/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Try actually reading it first.

>>1798522
>If I labor 50 hours polishing a turd versus 5 hours, how does that make my turd more valuable?
I'm going to take the bait. A society that doesn't beat people up for polishing turds is one that needs polished turds to reproduce its own profound socially necessary stupidity. Therefore in that strawman context, your turd-polishing has value and the more you polish turds (in that profoundly unintelligent society) it implies that there is value in such an alien action. But this can already be seen in Hindutva India.

But compare and contrast that example with auto manufacturing. Observe that the average price of a car is usually going to be higher than a slice of bread, almost regardless of supply and demand. The value (NOT price) is proportionate to the amount of socially necessary labour time it takes to manufacture it. This is because that society already needs cars to build more cars, cars to drive autoworkers to work. We can't have a further discussion without a theory of economic reproduction like Quesnay.

>>1798522
More intuitively people spend more time on production AND consumption of what is needed to reproduce their own labor. Usually people spend more time digging ditches (i.e. tilling for agriculture) than they do autistically spasming.

Value to marx is "human labour in the abstract", or "abstract labour" which is expressed in society as "socially necessary labour time" (SNLT), or the amount of labour you need to do to make a living for which youre paid for in wages. So the LTV denotes that all paid labour is productive since it serves the interests of the capitalist (by reproducing the worker's labour-power in kind). Marx makes clear distinction between productive labour and unproductive labour in this way.
Digging a hole in the desert isnt productive labour, unless youre paid for it (to marx).
But these analyses by marx are also pre-keynesian and so dealt with commodity-money like gold which limited the money supply and employment to the capitalist class, thus serving their needs as producers of profit. Today things are different since you can effectively be paid to be useless, and thus your labour is not "productive" in the way marx means it. This causes intra-proletarian infighting over who is a "real worker" and so on.
also "alienation" to marx isnt "loneliness", its just the way in which Value is externally represented by things like money. You cant feed yourself on paper, etc. A better translation would be "mediation". "The alienation of man" is the way in which mankind becomes a commodity rather than fully our "species-being" (self-relation) under capitalism, but to marx, the social substance of labour under capitalism is also a bridge to international relations, so capitalism is progressive as it is oppressive

Marx didn't invent labor theory of value. It comes from the work of prior economists that he built upon (Ricardo mainly). It was the standard agreed upon view in economics before the Austrian school astroturfed its way into the institutions and replaced it with subjective value theory and marginal utility theory which is capitalist nonsense that was disregarded and ignored until after the rise of Marxism motivated the bourgeoisie to search for anything that could be used to counter Marxist economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginalism#Marginal_Revolution_as_a_response_to_socialism

Simplest explanation I can give:
>producing anything has an associated cost
>all the inputs that go into it can be reduced to labor required to produce them in turn
>economic actors will try to get the best deal (buy low, sell high), which causes the price of items is going to tend towards the average amount of labor it costs to produce them ("socially necessary labor time"), which is synonymous with value

Marx's labor theory of value is derived from Adam Smith and Ricardo. It states that the value of a commodity is more or less equivalent to the average hours of labor it takes to produce it. It can explain why you will never be able to exchange a pencil for a fancy car.
You can find the core of it in the first chapter of Capital, beginning with considerations about utility and market exchange. It's a dense text, but it's a valuable thing to read, several times even, to be more knowledgeable about economics.

>>1798581
I would also agree that austrian "economics" is primarily moral in nature, with its transcendental critiques like "praxeology" and its rationalistic discourse of "human action" taking precedence over empirical reality. But thats why the chicago school (sowell, friedman, etc) has always been superior to the austrian cultists.

>>1798522
>If I labor 50 hours polishing a turd versus 5 hours, how does that make my turd more valuable?
<le mudpies critique
this is peak QTDDTOT. this is chapter 1 volume 1 shit. Not even brainlets like Bohm-Bawerk stoop to the "mudpies" critique. Marx explicitly states it has to useful labour producing a commodity with a use value. Sitting around polishing a turd is not useful labour.

>>1798522
if reading Capital is too hard; at least watch this

>If I labor 50 hours polishing a turd versus 5 hours, how does that make my turd more valuable?
No. This is addressed within the first few paragraphs of Capital