this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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chapotraphouse
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You can totally say you're a Marxists while repudiating the LTV. You would not be a Marxist, however.
I'd wanna ask you about David Harvey then, but outside of his reading of Capital he's known for having some odd opinions. He's also the only person I can think of who both claims to be a Marxist and doesn't go along with LTV.
I would say he’s a Marx scholar and not a Marxist. Kinda like how there are atheists who study the Bible.
Yeah I've also heard of academics who call themselves 'Marxians' to mean while they study and apply Marxist economics, they don't want the label of political Marxism.
Marx may not have been the first theorist to come up with it, but the LToV is still foundational to most of the economic theory that did have its origin in his work. Furthermore, Marx did make contributions to the LToV itself, and in that sense it is one of his significant contributions to various fields.
A person doesn't need to fully understand evolution by natural selection to consider themselves a Darwinist (biologically speaking, obviously I'm not talking about social Darwinism here). But if they reject evolution by natural selection as the mechanism for the diversity of species, then they are not Darwinists. Similarly, you don't have to be able to explain the LToV let alone its nitty-gritty details, but if you claim that the theory is false, you probably shouldn't be calling yourself a Marxist revolutionary.
Class analysis requires a mechanism for how one class exploits another economically, a mechanism that the LToV provides.
And that critique is what extended it beyond being merely bourgeois theory.
Maybe so. But are those models refutations of the LToV or elaborations on it? In either case, do you have examples?
For what it's worth, I agree with you on almost all of that. I think the main difference here is that I see the labor theory of value as being much more fundamental to Marxism than just, as you put it, one facet of it. It's very difficult to keep Marxism as a whole if you toss out the LToV, since the whole structure would begin to crumble. It may be possible for similar models to be put in its place to prevent the crumble, but I think that those models would have to be close enough to the LToV that the distinctions wouldn't really matter except to academics. (edit, fixed a word)
Agree, one doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be revolutionary (see also: anarchist comrades) nor does one need to be a Marxist to be class-conscious. But it would be incorrect to call such a person a Marxist.
Yes, Capital was a critique of political economy, but not an entirely negative critique. He accepted the LTV in its basic structure. The main difference was clarifying what kind of labor counts as the content of value. He did this by applying a dialectical analysis, going from the ~~particular to the~~ concrete to the abstract and again in the opposite direction^[I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value]. Only by doing this — in the process showing where in their analyses the earlier political economists went wrong — was Marx able to right the ship and arrive at the conclusions which now define Marxism.
*edited a brain fart, also added Rubin details