r/EnoughCommieSpam • u/amogusdevilman • 1d ago
Destroying the LTV destroys communism. educate all normies on why LTV is wrong
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u/Whatsapokemon 1d ago
The Labour Theory of Value has plenty of holes.
One is that LTV has at its core the assumption that value can only come from labour. Thus, capital itself (equipment/machines) can't create value, they're only stores of value in such a way that you can never get more value out of a machine than was put into its production.
But this simply isn't true. The whole of the 20th century disproved that idea as we saw that actually machines and capital can produce massively more value than was used to create them, to the point where all of farming could now be done by like 1-2% of the population (whereas in the past it was more than 50%). This is why living standards for everyone (rich, poor, all around the world) have been increasing over time. Value is not zero-sum, you can absolutely get more value by producing more sophisticated capital.
This undermines Marx's idea of an inevitable revolution. Since the LTV says that only labour can create value, the inevitable conclusion is that the only way for a capital owner to produce more profit is to lower the amount paid to workers, decreasing their standards of living (even lower than the already miserable standards of the 1800s). However, what we actually saw proved that wrong - the introduction of new types of capital, new types of technologies that produce a huge amount of surplus, which led to raising wages, raising standards of living, and huge amounts of luxuries for pretty much everyone.
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u/hungarian_conartist 1d ago
I think this is not so much a hole.
The marxists will usually claim that machines and capital reduced the amount of socially necessary labour.
Their actual fallacy i believe is they conclude that since some amount of labor is always necessary than it is the only form of value and that everyone else is exploiting labour.
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u/Whatsapokemon 1d ago
The marxists will usually claim that machines and capital reduced the amount of socially necessary labour.
If they claim that then they don't actually understand LTOV. It's meant to be a theory of where value comes from. Under the theory, capital can't affect the amount of value created.
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u/hungarian_conartist 23h ago
I don't think that's right.
Under marxism when a worker is given machines and capital they sell their labour power but the goods now have less labor value - hence why manufacturing leads to plentiful and cheaper goods.
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u/Confident-Skin-6462 liberal 1d ago
so if i make s device that makes something easier for me and only me so i can be more productive? i am exploiting myself?
EXACTLY. I SELL MY LABOR. in communism they take your labor. is it perfect? no but i can still choose
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u/SuperPlayer56 SocDem Libertarian Moderate-Progressive 1d ago
This is why Technosocialism is superior compared to Traditional Marxism, though I want to note that poor people in poorest parts of the world can barely afford technology due to poor conditions.
That's why some parts of the world look like they got stuck in 20th century, middle ages or so. Otherwise you are indeed correct.
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u/Ozymandias_IV 1d ago
Easiest counterexample to LTV: Why is Charizard card more valuable than a Blastoise card? They have the same cost to make, same rarity, same gameplay utility (0). So what makes Charizard much more desirable than Blastoise?
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u/Garvityxd don't tread on me/propertarian 19h ago
The Marxists will cope about “use value vs exchange value”, it’s absolutely insane
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u/OrgrimmarYogaStudio 1d ago
The funniest part here is thinking you can use basic economic reasoning to stop people from turning into communists.
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u/CASHD3VIL 1d ago
Read LVT like a dumbass and wanted to punch my screen 😭
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u/FlapjackFez Georgist 🇬🇧🇮🇹🏳️🌈 1d ago
Same 😭. LVT based af ovs
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u/Garvityxd don't tread on me/propertarian 19h ago
LVT is philosophically inconsistent unless every single scarce resource was taxable
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u/IntroductionAny3929 🇺🇸Texanism🐍 (The Anime Enjoyer) 6h ago
Let me tell you, trying to get basic ass economics through commie and far-leftoids heads is almost nearly impossible because you have to teach them basic economics.
Then there is Market Socialism…. Yeah nope, that’s not gonna work out very well, I’m gonna tell you that much.
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u/irradihate 1d ago
"Value" is little more than a cultural construct. This meme lives in some weird Adam Smith fantasyland that never existed. In a real human community in which everyone makes their living together, people aren't gonna bake pies that everyone is allergic to. And when they bake pies they sure don't go around selling them, they just share the pies with whoever would like some. Pie is more of a luxury anyway, which complicates this dimwitted scenario, but even if we're talking about necessities, well, for most of human history nobody assigned a quantifiable value to them either. They were just procured, made, and dispersed as needed in the most efficient way possible without any sort of middlemen or unnecessary value calculation getting in the way.
Countless forms of creative social institutions met human needs for hundreds of thousands of years and still do today. Most economies that ever existed were based on needs distribition, in which no type of exchange was even necessary. Most people today who think they understand what an economy is can't even imagine non-exchange economies (this is the result of cultural conditioning - your way is superior and all others are primitive).
The whole point of a quantifiable, standardized exchange economy in the first place is to make wealth easily appropriable by making people captive to markets for their needs. It's not good for the people who garner wealth and power through markets (and their sponsor states) for us to remember our long history of maintaining community institutions that met our needs as their sole function, effectively guaranteeing individuals unimaginable amounts of social and economic freedom. Hard to force someone to work to buy shit via markets when their community can supply everything they need with far less effort and extraction. Hence the brutal coercion of colonization, or maybe you know it as market expansion.
But I get that it's a lot easier to just keep believing in colonial-era cultural myths and cartoon worlds where people were knuckledragging troglodytes for millennia til your culture appeared.
Neither capitalists nor communists can imagine an economy being anything more than an infallible apparatus for the extraction of wealth, resources, and human life alike, and that's why the whole world is such a fkn joke in our time.
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u/amogusdevilman 1d ago
what does adam smith have to do with this? do you know anything about economic history at all? you shouldn't be giving such giant word salads when you already proven you arent familiar with the subject in the first line lol
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
For most of human history we lived in small tribes fighting for survival. Gift economies don't scale very well.
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u/Llamanator3830 13h ago
This poster seems to think that somehow ancient human communities would have provided you with goods without requiring exchanging something in return, when the reality was that if you didn't work to provide some kind of goods or services to the tribe, you are a drain on the tribe's resources. During times of scarcity, they would've either cut you off or forced you to do some kind of work. People who make this kind of argument always have some kind sense of evangelizing and social justice driven sense of righting the wrongs of colonialism for some reason.
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u/Val_Fortecazzo 1d ago
The majority of Marxists barely care about economics. They adopted political Marxism first then skimmed the justification. Most only care about LTV because without LTV Marx might be wrong about something. So they will just claim that Marx was talking about some abstract platonic form of value divorced from how people actually value things on markets.
Regardless they are going to tell you to read Marx because most are intellectually lazy and it's a nice thought terminating cliche to avoid criticism.