Which I imagine you read. Give me an example then.
>stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com
Of all "debunkings" this is one of the most pathetic I've seen. Literally nothing of value was said in that article.
Use & Exchange
Nathan Thompson
Christopher Harris
This is a Marxist blog, by the way.
Marx was wrong in this regard because he failed to realize (just like Ricardo and Smith before him) that technological progress would outpace diminishing returns within the capitalist system. Of course, it’s difficult to blame Marx for this since we didn’t fully realize the nature of technological progress and it’s relationship to economic development until relatively recent research in endogenous growth theory.
Carson Ward
A Marxist blog that says Marx was wrong…?
Nathan Brown
A Marxist blog that says that the LTV and the TRPF are wrong
Bentley Fisher
These are the problem with the LVT:
1. It reduces all heterogeneous human labour to a homogeneous abstract socially necessary labour time unit, but does not properly explain how this happens
2. It is possible that in cases of joint production, the labour value of a commodity might be undefined, nil, or negative.
3. As production becomes more and more automated by machines, robots and artificial intelligence, we could easily imagine a world in which capitalism continues and money profits continue, but human labour falls towards zero. So where, if surplus labour value is the source of money profit, would profit come from in such a world?
Aaron Jenkins
What do you have to say about Paul Cockshott's evidence for the LTV, that the average price of goods correlates with the average labor that goes into those goods?
Here, he shows how input-output data can be used to show evidence for the LTV:
Nolan Thomas
… With use-value, exchange-value and the money-form?
How so?
From rent.
Cooper Sanchez
What exactly is left unexplained? Are you referring to the labour reduction problem?
Explain yourself. Joint production means what exactly? And what's the issue with a commodity being NaN? We are interested in the aggregate effect, not the single commodity.
What you fail to understand is that such a world would not be capitalist. An economy that has no human labour in it is not an economy that can regulate itself through exchange. The economic output would be entirely decided by the previous distribution of wealth, it's a rent-economy, not an exchange-economy. Capitalism would cease to exist and neo-feudalism would be born, confirming Marx's dialectical theory of history.
See it like this: imagine having a machine that is capable of producing bread without an ounce of human input, it is capable of gathering seed, produce fertilizers, collect water, prepare the terrain, harvest, refine, cook and distribute. Let's now imagine a similar machine producing chairs. What is the exchange ratio between the two? Well there isn't really, you can exchange any amount for any other, it's just a question of waiting for the machine to be done. Let's arbitrarily say that they will exchange 1 loaf of bread for 1 chair. The two owners shake hands and the two machines start producing. But here's the question… how is it possible to gain a profit from this? Where in this exchange am I increasing my capital? I am always making an equivalent exchange, the costs are always the same and the exchange outcome as well. There is no capital accumulation possible, we can let the two machines work for millenia and the two owners would not have gained a single penny from it (but a whole lot of chairs and bread). This is because without human input, the value of the bread and chair is as meaningful as the value of air or light and not because they are abundant, but because they are effortless to obtain. For an economy to exist in this environment it needs to be based purely on rent, on parasitic existence an collection.
James Ortiz
Wut. You don't understand the labor theory of value, seriously, feel free to quote literally any of Capital and critique it. Where EXACTLY is it wrong?
This is marginally better, but still ultimately empty of anything.
1. It reduces all heterogeneous human labour to a homogeneous abstract socially necessary labour time unit, but does not properly explain how this happens
Marx makes it incredibly clear that the individual laborers/workplaces average out to a certain competitive time for production of a good. So the incredible and mystical "heterogeneity" (lol) comes out as an average rate. This is highschool logic user.
Don't even know what to say, this is unfounded to such a degree I can't imagine what his argument is. I can't even really tell if this is a critique.
I could also imagine a world where I'm God, and I make Capitalism explode. Capitalism is thusly, and quite clearly, unsustainable.
But anyways, I'll take your fantasy land and show you how.
Okay, so assuming you don't just replicate a human laborer in Silicon bodies, you still would need human laborers to create and repair the machinery. This is where the value would come from. If you are talking about human laborers recreated as Silicon, that isn't a refutation of Marx because he couldn't predict robots. They would still function under the LTV.
Because machinery is apparently SO cheap and effective it replaces all human labor (lmao where do you live for this fantasy)
Cameron Barnes
You've answered your own question. There isn't any profit, because there is no surplus value being extracted.
If there are no wage laborers, there are no wages. If there are no wages, there's no consumption. If there is no consumption, there are no profits.
Ideally this would mean the transition from a wage/profit based economy to one of production for need. What we are seeing now is the result of such a metamorphosis, as the economy sheds "surplus" workers (ie, eliminating labor to maximize profit). Diminishing working populations and wages are in turn creating diminishing profits, because there are increasingly fewer people to buy, and less money with which to do so.
This is one of the contradictions of capitalism. As the process of accumulation progresses, it increasingly obviates itself. However, the nature of profit and its necessity both in maintaining the system that creates it, and in its integral social role, incentivizes the profit-gatherers to continue the process as long as possible, even after the material conditions necessary for such a thing no longer exist. The finance economy has arisen directly because of this need, creating fictitious capital to continue the process of accumulation–in effect, collecting the surplus from theoretical future labor.
But in reality, no labor is being done, no capital being created, and subsequently falling profits derived from "real, existing" capital.