This is precisely correct, if there’s a large supply relative to demand, then production in that sphere will decrease and vice versa.
So then your basic point is that supply and demand, hence prices and the laws of the market, function as a means by which the labour of a society is distributed into various fields in accordance with need? I suppose that you’re right that all societies have to do this on some level, as if we spent all of our labour on creating atomic bombs we wouldn’t really be able to eat much. So, then, Marx seems to be putting forward the ways in which the market serves society before criticizing it. That’s nice of him.
Capitalists do not produce anything, they do not have productive labour.
I disagree, but we’ll get to that issue when we get to it, I suppose.
Because, any type of labour can be transformed into another type of labour. 3 hours of labour at tailoring is exchanged with 3 hours of labour in weaving.
But I thought that price did not equal value? Marx’s point seems to have been rather that the labour performed on tailoring is equated qualitatively with the labour performed in weaving, although he seems to admit elsewhere that they may depart quantitatively. At best you could say that the product of the 3 hours of tailoring is an exchange-value as well as a use-value, and hence the commodity bought becomes in some sense the product of the 3 hours of labour seen as production of an exchange-value (because as an exchange-value it can be expressed in terms of other use-values). This doesn’t imply that the product bought is itself the product of 3 hours of labour, however.
In any case, it would seem somewhat pointless generally to perform 3 hours of labour on tailoring and then exchange it on the market if you could spend the same time on weaving and get what you wanted directly.
It’s not meant to be a criticism of Capitalism. Marx was merely investigating Capitalism. We analyse EVERYTHING about Capitalism, whether or not we can turn it into propaganda.
My experience with most Marxists is that they only know about as much of Capital as they can use for propaganda. I suppose that you’re at least better than the ones who attempt to prove the theory of value through finding empirical price-value correlations, since you’re at least not trying to ignore theory for figures and reduce economics to a statistician’s panacea.
Marx saw value as a set of social relationships between people.
So the product as a ‘crystal of social labour’ is actually a ‘social relationship’? I’m not sure what this means. It’s fairly clear that in labouring for other people, you enter into a ‘social relationship’, so maybe what you mean is that in bringing commodities into relation this social relationship is created?
Dear christ do NOT get me started on that. Take my advice and merely forget everything you already think about Communism.
I suppose that it was wrong of me to bring up socialism here, since it’s not really what this topic is about. Maybe we should reserve discussion of that topic till later, so as to avoid arguing about things which are off-topic.
The price of a commodity (considered OUTSIDE of market forces liek supply and demand, monopoly etc. In otherwords, value) is determined by the socially necessary labour-time to produce it, AT THAT GIVEN TIME PERIOD (this dispells the whol “transformation problem”)
Aren’t you basically just saying here that average price coincides with value? Because Marx says that, “average prices do not directly coincide with the values of commodities, as Adam Smith, Ricardo and others believe,” and I believe that the whole transformation problem issue is because he says that the prices of a commodity, disregarding the ups and downs of supply and demand and so on, will revolve around ‘prices of production’, not value.
Drop your preconceptions, forget everything you’ve heard “Marxists” say. We do NOT think that there are “evils of commodity production.” NEVER have we held that. In fact, the entire purpose of describing commodity fetishism is to show that the MARKET is what controls everything. We do not blame the Capitalists, they are acting as they must within Capitalism.
Given what I’ve heard from Marxists (or “Marxists”, if you prefer), I’m guessing that that ‘we’ is at least half-Royal.
Marxism is not a system. Communism has never existed.
Don’t Marxists argue about ‘primitive communism’ or something of the sort having existed? I’ve always seen that kind of argument as somewhat specious, however, as if ‘primitive communism’ of some sort may have existed once, it’s just as much clear that it’s a thing of the distant past, and even Marxists admit that it had its basis in a low level of development of the individual’s power and productivity, which makes it somewhat absurd to argue that it must reoccur based on the highest development of such so far developed.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Mao Zedong alleviate unemployment by having people dig ditches and then having them fill them in? I think I’ve heard that somewhere before. Regardless, would this be a policy you would agree with, since it “distributes labor”?
I’m fairly sure that they’re arguing that the market ‘distributes labour’, so given that they’re a communist it would seem that they don’t agree with things just because they ‘distribute labour’.
Marx didn’t really have any economic theory as specific as you’re looking for. He just sought to destroy value relations via collective ownership of the means of production.
He seems to have written three books of ‘economic theory’ about capitalism, which suggests that he did have something resembling an ‘economic theory’. If you just mean that Marxian economics, like Austrian or neoclassical economics, is primarily concerned with investigating capitalism rather than detailing possible future societies, then that’s probably right, although it’s not clear from the context and it seems to have become trendy among some Marxists to deny that Marx wrote about economics.
I wouldn’t say his economic beliefs are separate form his ideology.
That’s probably a good thing, as when people’s ideologies have no relation to economics, they generally become politicians.