QoL is still in an upward climb. Average lifetime working hours is still marching down. We've peaked out on literacy and child mortality and preventable diseases with available technology.
You have to ignore 120 years of intellectual progress on economics to still want to apply labor theory of value to problems. There may be a day when we can achieve some semblance of a "socialist" mode of production - but I can almost assure you it will not be from people following Marx's flawed analysis. It will be from people who understand either classical or keynesian economics, or whatever new understanding come from it, and apply them towards actual functional policies.
Labor theory of value does have issues, but I don't think it can be so neatly dismissed either as alternatives appear to have vague criteria for what contributes to value.
I trade my time at work to sit at a comfy desk and type for money, and that is work. And I will negotiate for more time and money so that I may spend more time lifting heavy things at a gym. Funnily enough that is leisure and it costs me money. It is in the asymmetry of needs that we create excess value by working for each other taking care of the things they do not want to do for themselves.
Labor theory makes no sense in how people actually choose to go about their lives. Which is why modern economics is so focused on how to just maximise as much generic utility out of a market. And it is usually Marxists who are actually the most obsessed about counting up the little green slips of paper that don't mean anything.
You reference Hegel, but it is specifically his idea that progress is inevitable. Which is exactly why I reject Marx. Marx believed that making functioning plans was useless since progress was inevitable once unleashed. But Marx was a leech who counted on his friends for his subsistence and others to actually test his ideas. Progress is only made by intentional and planned efforts to deal with problems rather than just criticize and shake your fist at society.
Marx believed that planning out the detailed structure of a future utopian society, in the tradition of Owen or Fourier, was useless. And he was right. Societies are not and have never been the product of intentional design: no individual has the necessary power, no group has the necessary agency. They're the accretion, year after year, of millions of independent agents doing the best they can with the constraints the past has imposed on them. We can adjust the constraints, to some extent, and maybe aim, very imprecisely, at some desired end state, but we don't get to skip straight there.
You're taking ideas out of your pants and putting on Marx's mouth. At least be honest and say you never read him and hate his ideas without knowing what they are.
Excuse me? The overwhelming majority of Marx's published work was literally advocacy of concrete plans.
See his work with the International Workingmen's Association for some of the most well-known letters and articles arguing for explicit political positions and concrete labor actions: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/iwma/index....
the free market assigns the value created by laborers. it's as simple as that. the buyer wouldn't get this value in their life, at a price the market decided they pay, without the work of the laborer. the value wouldn't be created without the laborer, or any of the capital or tools that it took to create labor (since labor created the capital and the tools). much like machines, it's labor all the way down.
For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
What an absolute load of crap. Economics as a whole is barely a science, at best a toy, and that multiple pathways exist is not an indictment of any theory. Marx's observations hold true all these years after, alongside the progress we've had.
You clowns would take a system as complex as, oh, simply the whole of human activity and try to reduce it to a few simple laws. Sorry, despite what you learned online, "supply and demand" is not a fundamental law of the universe. This is not physics. There are no simple answers. There aren't even proper answers. Every school of economics holds on barely by a thread. "Assuming a rational actor" is the "assume a spherical cow in a vacuum" of liberal economics.
The underlying field of study of human action in general is called praxeology and was only seriously investigated by:
- Austrian school economists (1900s-present)
- Polish school philosophers (briefly in the interwar period, died out after WW2 when Lwów became Lviv)
I think wresting praxeology free of economics would be an interesting movement in philosophy.
I mean, just look at actual literacy stats and you will find we have a ways to go on this. A frankly absurd number of people in the UK are functionally illiterate. Same in France.
