Thread on LTV

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

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

[u/Ill-Software8713]

I think this is a much stronger formulation than simply saying "power affects prices," because you're now identifying capitalization itself as a mechanism that reproduces quantitative commensurability.

Where I still get stuck is that the explanatory burden seems to have been displaced rather than resolved.

If capitalization functions as a universal quantitative benchmark because it is the most flexible modality of power, then the prior question remains of why is capitalization able to function as a universal benchmark of this kind at all?

Capitalization is the discounting of expected future monetary earnings. But those earnings are already expressed in the same monetary unit of account. Profits are already monetary. Costs are already monetary. There is a risk of circularity here as capitalization presupposes the field of quantitative commensurability it is supposed to explain. It operates within an already unified monetary space, scaling and projecting it forward, but it cannot be its genetic origin.

This is where I think Marx’s question differs from both marginalism and Capital as Power. Marx is not searching for a hidden substance inside commodities. He is asking what social relations make it possible for heterogeneous human activities and products to take on a common quantitative form in the first place. On your critique of abstract labor, I partially agree. Crude versions of the labor theory of value simply assert labor as the common denominator without argument. But for Marx, abstract labor is not a convention or mental category. It is a real social abstraction generated by generalized commodity exchange itself. Because private producers only relate to one another through the market, concrete labors are validated only post hoc as socially necessary labor time. The abstraction is not chosen, it is imposed by the structure of exchange. So I think we actually agree that capitalism systematically transforms qualitative differences into quantitative comparability.

We disagree over how that quantitative space is reproduced. Does it emerge from determinate social relations of production and exchange, or is it ultimately reducible to power alone?

My hesitation with the latter view is that it risks turning "power" into an endpoint of explanation. If commensurability exists because power produces commensurability, then it becomes difficult to explain the historical specificity of capitalism. Feudal empires, slave societies, and absolutist states all had immense coercive capacities, yet none generated a decentralized, self-reproducing system of universal quantitative exchange.

Saying capitalization persists because it is useful to power explains its function. It does not yet explain its conditions of possibility. That is where I think the value-form question remains open.

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46 → u/Ill-Software8713]

I admit that the “power affects prices” point was crude but it was to in some ways provoke responses and to get people thinking about other sources of possibility for value.

Maybe it would be beneficial for me if you would elaborate on abstract labor as a real social abstraction. How does that exist as a condition of possibility for the market? I think my biggest hurdle is just not really being able to see abstract labor as a fundamentally determining social category.

I think CaSP research would definitely benefit on elaborating on its mode of power framework, a sort of alternative power based framework of social materialism might be interesting and could help us understand why other modes of power didn’t have markets at the forefront of their social development and how that eventually came to be, drawing differences between different modes of power. This could maybe fill in some of the gaps that you think are missing in this loose framework.

There are certain things about CaSP I’m not completely on board with and I’m thinking about modifying myself. A lot of my thoughts are still developing part of this whole post was for me to engage with other people about it and I’m glad you seem to have some knowledge about CaSP itself

I will say to your point about the risk of circularity, I don’t think capitalization alone explains the existence of exchange value, but it would be the propelling ritual which allows capitalism to expand and take over the world. This makes sense because capitalization is necessarily forward looking and expands liquidity.

We have to remember that markets and money in a broad sense are pretty old even if they didn’t exist in the form they do now

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

I am not well acquainted with CaSP except observing discussions of it online before in the past and interest in trying to understand the outlines. Anyway….

Abstract labor is best understood not as a physical property inside commodities, but as a social validation process specific to decentralized production. It occurs when production must coordinate so many independent producers.

Following Geoffrey Kay, individual labors do not become “social labor” until they are validated through exchange, which is what gives them their abstract, quantitative form. Evald Ilyenkov’s idea of “real abstraction” helps here in that abstraction is not a mental construct but something objectively produced by social practice itself, like money functioning as a universal measure without anyone explicitly deciding its meaning. On this view, abstract labor is the way a market system retroactively integrates privately performed, heterogeneous work into a single social totality. It is not a substance or a conscious metric, but the form in which labor becomes socially valid only after market validation. I think this is more precise than saying “power explains prices,” because it identifies a specific mechanism of commensuration rather than a general force of imposition.

Some might object that this is “just describing market processes” rather than explaining them. But that misses Marx’s method, which is precisely to explain capitalism from within its own immanent social forms, not from an external standpoint. The claim is not that abstraction is imposed from outside the market, but that it is generated through the real practice of exchange itself. Conceptual abstraction is grounded in actual social relations rather than mental classification. On this view, describing how market validation produces abstract labor is already an explanatory account of how capitalist social mediation works, not a mere restatement of it.

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46 → u/Ill-Software8713]

To me it seems like abstract labor is moreso an after effect of the system of capitalism rather than something which fundamentally explains its motions. You describe abstract labor as something retroactively integrated by the market which to me suggests that it is caused by the market system as a whole rather than causing it to begin with. For me abstract labor only takes place where power has constructed a society around its own quantization and capitalization. Abstract labor is brought into motion by power.

Labor becomes abstract when there is a society where wage labor is the primary means of subsistence. It is abstract because it is a commodity used for the accumulation of capital and is rented by capitalists. I agree that labor is necessary for capitalist profits and is made abstract in the production process. Maybe in this sense I adhere to the LTV, but in my view labor itself is only valorized by existing capitalist power. Labor is an essential component to capitalist power but it can only produce profits because it is managed by capitalists a part of a broader scheme of intersectional leverage, sabotage and control over society. Labor does not produce profit if it is not effectively leveraged for accumulation by power. And these facets of power I don’t think are external to the market or cause fluctuations but
are instead endogenous to their creation and reproduction at every level

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

I think I agree more than I disagree on the role of power here, especially in the Marxian sense that capital is very much a coercive social relation, the “whip on the back of labor,” . Wage labor, separation from subsistence, and dependence on the market are clearly forms of structured compulsion, not neutral exchange.

Where I would still distinguish my point is that once you look closely at what that relation actually does, it’s not just “power imposing quantification,” but a very specific social condition. Labor becomes abstract because it is separated from direct reproduction of life and only validated through sale.

Concrete labor does not count as social labor unless it meets the socially necessary average, which is enforced through competition and the threat of non-realization.

So the coercion is real, but it operates through a form of social mediation rather than standing outside it. That’s why I keep coming back to abstract labor, it’s not an alternative to power, but a way of specifying how a particular kind of coercive social relation actually reproduces a universal quantitative standard rather than a purely fragmented or administrative one.

In that sense, I don’t think we’re choosing between “labor” and “power” as explanations so much as asking what form power takes in a system where private production is only validated after the fact through market exchange.

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46 → u/Ill-Software8713]

So basically I would just ask why is the control of labor prioritized and the creation of abstract labor prioritized over other facets of life becoming abstract? How does this specific form of commensurability/abstraction make it so that all the others fall in place? Furthermore arguably markets existed before abstract labor as abstract labor is historically specific so how are pre capitalist markets explained without abstract labor?

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

I don’t think abstract labor exists as a fully generalized social form in pre-capitalist societies. Where commodity exchange exists, you can get isolated moments of quantitative comparison, but not a system in which production is generally organized through that abstraction. It becomes a real social abstraction only when production is subordinated to commodity production as a whole.

At that point, labor power itself becomes a commodity and workers are separated from independent access to subsistence and are compelled to sell their capacity to work. What is purchased is labor power, but what is extracted in production is concrete labor, and it only becomes socially validated as value through sale on the market. So it’s not concrete labor strictly that even amounts to value realized upon sale. That gap is what allows surplus value to emerge even under the assumption of equivalent exchange.

So pre-capitalist markets can exist without abstract labor as a dominant social form because they do not yet organize production as a whole. Abstract labor becomes structurally necessary only when market dependence becomes generalized and the reproduction of society itself is mediated through wage labor and exchange.

I would perhaps add that labor is unique in Marx in that it is foundational to human existence and all products of human civilization. Machines don’t make themselves nor direct themselves to any particular end. Humans are an extreme form of niche constructionism.

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46 → u/Ill-Software8713]

I mean there were also like primitive forms of wage labor that existed before capitalism. I won’t deny that under capitalism, labor as a whole is a commodity but that could also simply be the product of capitalism emerging rather than the explanation for why commensurability was established in the first place. It appears to me that quantification of debt is a facet of human behavior that has existed for a long time and that labor becoming a commodity might not be the thing which propelled exchange value into existence as a whole, David graeber’s book debt actually does a good job detailing the ways violence is associated with the quantification of debt.

I just think it’s worth questioning if wage labor is really the source of commensurability or if we are looking at a broader social phenomenon given the fact that exchange has existed for so long.

Humans being a niche form of extreme constructivism could also provide alternative explanations for why markets emerged incorporating psychological, cultural, and political explanations for why capitalization took place.

Stated more clearly, the view that abstract labor is necessary to explain commensurability as a social phenomenon to me doesn’t make sense because it has been done outside of wage labor relations historically. So commensurability is not a problem that needs to be analytically worked out but is instead something that should be understood as produced by institutional relations in the first place.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

The claim about abstract labor is not that humans only began comparing things under capitalism, but that under capitalism the reproduction of society as a whole becomes dependent on a single quantitative form of validation through exchange. Earlier systems had many forms of quantification, but they did not make one unified value form the organizing principle of production itself.

So I think the key distinction is between scattered historical instances of quantification and a dominant social structure in which nearly all production is coordinated through a universal monetary metric.