Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in The Great Leap

[Jester]

No, the LTV is in fact quite well understood by any competent Marxist economist. It is in fact, bourgeois classical economists who have misconstrued or displayed ignorance in understanding both Marx as a whole and the LTV in general - both intentionally and unintentionally.

In addition to this just being an assertion, it is also a strawman. I make no argument about who has understood or misunderstood the labour theory of value, but about the validity of the theory itself.

I suggest you read the following:

http://www.marxist.com/in-defence-of-ltv.htm

There does not seem to be any useful shadow of an economic argument there. Was there some argument in particular contained therein that is of use?

But this is a typical example of how classical economists misunderstood Marx and his analysis of the LTV. Most of the things you listed above are either monopoly or scarce based products.

If one's theory of value is incapable of describing the value of scarce products (unless "scarce based products" means something else?) then I might suggest it is a useless theory, because everything we care about is scarce. Nothing can be reproduced "without limitations or restrictions," and if the labour theory explains only those things that can be, then it explains nothing. Economics is the study of scarcity. That's the whole point of having theories of price and theories of value.

If the theory claims that there is an abstract thing called value, imbued on objects by labour alone, which may or may not have anything to do with either use-values or exchange-values (prices), then this is an ethical stance, not a scientific theory. It does not describe observable things, and does not offer any empirical predictions. This is a dead end for saving the labour theory of value as a useful contribution to economic theory.

Yes, there are certain commodities which cannot be explained by the LTV alone, but Marx never said they did.

So, you accept that there are commodities whose value cannot be explained by the labour theory of value (which is a criticism of the *theory*) but your defense is that Marx did not say they could be? But that is a defense of Marx, not a defense of the LTV. Can you defend the theory, or no?

-Jester