when marxists say "exploitation" it's just a mathematical fact, not a value judgement. it just means that workers, systemically (that is, it doesn't make a claim about any individual worker), don't get ownership over the full value that they produce. this must be true if you really think about it, otherwise there would be no reason to own a company that you aren't also a normal worker in
> don't get ownership over the full value that they produce.
But the value is subjective. A few lines of code is not valuable to me, no matter what context, so I am happy to trade it for a salary.
If I dig a hole for someone, someone agrees to pay me $50 for it. I value the $50 more than the cost of labour to do the hole. Me making holes is no value to me, and infact it's a good workout, so if they didn't pay me to do it I'd just go to the gym and do the same movement for free.
To them, it's probably the start of a fence or a clothesline or something that solves a real problem for them. Much more valuable than $50
on an individual level maybe it's (partially) subjective, but marx is concerned with the systemic level. he's talking about the industries which really drive the economy
i don't think there's ever been a successful attempt to reduce macroeconomics down to the microeconomics level. basically, the system as a whole cannot be calculated by summing up a model of all the individual behaviors, it doesnt work that way. there have been several broadly successful macroeconomic models
steve keen talks a lot about this same type of stuff and he's very much not a marxist, if you want a different perspective on it
No, it's not zero sum, it's possible to destroy value, i.e. 1+1 could equal less than 2. And it's also possible to create value, i.e. 1+1 could equal more than 2.
In the extreme case even literal bars of gold can become worthless after a few seconds of 'work', e.g. if someone throws them into an active volcano. After which no human individual or group would derive anything from it.
It's impossible for humans nowadays, but it is practically possible; one only needs enough delta v, which requires energy. There's certainly enough energy in existence to throw the Earth into the sun.
Yes, obviously this is absurd. But I'm just extrapolating your argument to make an argument: It is silly to expect any economic theory to account for throwing the Earth into the sun. But its also silly to expect an economic theory to account for other absurd behavior, like throwing gold into a volcano.
Every economic theory relies on simplified models of human behavior. Humans behaving irrational is not usually part of those models; the ways humans can behave irrationally is infinite - not useful for a model.
If not, have you completely misunderstood how easily this can be accomplished?
Raising an example that is not practically possible at all, by any dictionary definition of 'practical', such as moving the entire Earth into the Sun, and trying to confirm it meets that criteria by saying maybe in the very distant future it could be is just bizarre.
The latter is literally dozens, if not hundreds, of orders of magnitude harder to accomplish than the former. So even in some incredibly distant future where that would become 'possible', it would still not be practical in any sense that HN readers of 2023 would understand it.
If not, you have completely misunderstood the purpose of an argument reductio ad absurdum.
The point is not whether is is currently practical of if it will be practical at some point.
You are demanding that an economic theory makes sense of one particular, nonsensical human behavior. That demand is ridiculous; no economic theory tries to model irrational human behavior.
A reductio ad absurdum argument does not apply here because I, nor anyone else here, has ever claimed that economic theories have to satisfy all potential possibilities arbitrarily far into the future. In fact no one in this comment chain has even raised the mention of it other than you.
Have you completely lost track of the conversation? At best, it seems like an argument against the imagined thoughts made by yourself.
Well, you seem to make the argument that economic theories have to "satisfy all potential possibilities arbitrarily far into the future" because otherwise they are a "pretty dumb theory".
Or how is throwing gold into a Volcano any different from throwing the Earth into the sun, other than one being possible right now and the other maybe possible in the future? Both are pretty irrational and arbitrary actions.
> Or how is throwing gold into a Volcano any different from throwing the Earth into the sun, other than one being possible right now and the other maybe possible in the future?
The present day versus the far future is a very important difference, in addition to the several dozen or hundreds of orders of magnitude. Do you not understand how the normal person perceives possibilities in relation to time, or what orders of magnitude are?
Anything that is reasonably possible to do by a single individual right now, circa Sept. 2023, with normal single human adult scale resources, needs to be taken into account by any economic theories. If it's to gain credibility from the HN readerbase over the predominant theory.
If someone spending a few hours of effort could cause a theory to do the equivalent of a divide by zero then it's a dumb theory and close to zero passing readers will take it seriously.
If you have a valid economic theory, it doesn't matter if we apply it at 50BCE or if we apply it in 3000CE. Either an economic theory is able to explain a given economic situation and make predictions, or it is not.
> Anything that is reasonably possible to do by a single individual right now
Economic theories don't usually depend on the concrete specificity. Moreover; economic theories actually often pose the question "What if this thing that was not possible before suddenly becomes viable".
> divide by zero then it's a dumb theory and close to zero passing readers will take it seriously.
That might be a bad example; regular math doesn't do divide-by-zero, but we still use it very much.
> If you have a valid economic theory, it doesn't matter if we apply it at 50BCE or if we apply it in 3000CE. Either an economic theory is able to explain a given economic situation and make predictions, or it is not.
Great, I'm glad you agree the labour theory of value is unable to explain and is unlikely to be valid.
It saves me, and probably all passing readers, the trouble of having to continue following this rapidly narrowing comment chain.
> Great, I'm glad you agree the labour theory of value is unable to explain and is unlikely to be valid.
You know that I didn't write anything in that regards and that you are - using sophistry - putting words under my fingertips.
This feels to me like you are not actually interested in coming to a shared understanding but more in "scoring points" in a discussion. This makes me quite sad, because that's something that I would expect from a discussion on Reddit or Twitter, but not on HN.
