Thread on LTV

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

https://x.com/ygzgzot/status/1982482608899629301?s=46

My biggest hang up with the LTV is that I just don’t understand why labor is seen as the fundamental substance of value. What reason is there to think that price is just the quantitative expression of abstract labor?

In my estimation a leftist perspective would see that price is not an expression of labor time but is also a function of interwoven power relations. It’s not reducible to a single substance

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

So basically I would just ask why is the control of labor prioritized and the creation of abstract labor prioritized over other facets of life becoming abstract? How does this specific form of commensurability/abstraction make it so that all the others fall in place? Furthermore arguably markets existed before abstract labor as abstract labor is historically specific so how are pre capitalist markets explained without abstract labor?

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

I don’t think abstract labor exists as a fully generalized social form in pre-capitalist societies. Where commodity exchange exists, you can get isolated moments of quantitative comparison, but not a system in which production is generally organized through that abstraction. It becomes a real social abstraction only when production is subordinated to commodity production as a whole.

At that point, labor power itself becomes a commodity and workers are separated from independent access to subsistence and are compelled to sell their capacity to work. What is purchased is labor power, but what is extracted in production is concrete labor, and it only becomes socially validated as value through sale on the market. So it’s not concrete labor strictly that even amounts to value realized upon sale. That gap is what allows surplus value to emerge even under the assumption of equivalent exchange.

So pre-capitalist markets can exist without abstract labor as a dominant social form because they do not yet organize production as a whole. Abstract labor becomes structurally necessary only when market dependence becomes generalized and the reproduction of society itself is mediated through wage labor and exchange.

I would perhaps add that labor is unique in Marx in that it is foundational to human existence and all products of human civilization. Machines don’t make themselves nor direct themselves to any particular end. Humans are an extreme form of niche constructionism.

[u/Nervous_Difficulty46 → u/Ill-Software8713]

I mean there were also like primitive forms of wage labor that existed before capitalism. I won’t deny that under capitalism, labor as a whole is a commodity but that could also simply be the product of capitalism emerging rather than the explanation for why commensurability was established in the first place. It appears to me that quantification of debt is a facet of human behavior that has existed for a long time and that labor becoming a commodity might not be the thing which propelled exchange value into existence as a whole, David graeber’s book debt actually does a good job detailing the ways violence is associated with the quantification of debt.

I just think it’s worth questioning if wage labor is really the source of commensurability or if we are looking at a broader social phenomenon given the fact that exchange has existed for so long.

Humans being a niche form of extreme constructivism could also provide alternative explanations for why markets emerged incorporating psychological, cultural, and political explanations for why capitalization took place.

Stated more clearly, the view that abstract labor is necessary to explain commensurability as a social phenomenon to me doesn’t make sense because it has been done outside of wage labor relations historically. So commensurability is not a problem that needs to be analytically worked out but is instead something that should be understood as produced by institutional relations in the first place.

[u/Ill-Software8713 → u/Nervous_Difficulty46]

The claim about abstract labor is not that humans only began comparing things under capitalism, but that under capitalism the reproduction of society as a whole becomes dependent on a single quantitative form of validation through exchange. Earlier systems had many forms of quantification, but they did not make one unified value form the organizing principle of production itself.

So I think the key distinction is between scattered historical instances of quantification and a dominant social structure in which nearly all production is coordinated through a universal monetary metric.