the_dunk_tank

The gist of it is that marginal value theory shows that there’s an optimal level of employment within a particular workplace/job for maximizing value creating (basically, one worker is going to be spread too thin to be efficient, more workers increase efficiency but at some point adding more workers doesn’t increase efficiency). Liberals argue that Marx didn’t factor this in, plus some impacts capital reserve levels have on pricing, ergo labor theory of value is wrong.

This is a problematic argument on a few levels. One, Marx explicitly stated in Capital that particular businesses may have particular methods and ways of setting up their workflows that allow for greater value production that others, but that this doesn’t change the macroeconomic reality of value creation; he took it into account. Second, it’s used to validate the idea that we need a capitalist class to make those important efficiency decisions to optimize marginal values, but this is patently silly as most socialist economic platforms still have some sort of organizational oversight to examine these things, it’s a question of what class they report to. Third, Marx’s labor theory was more of an analysis of time as a limited resource for laborers than as a pure pricing determinant; Richard Wolff has talked about this. Fourth, it’s dressing up nitpicking as a refuting of the fundamental argument. Okay, Marx got some of the calculations wrong, that doesn’t make the whole theory invalid. Like, modern copies of The Origin of Species are full of footnotes stating which bits of Darwin’s arguments about particular evolutionary mechanisms have been overturned by subsequent biological research but it doesn’t render the theory of evolution wrong. Or to put it another way, if Marxist economics is wrong because of this nitpicking then all of Adam Smith’s works are wrong as well as he also used labor theory of value.