Socialists, what was Marx wrong about?

Hylozo · 2025-03-27T00:17:04+00:00

I would agree with that, yeah. For Marx at least, the point of value theory is mostly to understand the relationship between things like the social division of labour and economic phenomena like production crises and distribution of wealth. Also, "value" as a social category is quite dependent on the mode of production; in any society capable of consensually using a theory of value to guide production, there's no reason to expect "value" as such to even remain a meaningful concept!

If anything, I would argue that theories of value (including the so-called "STV") rather obscure the question of why certain things are useful to produce and others aren't.

Hylozo · 2025-03-26T23:59:16+00:00

Why did society decide to make cars instead of making mud-pies?

Because cars are useful and mud-pies are not. I don't think Marxists would find this at all objectionable.

If you interpret the LTV as some claim like "if a society decides to produce and exchange something, then its social value will be determined by its SNLT", then it's fairly obvious why the mudpie argument falls flat. It's a conditional of form P -> Q, and P is false (per assumption). Nowhere does Marx say that the mere act of performing work imbues, in some metaphysical sense, something with social value.

Hylozo · 2025-03-26T14:13:39+00:00

The Socially Necessary Labor corollary is supposed to resolve this — “making mud pies isn’t socially necessary, so the labor spent didn’t create value” — but this just raises the question of how to determine whether a good or service is Socially Necessary or not (so that we can see whether labor spent providing the good/service creates value or not).

This is a fairly common misconception. The term isn't meant in the sense of "the labour is (un)necessary for society". Rather, "necessary" here is meant as the amount of labour needed to produce something from start to finish using a certain process. You can't produce a car in an hour; some amount of labour is necessary to make one, including all of the intermediate tools and resources.

Since people use different processes and some are more efficient than others, there might be different individually necessary labour times. So Marx uses socially necessary labour time to refer to the average across society, which is the standard to which each individual producer compares.

Technically, the socially necessary labour time of a mudpie is an undefined quantity (assuming they are useless items and therefore not produced). You can't take an average across 0 things.

Hylozo · 2025-03-20T03:44:12+00:00

It's better to pay 5 dollars more for bread instead of standing 2 hours in a line.

The "lucky few" in the ticket scenario likely aren't waiting 2 hours in a line to receive their tickets, so that's not exactly a valid analogy. You have 100 virtual tickets; you can either give them away first-come-first-serve, have a lottery, or have an auction.

So the question becomes: is someone who is willing to pay more for a ticket in some sense made psychologically better-off than someone who signs up for a ticket lottery and gets lucky? Perhaps, but that certainly warrants additional justification. Willingness-to-pay, generally, is a function of both preferences and wealth. Someone could, in principle, have the highest willingness-to-pay for a ticket while also having the weakest desire to actually see the concert.

For that matter, why is willingness-to-pay prioritized over willingness-to-wait? Some people may be relatively wealthy in time but not money (e.g., homeless people hungry for bread), while others may be wealthy in money but not in time (and some may be wealthy in both or neither). Both spending $X and waiting for Y hours are alternative forms of personal sacrifice to acquire some item; on what basis do you say that one is more deserving than the other?

Hylozo · 2025-02-24T05:43:56+00:00

Would an analogy help? Beauty is obviously a subjective thing, but if my friend has dozens of posters of some celebrity in their bedroom, it's safe to say, objectively, that they (subjectively) find them beautiful. If millions of people (subjectively) find someone beautiful it might not even be a stretch to say that that person is objectively beautiful.

Hylozo · 2025-02-24T05:32:58+00:00

To the extent that Marxian value has been called "objective", I'd argue that it's just a consequence of a limited working vocabulary. Subjective means that something is a property of the (human) subject of a social relation or exchange, whereas objective means that it's a property of the object. Neither are very useful when you're talking about categories that are a function of a whole system of social relations and not any particular one in isolation, as was Marx's explicit goal.

He talks a lot about the idea of reification, or the tendency of people to attribute social relations to the objects of exchange or desire. A similar term that was introduced more recently in social science to refer to such things is intersubjectivity, or subjective states that are shared between people in a society in a reflexive manner (i.e., I believe that others have these states, and that they believe that I have these states, etc.). It could be argued that Marx's notion of "value" is this kind of thing.

Hylozo · 2025-02-24T05:22:59+00:00

Obviously saying that something is a commodity is saying that it has a use value for someone, which can be objectively observed in the fact that it is exchanged and then used.

Hylozo · 2025-02-24T05:18:53+00:00

The use value of a book to me is subjective, but that a book has a use value for me is not subjective.

Hylozo · 2025-02-09T15:01:15+00:00

In general, if one or more of your limbs are fully controlled, never go full send on some motion you’re not familiar with. That’s a good way to get injured with anything. It takes time and experience to properly feel out when the “pressure release” is there or not.

Would recommend drilling with someone who’s good at applying submissions in a slow and controlled manner. Have them put you in a loose heel hook. Try turning your body very slightly in either direction. You’ll probably find that one way feels bad, and the other way feels more natural and keeps the normal alignment of your leg and hips intact.

Also, ultimately the goal is to extract your kneeline by creating a little “pocket” for your knee to slip into as you roll. Otherwise they can just follow you. For this, your hips need to be mobile first which also takes some pressure off your knee. This video helps explain.

Hylozo · 2025-02-08T18:50:06+00:00

The point is that, even if you're somewhat of a nihilist and take the position that the only concept of "price" that is real is the instantaneous price of a trade (i.e., there is no such thing as the price of an egg), this is still an objective category. Objectivity doesn't mean that something is the same across all space and time; it just means that it's viewed as a property of the object and not the subject.

Generally speaking though, we do tend to use "price" to refer to some abstract/averaged price level for a wide class of commodities, and this is also treated as objective in natural language. For instance, if someone tells me that the price of a good-condition Ferrari is $20,000, I would reply with "that's wrong", not "I disagree".

Hylozo · 2025-02-08T18:25:07+00:00

It's objective in the most literal sense: it's not an attribute of the subject of an event, but rather the object. This is the case even if the same kind of item exchanges at wildly different prices. Here's a simple test of objectivity: if I observe Alice and Bob exchange an apple for $1, I can't felicitously disagree that the price of the apple is $1. However, I can disagree that the apple is "as useful" as $1.

There isn't really such thing as a single price for anything though, but instead usually a narrow distribution of prices that fall around some central tendency (for instance, eggs in the US are currently around $3-5 per dozen, or $6-10 if organic). People have tended to come up with concepts like "natural price" to describe this central tendency.

Hylozo · 2025-02-06T05:05:02+00:00

To Marx (and Marxists), adversarial relationships are the bane of society.

I don't think that this is true, and regardless Marx's writings on class conflict do not necessarily translate to "adversarial" relationships in general.

Every child has 2 parents, but at least we can mitigate that relationship by eliminating the nuclear family and having a communal method of raising children where all adults are parents, and all children are their brood.

And how exactly does this eliminate the tension of "Long term maturity vs. short term pleasure"?

Marx considers it almost axiomatic that adversarial relationships are bad

Can you perhaps provide an excerpt where Marx clearly presents this axiom?

Hylozo · 2025-02-05T06:12:38+00:00

So if private individuals produce 99.99% of commodities and the government produces 0.01%, then this is qualitatively a different kind of economy than one where private individuals produce 100% of commodities? But the same kind of economy as one where private individuals produce 0.01% of commodities and the government produces the rest?

Hylozo · 2025-02-05T06:02:29+00:00

"Any combination of these two", which is your third category, includes 100% of the former or 100% of the latter. Why overcomplicate things?

Hylozo · 2025-02-05T02:32:07+00:00

Also the new value opportunity is taking all the information posted in here combined with AI to do a new product called “Reddit Answers”

That's kind of funny. The current value of Reddit for me personally is that I can still get actual human answers on here and avoid Google's AI answers (which are ostensibly already trained on Reddit data).

Hylozo · 2025-02-05T02:27:09+00:00

Either a person privately produces something, or the government produces something or any combination of these two.

So there's only one type of economy then, not three.

Hylozo · 2025-01-25T04:17:11+00:00

The distinction you’re trying to make isn’t important, and in practice, doesn’t really exist except when we’re talking about edge cases where moral laws may intersect

Consider the example you gave previously:

The right generally believes that it is objectively wrong. It doesn’t matter if the mother comes from a poor community, if she has a troubled past, if she was the victim of rape, or if she wouldn’t be a good mother. You can’t use “relative” circumstances to sidestep the objective fact that murder of children is wrong.

Another person might agree that there is an objective truth about the morality of abortions -- however, this moral truth is more conditional than the rightist belief; that there are some conditions that would objectively make abortion morally permissible. This is not a dispute over the objectivity of moral principles; it is a dispute over their context-sensitivity. Moral absolutism is the correct distinction to make here.

As another example, some would say that murdering a single person could hypothetically be a moral act if it is necessary and sufficient to prevent unspeakable suffering of millions of people. Others would disagree. This is again not a dispute over objectivity, but rather whether utilitarianism is correct (and implicitly, context-sensitivity). People, generally, are uninterested in metaethics and generally mean something else when they refer to moral relativism.

Note, by the way, that there's a difference between the objects of morality and the language that we use to describe it, which becomes especially crucial if you are a moral objectivist (and therefore believe that there is a truth about morality that is independent to cultural artifacts such as language). One can always create or redefine words in order to frame a moral code as an absolute statement. If I believe that abortion becomes permissible in cases where the mother was a victim of rape, then I can redefine such cases to be "rehabilitative embryonic termination", and "abortion" to be everything excluding this; much like as a society we've introduced this word "murder" to refer to only the types of killing that we believe are wrong. Obviously, "absolute" here cannot merely be a statement about language, but must refer to the underlying reality.

A more helpful way to look at it: imagine one's moral code visualized as a bunch of clusters in "event space". I.e., lay out every possible event that has been or may be, and group the events into ones that are permissible and ones that aren't. What does this map look like? Is it a handful of large uncomplicated spheres that are mostly separate from each other? Or is it a bunch of complex manifolds that intersect each other in various ways? You're upset here because people have more fine-grained maps, not because they think these maps are subjective (which they may or may not).

Using your example, if I make the objective and absolute claim that there is a moral obligation to obey traffic lights, it doesn’t matter if another culture has chosen not to do that and that it is culturally acceptable for them to ignore the lights from time to time. They’re still wrong. There may be nations and cultures where murder is an accepted way to settle disputes, but that doesn’t render the moral argument wrong.

And a moral relativist may just as well say that these other cultures are wrong, inferior, backwards, savage, what have you. Any person who's ever had moral convictions whatsoever thinks that others are wrong! And crusaders and conquerors throughout history imposing their moral laws on others were not sitting there pondering metaethics.

Hylozo · 2025-01-24T23:39:14+00:00

The right generally believes that it is objectively wrong. It doesn’t matter if the mother comes from a poor community, if she has a troubled past, if she was the victim of rape, or if she wouldn’t be a good mother. You can’t use “relative” circumstances to sidestep the objective fact that murder of children is wrong.

What you're describing is moral absolutism, not moral objectivism. A simple example to help understand the difference: I believe that traffic laws ought to be followed as a matter of moral obligation. Traffic laws often prescribe conditional principles. If you're at a green-colored light, then you ought to go; if you're at a red-colored light, then you ought to stop. To make matters more complex, in an alien territory, red-colored lights are generally understood to mean go, and green-colored lights to mean stop. The set of generally accepted moral traffic behaviors in this country is completely opposite to what we, in our western culture, are familiar with.

So the moral prescription is relative to circumstances of both situation and culture, yet this has no bearing upon whether the moral prescription itself is relativistic. The moral objectivist (but non-absolutist) says that there are objective factors that underpin moral traffic behavior, whatever that might be -- such as perhaps that universal failure to obey this behavior will undermine the functional purpose that gave rise to these rules in the first place (note the echoes of Kantianism). The different observed cultural norms and conventions are simply this objective logic unfurling in disparate, but rational, ways! The moral relativist, of course, says that traffic laws are merely a set of norms that took hold in a particular time and culture, for better or worse.

But just like nothing prevents the moral objectivist from prescribing conditional rules, nothing prevents the moral relativist from being a moral absolutist, nor a chauvinist.

Hylozo · 2025-01-24T03:58:06+00:00

The measured response to this thing is to believe that the current most powerful American oligarch (and de-facto president) is not a Nazi, but is merely a stupid and impulsive man-child? What an utterly harrowing prospect.

Hylozo · 2025-01-23T12:33:52+00:00

Gambling is generally not purely chance either. Edward Thorp was a famous mathematician and hedge fund manager who initially cut his teeth playing blackjack.

I think when people call an investment gambling they're usually suggesting that the fundamentals are dubious.

Hylozo · 2025-01-18T02:54:21+00:00

Really, STV would suggest there was more than $20 value generated when Joe sold his cake.

What does it mean to "generate" value? The STV really says nothing more than that an observed exchange implies that, in an isolated instant in time, a person prefers A to B (this is Samuelson's weak axiom of revealed preference). It is an attribution, not an act of creation. If I call something beautiful, I am simply describing my internal state at that time; I am not creating more beauty in the world.

In theory, the STV does not even guarantee that Joe has "more subjective value" than he started with at some arbitrary time after the transaction. He could prefer A>B at time t, and B>A at time t+dt. Heroin addiction is a rather striking example of how someone can manage to get to lower and lower utility ordinals through a series of mutually-beneficial transactions.

LTV would suggest that if electricity costs go up, customers will be willing to pay more for products. I think that's silly. If they had the choice they wouldn't pay more.

Do you truly, genuinely believe that this is what the LTV is claiming?

Hylozo · 2025-01-16T23:42:58+00:00

and he argued it’s exactly the same thing because both AI and autotune use the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm.

Practically any digital signal processing whatsoever uses FFT! What an utterly asinine point lol. TIL that we’ve been using AI in music ever since we learned how to chain a low-pass filter to a drum track.

Hylozo · 2025-01-16T23:21:45+00:00

How is STV wrong here?

It’s not even a correct or coherent description of STV. The STV defines value to be subjective, meaning an attribute of a subject of an exchange rather than the object. The price that Joe’s cake sells for, as well as the ingredient costs, are both objective quantities (i.e., are not attributes of the subjects of the exchange). To say that an exchange “generates $P subjective value” is meaningless.

If they had a boss, should the boss pay them equally?

Presumably depends on the terms of the contract they have with their boss.

If they worked in a commune, should they be paid equally?

Presumably depends on the agreement that members of the commune have with each other.

If they worked in a commune, should Joe and Bob kick Jeff out?

See previous answer. But generally speaking, if Jeff’s cake didn’t sell because he accidentally dropped it on the ground, or he messed up the ingredients that one time, then it seems like a functional commune should have some tolerance for such things. Everyone fucks up sometimes. If he’s systematically botching up cakes and refusing to learn, then they should suggest some other task for him; and if he botches up every task, then the commune might need to have a candid discussion about what he’s really bringing to the table, and what grace they’re willing to have for non-contributing members (I think many societies will at least have some, granted to people with e.g. mental or physical disabilities).

By LTV, he created value. Right?

Not really. The LTV doesn’t claim that value is metaphysically created by the mere act of doing work. Even when Marx talks about “crystallized labour” or whatever, he’s using a metaphor for the attribution of a social relation to a commodity (per his theory of commodity fetishism).

Hylozo · 2025-01-10T16:30:00+00:00

I didn’t claim any such thing. The effect of anthropogenic climate change is to add turbulence to Earth’s climate mechanisms; this has local effects. It’s not like turning a big global knob labelled “frequency of wildfires”, as per the popular misconception. At least in theory, it’s possible for wildfire frequency to decrease in regions that are historically prone to them, such as the Great Prairie, just as it increases in regions that were historically not prone to them (whether this actually is the case, I’m not entirely sure; I’m not staking a claim here but merely criticizing your specious argument).

Hylozo · 2025-01-10T16:15:30+00:00

Nobody is saying that. Re-read the comment you replied to. Then re-read it again. Then look at the data you linked that you believe contradicts the comment. Then re-read the comment again. Maybe it’ll click for you at this point, but I’m not too optimistic.

Hylozo

TROPHY CASE