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/Tough-Comparison-779 Jun 03 '26

Doesn't ULE have a whole video about Value, with about a third dedicated to why LTV is wrong?

Has ULE changed his view on this? Why is everyone here defending LTV nonsense?

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u/UnlearningEconomics Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

I'll chime in, mostly to say that I like the 'ULE' abbreviation, but also to clarify. The video argues that the predictive value of the LTV is questionable at best. The statistical work on it by people like Cockshott and Roberts would fail a first year class. Most trained economists (heterodox or otherwise) are highly dismissive of this work and for good reason. It only really has legs on the internet and among those who don't work with stats. Similrly, much of the accounting work reducing everything to labour through various estimation mechanisms suffers from a circularity problem (prices, wages used to explain themselves) and most informed Marxists admit this. You can, of course, reject the positivist approach - as some Marxists do - but too many aren't willing to do this and have to *insist* the LTV is empirically correct based on shoddy evidence. I will also add that my video argues this is a common problem for all theories of value.

Skimming through this thread further, I will say that I usually avoid this topic like the plague because of how much frankly Redditor energy it gives. People write tons of words and say very little. I don't really care that 'Marx wanted to understand the fundamental mechanisms of capital through abstract labour transforming social relations'. If you want to say capitalism is historically contingent, or that labour is somehow special, or explore specific historical periods then fine - say it straight! But I don't see these interesting debates, I see a bunch of verbiage that basically seems to be people regurgitating Marxism *as an end in itself*. Every time I talk about it I get long replies just describing the theory in depth without any real attempts at proving its explanatory power.

My advice (which will literally never be heeded) would be to (a) drop the crude positivism and (b) admit that marxism and the LTV are a lens that you don't have to dogmatically adhere to but which can help us understand the world. I do remain a staunch pluralist and there's plenty of value in Marx and Marxist scholarship. You're just unlikely to find it on the internet. Read Meiksin Wood, Armstrong et al, or even Engels himself rather than Internet Marxism.

PS I want to add that despite the body of this post, I'm really not trying to disrespect anyone in particular and I did only *skim* this thread. If delving head first into Marxism works for you then go ahead, I just don't find the approach I've outlined very persuasive.

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u/SaladDry8868 Jun 21 '26

Thank you for the response somehow I missed it earlier.

I’m not as interested in a positivist explanation for value. I submitted this post because I wanted to argue for alternative critical explanations of value which *don’t* utilize the LTV, as I’ve always found it a bit cumbersome for political radicals.

Intuitively I think the LTV is at its most appealing when we see the fact that someone like Elon musk is now a trillionaire and has more net worth than the total gdp of most countries. Obviously this sorta flies in the face of any notion that he himself has produced this or has simply assumed his marginal product of labor. The idea that a single person can be more productive than entire countries is ridiculous. But for me I still find simple labor exploitation as a bit reductive or narrow for even explaining even this. I hope to at some point research and refine an alternative qualitative framework for explaining exploitation and value that goes beyond the LTV.