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

[Jester]

Indeed, 'scarce based products' does mean something else, although it was Ricardo rather than Marx who first explained this. You fail to understand that price (which is subjective) has little or no relationship to value (which is objective).

Okay, then. What is the difference between "scarce products" and "scarce based products"? I do not understand this distinction.

Either the LTV is a theory of price, or it is a theory of value (meaning something other than price). If it is a theory of value, the question is, what kind of value. It is clear it does not mean use-value, because that is subjective, nor exchange-value, because that is price. We could, of course, say that value is *intrinsically* the value of labour power inputs, but that would be a tautology - all value is labour value because all value is defined as labour value.

But if it isn't that, then what IS it? What does it help us DO?

For Ricardo, the answer was obvious: It does tell us about prices. The exceptions to the labour theory are real, because they do *not* tell us about prices. For Ricardo, it was not a satisfying theory, but it was the best he had, fully acknowledging its exceptions. As you quote, he suggests that commodities not well described by the labour theory (as a theory of *price*) are only a small part of the economy.

That may well have been true in 1800, but it certainly isn't true today. Real estate in large cities. Blockbuster movies. Airline tickets. Patent medicines. High-education services. These are not tiny parts of the economy any more, and the failure of the labour theory to describe them is not a small matter. It means, as I said earlier, that at best, the labour theory explains a restricted set of prices.

The labour theory is also useless at international economics, and has essentially nothing to say about the fact that labour prices vary enormously across the world. Does my London haircut have the same "value" as a haircut produced in Mumbai at a fraction of the price? If so, what does this even mean? If not, how is that compatible with a labour theory of value?

Objects, which are not products of human labour, and do not have value, can certainly have a price when offered for sale. Through their price they take on a “commodity form”. As Marx explained, “things which in and for themselves are not commodities, things such as conscience, honour, etc., can be offered for sale by their holders, and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can, formally speaking, have a price without having a value. The expression of price is in this case imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics.” 18 He goes on to give the example of the price of uncultivated land, which is without value because no human labour has been spent in its production. Nevertheless, given an attractive location, it can attract a hefty price.

This is exactly the sort of gnomic evasion that makes Marx so difficult. Things which are not produced by labour but have the form of commodities have price, but not value, because value is imbued by labour. Their price is "imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics." But that doesn't mean anything! It doesn't map usefully onto an idea of imaginary numbers, or variables, or any other mathematical concept. It's just a way of saying that value is NOT observable, and therefore, we are back to the ethical interpretation - the labour theory of value says nothing scientific, but is instead an ethical statement, about what we SHOULD value.

Monopoly prices are a product of definite circumstances, and do not reflect value as such. Despite our critics, the law of value, remains the key regulator of the capitalist economic life.

As an empirical statement, these "definite circumstances" are all around us, all the time. They are not strange exceptions, they are entirely normal occurrences. I can point to dozens of exceptions in the room I am sitting in. The room I am sitting in *itself* is an exception. The internet I am typing this on, and its provision, is an exception. The computer programs used to process this information are all exceptions. The coffee in my cup is an exception.

As I said, the labour theory of value of limited use, in describing the *simplest* commodities - shirts, cars, televisions. And even then, it doesn't really add anything, it's just a different way of understanding input costs, with an arbitrary focus on labour.

False. You are conflating actual scarcity with artificial scarcity. Production under capitalism (along with laws that protect private property) is structured in such a way that it is in the direction of profit and not use-value, so it deliberately creates scarcity in many places where there would otherwise be none. There are plenty of observable examples of this.

Most of the scarcity that matters is not artificial. Space in cities is limited, and people inflict congestion externalities. Roads only fit so many cars before they turn into parking lots. Air space is limited, and overfilling it leads to plane crashes. Infrastructure of all kinds is scarce, and building more of it is much more complex than simply adding labour, because it inflicts costs on others.

Abolishing property rights does not remove scarcity. The whole point of property rights is to incentivize production and trade, and to disincentivize theft and destruction. You can say this is all an elaborate edifice created by the ruling classes etc, etc, but it's not the fundamental source of economic scarcity.

This of course, is done on purpose, and you know very well why.

Please stop doing this. You cannot read my mind, nor can I read yours. It reeks of conspiracy theory, and adds no value to the argument.

Again, value is objective, not subjective or abstract.

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Actually it is your theory, of marginal utility, that suffers this problem - not the LTV.

What are the objective, empirical predictions of the LTV, that demonstrate its usefulness? You've already said you don't view the LTV as being about prices, so what is it about, that we can observe and measure, to test whether the LTV leads us from truth to truth?

-Jester