[Wellsy]

Natural resources -- ~99.99999999999999999999% of the universe -- are not, repeat, NOT man-made, and their value proves the Labor Theory of Value is objectively false.

Get wrecked Marx, how could he not have considered use-values given by nature omfg! #LaborAin'tShit.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm

First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

- Some idiot probably, May 1875.

[Rancid]

Value Value Value Value Value Value Value
Things things things things things things things things things
Production production production production production production production production
Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price Price

[Truth To Power]

Sorry Philosopher King TtP, I didn't comprehend the strength of your argument in slamming together concepts like a child smashing toy cars together.

You cannot refute it, so you have to evade, scorn, dismiss, misrepresent, ridicule, deride and mischaracterize it. Simple.

I will now reflect on your comments further and be compelled by comprehension to the truth.

No you won't:

Ah yes, Landowners et al. exploit producers. Thank you for clarifying.

See? Landowners and other privilege holders do exploit producers; but more importantly, they force producers into a disadvantageous position that makes it both possible and inevitable that others who are not privileged will exploit them. That is why naive, confused, and shallow thinkers like Marx and socialists blame the factory owner for what landowners do to workers.

Suppose there is a greengrocer who is being extorted by a protection racket. The racketeer gives him until the close of business today to come up with the payment. To get the cash, the greengrocer puts everything on sale for half price -- in the last hour, 1/4 price. As a result, although he makes the extortion payment, his business cannot prosper, as he can't pay for enough new inventory. Marxist-socialist theory holds that it is the greengrocer's customers who innocently take advantage of the greengrocer's predicament to get bargain-priced fruit and vegetables who are to blame for the failure of his business, not the racketeer.

Now of course it was known well before Marx's time that supply and demand were the immediate determinants of actual market phenomena. But even classical political economy was aware that over the course of time the ceaselessly fluctuating interplay of supply and demand was itself regulated by a much more fundamental principle: the Law of Equal Profitability.

Which is like the Law of Equal Economics Ability in not existing.

For instance, if as a result of m3;rket conditions a particular sector's rate of profit rose above the average rate, then the flow of capital would tend to be biased towards that sector, causing it to grow more rapidly than demand, and driving down its market price to a level consistent with average profitability.

Except for that pesky natural resource market, where higher profits attract more investment chasing fixed supply, and prices rise...

Conversely, the sectors with low profitability would tend to grow less rapidly than demand, causing their prices and profitability to rise.

Except that low profitability often means declining demand, and as suppliers tend to want to stay in business even when they lose money, prices and profitability fall.

The classical economists were thus able to demonstrate that behind the continuously varying constellation of market prices there lay another set of prices, acting as "centers of gravity" of market prices and embodying more or less equal rates of profit. The name given to these regulating prices in classical political economy was natural prices; Marx calls them prices of production. Their discovery was the first great law of prices.

In the real world, there are more and less competitive markets. In the most competitive markets, prices tend to approach production cost regardless of profitability. In uncompetitive markets, prices tend to approach the monopolistic price regardless of profitability.

By David Ricardo's time, the problem had moved on to a higher level. What Ricardo sought to do, for instance, was to go one step further and look behind prices of production themselves, to discover their "centers of gravity." That is, just as the market price of a commodity was shown to be regulated by its price of production,

Jevons demolished that misconception by pointing out that in fact, it is the other way around: market value determines how much producers are willing to spend to make the product.

Ricardo sought to show that this regulating price was itself subject to a hidden regulator- the total quantity of labor time required to produce the commodity, both in its direct production and in the production of its means of production.

Except that one of the means of production -- natural resources -- is not produced at all. It is merely appropriated, which invalidates the entire labor-based analysis.

...The total quantity of labor time was the center of gravity of the commodity's price of production, just as this price of production was itself the center of gravity of its market price. This was Ricardo's attempt to formulate a second great law of prices.

Which failed. Production does not have a price other than what it sells for. It has costs. Two different things.

What Ricardo perceived was that there was an intrinsic connection between the "quantitative worth," the exchange-value, of commodities, and the total labor-time required for their production. 24 This, according to Marx, was RJcardo's great scientit1c merit?5

But Jevons showed what that connection actually consists of, conclusively debunking Ricardo, Marx, and the Labor Theory of Value.

But at the same time Ricardo was trapped by the conceptual framework of bourgeois political economy, which saw all production as being alike. He was consequently unable to distinguish concrete labor, an aspect of all social production, from abstract labor, an aspect which only commodity producing labor takes on.

Marxist gibberish with no basis in reality.

Ricardo therefore misses the difference between Value and the form of Value. Instead of recognizing price as the manner in which the exchange process reflects Value, and developing the various intermediary links between the two, he attempts instead to fuse them together through his law of prices. His failure to adequately distinguish between Value and price is, according to Marx, the first great source of error in his analysis. 26

Which Marx then doubles.

In addition to that, however, there is another problem. How can Ricardo attempt to analyze the effects of a uniform rate of profit on prices,

There is no uniform rate of profit. It is a Marxist chimera. All there is are investors trying to make as much profit as they can, like runners in a foot race. There is no more a uniform rate of profit than there is a uniform speed of running in a foot race. All there is is a meaningless statistical average that can only be determined after the fact. So it can't have any effect on prices.

asks Marx, when he nowhere discusses what determines the level of this rate of profit? And this in turn leads to an even more basic question. A uniform rate of profit is simply a way of saying that profits on different capitals are proportional to the size of these capitals: that is, each capital gets a share of total profit in proportion to its own size.

Which is just false and absurd.

But Ricardo nowhere discusses what determines aggregate profit in the first place. How then can he attempt to isolate the factors which regulate the movements of prices of production when he is missing a crucial ingredient- profit?

What determines the average running speed in a high school 100m sprint competition? Is it the average that causes the runners to run at a certain speed, or do the speeds of all the runners determine the average?

GET IT??

Profit is merely a residual: what is left over from prices realized in sales revenue after deducting production costs. It cannot affect prices as it only exists after prices have been determined by actual sales.

lt is therefore apparent to Marx, that even given the relation between Value and money price which he himself derives,

Incorrectly.

the specific manner in which Value regulates price cannot be developed without first showing how profit arises. And this, as we shall see next, leads Marx to the concept of surplus-Value.

Which is an anti-concept deployed to prevent use of the valid natural concepts, "land rent" and "the increase in total value that the capitalist's investment causes."

If you attempt to analyze the origins of surplus value—profit and rent—in terms of prices of production, it will appear that dead labor—constant capital produces surplus value.

Dead labor is a Marxist anti-concept deployed to prevent use of the valid natural concept, "products of labor devoted to production."

We already saw this in looking at the problem of fine wine aged in old oak chests. When we use production prices, it appears that the aging wine and old oak chests are producing considerable quantities of surplus value. But Marx already realized that this was an illusion.

It's not an illusion. The investor's choice to provide the wine, chests, etc. for the aging process creates the additional value of the aged wine.

This is why Marx did not use prices of production to analyze the origins and nature of surplus value. Indeed, production prices hide the real nature of surplus value.

Surplus value is a Marxist figment, just another anti-concept.

[ingliz]

~99.99999999999999999999% of the universe

To humans, very little of it is of any use unless human hands process it.

It's only desired because it can be made into something it wasn't - Something useful.

[Rugoz]

It also gives a good case for the basis of why exchange value makes any sense and that if it's not an illusion, and there truly is cardinal measurability of commodities, then it is of something.

Exchange value is not an illusion, but observable every day. You don't need value theory to explain it either. In fact it cannot, since supply and demand is affected by all kinds of stuff other than the "abstract labor" used in production.

As for the "cardinal measurability of commodities". How so? There are different types of labor, and they cannot simply be aggregated to labor time, no matter the weighting scheme. Production technology changes all the time, hence the "value" of particular types of labor changes all the time, as well as the labor expended for a particular commodity. The availability of resources, and thus the labor required to extract them, changes according to geography and time. The supply of labor itself is always changing. Everything man-made, not least capital goods, was made throughout history. How do you weigh labor time expended at different points in time?

The amount of labor spent on a commodity is ultimately a consequence of a variety of factors. You might as well just use the price of a commodity (in real terms) as the "cardinal measure". Because it's actually measurable, and certainly closer to what is colloquially understood by the term "value".

[Wellsy]

:eh:

Exchange value is not an illusion, but observable every day. You don't need value theory to explain it either. In fact it cannot, since supply and demand is affected by all kinds of stuff other than the "abstract labor" used in production.

As for the "cardinal measurability of commodities". How so? There are different types of labor, and they cannot simply be aggregated to labor time, no matter the weighting scheme. Production technology changes all the time, hence the "value" of particular types of labor changes all the time, as well as the labor expended for a particular commodity. The availability of resources, and thus the labor required to extract them, changes according to geography and time. The supply of labor itself is always changing. Everything man-made, not least capital goods, was made throughout history. How do you weigh labor time expended at different points in time?

The amount of labor spent on a commodity is ultimately a consequence of a variety of factors. You might as well just use the price of a commodity (in real terms) as the "cardinal measure". Because it's actually measurable, and certainly closer to what is colloquially understood by the term "value".

When I say exchange value may be an illusion it doesn’t deny that people can exchange things and we are in practice equating different commodities. It’s more a question that the exchange is actually a legitimate ratio of some quantity, that there is some shared property for measurement.
If there is no such shared quantitative property then it isn’t an exchange of anything but subjective judgements.

But that we do exchange things and do have so many commodities in comparison with one another, it takes on a social force greater than just my subjective judgement. So the Marx takes from the great mass of exchange ratios that commodities ‘have’ value or they otherwise wouldn’t exchange and Samuel Bailey would be correct that there is nothing but exchange ratios, which would likely be arbitrary.

Indeed there are lot of concrete or real world factors in production, but one can consider an abstraction legitimate which forecloses other specifics to focus on the essential if it has explanatory power. In a model of gravity one may discount opposing forces initially in its theorization. That air resistance slows something down doesn’t render gravity false because it complicates the perfect idea of something falling in a vacuum. Which is why Marx assumes things like value and price are equivalent in the first volume of capital and as he adds more concrete details to his analysis it become more dynamic. He starts from a very abstract point, the mere commodity and logically builds upon it through each volume. It’s a particular kind of analysis where one starts with a fundamental concept that contains properties of the whole of something.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Epoque_Keynote_Address.pdf

Indeed that is one criticism that some make that whether skilled labor can be compared and reduced to unskilled labor. But Marx doesn’t deny the specific qualities of labor for specific use values and in fact argues that this is why labor can not function directly as money.
[url]digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdf[/url]

It is only in the critique of Bailey (in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3, p. 124-159) that this distinction is explicitly discussed. The 'immanent' measure refers to the characteristics of something that allow it to be measurable as pure quantity; the 'external measure refers to the medium in which the measurements of this quantity are actually made, the scale used, etc. The concept of 'immanent' measure does not mean that the 'external' measure is 'given' by the object being measured. There is room for convention in the choice of a particular medium of measurement, calibration of scale of measurement, etc. It is not, therefore, a matter of counter-posing a realist to a formalist theory of measurement (as Cutler et al., 1977, suggest p. 15). Rather it is a matter of insisting that there are both realist and formalist aspects to cardinal measurability (i.e. measurability as absolute quantity, not simply as bigger or smaller). Things that are cardinally measurable can be added or subtracted to one another, not merely ranked in order of size, (ranking is ordinal measurability).

A useful discussion of this issue is to be found in Georgescu Roegen, who emphasises that:

'Cardinal measurability, therefore, is not a measure just like any other, but it reflects a particular physical property of a category of things.' (Op. cit., p. 49.)

Only things with certain real properties can be cardinally measured. This is the point that Marx is making with his concept of Immanent' measure, and that he makes in the example, in Capital, I, of the measure of weight (p. 148-9). The external measure of weight is quantities of iron (and there is of course a conventional choice to be made about whether to calibrate them in ounces or grammes, or whether, indeed, to use iron, rather than, say, steel). But unless both the iron and whatever it is being used to weigh (in Marx's example, a sugar loaf) both have weight, iron cannot express the weight of the sugar loaf. Weight is the Immanent' measure. But it can only be actually measured in terms of a comparison between two objects, both of which have weight and one'of which is the 'external' measure, whose weight is pre-supposed.

Thus when Marx says that labour-time is the measure of value, he means that the value of a commodity is measurable as pure quantity because it is an objectification of abstract labour, i.e. of 'indifferent' labour-time, hours of which can be added to or subtracted from one another. As such, as an objectification of pure duration of labour, it has cardinal measurability. This would not be the case if the commodity were simply a product of labour, an objectification of labour in its concrete aspect. For concrete labour is not cardinally measurable as pure time. Hours spent on tailoring and hours spent on weaving are qualitatively different: they can no more be added or subtracted to one another than apples can be added to or subtracted from pears. We can rank concrete labour in terms of hours spent in each task, just as we can rank apples and pears, and say which we have more of. But we can't measure the total quantity of labour in terms of hours, for we have no reason for supposing that one hour of weaving contains as much labour as one hour of tailoring, since they are qualitatively different.

t be labour-time, the argument that labour-time is the (immanent) measure of value entails that labour-time cannot be the medium of measurement. For we cannot, in the actual labour-time we can observe, separate the abstract from the concrete aspect. The only way that labour-time can be posed as the medium of measurement is by making the arbitrary assumption that there is no qualitative difference between different kinds of labour, an assumption that Marx precisely refuses to make with his insistence on the importance of the form of labour.

It is surprising that Cutler et al., 1977, who emphasise their critique of the supposed function of labour-time as a social standard of measurement in Capital, do not refer to Marx's distinction between 'immanent' and 'external' measure. Had they done so, they might have realised that it is money, and not labour-time, which functions as the social standard of measurement, in Marx's Capital, as in capitalist society itself. The reason that labour-time is stressed as the measure of value, is to argue that money in itself does not make the products of labour commensurable. They are only commensurable insofar as they are objectifications of the abstract aspect of labour

You can argue whether labor is in fact what makes commodities commensurate and trace old debates.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/on-labor-as-the-substance-of-value/

Many objections have been raised to Marx’s argument over the years. The great bulk of these critiques can be found in Bohm-Bawerk’s 1898 book “Karl Marx and the Close of His System”.
…

This is covered further in the chapter on abstract labor however the basic line of argumentation is this: There are multiple forces in a capitalist society that reduce human labor to an abstraction, a pure expenditure of physiological labor. Socially necessary labor time reduces all labor to its maximum output so that all labors everywhere are valued the same, that is, they are all labors producing at maximum efficiency. We can compare the labor of apple pickers to piano makers because both are human labor expended in its most efficient form. Capital of course has no care for the specific use-values it creates and therefore no care for the concrete labor that produces them. It only cares about value production, value in general. Thus capital treats all labor as abstract units in a giant profit calculator. Whether this labor produces apples or pianos or rubber ducks makes no difference as long as it is working at maximum efficiency. For this reason workers in a capitalist society have a much higher degree of subjective indifference to their work than in past societies. People move from job to job with much more flexibility than in, say feudalism where one was born into a caste and worked in the same capacity for life. Etc….

Thus Marx can say that labor is the substance of value because labor is both concrete and abstract at the same time.
…

If Marx had merely said that labor time is the primary determinant of commodity values then we could easily prove or disprove his theory with empirical studies of prices in relation to labor inputs. But Marx’s argument that labor is the substance of value is a different beast entirely. All money prices represent sums of value. These prices can be above or below the actual labor content of a commodity. This can happen through unequal exchange. It can happen through imbalances of supply and demand. And this happens systematically with prices of production. Regardless, none of these deviations stop prices from being sums of value or stop labor from being the content of this value.

What then can be done to empirically verify Marx’s theory of value? I do not believe there is any knock-down empirical proof that labor is the substance of value. However, the argument that labor is the substance of value suggests several tendencies/phenomena that can be empirically judged, to an extent. For one, even though prices systematically deviate from values this is a systematic deviation. They do so in a predictable way. This means that there are still correspondences between value and price. The chief correspondence is the fact that a decrease in labor time per unit produced (increases in efficiency) leads to falling unit prices. This is a prediction based on Marx’s theory of value and it is a prediction that is quite obviously borne out empirically again and again. Everyone is aware that commodity prices fall as labor becomes more productive.

I would argue that marginalism simply avoids the issue of commodities being commensurate but still gets itself into a bind in the Cambridge Capital Controversy where neoclassical economics struggled to defend the the returns capital got from its contribution to production mathematically and tried to shift from capital as physical goods to its worth in money but still failed because its mathematically inconsistent.

Spoiler: show

https://theotherspiral.wordpress.com/2016/05/03/anwar-shaikhs-capitalism-notes-on-part-i-chapter-3/

From consumer theory, we turn to production theory, which brings us to the question of the Aggregate Production Function and the so-called “Cambridge Capital Controversy”. In its particulars this is a very complicated topic, but I would first like to state what is at stake in the issue. One assertion that neoclassical economics makes is that the owners of each of the “factors of production” (basically: land, labor, and capital) receive exactly the value of their economic contribution in a competitive market. In this view, the Marxist assertion that workers are exploited through the extraction of surplus value is a priori wrong. Any existence of “exploitation” must be a result of imperfections in competition, not a constituent element of capitalist production as such. As you might imagine, this is a very politically charged issue because it provides a theory of “who gets what and why.” This tenant of neoclassical theory has been used, for example, to justify both the extremely high salaries (if we include “bonuses”) that are paid to high-ranking financiers and executives, and the extremely low salaries that are paid to oppressed groups (e.g. Wal-Mart employees, factory workers in the Global South, social workers) and has been used to justify the gender gap in salaries as well.
…

So how can this neoclassical just-so story be justified? One way is with the Aggregate Production Function (APF). As Shaikh notes, Paul Douglas, its creator wrote that “the approximate coincidence of the estimated coefficients [of a Cobb-Douglas APF] with the actual shares received…strengthens the competitive theory of distribution and disproves the Marxian” (86). That is, of course, if the APF is in any way plausible, and this is what the Cambridge Capital Controversy and subsequent debates was all about.

Essentially the APF is intended as a model that describes how each of the “factors of production” receive back what they put into the production process through market distribution. If the APF were generally accepted, it would exclude the Marxist theory of exploitation. The difficulty that the APF encounters is in trying to specify what the “capital” factor of production is, and how it is employed.
…

So while labour in theory can be reduced to the common unit of unskilled labour, “capital goods” cannot be reduced to a common unit of homogeneous “capital.” The neoclassical response was to argue that capital goods are rendered homogeneous in their money form. The problem then arises that the money value of capital is in part determined by the rate of profit, and the rate of profit is in turn affected by the employment of capital. Because the money value of capital is not independent from the rate of profit it cannot serve as a proper independent measure of the capital “factor of production.” We therefore have an “aggregation problem” in both physical and monetary terms.
…

As we saw above: “A second core proposition is that a change in the price of a factor of production will lead to a change in the use of that factor – an increase in the rate of profit (associated with falling wages) will lead to more of that factor being used in production. The law of diminishing marginal returns implies that greater use of this input will imply a lower marginal product, all else equal…” but because the relationship between the techniques of production and rate of profit is not “monotonic“ (As one goes up so does the other, without reversing direction) the stability of the whole system is undermined. The long and short of the issue then is that the APF does not provide a reasonable model that can grant legitimacy to the neoclassical story of distribution.

The only case in which neoclassical economics can provide a production function is when “all firms have the same capital-labor ratio and the same wage and profit rates.” (87) But in this case there is no “aggregate” production function at all because it is in fact a one-agent model. Just as with the neoclassical consumer theory, the neoclassical production theory is a “…trivial [case], because by construction there is effectively only one agent in each domain.” Therefore even if we accept the “hyper-rational” model, neoclassical economics cannot provide anything more than a trivial one-agent model that is completely static and utterly unrealistic.

Basically Marx’s argument for abstract labor as a real social phenomenon in capitalist production is to argue for the commodities are in reality commensurate, and its not all subjective judgments upon use-values and arbitrary numeraires.

But I love that you emphasize the dynamism of reality that labor changes so much across time and place. Which our models should reflect. Marx attempts to do so when he considers how the socially necessary average labor time is lowered with the expansion of technology or more efficient production which allows the first innovator super profits by selling things above their value until the industry catches up on a whole with the technology all ‘equalize’ profits such that the new profit rate will have dropped as prices will have dropped in competition. This is a contradiction that Marx asserts about why the rate of profit has a tendency to fall. Individual capitals will use machines to outcompete one another in an industry, but once technology is generalized across an industry, the profit rate is lower. One can get into why machines expand use value/productivity but do not create surplus value on the whole (Marx is concerned with capitalist dynamics at a macro level and even analysis of smaller things is always assumed within a braider context which is built upon).

You might even argue about the practical task of determine what the approximate socially necessary labor time is in an industry but generally the one who sets the price in an industry is the most productive firm while others are price takers.
So how productive is labor in an industry at a time on average? Of course every society is somewhat concerned with production or it wouldn’t reproduce itself. But in capitalist the disciplining of workers to be productive is pivotal in competition and of great concern to the capitalist than previous epochs.

But I will say that some perfect accounting of necessary labor times isn’t Marx’s task in explaining the dynamics of capitalist production.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff4.htm#Pill12

It has been widely (and wrongly) believed by many economists and others that Marx emphasised labour precisely as this ‘practical’ standard of value. As opponents of Marx, such writers have directed their efforts to showing that labour could not be accorded this privileged status; they have argued along these lines because of the absence of precisely established units with which to measure the various forms of labour which are different from each other with regard to intensity, skill etc.

Such a line of attack utterly misconceives the nature of Marx’s value theory. It is both impossible and unnecessary to discover a measure of value which will make possible the equalisation of labour or the products of labour. It may be a simple point, but none the less profound, to insist that this equalisation of labour takes place objectively, spontaneously and indirectly – that is, independently of any participants within the capitalist system.

It is in this real, objective process that value is measured. Out of the process of the production and circulation of commodities money (gold) arises. Gold is not some ‘external’ measure, standing outside the world of commodities. Nor was it ‘selected’ by conscious planning on the part of economists or politicians. This measure (gold) was historically selected, after long trial and error, in the sense that it was its physical-material properties which enabled gold to select itself as the most suitable money-commodity.

The matter can be reformulated thus: it is not money that renders commodities commensurable; on the contrary, it is because all commodities as values are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values find their measure in one and the same commodity. By a social and historical process this commodity is converted into money. Unless the objective nature of these processes is grasped, then the significance of all Marx’s categories of political economy is lost. We have already spoken of the social character of the labour which creates value, summed up in Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Marx insists that the measure of value is not labour-time, but socially-necessary labour-time, that is labour-time required to produce a commodity at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces. And it is only when the producer of a product tries to sell this product on the market that he discovers its real, objective value (if any). During periods of capitalist slump the piles of unsold goods signify that the concrete labour embodied in them was socially unnecessary. Such labour cannot, through the market, be transformed into abstract labour and therefore creates no value. But the owner of capital can never discover this beforehand, even though he may be armed with the latest ‘market research’ techniques and may even have read Capital. The essence of capitalist production here is that he can only discover whether the labour incorporated into his products was socially necessary at the end of the process.

Our task is not, therefore, to seek some measuring rod for the processes of capitalist production. The very process is its own measure. Value does not measure commodities; commodities discover their own measure of value. The task of Marxism is to discover how this is done, to discover the laws and tendencies of this process, laws and tendencies which do not appear empirically on the surface of society but appear always in the form of crises:
…
In short, instead of the vain search for some formal standard by I which to measure the magnitude of value, Marx set out to abstract the laws of the development of capitalism (‘law of motion’), that is to uncover the (highly contradictory) processes whereby this problem was actually resolved in practice.

Now political economy ran into insurmountable difficulties in the course of its futile search for a measure of value. Smith sometimes saw this abstract standard in ‘commandable labour’ (wages), sometimes in corn. Others discovered it in labour or in money. Marx’s comment underlines his distance from all those who continue to look for such a standard: ‘The problem of an “invariable measure of value” was simply a spurious name for the quest for the concept, the nature of value itself, the definition of which could not be another value’ (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value).

Basically Marx’s work is a critique of political economic, not a reproduction of it with some additional concepts.

Marx treats labor as the substance of value to understand dynamics not for some perfect predictive process but to show the ways in which political economists simply lose sight of the social relations that govern capital and make it possible, as well as implications from it that are foreclosed when one instead generalizes from two individuals bartering and haphazardly shift between use and exchange value unconsciously.

[Truth To Power]

To humans, very little of it is of any use unless human hands process it.

<yawn> It is precisely for the opportunity to process it -- which if it were not owned, would otherwise have been available -- that people are willing to pay astronomical sums for something that has never been processed by human hands.

You know this. Of course you do. You merely have to contrive some way of not knowing it because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.

Will you ever find a willingness to know the fact that the astronomical unimproved value of land just conclusively proves me right and you wrong? There is nothing you can ever say, do, or believe that can ever change that fact.

It's only desired because it can be made into something it wasn't - Something useful.

And the person whose decision and initiative cause something useful to be made from it is called the "producer" of that useful thing because he is the one who causes it to exist rather than not exist.

[ingliz]

the astronomical unimproved value of land

Then I suggest you look to Arizona or New Mexico.

The shittiest no well, no road access, no utilities, no fuck all in the back of beyond unimproved land in Arizona and New Mexico can cost as little as $200 an acre.

I am sure with your skills you could make the desert bloom.

[Truth To Power]

selling things above their value

As long as you permit your brain to excrete such effluvia, I will not be able to replace the nonsense there with truth.

[Wellsy]

As long as you permit your brain to excrete such effluvia, I will not be able to replace the nonsense there with truth.

As long as you permit your brain to excrete such effluvia, I will not be able to replace the nonsense there with truth.


There. Productive.

[Truth To Power]

Then I suggest you look to Arizona or New Mexico.

<yawn> The sad part is, you actually think that is relevant.

Sorry, no. The fact that unimproved land is free on Pluto is completely irrelevant to the fact that in NYC, it costs hundreds or even thousands per ft^2.

Try to remember.

The shittiest no well,

A well is an improvement created by labor. Try to keep your eye on the ball.

no road access, no utilities, no fuck all in the back of beyond unimproved land in Arizona and New Mexico can cost as little as $200 an acre.

Which is merely what the market thinks that economic opportunity is worth.

And your point would be....?

The unimproved value of land comes from the services and infrastructure government provides, the opportunities and amenities the community provides, and the physical qualities nature provides at that location. Not the middle of the Sahara; not the top of Mt Vesuvius; not Antarctica; not Pluto. That location. And every location is unique.

Try to remember.

I am sure with your skills you could make the desert bloom.

Not even my skills can make knowledge bloom in those who refuse to know.

You refuse to know the facts I identify because you have already realized that they prove your beliefs are false and evil. Simple.

[Truth To Power]

As long as you permit your brain to excrete such effluvia, I will not be able to replace the nonsense there with truth.

<sigh> You have no intention of replacing nonsense with truth, quite the opposite.

Marx's whole towering edifice of anti-concepts was to replace the truth that classical economics had established -- that the factory owner contributes to production while the landowner does not -- with the nonsense that the additional production the "capitalist's" investment causes is somehow surplus labor value. All the nonsense about "abstract" labor and "immanent" labor (and who knows what other nonsense -- atonal labor? sarcastic labor? dilithium labor?) is just an ingenious and dishonest contrivance to remove the truth and replace it with nonsense.

[Truth To Power]

Get wrecked Marx, how could he not have considered use-values given by nature omfg! #LaborAin'tShit.

ALSO EXCHANGE VALUES.

I.e., values that are actually values, unlike utilities. Which are not values.

Try to keep your eye on the ball, mkay?

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!)

Blatant equivocation fallacy. Nature can only have exchange value -- i.e., value value -- if it can be exchanged. For that, it has to be owned, or at least possessed in some manner that empowers its possessor to exchange it.

as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.

Self-contradiction. If "nature" means anything in this context, it can only be what is not human.

bourgeois phrases

Oh, please.

And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner,

That is known to be false. At the beginning, man knew that he was not the owner of anything in nature until he removed it from nature by his labor, making it into something that would not otherwise have existed: the product of his labor.

treats her as belonging to him,

Again, that is an outright fabrication on Marx's part. Before land was appropriated as private property, no one treated it as belonging to him, because no one presumed to exclude others from its use. They only claimed property in what they had produced. More or less definite territories were claimed by communities, but not by individuals, and they were not property per se: brute, animal territoriality is quite different from property.

his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth.

No, that is merely another false claim by Marx. Nature must have had use value (utility) before any labor was applied to it: if it did not, no labor would or could have been applied to it. If no stick has any use value without labor, how could one choose which stick to apply one's labor to sharpening? If no stone had any use value without labor, how would one choose which stone to flake chips from by one's labor?

The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor.

Notice how Marx dishonestly substitutes "the material conditions of labor" (whatever they might be) for "nature." Our remote ancestors lived just fine without the products of others' labor. They never lived without nature.

He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

People lived without "capital" (or its owners' permissions) just fine for millions of years. They never lived without land. By changing the subject from "nature" to "the material conditions of labor," Marx is trying to pretend that a "capitalist" offering the workers access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have had is the same as a landowner depriving the workers of access to economic opportunity they would otherwise have had, unless they meet his extortion demands.

- Some idiot probably,

Definitely, as proved above.

[ingliz]

A well is an improvement created by labor.

A well is a hole if you don't hit water.

The unimproved value of land comes from the services and infrastructure government provides, the opportunities and amenities the community provides, and the physical qualities nature provides at that location.

So you are saying that when you buy 'unimproved' land you have produced fuck all yourself and any value the land has is down to the government and the community's efforts to improve it.

And your point would be .... ?

What happened to the 'I don't need society' bollocks?

[Truth To Power]

A well is a hole if you don't hit water.

Human effort devoted to production is still labor even if it turns out not to produce anything of use.

So you are saying that when you buy 'unimproved' land you have produced fuck all yourself and any value the land has is down to the government and the community's efforts to improve it.

No, not to improve it. Government's efforts to provide desirable public services and infrastructure are directed in various ways that tend to make use of the land more advantageous without necessarily being devoted to that end, or any of the services or infrastructure actually being on any given land parcel; they are just accessible from it. What the community does enables the land user to access opportunities and amenities that were created by other private interests for other reasons, and only incidentally make use of the land more advantageous. Again, they are not located on the unimproved land, merely accessible from it.

And remember: the physical qualities nature provides at that location are also a factor.

What happened to the 'I don't need society' bollocks?

You have evidently become confused, and mistaken me for someone else.

[ingliz]

Human effort devoted to production is still labor even if it turns out not to produce anything of use.

You're a Keynesian, now? One of John Maynard Keynes's most famous quotes was "Let them dig holes in the ground".

Interesting.

[Truth To Power]

You're a Keynesian, now?

No.

One of John Maynard Keynes's most famous quotes was "Let them dig holes in the ground".

Which just shows how little he understood of economics -- although he knew enough to propose the euthanasia of the rentier.

Keynes did not understand the role of private commercial bank lending in governing the money supply, or how the debt money system (fractional reserve banking) inherently creates a positive feedback mechanism that destabilizes the economy. He also did not understand how landowner privilege causes unemployment, attributing it to "insufficient demand."

[Wellsy]

I guess it reflects the philosophical and inquring nature of Marx that he questioned the form and basis of exchange being possible itself as a social process. As modern economists just take the existence of exchange as an argument from experience in the same way in Zeno's paradox the paradoxes he found in the concept of motion didn't refute in experience that motion was possible, but they don't really question what makes it possible and Marx's argument isn't really registered at all in part as it's often interpreted in an individualistic manner abstracted from any social context. By not seeing it as a social process, it cannot be imagined to be anything by subjective because there isn't a correct understanding of how human actions even between two individuals doesn't exist strictly between them but mobilizes one's culture and the material means of that culture. There isn't just interactionism but culture that mediates ones ability to even interact with another meaningfully.

http://digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdf

The critical point is that if we treat the equivalence of commodities in terms of a numeraire commodity, we must presuppose the equivalence of commodities, but we have still not answered the question 'As what do they become exchangeable?' In what relation do they stand in the social process that enables one commodity to become the numeraire? This point emerges much more clearly from Marx's discussion of Bailey in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 3, (p. 133-47) than it does in Capital. Much of the most sophisticated modern economics, whether of the Sraffian or neo-classical variety, prefers to sidestep this question by not treating the formation of exchange-values as a social process at all. It assumes exchangeability and focuses almost exclusively on the question of consistency. The central question it asks is whether a set of exchange-values (prices) can be deduced from given premises which will be consistent with some criterion set by the economist, such as the reproduction of the structure of production, or the attainment by each consumer of his 'preferred' consumption bundle, given the assumptions about how economic agents react to prices. Finding such a consistent set of exchange-values is called proving the 'existence' of an equilibrium set of exchange-values. But it is a very attenuated concept of existence, referring to the formal solution of an arithmomorphic model, not to the real world process of exchange.

An earlier generation of neo-classical economists were more robust; and so are many policy-orientated neo-classical economists today, who must eschew the theoretical rigour and purity of general equilibrium models if they are to be able to make policy prescriptions. They give the same answer to the question 'As what do commodities become exchangeable?' as was given by Bohm-Bawerk: commodities become equivalents as yielders of utility, of satisfaction. The exchange process is explained in terms of commodity owners commensurating different commodities in terms of the satisfaction they bring. Marx rejects this view, but does not set out very clearly the reasons why, quite possibly because although this has come to be the dominant view among economists, it was not so in Marx's day.

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4949&context=lcp

The focus is on the exchange of “real” objects—the goods and services understood to be at the heart of material productivity. In many accounts, the activity of comparison produces money unproblematically: once we assume ratios of value, commensurability—comparability of goods in a common unit— appears. After all, if the value that market activity concerns can be theorized to precede that market, it should be articulable in some measure.2 According to classical commentators, some item emerges from the set of valued items and acts to measure its counterparts.3 In more modern renditions, money can be a unit without intrinsic value, a measuring convention like the inch or the pound.4 Like an inch or a pound, the monetary unit is simply a quantum of pre-existing value. And as a vehicle for comparison, the medium does not affect the activity of choosing (although political communities can interfere with economic activity by disturbing money’s operation).
...
I argue that the neoclassical model of the economy presumes a particular approach to value and money. That approach enables, indeed encourages, adherents to believe in the basic autonomy of the market, at least as an ideal. And that ideal has great normative power: it casts the market as presumptively democratic, in fact more democratic than representative politics, because only in the economic arena are individual choices, independently made, directly and equally effective in creating an equilibrium.

That vision, however appealing, turns on an axiomatic approach to money that is not conceptually sound. In particular, we cannot assume that the act of comparison, carried out across different objects by many independent actors, creates commensurability at the level of value’s expression over the relevant universe of entities compared. On second look, the Walrasian model at the heart of general equilibrium theory claims no such thing.7 In that model, the unit of account precedes rather than follows the act of comparison. Partial equilibrium models likewise assume a working medium. In other words, neoclassical thought itself ascribes a unit that will make value commensurable. The unit is abstract and therefore neutral; it is a device that transparently expresses value without more. That move is essential to every activity that follows: it enables comparison, choice, and, eventually, exchange. It thus makes possible market activity as a process that aggregates individualized preferences and produces prices.

Having assumed a unit that makes values commensurable, neoclassical thinkers can relegate all other questions about what actual money is and what role it plays to the realm of applied science.8 That deferral is terrifically enabling. It allows economists to explain actually observed moneys that don’t conform to the abstraction in ways consistent with normative premises of equilibrium models. Thus neoclassical thinkers define money in the real world in ways that tack close to their presumptions about how money should look: they assume that exchange activity among equally situated individuals suffices to produce a medium as bartering individuals converge on a commodity or agree to an empty measure as a convention. Although those moneys fail to resemble the unit of account imputed by Walras—they are either material and non-neutral or nonmaterial and meaningless—those problems are not categorized as fatal.9 To the contrary, economists can correct for monetary dynamics while identifying those dynamics as distortions, given money’s deviation in the real world from the Walrasian abstraction.

In effect, neoclassical economics imputes a term to resolve the challenge of commensurability at the conceptual level: it assumes money as an abstract and neutral unit of account. The discipline subsequently explains moneys actually observed: it focuses here on money as a medium emerging from trade. The sleight of hand submerges the issue of incommensurable values. Incongruities are set aside as the byproduct of difficulties on the ground.
...
The basic point is that some commensurability in value allows comparison among the wide heterogeneity of commodifiable items. Neoclassical theory has split again and again in its debates over value, from the subjectivism of Bentham’s utility to the methods for comparing pairs of preferences.22 Implicit across those debates, however, is an agreement that comparison is possible, even if in an abstract term.
...
The problem of commensurability is different. It poses the challenge of comparison: how is it possible to compare an orange to an advance of resources, or a dog to military service? What about the relationship of any of those to the possession of land or art, or to the obligation to support the public order? That question, infinitely harder, is virtually nonexistent in the economic literature on money.43 That neglect, in contrast to the intense focus on the issue of the double coincidence of wants, occurs because Walras’s auction has done its work. It has established the intuitive power of the market-as-a-huge-bazaar, an orgy of real exchange among objects of comparable value.44
...
Narratives that propose an empty measure provide no reference point against which comparison can proceed. Money, even if considered only as a unit of account, is nothing like an inch or a pound. Those metrics are more like denominations; they divide a matter already commensurable, like linear space or weight. By contrast, money creates a reference point for an amorphous matter: value. To this day, neither economists nor philosophers have agreed upon how to conceptualize the “value” of time, goods, services, satisfactions, or desires. Once that is done monetarily—the whole trick—no one really cares much how denominations are ordained to subdivide existing value.

So thoroughly has utilitarianism and the flattening of human experience to pleasure become the popular prejudice that it's difficult to even be aware of it enough to question it's incomprehensibility, to flatten all qualities. We're all just pleasure blobs.