I heard an interview with Keen where he claims that Marx contradicts himself, specifically that his attempts to solve the transformation problem in Capital Vol. 3 undermine the LTV. If labour is the only source of surplus value i.e. profit, there is a TRPF, but Marx seems to hint at the fact this may not be the case because of profit variation between commodities and, from what I've read, still no consistent, applicable method of determining a price magnitude from a value. Perhaps this is related to the machinery argument from the start of the thread.
I think you need to make an actual transcript of the interview or present argument in full some other way, rather than suggest to guess what exactly was meant.
Sorry, I wrote that really confusingly as well. I guess I just meant in Volume 3, Chapter 9 of Capital, Marx outlines the composition of capital varies between markets and gives examples of how varying composition of capital affects the rate of profit even whilst the surplus value remains the same relative to labour. From my understanding, this seems to be a concession that the determination of prices, and therefore profit, are determined by all capital inputs (both in terms of use value and exchange value) which undermines the TRPF. I think that's Keen's argument as well.
I don't know if that makes sense still, I'm really bad at explaining what I mean.
Ryan Jenkins
Meant to respond to this post
Matthew Russell
I'll try to answer though I'm not sure if I'm totally understanding the contentions, but I don't think it is that labor is the only source of surplus value in the sense you are speaking of, it is that labor is a universal input for economic production and so surplus value is always measured against standard labor productivity. There can be a myriad of factors which effect standard labor productivity, including heterogeneous capital goods, and this in turn effects the price, but the equality between all of them still remains labor. So it may be that one commodity has its price determined as labor, plus this specific type of fixed capital, plus some raw material that has its own price specificities, and then another has a separate set of qualities in those categories, but labor is still there. So these unknowns just become assumed as a part of the process of production for labor in this particular industry or whatever. Instead of saying 5 labor hours and a handsaw, we just say it takes 5 labor hours.
But in the case that Keen is extending this to autonomous machines, I think that starts exiting the labor theory of value as Marx laid it out. We would basically be looking at some variation on a slave economy. I think Isaac Asimov had a book in which one of the outer colonies was populated by a bunch of supermassive property owners with the equivalent of entire states to themselves, and there'd just be armies of robots running around generating goods and services for them to consume. I'd honestly imagine that if it were possible, that'd basically be the logic of a world in which machines are capable of autonomously generating value. It wouldn't happen all at once, but I figure there'd start being these industrial segments entirely dominated by autonomous machine labor, which would start usurping the market system as the machine lords just accrued more property and capital goods to themselves, and saw less need to actually produce for the market.
Lucas Lopez
It's very simple: If constant capital / variable capital goes up, ROP goes down. Since constant capital is just a cost that has to be reproduced through sale, and can't generate surplus. If constant / variable goes down, ROP goes up.
