is this an ernstchan threda
t. reader of hedaline only
It really depends on situation of economy itself imho.
In short, there's two different regimes in which an economy can be running. For production you need:
- labour
- resources
Since it's unlikely that the economy will be perfectly balanced (i.e. that there's exactly as much labour as needed to extract all the available resources at a time), the implication is that one of those will be scarce compared to the other.
In economies where labour is scarce (or rather, where there is not enough population in a given area to exploit all the available resources), ability to extract value will primarily depend on dominion over labour itself. Such economic environment promotes creation of economic systems where capital is amassed primarily through dominion over labourers – in extreme cases, this leads to slavery-based systems - modern example would be the sparsely populated but resource extraction potential rich American South, with decentralised economy (leading to implementation of race-based chattel slavery), and of Siberia with state-centralised economy (leading to implementation of gulags).
However, in economies where resources are scarce, the game is instead in securing resource ownership. This scarcity of resources also means that labour becomes devalued – no longer does the capital require to secure their workforce, for there is more available than can be used anyway. Since resources are hard to secure, major attention is now turned towards investment and resource acquisition, which leads to creation of economic systems based on stock market – where access to wealth is promised already before said wealth is generated - since it is of crucial importance to secure supply lines for future production. An extreme example of this is industrial Britain, whose thirst for resources (caused in part by rapid technological advancement increasing production capacities way over available resource wealth, and in part by domestic population growth) led both to explosive imperialist expansion, and to massive degradation of value of labour, leading to the horrors of industrial Britain that in turn inspired Marx.
Labour theory of value is thus nothing more than kneejerk reaction to this 2nd regime; an ought rather than an is.
Note also that Marx himself alludes to the aforedescribed view:
<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.
And, futherso:
<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.
Critique of the Gotha Programme, I
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm
tl;dr Labour Theory of Value describes only the limit case in which resources » labour. In the limit case where labour » resources, capitalist value prevails instead. This is The Great Contradiction of 3rd book of The Capital, which can only be resolved by expanding the economic theory and recognising that the Labour Theory of Value describes merely one limit regime – in fact, the one NOT present in 19th century Britain – of a wider economic theory.
- entertaining guy
- charismatic, weird and fascinating personality
- both a very high level philosopher and maker of shit jokes
- serious leftist thinker with important opinions that are sensible and have the potential to be mainstream, but has few other proponents (pro redistribution of wealth but anti pc and sjw crap)
- insanely prolific writer
- destroyer of Jordan Peterson
>tl;dr Labour Theory of Value describes only the limit case in which resources » labour. In the limit case where labour » resources, capitalist value prevails instead. This is The Great Contradiction of 3rd book of The Capital, which can only be resolved by expanding the economic theory and recognising that the Labour Theory of Value describes merely one limit regime – in fact, the one NOT present in 19th century Britain – of a wider economic theory.
What is capitalist value lol?