Labor theory of value does have issues, but I don't think it can be so neatly dismissed either as alternatives appear to have vague criteria for what contributes to value.
I trade my time at work to sit at a comfy desk and type for money, and that is work. And I will negotiate for more time and money so that I may spend more time lifting heavy things at a gym. Funnily enough that is leisure and it costs me money. It is in the asymmetry of needs that we create excess value by working for each other taking care of the things they do not want to do for themselves.
Labor theory makes no sense in how people actually choose to go about their lives. Which is why modern economics is so focused on how to just maximise as much generic utility out of a market. And it is usually Marxists who are actually the most obsessed about counting up the little green slips of paper that don't mean anything.
You reference Hegel, but it is specifically his idea that progress is inevitable. Which is exactly why I reject Marx. Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed. But Marx was a leech who counted on his friends for his subsistence and others to actually test his ideas. Progress is only made by intentional and planned efforts to deal with problems rather than just criticize and shake your fist at society.
You're taking ideas out of your pants and putting on Marx's mouth. At least be honest and say you never read him and hate his ideas without knowing what they are.
The closest he got to describing a post-capitalist state was the very bleak "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" concept.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.
But it turns out that, after a socialist revolution, who is going to make the bread and who is going to distribute it is not a problem that will inevitably be solved.
Marx was, I think, of a very different mind about revolution than many of his later followers: I suspect that to Marx, a “socialist revolution” was more like the Industrial Revolution and less like the French (or, perhaps more to the point, Russian) Revolution.
Marx wasn't against providing concrete steps addressing coherent real issues adapted to the conditions in particular places (see the program for the German Communists that is often presented as an appendix to the Communist Manifesto). But the utopian end-state society was, in Marx’s view, rather far off.
No, the point is that he's not talking about a particular system. The famous soundbite from The German Ideology:
> Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
Communism, for Marx, is the thing that beats capitalism, and he's only willing to make claims about it that he thinks follow from that. He believes it will lack the features of capitalism that undermine its long term stability, and do a better job than capitalism of accomplishing the things that a mode of production needs to do to win out over others (namely, producing things), but anything more than that cannot be predicted decades-to-centuries out. Things will need to be administered, but they're not going to be administered by him, or in circumstances he can predict.
Consider feudalism. An educated Frenchman in 1700 could reasonably think that feudalism was on the way out, that it would probably mean the displacement of the aristocracy by the emerging bourgeoisie, that it would not have a patchwork legal system built out of a thousand years of accumulated hereditary agreements and local precedent, that it would professionalize government to some degree, that it would do a better job of maintaining a professional military, and so on. But they had no chance whatsoever of predicting the structure of the Federal Reserve, and it would be insane of them to claim otherwise.
Excuse me? The overwhelming majority of Marx's published work was literally advocacy of concrete plans.
See his work with the International Workingmen's Association for some of the most well-known letters and articles arguing for explicit political positions and concrete labor actions: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/iwma/index....
For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
But here's a deeper dismissal for you anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_...
it even conveniently brings up your doge argument
The labor theory of value was accepted wisdom prior to the late 19th century: it originates with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It's wrong (or more accurately, not a good conceptual framework) but it's not obviously wrong, let alone "idiotic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value
There's no reason to believe that Smith wouldn't have latched onto the much better solution. So being hell-bent on the incomplete answer from the 1700s is a unique peculiarity of Marxist theory.
Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.
Based on Marx's own flawed logic! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-05-02
How much is a glass of water worth? Should it change if it takes me 5 seconds or 5 years to procure? Using labor theory to assign value makes no sense and is not a workable model for anything for anything other than justifying Marx's own circular logic.
Honestly it reminds me of like Marx's non-rigorous "eh whatever" approach to dividing by zero in his mathematical work. While one can define division by zero in non-standard analysis, that involves some actual rigor in how your treat it according to your definitions, not just shrugging your shoulders and doing it.
Can't speak to the division by zero, but it doesn't come up in any of Marx important work. His mathematical manuscripts don't have any significant relationship to his work on political economy.
The revolutionary approaches have not succeeded thus far, granted. There is a branch of Marxism about revolution, but what we're talking about here is a description of capitalism. Marxist revolutionary activities have nothing to do with how potent that analysis is.
the free market assigns the value created by laborers. it's as simple as that. the buyer wouldn't get this value in their life, at a price the market decided they pay, without the work of the laborer. the value wouldn't be created without the laborer, or any of the capital or tools that it took to create labor (since labor created the capital and the tools). much like machines, it's labor all the way down.
> it's labor all the way down
This is completely orthogonal to value. Sure things wouldn't exist without people to make them. That doesn't mean that the labor it takes to make something constitutes its value.
i feel you and the other poster are mybe talking past each other..
$1 banknote is equal to $10000000 banknote in labor.
No it's not. For one, it can only assign values to things which are actually exchanged. When you look at things on the scale of states, this isn't always a possibility. You can't put the ISS on craigslist and see what it sells for.