cost of production is less than the yield of returns at which point there is capital emmigration. The underlying reasoning is that periods of high supply/low demand/costs below the cost of production are matched with periods of low supply/high demand/costs above the cost of production. So hypothetically then, doesn't this mean that the overall effect is that periods of high supply/low demand cancel out periods of low supply/high demand? Under this case, the only variable left is the cost of production which can easily be calculated according to the socially necessary labour time of producers.
I suppose the reason why governments cannot price commodities according to the LTV is because of the massive diversity of economic activity and the relative impossibility for a government to calculate the socially necessary labour time across a society; under socialism though, there would be a free flow of information between producers' cooperatives and autonomous communities making these calculations far easier, no?
*I am asking you for your "enlightened guidance"*
I have to say, on this forum this is true quite a bit. I have been on other politically neutral forums though where the rightists are far more logically consistent in their arguments but the amazingly vulgar one liners that are just thrown around by rightists on this particular site literally amaze me. I don't claim to be all-knowing myself but at least I make structured arguments and expand on my points (some of those points are possibly uninformed, I will admit but they are at least well developed).
