Labour Theory of Value debate between Academic Agent and Jack Angstreich - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
Forum rules: No one line posts please. This forum is for discussion based on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism and similar revisions. Critique of topics not based on historical materialism belongs in the general Communism forum.
#14838926
I don't have time to go into this in detail because its nearly four hours long and other people have already pulled this apart to death, including the Academic Agent himself.

What I'm curious about here is how the anti-Marxists on PoFo respond to a debate like this. It seems to me like the Academic Agent, a self described reactionary, was totally annihilated in this debate and revealed to basically have no idea what he was talking about. Not only was this guy basically shown to have not bothered to have read Kapital (predictable) but he was also constantly referring to long-winded examples while trying to find some aspect that "aha! Marx's theory fails" when in fact he was just sophistically introducing one fallacy after another. It's pretty painful to watch. He kept referring to Smith, Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell (again, not surprising) as if this somehow proved Marx's theory was "rubbish".

Utterly predictably the crux of the debate comes at about 33 minutes in this video when the Academic Agent reveals he doesn't understand why equilibrium prices exists, what they are, or why the LTV might be useful to explain equilibrium prices. It's pretty astonishing for a guy in a formal debate to ask their opponent to explain the core concept of that debate. When this is pointed out to the "Academic Agent" at 34:50 in the debate it becomes abundantly clear that the "Agent" has already lost the debate and in fact the next 3 hours will likely involve desperate back-peddling to save face. In fact this is so embarrasing I'm beginning to think the "Agent" is a double agent meant to spoof people like Sargon of Akkad or other annoying right-wing youtube personalities.

What I can't understand is this echo-chamber mentality where you only bother with half the argument. Anyone actaully qualified or interested will have done their homework. It couldn't be clearer this guy had only read the sources that appealed his already established biases.

Does anyone see it another way?

#14839081
Didn't watch the video but looked at the break down of the debate in the link and holy shit that is embarrassing. If his confidence of being able to debate was really due to his echo chamber caressing his ego as an intellectual, then it was pretty severe XD
Its difficult to think someone could walk into any debate so unprepared, he wouldn't even fair that well against any shmuck online with that lack of knowledge.
I mean the equivacation of subjective value with value as considered in the context of Marx's work should barely be a hurdle but that overview shows just how difficult that was for him to deal with.
That was pretty humiliating, it would've been a lot less painful to confront his lack of preparation and inadequate knowledge to be discussing it. But he made it so much worse :lol:
#14839109
It always amuses me when someone tries to defend a position they themselves don't understand. Against a position they understand even less. Using examples from people like Thomas sowell who seems to understand nothing.

It'd be an interesting debate to see someone knowledgeable about modern economic theory debate the topic but flailing nonsense reactionaries help no one understand anything.
#14839122
MB. wrote:Utterly predictably the crux of the debate comes at about 33 minutes in this video when the Academic Agent reveals he doesn't understand why equilibrium prices exists, what they are, or why the LTV might be useful to explain equilibrium prices.


Well the LTV cannot explain equilibrium prices (which, of course, are market prices at a hypothetical equilibrium), as it ignores time preference, risk aversion, i.e. the very reason behind interest rates. I have already written that in another thread.

I'm also waiting for somebody to explain its usefulness. First of all, you'd have to determine the value of labor, which is by itself never in equilibrium. Even if it were, you'd have to track the amount of labor contained in every good produced. A technology or preference shock (happening permanently) would of course totally ruin your accounting, since not only the value of labor changes as a result but also value of capital and extracted resources, regardless of its embedded labor.

The only way you can approximate equilibrium prices is by smoothing out market prices (very roughly put).
#14839125
MB. wrote:What I'm curious about here is how the anti-Marxists on PoFo respond to a debate like this.

It's irrelevant. Jevons refuted the Labor Theory of Value 140 years ago, starting the marginalist revolution. Nothing in the debate has changed since then, although it's disappointing to see "Academic Agent" is obviously unfamiliar with its whole history. The anti-empirical approach to economics that Marx concocted and the neoclassicals gleefully seized on and ran with has run its course, to the point where it now infects virtually all schools, and hardly anyone has a clear thought on the subject.
#14839247
Might be worthwhile pointing out that Marx was trying to understand the nature of capital in a way that is of no interest to modern economics. Capital functions as a kind of immanent critique within the political economists before Marx, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. He set himself a specific task and I think this is important to note if one gets the sense that Marx was just fine tuning economic theories.
http://crisiscritique.org/political11/Andrew%20Kliman.pdf
The Specificity of Capital
It is frequently asserted that Capital “leaves out” or “overlooks” some important aspect of capitalism, or that its treatment of that aspect is “underdeveloped.” For example, Monthly Review author Heather Brown (2014) recently complained that “Marx’s theory remains underdeveloped in terms of providing an account that includes gender as important to understanding capitalism.” This presumes that “understanding capitalism” —as such or, perhaps, in its totality—was the aim of Capital. Since gender relations are important aspects of capitalism, it then follows that provision of a fuller account of gender relations would help to rescue Capital from the “underdeveloped” state in which its author left it.

I think this seriously misconstrues what Capital is about. It is entitled Capital for a reason. It is not entitled Everything You Need to Know about What Takes Place within Capitalism, or even Everything You Need to Know about Capitalism. It focuses specifically on capital––the process in and through which value “self-expands,” or becomes a bigger amount of value. It is about how that self-expansion is produced, how it is reproduced (renewed and repeated), and how the whole process is reflected, imperfectly, in the conventional thinking and concepts of economists and business people.

This does not mean that Capital is reductive. There is a crucial difference between having a specific focus and being reductive. I don’t think Marx wrote or suggested anywhere that the process of value’s self-expansion is the only thing within capitalism that matters or that other processes can be reduced to it. It does affect a lot of other things, sometimes in crucial ways––and this is perhaps the main reason that a book on Capital is mistaken for an Everything About Capitalism book––but to recognize the interrelationships is not to reduce these other things to the self-expansion of value.

Of course, there is some sense in which any book with a specific focus “leaves out” or “overlooks” other things, but we don’t normally complain that a cookbook leaves out or overlooks instructions for changing the oil in your car or any analysis of international politics. The charge that Capital “fails” to discuss many aspects of capitalism and what takes place within it seems to me to be similarly inappropriate and unfair.


And I suspect that in focusing on capital, Marx wasn't concerned with prices in itself and I think this does a nice job summarizing the divergence between what has developed out of the marginal revolution and the focus of political economists.
Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology - Simon Clarke
Technically the marginalist revolution is defined by a new method of economic analysis which applies the calculus to the problem of the determination of prices. The new method of analysis did not involve any substantial technical innovations, for once the question of the determination of prices in the market had been posed as a topic for rigorous investigation the techniques required for solving the question fell almost immediately to hand. The pioneers all posed the question within the framework of a theory of utility and this in many ways made their approaches to the question, and their solutions, extremely cumbersome. However the essence of the problem, and of its solution, was relatively straightforward. Thus the methods of calculus had been applied to economic problems before, by such thinkers as Gossen and Cournot, and to analogous problems by Bernoulli, but the earlier attempts had been ignored, not because of a blindness to genius, but because the questions that were posed did not at the time seem particularly significant.

The new methods of analysis arose out of a new concern with the problem of prices. Economists had always sought to explain the determination of prices as part of their enterprise. What the marginalists introduced was an emphasis on the need for a rigorous theory of price determination. For classical political economy the determination of prices was a subordinate concern. The central theoretical issues were those of the constitutional order within which capitalism could best develop to the advantage of the nation as a whole, and of the relations between the classes proper to such a development. This led classical political economy to pose questions of distribution within the framework of a theory of growth, within which the rigorous determination of individual prices was of little concern, so long as the determination of prices could be assumed not to conflict too seriously with the theory of distribution. For the marginalists this order of priorities was inverted, and the central concern became one of developing a rigorous theory of price determination.

Within classical political economy the determination of prices was subordinate to the problem of distribution and prices were the by-product of the theory of distribution. Once wages, rent and the rate of profit had been determined, prices could be derived by adding together the component parts. However the contradiction between the classical theory of production and the Ricardian theory of distribution meant that the resultant prices did not coincide with the values according to which the distributive categories were determined. Hence within the Ricardian system the determination of prices was always subject to the qualifications that this divergence necessarily introduced. The vulgar critics of classical political economy had exploited this contradiction to reject the classical theory of distribution and the theory of value on which it was based. However, although they asserted the priority of price over value or even the exclusive reality of price as against value, they could offer no rigorous theory of price determination, nor did they seriously seek to develop such a theory.

The marginalists followed the vulgar economists in their concern with the question of prices, but they did not follow them in rejecting the need for a theory of value. For the marginalists a theory of value was essential to any attempt to develop a rigorous theory of price, and the scientific weakness of the classical theory of value was that it could not achieve this. The task the marginalists set themselves was to develop a rigorous theory of price determination on the basis of the subjective theory of value, the basis of the marginalist theory of value was initially defined as ‘utility’.


As I understand it, the matter of value has not been resolved, for good posts on this site, one should google ' sans salvador site:politicsforum.org'. Sans Salvador seems to discuss things in more detail than many have previously.

And as a point to the AA's lack of knowledge...a quote from SS
No, opponents of the LTV should (and must, if they want to be correct) argue against the arguments for the LTV. There is as I said above no reason to believe the LTV must be false, but also no decisive evidence that it is correct.

This appears to be the problem that comes up, people interpreting Marx based on their own assumptions and world view, thus incapable of interpreting Marx's work because they don't know how Marx thought. Which is an issue expressed in a basic form with how AA couldn't get past using his own definition of value as subjective value and simply refused to engage with the definition within the context of a labor theory of value. As it stands, LTV is at least logically coherent based on it's own premises and thus has a logical consistency to it, the difficulty though is empirically proving it. As logical consistency doesn't necessarily translate to a it being true/correct.
Basically, a valid critique should be aspiring to be an immanent critique, because that which deals the most blow is exposing the actual limitations of something by finding it's limits through it. As opposed to evaluating some abstract model based on how well it fits in accordance to some other model with its assumptions, which one probably mistakes as reality itself.
http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post/426639828/physical-concepts-are-free-creations-of-the
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however they may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way to open the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all of the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.


As an extra, saw SS posted an FAQ on LTV, though they stated that they were less sympathetic than the person who made it, expressing that they perhaps thought it stretched itself a bit.
#14841780
Wellsy wrote:Might be worthwhile pointing out that Marx was trying to understand the nature of capital in a way that is of no interest to modern economics.


Given you know nothing of modern economics, why make such a ridiculous claim?

Wellsy wrote:And I suspect that in focusing on capital, Marx wasn't concerned with prices in itself


He was, just not in observable market prices.

Btw, throwing stuff against a wall to see if anything sticks is not debating. Address the points of previous posters.
#14842520
Rugoz wrote:Given you know nothing of modern economics, why make such a ridiculous claim?

Because it seems to me the focus that modern economics takes is something entirely different from the task Marx set for himself. Though I would find it more helpful if you'd explain things than express what seems to be frustration for a lack of response from me in the other thread.

Part of my aversion besides prioritizing my time on personal things, comes in part from not having an adequate knowledge of Marx's perspective and explicitly stating as much previously. I do overextend myself purposely with speculative points to see what catches, as writing where one isn't comfortable can yield interesting results a lot of the time.

He was, just not in observable market prices.

Fair clarification
Btw, throwing stuff against a wall to see if anything sticks is not debating. Address the points of previous posters.

Indeed it isn't much debate, so don't frustrate yourself with me in expecting much of it.
I was merely posting something I thought might be of interest considering Marginalism was brought up.

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