Labor Theory of Value

I agree. Most of the rich people I know inherited it and strike me as lazy. However the workplace I was referencing was actually run by a guy who was psycho and was probably a multimillionaire. He was miserable to be around but he knew what he was doing pretty damn well.

People are in debt because capital is cheap. I would prefer they take out loans to create value but it seems most people just buy consumer goods on credit.

I have no doubt about that. I just don't have much faith in democracy and didn't want that to sit uncontested. As an aside, if you have any good examples of different methods I am interested.

Didn't say it was. Was pointing out that the idea that workers can't start a business because of lack of capital seems off. I would agree that free time is a factor but last I've checked loans are at 4% right now. On a semi-related note I am interested in how a communist would deal with risk of investment though.

yeah if you define medical care, transportation, education, and shelter as "consumer goods"
you make it sound like people are taking out credit to buy TVs

This is some intense ideology my friend

I would defined education as a consumer good. Shelter/medical care not so much. Transportation is questionable.

Its what I am getting out of the labor theory of value. How is labor different from any other market good?

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This is a very good question! The reason that workers are paid less than the full value of their labor is that they are not paid for their labor. They are paid for their ABILITY to do labor, which is called "labor power." Labor power is the commodity that workers sell to their employers. Its price is determined by the cost of living, education, and things like that. It's important to note that the price of labor power is subject to class struggles, such as trade union struggles. When workers unite and fight for better living standards, they drive up the cost of labor power. The cost of labor power can also be driven up by passive collective demands, such as when there is near-full employment. There are limits on how high and how low you can price labor power though: the lower limit is subsistence (can be broken through if you allow worker extermination or very low life expectancy + high birthrates) and the upper limit is the full value of the labor (some workers are paid over this limit, but capitalism couldn't function without most workers being paid below their full labor).

Disappointed in your responses, you didn't address OP's question.

You can't price labor in terms of labor. That's like pricing gold in terms of gold. It doesn't make sense. Labor value is a relation among commodities, just like gold prices are.

Cool. So if I understand you the argument is that people aren't paid based on the amount of work they actually do but on supply/demand factors. This makes sense to me. The solution to this problem is to either unionize or to increase employment. Employment is near full last I checked to the only route to improvement (at the current moment at least) would be to increase unionization. I can get behind that. How would a communist/socialist go about unionizing?
Not sure I agree here because I still think the capitalist can potentially provide create value here by giving the worker good direction.

You can. It would be a unit value.

All you would end up with is labor hours per labor hours which cancels out. That literally makes no sense.

fuck off Ace, unionizing won't fix capitalism

Not sure I get the reference, but elaborate please. What further steps would you take?

That is like saying money isn't a product. Just because it is used for exchange doesn't make it outside the system.

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The expenditure of labour itself is the action that creates value; labour is the "value-creating substance", as Marx called it. Labour power, i.e. the capacity to perform labour, has its own value, that being the amount of labour necessary to reproduce it (i.e. to produce food etc.) - but labour itself cannot be measured in terms of how much labour it contains.

Not saying to read the whole book, but the first chapter of Capital explains all of this pretty well: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1

The only way this increases value is by increasing density of labor (IE, how hard people work or how consistently). Meaning it will result in surplus anyway.
Look, you seem to be somewhat interested in the topic. Just read Capital already.

The exchange value fiat money represents is clearly different from its value as a piece of paper.

yeah
Does it have to be a capitalist giving directions? The person conducting an orchestra usually doesn't own the place or the instruments used. It doesn't follow from the opinion that some people need orders to be productive that the means of production must be privately owned.

Strangest political compass I have ever seen.

People are paid a pre determined wage, no matter how much they will produce for the capitalist in the eg. 8 hour work day. He pays their ability to work not by how much they produce. They get paid x, even if theybproduce more than x (or less, but such a company will go bankrupt soon).

Average hours of human labor required to produce the good.

More specifically the socially necessary labour time to produce similar generalized goods as demanded by the rest of the economy

Isn't that just supply and demand, but replacing "supply" with "labor" in the equations?

Market prices are ultimately determined by supply and demand. Labor values don't account for every instance of a particular observable market price because, as marginalists love to point out, some case like water being sold in a desert to a person dying of thirst would see the price capable of rising far beyond other commodities that took many labor hours. This is an extreme example, but out in the world there are plenty of instances of price fluctuation that reflects chaotic circumstances that are impossible to predict.

However, trying to explain these prices in a scientific way by simply referring to "supply and demand" doesn't offer any information. It's like shrugging and saying "I don't gotta explain shit", it abdicates all responsibility for having a theory of price formation to basically saying it is what it is. Labor values are a predictive theory of price because they suggest that prices will have a certain relationship to the amount of labor expended in producing commodities. To challenge it would require either falsifying its predictions, showing its logical inconsistency or having a stronger theory that makes better predictions.

But to go all the way up the comment thread, the reality is that a planned economy would not simply look at labor values to determine prices and call it a day. It's generally understood that what a socialist economy would try to do is conserve labor while trying to maximize welfare. So actively diminish labor expenditure for greater production of goods and services, which can be seen to be in contrast to the capitalist job fetish driven by a fear of increasing unemployment and a breakdown of the circuit of market production and consumption. However, we know this can not always result in optimal outcomes because simply looking at maximum conservation of labor to maximum output neglects a myriad of factors, one that is presently most important being ecological. So the real process of creating a plan would probably include more information when deciding how to weigh certain possibilities, such as adjusting the costs to certain possibilities to reflect how they may be less than desirable for being especially resource intensive when those resources may be limited.

But this says nothing about capitalism vs. socialism in particular, since capitalism is failing to take many of these externalities into effect as it is. Of course with capitalism this even transcends ecological catastrophe to just the daily, mundane perpetuation of extreme, absurd levels of poverty which are miraculously considered "optimal allocation" or something like this.

Labor is a commodity like any other. Its price goes up and down but will generally be a little bit more than what it costs to create it in the long run. This is the correct amount in a sense,a bag of sugar should cost about what it costs to make and deliver it, but when talking about people this is inhumane and means poverty for all.

How do managers play into the LTV?

A manager doesn't own the means of production, does valuable work (in theory lol) and gets paid from the surplus.

Are managers part of the working class or not? Is there a cut off point?

Marxism does not lump everyone into working class and bourgeoisie. Marx made the observation that society (as he saw it, in his time) was increasingly progressing towards two classes to the exclusion of others, but I doubt he would claim that the managers, skilled teachers, and ordinary laborers were all literally the same class, only that they would have shared in common a relationship to capital.
A manager is (at least in theory) a necessary part of the production process, to enforce efficiency of the production line. It's quite possible for someone in a managerial role to be little better off than a slave driver in class, but it is not a rule that managers are just as much workers as anyone else (because we all know that the managerial class is rife with nepotism, and sinecures do happen).
They would be, in a broad sense, "working class", in that they're dependent on receiving a wage to survive, but there is an obvious difference between a friend of the owner getting a sinecure and the shift manager who is just a regular employee with seniority and experience. Only in the loosest sense are the higher managers "working class", and they are usually hired because of their loyalty to the owner class and separation from the lower class of workers. The gradual tendency towards proletarianization would mean that, in the long run, more managers will either be part of the capitalist class outright or they would be little better than the workers they command in status (though afforded extra privileges by the employer). I'm not going to pretend that the manager is the exact same thing as a guy working part-time stocking shelves though.

If they play a necessary role in the production process via administrative or intellectual labor, then they contribute to the overall value of the commodity.

There is no cutoff based on income, though for purposes of analysis I think it is useful to distinguish between people who make significantly more than the average prole because you have to consider what the socialist political project is offering. Some very high income earners can stand to lose out along with capital owners, though capital owners obviously stand to lose far more. That means that their interests may align with capital owners, and so they are basically the cops of the proletariat, class traitors who are being paid off to continue to support the property rights of the capital owners. This group of people has also even been made into a trope in plenty of popular media, more recently in Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You where a low wage worker is offered a high paying job, which leads him to betray his fellow workers who are starting a union and essentially sell arms and means of extreme exploitation on behalf of the billionaire business owner.

So from what I understand, technically a manager is working class, but we can move past that simplistic analysis

My other question is has there ever been a marxist organisation analysis of NGOS, charities, non profits etc. I understand that they are mere stop gaps for what government should be doing , but I'm interested to know if anyone has done an organisation analysis, looking at how the managerial class in NGOS is essentially living off the labour of the lower ranked volunteers and lowly paid staff.

Yes, he is working class - he is employed by the capitalist, but in his job he is playing the role of the capitalist - he is looking to squeeze as much surplus from the proles as he can to boost profits as high as he can.

NGOS are, for the most part, a tool of the porky to make people comply and to prevent people from acting in ways that would threaten the system.

James Petras has written some good things about this.

monthlyreview.org/1997/12/01/imperialism-and-ngos-in-latin-america/

p.s. - there are two articles in the above post

thanks these are really useful.

I'm also looking for some critical articles on the internal pay structure of NGOS, maybe I should just write it myself