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re: The Labor Theory of Value
Posted on 12/4/25 at 10:51 am to 4cubbies
Posted on 12/4/25 at 10:51 am to 4cubbies
Parroting a hack leftist white guilt author who focuses on juuuuustice and oppressssssion. Sprinkle in some “cultural imperialism”.
You know they aren’t and will never pay you to take your time and spread their propaganda don’t you? You are working for them for absolutely free. Ironically to spread propaganda on a piece ultimately about fair wages.
You know they aren’t and will never pay you to take your time and spread their propaganda don’t you? You are working for them for absolutely free. Ironically to spread propaganda on a piece ultimately about fair wages.
This post was edited on 12/4/25 at 10:56 am
1
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:01 am to wackatimesthree
quote:
BTW, what happened? You told me all your required Marxist reading was finished. How did this assignment pop up and suck you back in?
I’m writing papers based on the works of academics, so I’m citing theories and authors I agree and disagree with.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:04 am to CleverUserName
quote:
Parroting a hack leftist white guilt author who focuses on juuuuustice and oppressssssion.
Its her specialty, and she denies it occurs, but everyone here is a witness.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:06 am to thetempleowl
quote:
value of the labor is how many people can OR WILL do it
Hence why plumbers, roofers, lawn guys, etc...make what they make. Pay enough, and more people will do it. Quit paying for them to sit on their arse, watch how many enter the labor force!
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:09 am to 4cubbies
I haven’t read this title but as others have mentioned, it sounds like your analysis may conflate two different concepts
The Smith view indicates how a purchaser determines value. They measure it against alternative means of production of elastic goods
Your author seems to focus on negative economic rents. In the first instance, value is what we solve given other known factors such as labor (and capital cost, time) and would be integral in a build v buy type decision
In your authors case, value is fixed and we are calculating the labor input. Once that quantity is obtained then it’s subtracted from the property owners actual cost of labor. That negative value appears to be the focus of her argument
The fact that all the other numbers are hard to calculate, or knowing the means to calculate them, would be irrelevant if that is her point. As long as the number is negative, then there is a difference in the cost of labor to the property owner and the value of that labor when making the calculation
The issue to her premise isn’t as much as the difference between labor value theory and subjective value theory as the issues on trying to implement systems that would calculate and distribute “true value” if it could even be calculated. For instance, if the labor received economic rents then by her same theory then labor would be exploitive of capital as they now have negatively economic rent. Thus, if this is the theory of exploitation, there will always be some exploitation
The Smith view indicates how a purchaser determines value. They measure it against alternative means of production of elastic goods
Your author seems to focus on negative economic rents. In the first instance, value is what we solve given other known factors such as labor (and capital cost, time) and would be integral in a build v buy type decision
In your authors case, value is fixed and we are calculating the labor input. Once that quantity is obtained then it’s subtracted from the property owners actual cost of labor. That negative value appears to be the focus of her argument
The fact that all the other numbers are hard to calculate, or knowing the means to calculate them, would be irrelevant if that is her point. As long as the number is negative, then there is a difference in the cost of labor to the property owner and the value of that labor when making the calculation
The issue to her premise isn’t as much as the difference between labor value theory and subjective value theory as the issues on trying to implement systems that would calculate and distribute “true value” if it could even be calculated. For instance, if the labor received economic rents then by her same theory then labor would be exploitive of capital as they now have negatively economic rent. Thus, if this is the theory of exploitation, there will always be some exploitation
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:16 am to 4cubbies
A person uses their time to provide a product or service that someone else deems valuable and that value is measured in money.
Time = money.
Time = money.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:28 am to 4cubbies
quote:
Smith isn’t talking about market price at all. He’s grounding value in labor commanded or saved. It’s all about production cost, not about how much consumers desire something. It's interesting that Smith is considered the Father of Capitalism when he held ideas like that.
Each sentence Smith wrote doesn’t contain the universe of his opinions. Adam Smith wrote about the effects of Demand in The Wealth of Nations. He understood the Supply/Demand curve. But if you cherry pick one sentence out of the book it might appear that he doesn’t.
To a modern reader The Wealth of Nations seems almost banal. At the time, though, it formed a foundation for economic thought moving forward.
You speak of the “Subjective/Marginalist Theory of Value, where value emerges from supply, demand, and scarcity.” But scarcity is simply a component of supply. If demand exceeds supply then the price goes up until supply increases to meet the new (lesser) demand at that price. If there is not enough supply to meet demand then it’s scarce.
LTV does not fail to consider scarcity or subjective expected utility; they are just baked into supply and demand respectively. It’s only natural that current analytics should be more granular than past ones.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:30 am to 4cubbies
quote:
I'm dictating this post to another illegal who is transcribing it for me btw.
Good troll!
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:37 am to 4cubbies
quote:
Isn't it interesting that Adam Smith and David Ricardo came up with it?
Adam Smith postulated that labor was only a part of the price of a good or service. "The first price" as he called it. He also recognized that scarcity and desire were a significant component of final price.
Karl Marx tired labor to exploitation in capitalism.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 11:56 am to Penrod
We have to do something about the AWFL epidemic in this country
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:06 pm to 4cubbies
quote:found your problem
I’ve been reading Iris Marion Young’s Five Faces of Oppression (Exploitation, Marginalization, Powerlessness, Cultural Imperialism, Violence).
Good on you to see that the woman is spinning a narrative. Hopefully you use that knowledge and recognize everything she says is bullshite
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:12 pm to JimEverett
quote:
t is interesting to think about how Marx would view the world today.
I don't think he could understand the material abundance of the west combined with how few people are actually involved in making goods.
That might be a reason that the LTV is not used by economists much anymore?
There’s no way he could fathom the service-based economy we employ in the west. His work and ideas focused on tangible goods.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:16 pm to 4cubbies
Curious what y’all think.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:18 pm to 4cubbies
Are you a man pretending to be a liberal woman as a troll or is this really how liberal women think
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:24 pm to 4cubbies
quote:Are you attempting to find a cure for insomnia??
I’m writing papers based on the works of academics, so I’m citing theories and authors I agree and disagree with.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:27 pm to jrobic4
quote:
Hence why plumbers, roofers, lawn guys, etc...make what they make. Pay enough, and more people will do it. Quit paying for them to sit on their arse, watch how many enter the labor force!
So true. For example, Soviet workers favorite quip was, "They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work."
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:29 pm to 4cubbies
The LTV is partially correct but incomplete. It is not just the amount of effort and the length of effort, but also how much knowledge is required to competently exert said effort. For example, saffron is one of the most expensive crops on earth because of how much labor it requires to harvest and process. Meanwhile, it doesn’t take very long for a competent coder to produce a website with a functional online store and POS system, but it does take a long time to train a coder to have the skills to do so.
If a skill set is rare, and the time required to train another person in that skillset is great, then that labor will be expensive even if it takes little time to perform.
If a skillset is common, and laborers are plentiful and interchangeable, then even if much labor is required, the labor may be inexpensive.
If people are properly compensated for their time, skills, and effort, such labor is not oppression. The idea that the excess value created versus the price paid can be used to measure oppression is once again an interesting theory but often incomplete. Creating excess value is the very purpose of labor.
If I am hungry, I will cook. I will gather fuel, gather raw ingredients, prepare cooking implements, and use my knowledge to create a dish. If said process consumes more calories of effort than it produces, then I will quickly starve to death. If it produces the same, then I will have no calories left to perform any other life sustaining tasks. If all I do is focus on tasks which create the bare minimum to survive, then I cannot devote time and effort towards innovating, increasing efficiency, or creating additional resources that I can trade for more. Yet, if I am creating excess value, and thus have calories to spare, I can potentially use them to come up with more efficient recipes, better cooking implements, or new fuel sources. This could cut my cooking time in half, require less ingredients, or allow me to cook more food in the same time. These innovations can stack.
I don’t know if I actually answered your question, but the reason for labor is producing excess value. What our information economy has done is create a K shaped labor model. Basic labor will always have some value, but only so much. Those with highly specialized skills command high value for their labor so long as their specialty is in demand. AI is now hollowing out the middle while one by one eliminating specialties along the way. Machines remove sweat equity and physical labor from many fields while AI is removing bean counters and information labor.
Innovation has always displaced labor. The Industrial Revolution and Mechanical Agriculture displaced millions and rendered many professions obsolete, but also created new professions over time. This balanced things out in the long run, but I fear the scale and rapid pace of these current changes will be too fast to find equilibrium. Labor is being destroyed too quickly, too broadly, and our political class is reacting to it by flooding developed nations with even more unskilled laborers. It doesn’t make any logical sense.
If a skill set is rare, and the time required to train another person in that skillset is great, then that labor will be expensive even if it takes little time to perform.
If a skillset is common, and laborers are plentiful and interchangeable, then even if much labor is required, the labor may be inexpensive.
If people are properly compensated for their time, skills, and effort, such labor is not oppression. The idea that the excess value created versus the price paid can be used to measure oppression is once again an interesting theory but often incomplete. Creating excess value is the very purpose of labor.
If I am hungry, I will cook. I will gather fuel, gather raw ingredients, prepare cooking implements, and use my knowledge to create a dish. If said process consumes more calories of effort than it produces, then I will quickly starve to death. If it produces the same, then I will have no calories left to perform any other life sustaining tasks. If all I do is focus on tasks which create the bare minimum to survive, then I cannot devote time and effort towards innovating, increasing efficiency, or creating additional resources that I can trade for more. Yet, if I am creating excess value, and thus have calories to spare, I can potentially use them to come up with more efficient recipes, better cooking implements, or new fuel sources. This could cut my cooking time in half, require less ingredients, or allow me to cook more food in the same time. These innovations can stack.
I don’t know if I actually answered your question, but the reason for labor is producing excess value. What our information economy has done is create a K shaped labor model. Basic labor will always have some value, but only so much. Those with highly specialized skills command high value for their labor so long as their specialty is in demand. AI is now hollowing out the middle while one by one eliminating specialties along the way. Machines remove sweat equity and physical labor from many fields while AI is removing bean counters and information labor.
Innovation has always displaced labor. The Industrial Revolution and Mechanical Agriculture displaced millions and rendered many professions obsolete, but also created new professions over time. This balanced things out in the long run, but I fear the scale and rapid pace of these current changes will be too fast to find equilibrium. Labor is being destroyed too quickly, too broadly, and our political class is reacting to it by flooding developed nations with even more unskilled laborers. It doesn’t make any logical sense.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:31 pm to 4cubbies
Interesting post. This LTV vs. surplus idea is interesting with respect to discussion culture (e.g. w/politics). Most people including myself don't know lots of economics, but we nevertheless acquire folk understandings that trickle down from trends in formal economic thinking and so we swim in water with relatively few structural accounts (doesn't have to be LTV), creating this space where our at-hand explanations for events tend to be agential (e.g. great man history, conspiracism, etc.), which isn't to say agents aren't highly consequential, but it skews things away from the systemic or random. Of course ironically you can come up with plenty of CT's for that trend.
This post was edited on 12/4/25 at 12:47 pm
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:33 pm to 4cubbies
I think we labor as slaves to the state for ~25% of the year. For our efforts we are awarded the opportunity to see that labor wasted on lazy people and criminals. Hope that clears things up.
Posted on 12/4/25 at 12:33 pm to 4cubbies
There's a lot to unpack here, so first I need to get a reading of what you're thinking.
It sounds like you're seeing LTV's "Value" as just a placeholder for "Price." LTV sees Value (total socially necessary abstract labor time embodied in the commodity) as a component of Price, but not Price itself. Marx saw that as the Capitalist system but he went a step further and imagined his utopia as having a worker's time qualified into a sort of labor certificate which could be exchanged for goods of equal Value (ie: the same amount of time put into making it). The very rough version is that he saw labor time (with some exceptions) as being Price (although it's never outright stated because Marx loved being overly linguistic).
In modern economics, we don't have Value as a component. Labor is labor and that's compensated with currency. That currency (which is a stand-in for Labor but not the "labor time" of Value because the currency compensation adjusts based on varying inputs whereas "labor time" is a static understanding that it's "the time spent at laboring").
I don't. It was a limited view made by people with similarly limited views (not casting stones, just stating it was harder to see the bigger picture back then).
No, and there's no reason to do so.
I'm not sure it's even philosophically useful other than in hindsight to see how our understanding of economics has grown over time.
quote:
Young is working from the Labor Theory of Value (LTV). That’s the classical economics tradition of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and of course our friend, Karl Marx. Our dominant framework today is the Subjective/Marginalist Theory of Value, where value emerges from supply, demand, and scarcity.
I can see why Young leans on LTV. It gives her a structural, objective way to define exploitation as surplus value transfer, not just “unequal exchange” or bad deals. If she wants to define exploitation as an economic form of oppression, she needs a theory that makes exploitation measurable and built into the system.
But the problem for me is that the LTV completely ignores scarcity and subjective utility. That makes it impossible to take as a comprehensive theory of value in 2025. It seems like a product of its era, not something that maps cleanly onto how markets actually work now.
It sounds like you're seeing LTV's "Value" as just a placeholder for "Price." LTV sees Value (total socially necessary abstract labor time embodied in the commodity) as a component of Price, but not Price itself. Marx saw that as the Capitalist system but he went a step further and imagined his utopia as having a worker's time qualified into a sort of labor certificate which could be exchanged for goods of equal Value (ie: the same amount of time put into making it). The very rough version is that he saw labor time (with some exceptions) as being Price (although it's never outright stated because Marx loved being overly linguistic).
In modern economics, we don't have Value as a component. Labor is labor and that's compensated with currency. That currency (which is a stand-in for Labor but not the "labor time" of Value because the currency compensation adjusts based on varying inputs whereas "labor time" is a static understanding that it's "the time spent at laboring").
quote:
So, for the economists and theory-minded folks here:
How do you make sense of LTV today?
I don't. It was a limited view made by people with similarly limited views (not casting stones, just stating it was harder to see the bigger picture back then).
quote:
Is there a way to bridge the gap between a structural, production-based concept of value and the marginalist, preference-driven one we use now?
No, and there's no reason to do so.
quote:
Or is LTV simply philosophically useful and economically obsolete?
I'm not sure it's even philosophically useful other than in hindsight to see how our understanding of economics has grown over time.
This post was edited on 12/4/25 at 12:36 pm
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