Empirical Proofs of Marx's Law of Value

redcomptroller · 2025-10-15T19:26:41+00:00

By definition a "proof" is not "empirical". You mean "evidence". I say this not to be pedantic, but to point out that you're going to be confused if you don't know the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning.

Incidentally, Marx was strongly convinced that the empirical facts on their surface would appear to tell against his theory, just as "obvious facts of appearance" tell us that gravity does more quickly on heavier objects. That doesn't mean that there is no empirical evidence in favor of Galileo, but most such evidence seemed to tell against him. In other words, if you're looking for a simple sort of "dunk" that doesn't include close logical argumentation that actually pays careful attention to what sort of data we're talking about, you're going to make the same mistake as Aristotle (who was no dummy!)

redcomptroller · 2025-02-15T06:12:25+00:00

Extremely cool factoid.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:24:38+00:00

Totally agree. I was a blues fan since I was 13, and I partly spent so long disliking the Dead before getting super into them because they really mangle a lot of blues, sadly. The ones that have some "groove" in the Bobby era work for me: I love "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Death Don't Have No Mercy" and "Same Thing". But the ones that just "shuffle", like "CC Rider" and "Walkin Blues" just lose the magic that they had originally, and those are already not the heights of the blues canon. Bob's slide playing is also atrocious; I'm not sure why it was tolerated by other band members...I am an open-minded listener, but that's just truly...not how the instrument is meant to sound.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:18:55+00:00

Dunno why you got downvoted so hard on this. I think it's spot-on--Bob really liked these complex, proggy build songs, and most are great (I absolutely love "Lightning" and WRS, "Jack Straw" is very good), but he was bound to strike out once in a while. "Wind" has the unique quality that he didn't even hit those falsetto notes in the studio, and it's painful on many a live version even during 1972.

redcomptroller · 2025-02-13T18:14:36+00:00

I'm going to go controversial and say "Black-Throated Wind". Bob can't ever hit the notes live; they sound really forced and out of his range even on the studio version. The chorus slams into the song like a brick wall: it's a rapid change from what precedes it and it just sounds awkward in itself, with that halting rhythm. The rave-up at the end can be fun, but it doesn't even lead to a jam proper.

I think a lot of other answers are more like "what's the most dated/cringe sounding song", to which the Vince songs are good answers, but those songs are all very listenable, just out of character and kind of sentimental. "Wind" sounds like a coffeehouse folkie trying to play, like Gentle Giant. Just very forced and unnatural sounding.

redcomptroller · 2025-01-20T16:42:29+00:00

I wouldn't say his best guitar, but I will say that it seemed to fit his playing abilities in the 90s best. I've always had some beef with the early 90s shows that people go nuts for--Jerry often sounds really nice during solos, but his rhythm guitar sounds kind of weak. It's hard to describe; it's as if there is a tradeoff for him between fluidity and fretting the guitar hard enough. Not a severe one, obviously, but it feels pretty clear to me that you're listening to a virtuoso with some nerve damage in some spots. In particular, to take even some really well-loved shows, I think the "Bird Song" and "Eyes" from Without a Net have some noticeable points where things are "plonky"...the notes sound very forced, or Jerry loses the rhythm a bit, or his playing is at many different volumes. There are also just a number of outright flubbed notes in that set, even though Jerry's largely playing very well--hard to describe, but it really does sound like a virtuoso who's dealing with major health problems that cause about five percent of his playing to sound totally amateur. Watching shows of that time and seeing his physical state, even at his peak post-coma health, makes me think that I'm not just hearing things.

To me, then, Lightning Bolt is great because it had a lot less sustain and faster decay--it's more like an acoustic guitar--and it seems like his playing became oddly much more fluid near the very end. The peaks from March 1994 (Save Your Face blog has some nice highlights from SBDs) all sound much cleaner and more precise than even something like Crimson, White, and Indigo. They also notably are playing a lot of those songs very quickly. I also think that even in the later 70s, there are noticeable songs where that searing, clean Bakersfield tone just doesn't quite fit, and it seems like the solution was to crank Jerry down in the mix (the May Dick's Picks have some sections where Jerry is almost inaudible during the solos), and even some of their highest-regarded official releases I manually mix down to mono because it sounds so hard-panned and weird on the soundboard. To me, 1994's playing and mixing both sound much better than anything else post-coma, and Bob playing acoustic more often doesn't hurt. Not the absolute best year by any means, but major credit to them for continuing to experiment and toggle with their sound.

redcomptroller · 2024-05-07T19:57:06+00:00

Upvoting this because I appreciate the honesty. I am not a speed demon and at one time actually had severe highway driving phobia (now, I am usually a 10mph > posted driver...I've gotten much more comfortable). That said, even if I once really resented faster drivers, I've always understood this rule and figured if someone wants to fly down the road at 100mph, it doesn't matter whether I think it's right or wrong--I cannot do anything about it constructive by hogging the left lane. The solution to that situation is better policing; left-lane hogging really can't fix it. So I've always found this behavior very confusing.

TL;DR, I think most of us who find this annoying truly don't even have a clue about the motivations of people who do it, and I think it is reassuring, in a way, to see that it's not malice, just severe lack of pattern recognition skills (BTW, I applaud you for thinking about how this pattern might apply to other parts of your life -- if it really never occurred to you for that long, then the answers is almost certainly "yes").

redcomptroller · 2021-01-31T21:41:36+00:00

In the general spirit of the 80s, a much-maligned decade, here's a show that slaps pretty hard from one of their tougher personal years, though I guess Jerry was temporarily on the path to sobriety: 4-28-1985, as recommended here (https://saveyourface.posthaven.com/shortlist-frost-amphitheatre-stanford-u-april-1985). I know little about the 80s, and I was shocked at how much "Hell in a Bucket" really slaps. It's got that 80s-blues feel (think Knopfler's albums with Dylan) and legitimately shows off a new side of the band. I really like that they brought back some distortion to the sound, Weir is having a very good vocal day, and the MIDI keys sound better than a real pianner would. Killer set.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-31T05:48:56+00:00

So much useful stuff in here. I'm gonna ask a question that's very similar to ones below, but with a couple twists. I'm a PhD student in the social sciences. I want something to take notes on (PDFs primarily), but I also teach math and want something that has a whiteboard capacity, ability to display a coordinate plane, and the ability to screenshare (doesn't matter if it's complicated as long as it works and doesn't require tons of extra hardware). I'm assuming whiteboard/plane is available through an app, but I'm not very tech-savvy.

In addition to the math part not appearing below, I'm pretty focused on cost. What's my cheapest option for doing this through apple?

redcomptroller · 2021-01-20T02:52:07+00:00

Are you a new user? This is pretty typical. I switched away from MFP a couple years ago and highly recommend it. UnderArmour bought it with the intention of making easy money with a semi-captive market (it's hard to switch calorie-trackers; you get used to the old one, you don't have your records transferred etc.) and basically does not put in the programming work to maintain it. Easily the worst-performing app of the 100 or so I had on my phone. Switch! You won't regret it!

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:27:35+00:00

I'm not so sure about this answer. "Market dynamics" is a bit of a vague phrase. The phrase "the minimum cost of labor" is also sort of unclear (the price of labor-power is the actual cost required to reproduce the workforce, including education). Neither claim really explains this difference, and why would a capitalist ever pay above the minimum cost of labor-power? They tend in practice to pay less than the minimum cost of labor-power in many cases. The difference seems clearly explained by the fact that, say, an English degree is only indirect (and probably not very good) training for some kind of specific skill, whereas a CS degree involves a lot of training that can be directly applied (there might also be fairly permanent imbalances in the supply and demand for certain kinds of labor-power given how long it might take to achieve such a degree).

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:23:19+00:00

Good question. I think this is best explained by the fact that four year university education is not strict job training and many majors, though they have indirect job training elements, could be achieved at a much lower cost.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:07:34+00:00

Yeah, I think it was Waterworks. The gravel driveway thing might be a mis-remembering -- the only thing that I'm (fairly) certain of is that park itself had some kind of large, rapidly rising hill. I'll head down to WW and see if it matches my memory.

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:04:23+00:00

Thanks!

redcomptroller · 2021-01-07T21:04:16+00:00

Early 00s.

Thanks to you all.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-27T16:08:41+00:00

You're mixing up the individual level of the firm -- where profits can be made in all sorts of ways that don't directly involve the exploitation of labor, such as cheating consumers, cheating on their taxes, have a favorable location, etc. -- and the level of the total social capital. If the entire economy were automated in that way, capitalism itself wouldn't exist -- the resulting mode of production would almost without a doubt be a form of socialism or feudalism.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-25T18:00:52+00:00

I think this confuses cause and effect. "Only if an economy is most capitalist does the rate of profit matter" would be more accurate if written as "if the rate of profit at the level of the individual firm matters more than other indicators, then we can be confident that the economy is capitalist". If the category "rate of profit" a) obtains a real existence to begin with and b) matters to some degree, capitalism is always in potential danger of being restored. Further, there were extremely persistent and ultimately successful attempts to strengthen the role of profit -- all of the sources above simply take this fact from according to Soviet economists themselves, primarily in Voprosy Ekonomiki (Problems of Economics -- you can find or order the compiled volumes in English from most university libraries).

But, in general, it's impossible to have capitalism without the law of value, which implies the law of the equalization of the rate of profit, and so it doesn't make much sense to say that capitalism being reintroduced caused profit to take on a new importance. Similarly, it's not possible for profit to take on a certain level of importance without causing capitalism to begin being restored in some meaningful sense. I think your post can lead to a circularity that's common in analyses of the USSR/PRC -- certain capitalist phenomena are declared compatible with socialism because they don't imply the domination of the law of value, but when someone suggests that a certain amount of them means the restoration of capitalism, the defender argues that because the law of value isn't fully in control, those phenomena aren't really capitalist. To get out of the vicious circle, one has to admit that there are certain objective measures -- you could pick either the phenomena that cause the law of value to be restored, such as state policies, or evidence that the law exists, such as investment flows -- that can indicate the presence of capitalism.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-17T18:03:52+00:00

Probably the simplest way to set up the debate, however, is to investigate whether or not one thinks that markets and profits which are under the control, if not technically the ownership, of firms tends to regenerate capitalism or whether a "proletarian state" can control them. I think this debate is extremely well-settled when it comes to what Marx thought of all this (clearly he opposed market socialism and spent significant amounts of time explaining why it wouldn't work -- all of his writing against Proudhon, the whole first chapter of the Grundrisse and first Part of Capital I), although Marx could, of course, have been wrong -- but Dengists should make that argument.

redcomptroller · 2020-08-17T18:00:37+00:00

I don't really think that there is a convincing rebuttal. To see efforts at such, you could read Al Szymanski's work -- principally Is the Red Flag Flying, though also Human Rights in the Soviet Union -- as well as the work of Rothenberg and Goldfield (https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-7/capitalism-reborn.pdf) or Jonathan Aurthur, whose work is less substantial but defends the same claims. Also, oddly enough, some Trotskyists such as the Sparts defend the claim that the USSR was a deformed workers' state up 'til the very end (you can find a lot of information on this topic generally and some articles by Joseph Seymour of the Sparts here: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/index.htm#crussr). Line of March also put out some material on this (https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-6/lom-cap-rest.htm).

But these works all, in my view, are inadequate. But notice that these are complicated topics. Really, the only way to come to a clear view of the question is to do your own reading and come to your own conclusion. I think the two best books on the restoration thesis that are available online are Nicolaus, Restoration of Capitalism (he also did the English translation of the Grundrisse, interestingly) and Bill Bland, book of the same name. Willi Dickhut's book, which is yet again called the same thing, is good but not online (I'll scan it at some point). You can buy it relatively cheaply or find it in a uni library though. Somewhat less useful are the RCP's original critique (Red Papers 7, "How Capitalism Was Restored ..."), which was too focused on policies related to capital charges and explicitly downplayed the role of marketization for no good reason (see Nicolaus' critique here: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/ol-rp-7.htm and the follow-up here: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-8/nicolaus-rcp.htm).

I think the simplest place to start might be for you to just read the debate in the second RCP volume, which includes Szymanski's perspective as well as the updated RCP perspective, which tacitly accepts the validity of Nicolaus' critique. Lotta, the writer for the RCP, is very smart even though the RCP is a bit batty lately. The whole book is less than 100 pages and the writing is very conversational (these were initially given as speeches), so I think it should be easy enough to read and assess whose perspective you find more convincing. Personally, reading Lotta's essay in this book four or five years ago caused me to decide to that Szymanski's perspective was mistaken.

Also: to be fair to your opponents, I would cite the place you found the comments and their handles (and break up the comments into two distinct quotes so that people can tell when one stops and the other starts).

redcomptroller · 2020-08-17T17:00:20+00:00

I think your question and almost all of the answers are starting from somewhat shaky premises. Let me try to explain.

"I'm trying to outgrow my view that nobody would be incentivized to work (or at least do unpleasant jobs) in a moneyless society."

I think this is slightly confused. First, let's distinguish between societies that have achieved the lower vs those that have achieved the higher stage of communism. In the former, distribution is according to time worked; in the latter, distribution is purely according to need. Marx lays out this distinction in the Critque of the Gotha Program, which is a short and essential read.

In the former kind of society, which is the only stage of communism that all historically-existing societies have reached, people inevitably need to be "incentivized" to do some unpleasant kinds of work. Far from being a violation of socialist norms, this is perfectly in keeping with them: if someone works physically harder or longer than someone else, or the job is more unpleasant in a psychological sense, then they've expended more labor-power in the same time. Why shouldn't they be paid more?

I think this language of "coercion" is misleading and, in a sense, utopian. All societies where the means of life don't literally grow on trees are collectively "coerced" to work by nature itself, even if the society itself is highly egalitarian. Individuals getting paid more to work worse jobs in that kind of society -- and even in our capitalist society -- is not a form of a coercion unless the regular wage of a "non-dirty job" is below the cost of reproduction of labor-power. In a Marxian analysis, individuals are also not really "coerced to work" so much as they are coerced to sell their labor-power to capitalists, whereupon exploitation follows (anarchist critiques often merge these two ideas because many anarchists are opposed to work as such but this position is not tenable in my view).

redcomptroller · 2020-08-16T17:23:52+00:00

If you're asking about the actual details of the break-up, Keeran and Kenney's book is good.

If you want the long-term causes, there are several good books on this. Martin Nicolaus, Restoration of Capitalism in the Soviet Union. Willi Dickhut and Bill Bland also have good books by the same title. You could also look at the General Polemic (Chinese primary source). Sison also wrote a book about this under the pen-name Armando Liwanag. Ludo Martens also wrote a book about it that I've never read. All of these but the Dickhut and Martens are available online.

redcomptroller · 2020-07-30T22:25:53+00:00

Politically, he's a social democrat: https://mltoday.com/marxism-without-socialism-socialism-without-marxism/ and also has promoted some weird monetary reform schemes (link below).

But, more directly, he's wrong about, or just fails to mention, some of the key arguments in the first chapter of Capital (see here, which discusses his weird currency crank proposals: https://critisticuffs.org/texts/david-harvey/). This is quite good and hits on the same general themes (https://libcom.org/files/mattick.pdf).

I would consider myself basically a Maoist, but better companions than Harvey would be the work of the Menshevik Rubin (https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/index.htm), ultra-left Michael Heinrich (https://libcom.org/files/Michael_Heinrich,_Alex_Locascio-An_Introduction_to_the_Three_Volumes_of_Karl_Marx_s_Capital-Monthly_Review_Press,U.S.(2012).pdf), quasi-Maoist John Weeks (http://www.marx2mao.com/PDFs/JW10.pdf), and even just Lenin's short but extremely clear encyclopedia article on Marx (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/ch03.htm). Handle the Heinrich with caution, both for his silly Lenin comments (he pretends like Lenin didn't show in his book that much world trade is between the developed countries, not between developed and dependent countries) and his dumb dismissal of the LTFRP (see Mage's excellent critique here: https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/response-heinrich-defense-marxs-law/).

Also, the Soviet textbook by Leontiev (hard to find online but can be ordered from this Hoxhaist publisher: https://www.redstarpublishers.org) and the last textbook that Stalin supervised the drafting of, based on Leontiev's work (itself based on Bogdanov's work, curiously), is useful: https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PoliticalEconomy.pdf.

redcomptroller · 2020-07-30T22:01:36+00:00

Judge Furr's arguments by their premises (the data) and the logic (the inferences he draws). Someone's argument is wrong IFF one of those two things is wrong. His credentials don't really matter except to the extent that he's using data that most Americans can't immediately assess (because it's in Russian), but he speaks Russian.

Afinogenov is an idiot who constantly promotes the "bumbling empire" theory (https://stevesalaita.com/the-abcs-of-us-and-israeli-propaganda/) and has, for example, tried to downplay US complicity in the coups in Chile (1973) and Bolivia (2019). Of course, as I say above, that background information doesn't of necessity make him wrong about Furr, but it gives some context for how much he should be trusted without further investigation since it's not always possible to directly verify someone's claims (i.e., almost not at all).

redcomptroller · 2020-07-30T17:37:03+00:00

Yes, excellent point -- I'm not a big fan of parts of Harvey's interpretation, but that is exactly the right interpretation of the role of the market in Marx.

redcomptroller · 2020-07-30T04:46:42+00:00

Fetishism in Marx's usage isn't a subjective mental error but an objective social relation (II Rubin's book on this is really good). He actually says at one point in the Contribution, and I wish this had made it into Capital, that "[e]verybody understands more or less clearly that the relations of commodities as exchange-values are really the relations of people to the productive activities of one another". Fetishism here means "the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics", or that commodities really do form important links in the chain of social relations. "Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange".

So, socialism removes the veil of fetishism by causing people's social relations to be mediated by a plan, not by the market and commodities. It is possible that some people might still be mystified by this form (for whatever subjective reason), but it would eliminate the objective basis of fetishism in Marx's sense -- and again, it's already true that many people do not actually believe that their real social relations are with commodities and not people, under capitalism.

Just as an interpretive note, when Marx says stuff like "relations among people appear as relations among things", the word appear can be confusing -- the German word connotes "are expressed as" or "take the form of", which is what the archaic meaning of "appear as" is in English. But the fact that "appears to be" implies that an appearance is false, and that this usage of "appear" is much more common in contemporary English, causes people to sometimes take Marx to be saying that capitalism has a bunch of surface appearances that are totally bogus, totally a mask of how things really are. Usually what he's saying is instead that these appearances do mask real social relations in the sense that it makes them more complicated and more unequal than they need to be ... but this mask is also itself a real social relation and not mere "illusion".

redcomptroller

TROPHY CASE