[lbo-talk] Unproductive Workers = The Best Organized in the USA

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 08:25:07 PST 2006


WS: >Let's be honest, the LTV is a bunch of crock. It was a good rhetorical device to rally for a greater power of labor at the turn of the century - the common sense wisdom "he who pays the piper, calls the tune" dressed up in econo-babble to make it look scientific and important - but as science it is a bunch of crock that has zero explanatory power (as most economic theories do anyway.) ... The LTV fails to explain the behavior of business firms... <

Marx's LTV (as opposed to Ricardo's) isn't meant to "explain the behavior of business firms." It's a macrosocietal theory. This kind of microeconomic behavior can be explained by such things as supply and demand, which Marx turns to only in volume III, when he deals with "the surface of society, in the action of different capitals upon one another, in competition, and in the ordinary consciousness of the agents of production themselves." That is, after volume I, he disaggregates.


>If the use value does not matter, then why do we have such a
diversity of products? <

I don't know who said that "use value does not matter." It wasn't Marx.

>... And how about employee-owned stock corporations, are their owners capitalists who care only about exchange value and exploit themselves as workers? <

that's clearly a mixed case, while Marx was focussing on pure cases. It's hard to understand the former without the latter.


>And then, there is pesky automation. Today, great value is produced
by automated production line with minimal human involvement and with future technological advances it is likely that most material production will be carried by robots controlled by a handful of software engineers. That clearly contradicts the basic premise of the LTV that only human labor produces value. Moreover, with such automated production the profits are made not in manufacturing but distribution - a fundamental fact of life in modern economy on which the LTV has nothing to say. <

Marx wasn't familiar with this? au contraire. Anyway, who makes those machines?


>Methinks that the LTV should be put to rest in the museum of human
thought. It was a clever rhetorical device to mobilize support for labor struggle for power in labor-intensive industry era where labor had virtually no decision making power. ... <

what would you replace the "LTV" with? you can only trump a theory with another theory.

-- Jim Devine \"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin

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