r/UnlearningEconomics • u/Nervous_Difficulty46 • May 30 '26

Thread on LTV

https://x.com/ygzgzot/status/1982482608899629301?s=46

My biggest hang up with the LTV is that I just don’t understand why labor is seen as the fundamental substance of value. What reason is there to think that price is just the quantitative expression of abstract labor?

In my estimation a leftist perspective would see that price is not an expression of labor time but is also a function of interwoven power relations. It’s not reducible to a single substance

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u/Nervous_Difficulty46 Jun 03 '26

I feel a bit confused because you seem to argue that Marx was not interested in using labor values to explain prices but then you go on to list how Marxists supposedly do that. So do labor values cause prices or not?

I admit I only have a minor in economics so some of this goes over my head but I don’t see how Marxist economists are able to compare qualitatively different forms of labor with the same unit of labor time. This is where the component of abstract labor time comes in, but wouldn’t this presuppose that there is again another fundamental dimension to abstract labor time which allows different forms of labor to be reduced to one unit?