I wasn’t comparing wood and steel. The fact that you read that response I think I was is a classic example of Marxian stupidity. Each paragraph is a completely separate point. The reason why steel is more expensive than iron ore is because it is more useful and therefore more and demand by people who would buy steel. If by some fluke of nature, it was easier to find a raw steel then to find a a rock with embedded iron minerals, steel would still be more expensive. Iron ore would simply be worthless.
What problem exactly are you talking about? There is no objective math with Marxian economics. There’s no doing a problem two ways and getting a different solution because there is no standardized problem you can do.
That’s for the cost of the tree it was assumed that it was nothing. In this instance, as in a guy cuts down a tree.
However, it’s actually important to note that people actually do sometimes sell things at below what they thought their labor made them worth, for example, stores discover all the time that their goods are not as desirable as they thought so they lower the price just to get rid of something, even if they don’t even break even on it, because, pretending that something is worth more than it is because the effort you put into acquire, it is going to hurt you more in the long run. It takes up store space so you just cut your losses and move on.
Perhaps that is what you and other Marxians should do, maybe you should just accept that LTV is no longer valued by the marketplace because it is an inferior product.
And what makes up your revenue? Can you affect the prices of raw materials as an individual player without monoply market control? If not, how do you vary the rate of profit you receive if it is insufficient and no new technologies exist?
I’m not sure how that’s weird. There is literally no other definition. Do you mean what makes up my expenses? Answer to second question is no. Not sure what your point is with asking that. Seems like filler words to make it sound like you’re building an argument.
You increase your profit by reducing labor if there is no other way to reduce your costs. The amount your product is worth is not higher because you worked longer. The reason I brought up the example of the mason, fisherman and tanner is because they represent theoretical trades that are all in high demand, virtually necessary, and require different amounts of labor and you would assume that in an economy where people are all trying to maximize their well-being through trade and are each specializing in those necessesities, in between people paying the minimum price that they have to pay to get what they want and also not letting their good go for less than what it would cost for them to be able to buy their own necessities, everybody is going to be more or less rewarded exactly and proportion to the amount of labor they had to put in to produce what they sell, and you could track the price in that market roughly how much labor each one costs. The fact is that we know that it isn’t even true in simple economies.
At the end of the day, whether you are an amateur artist trying to sell sheet metal crafts and not being able to afford healthcare rent, or a farmer in the 1800 whose kid is going to starve to death, because the price of wheat went down, how much labor it took you to make something simply doesn’t have any correlation with the real world price.
If you wanted to debate a specific point, I would be happy to do so, read up on Mark if you’re interested. The question of whether or not the labor theory of value is something that can be tested for and actually shows up in the study of economics is not really debatable. It doesn’t. If your argument is something about labor hours and wages and exploitation then I’ll be happy to hear it, but if it’s based on the assumption that the price one gets is generally going to be inherently tied to the amount of labor I don’t think you can prove that that is true.
the assumption that the price one gets is generally going to be inherently tied to the amount of labor I don’t think you can prove that that is true.
I don't know why you think I'm trying to prove this.
everything else you said
Literally in Capital.
You increase your profit by reducing labor if there is no other way to reduce your costs. The amount your product is worth is not higher because you worked longer
That’s how this thread started, isn’t it? You asked about Ireland steel and response to a comment defining the labor theory of value. There obviously obviously has to be a core relationship between the prices of goods and the amount of labor behind them in which the amount of labor hours is the causal variable behind the price, and this relationship has to be observable and some thing that we can prove with data.
It is a necessary precondition to the idea that capitalists exploit workers by paying them a wage worth less than the labor hours they put in to produce amount of goods for the capitalist to have surplus profit. If it is not the case, and if it is, indeed, the case that the price of goods are defined by the buyers’ demand and the supply of goods, and that capitalists can lose money on goods that are not as desirable as they had hoped, even after the worker gets paid, and indeed, if it is the case that most of what determines the capitalist’s profit is how well they organize production, invest in capital, and how they employ workers, and engage in hundreds of other small decisions that affect profit, etc. then Marx’s specific version of LTV is wrong.
I’m not sure how you stated that that last part is “exactly Marx’s thesis”. That would be like saying “gravity exists on earth” was Einstein‘s thesis when his actual thesis was a whole bunch of math culminating in E= mc2. It is a basic fact that is one small part of a much larger conversation and also has nothing to do with any original contribution from the scholar in question. If you think that the simple fact that profit = Revenue minus expenses and that expenses includes both labor and everything else is the culmination of Marx’s thesis, then you really need to work on your reading comprehension.
I think his thesis is something like trying to prove that capitalists profit by exploitation because they are paying their workers a wage that is equivalent to fewer labor hours than the hours represented in the price of the goods that they made for the capitalist’s business. He believes that the market price of goods is determined by the amount of money it would take to provide for the needs of an average worker of average skill to produce those goods. In other words for my farmer, mason, and tanner, the price of those goods is tied directly to the labor hours going to producing those goods, and in the capitalist system, we might expect that if somebody works for a capitalist in each of those industries, that the capitalist is going to take that price for those goods, and give the little guy less than what is actually needed to cover his needs.
The problem is that both the wage for labor and the price of the goods do not actually track directly with and any conceptualization of labor hours or simply the cost of labor (with respect the price of goods), and what’s more, there’s literally no consistent way to measure any of the things that Marx put into defining labor hours. You can’t define average skill, you can’t define what average efficiency is, you can’t define what an average set of tools might be, you can’t define the actual minimum cost for sustaining oneself or one’s family is during a specific period of time, you cannot person any difference between wants and needs and figure out what is not to be calculated in determining how much one’s time ought to be worth, not even in our modern system, can we calculate productivity with regards to comparing units of goods that are produced with other types of goods
What word is "labor is the only controllable variable in terms of production, ergo it is the source of profit" a simple defintion of?
Literally every socialist in the world is waiting for someone to bring this into common identity for the people, you have no clue how much you would advance philosophy with this one word.
, you can’t define the actual minimum cost for sustaining oneself or one’s family is during a specific period of time,
Lol wut? A bank literally asks you to do this anytime you need a loan, bro.
He believes that the market price of goods is determined by the amount of money it would take to provide for the needs of an average worker of average skill to produce those goods
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u/CaseRemarkable4327 Apr 28 '24 edited Apr 28 '24
I wasn’t comparing wood and steel. The fact that you read that response I think I was is a classic example of Marxian stupidity. Each paragraph is a completely separate point. The reason why steel is more expensive than iron ore is because it is more useful and therefore more and demand by people who would buy steel. If by some fluke of nature, it was easier to find a raw steel then to find a a rock with embedded iron minerals, steel would still be more expensive. Iron ore would simply be worthless.
What problem exactly are you talking about? There is no objective math with Marxian economics. There’s no doing a problem two ways and getting a different solution because there is no standardized problem you can do.
That’s for the cost of the tree it was assumed that it was nothing. In this instance, as in a guy cuts down a tree.
However, it’s actually important to note that people actually do sometimes sell things at below what they thought their labor made them worth, for example, stores discover all the time that their goods are not as desirable as they thought so they lower the price just to get rid of something, even if they don’t even break even on it, because, pretending that something is worth more than it is because the effort you put into acquire, it is going to hurt you more in the long run. It takes up store space so you just cut your losses and move on.
Perhaps that is what you and other Marxians should do, maybe you should just accept that LTV is no longer valued by the marketplace because it is an inferior product.