Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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(EDIT: Perhaps the downvoter would care to give a counter-argument for why the LTV is a pre-requisite for Marx political ideology?)

I don't see what it is you believe relies on the labor theory of value.

Marx theories span a wide range, but certainly his political ideology did not in any way rely on the labor theory of value to underpin it, and it is something most people advocating Marxism don't even know or understand very well.

What it does rely on is whether Marx hypothesis that capitalism will necessarily self destruct as it reaches the limits of market expansion is correct (no more people living out of reach of capitalist competition). Marx expected this to happen by forcing capitalists into ever harsher competition and automation at the cost of starting to throw workers back into poverty and as a result pulling the rug out under their own markets, eventually leading to sufficient social upheaval to drive the working classes to revolution.

It further relies on Marx hypothesis that upon the self destruction of capitalism, that the working classes can end the class struggle by seizing control and redistributing wealth and the control of the means of production.

The LTV is used by Marx as justification for why some of this is "right", but at the same time Marx theories on the political and economic development of society does not rest on right and wrong, but on how the self-interests of the members of the various classes affects society as the economic development alters the relative powers of these classes.

There are plenty things that can be wrong in these theories, but whether or not the LTV is right or not is an entirely orthogonal issue.

I'll try to summarize why the LTV is so intrinsic to Marxist analysis. Marx's basic argument in Capital is that labor is what creates value in capital goods. The argument goes like this: if no labor is added to capital goods they eventually rot and become worthless and cease to be a capital good at all. Thus labor is at the heart of what drives value because what gives something value is labor time stored within it. This is at the heart of the exploitation of the workers because the capitalist gets this return without having spent any of their own time to build and develop the capital and they pay less than the value of the capital goods to the workers who made the goods in the first place.

Understanding the employee/employer relationship is at heart of understanding capital and the returns capital receive over time. The employee is paid in advance of sales (most of the time) and thus the employer shoulders the risk of those sales never materializing in the first place. To compensate employers for that risk, employees are paid less than the full output of their labor. As we know wages are not taken back if the product or service they were developing was never sold. It's a mutually beneficial relationship that explains profits in a way that does not involve exploitation but rather mutually beneficial exchange.

If there is no exploitation you don't have Marxism in the first place. This is a very basic summary of "Karl Marx and the Close of His System".

> Marx's basic argument in Capital is that labor is what creates value in capital goods.

Capital is an economic work which is of minor relevance to his political ideologies. It tries to explain and provide theories that certainly would support some of his political views if true, but Capital is not a pre-requisite for the political ideology (in as much as there's a large number of other possible theories that could equally provide justifications for the political ideology).

> If there is no exploitation you don't have Marxism in the first place

That's simply not true at all. For the political ideology, the concept of exploitation is merely one of many arguments used to justify why the working class should consider it morally acceptable to overthrow the capitalist regime. It was realpolitik.

It's worth noting that Marx' philosophical works are far more "capitalist friendly" than most modern day socialists, for example. Marx may have talked about exploitation, but he also talked about these structures as equally binding the capitalist into a role he could not escape, and spoke with admiration about the development the growth of capitalism was creating. After all, according to Marx, the growth of capitalism is what will make socialism possible. But those bits don't get people out in the streets. Talk of exploitation does. And so Marx-the-politician was far more aggressive in terms of language than Marx-the-economist or Marx-the-philosopher.

The subjective view of the working classes on whether or not there is exploitation is the only thing that ultimately matters in the context of his political ideology, and even then only because it has historically been an effective recruitment factor.

Other than that, the presence or absence of exploitation is relatively irrelevant to Marxism. Marx ideas about the structural development of social and economic systems and inevitability of socialism, for example, does not rest on exploitation, but on whether or not capitalism eventually will develop to a state where it causes sufficient social upheaval to be a catalyst for new revolutionary movements amongst the working classes, and whether or not the structure of this will lead to a socialist system.

> Marx expected this to happen by forcing capitalists into ever harsher competition and automation at the cost of starting to throw workers back into poverty

His analysis of this in Capital uses the LTV as a base assumption. Under the LTV, capital profit is "surplus value" that is driven down by competition, and capitalists cannot exist as a social class once their surplus value fails to exceed their personal labor cost. Marx was very proud of this claim, and bragged in a letter to Engels that he had "proven" this historical inevitability.

Like most economic models, they cease to be correct when the premises fail.

The point is that the LTV is not a critical premise for the hypotheses underlying his political ideologies, but one possible theory for a mechanism that if correct would certainly provide some degree of evidence for parts of those hypotheses, but which is just one of many possible such mechanisms.

Disproving/invalidating the LTV does no more disprove the claims underlying Marx political ideology than disproving one meterological model would be sufficient to say I'm wrong if I say it'll rain tomorrow.

If you want to attack the validity of his ideas regarding the long term viability of capitalism, there are many possible approaches, but the LTV is a sideshow.

It's a strange world you live in where a political theory can be both fundamentally unsound in theory and disastrously, murderously false in practice, but worth considering anyway. I don't want to spend any more mental cycles on understanding your world.

It's a strange world you live in where invalidating one possible explanation for predictions made as part of a political theory is sufficient to invalidate every possible explanation.

As for being "disastrously, murderously false in practice", the only thing this demonstrates is that you are conflating Marxism-Leninism and Marxism.

Lenin devoted years to revisionism and campaigning to justify how Russia could break central tenets of Marxism and successfully transition to socialism without first going through a capitalist phase. Even then, he was left with having to carry out a coup in the October "revolution", overthrowing not the former oppressive Czarist regime, but the democratically elected socialist interrim-government (SR and the Mensheviks making up the bulk; both were hunted down over the following years), after it was clear that contrary to Lenins theories, Russias landless peasants did not rise up to join the working classes (the Bolsheviks got the support of about 10%; mostly based in the big cities - this was prompty explained away as the result of counter-revolutionaries etc.)

While this does not prove Marx is/was right, the abject failure of the SSSR was directly in line with Marx theories. Already from 1845, a central portion of his thesis was that a pre-requisite for a successful socialist revolution would be a well developed capitalist economy where redistribution would not merely lead to making poverty common, as well as the working classes making up a substantial majority of the population. Neither were true for Russia, nor for any of the other countries where Leninist inspired groups tried to carry out revolutions.

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