Originally Posted by G_Haile12

Good to see you can counter my economic thesis here with excellent thought out rebuttals. Unfortunately the Right is almost exclusively stupid.

Originally Posted by TheChief

Yeah i know you socialists love to ban freedoms of speech and expression.. hell you might aswell lock people in cages in the socialist system..

Answer me a few things:

Wheres the motivation?
Wheres the opportunity?
Wheres the freedom?

Originally Posted by TheChief

Wheres the motivation?

Originally Posted by lavell12

Cite an example where Marxism/Communism has worked?

Originally Posted by G_Haile12

We will start this explanation of the labor theory of value with an analogy from outside the sphere of economics. This is because people like Fox have no idea what Marxism is, and seem to base themselves wholly of conservative stereotypes and general lies.


A teenage boy is arguing with his mother about borrowing the car. A shrink watches their interaction and he doesn’t really pay attention to the specifics of the argument. To the shrink it isn’t important if the boy did his chores, or whether the mother promised him he could borrow the car…. The shrink sees all these unconscious motivations at play: a struggle over control, the son wanting to leave the nest but not, maybe there’s a good ole oedipal complex or something. These motives are the motor and context of the entire interaction-even though they don’t enter into the surface substance of the interaction which are just words about cars and chores. The specific words of the conversation are important if we want to know about cars and chores. But if we want to know about their relationship, their egos, their behavior… then we have to ask deeper questions that penetrate beneath the surface froth of words.

Similarly, the substance of bourgeois theory, supply and demand, is important for understanding some things about the economy: price fluctuations, inflation, etc. But if we want to understand deeper issues about the economy we need other tools that are able to pierce through this surface substance to the underlying meanings.

That is what the labor theory of value is all about.
All societies coordinate human labor in order to produce things. The total social product is divided about society. The organization of this production and distribution is the subject of economics.

When societies began producing a surplus of this social product a new aspect of distribution and production entered the equation: who controls the surplus?

Under feudalism the social surplus was extracted from peasants by landlords.

In slavery the social surplus is extracted from slaves by slave owners.

In both of these examples the economic act in which the surplus is passed from worker to exploiter is easy to see. Under feudalism the peasants gathered up a portion of all the food they had made and physically took it over to the landlords house and gave it to him.
Under slavery a slave works all day harvesting cane or cotton or diamonds and then watches the slaver owner take away all of those goods at the end of the day without compensating them.

In both types of society it is clear to all involved that human labor is producing these goods and that it is the products of labor that are being appropriated by the dominant class.

Under capitalism the process of exchange makes it harder to see the passing of the surplus from exploited to exploiter. But it’s still there. Workers are still producing the entire social product and another class, this time the capitalist class, is taking the surplus from them, selling it back to them and getting rich off it.

But what we see is money. We work and we are paid money for it. The capitalist sells the commodities we made and he gets money for it. We don’t see the exploitation- but it’s still there, albeit in a different form. (Workers aren’t forced to work for a slave owner or pay a tax to a feudal landlord. But they are compelled by necessity to eek out a living in a capitalist society. Most of the time this means selling your labor to a capitalist.)

In this way. money- or the process of exchanging goods and services in a “free” market- obscures the underlying reality that what is really going on at a basic, societal level is that a dominant class is extracting the social surplus from a subordinate class.

This is basically what the labor theory of value is saying. When people make things in a capitalist society, it is the labor that goes into them that gives them their value. Though money obscures and distorts this underlying value, this collective human labor is still the basic driving force of our collective economic activity.

The concept that the labor that goes into a commodity is the underlying essence of its value has been around for awhile. It even predates Marx, though he really gives the theory new life. Economists going all the way back to Ben Franklin realized that this theory helped answer a perplexing question in economic theory: why do heterogeneous commodities exchange?

Explain: by heterogeneous, of course, I mean that commodities are really different from each other. They have different physical properties, different uses. Why is it that they can all be exchanged in the free market? What explains the ratios of their exchange? (why are some commodities worth more than others?)

The theory went on to postulate- all these commodities must be made up of a common substance, something that they all have to a greater or lesser degree, something that gives them value. This thing is their “embodied labor time”, that is, the amount of labor that went into creating them.

Thus a 2008 chevy corvette convertible with custom leather seats and a bose audio system is worth more than a dozen eggs. This is because it requires the combined labor of many people all working over a long period of time to make all the parts of a car and put them together. To get eggs you throw stale bread at chickens and. At todays price of 55 grand, it would take about 660,000 eggs to equal one 2008 chevy corvette convertible with custom leather seats and a bose audio system. That’s their exchange ratio. The labor theory of value helps us to explain their exchange ratio.

Originally Posted by Zapatista

While I am not a Marxist, I can appreciate some of the ideas here.

The motivation is to be happy and successful, same as in a capitalist society. A collectivist society just goes about it differently.

The opportunity is the same as ina capitalist society. You can do whatever it is you want to do, except maybe be in a corporation.

The freedom? Well, that is obvious. You have the freedom to do whatever it is you wish, unbound by a rigid class system.

Note, this is all in theory of course. In practice, the Marxist sytem seems to rarely work out this way. Though, similar collectivist systems have worked very well, such as the anarcho-syndicalists in the Spanish Civil War, the Paris Commune or, for a more current example, just look at the EZLN in Mexico.

Originally Posted by Whaler17

So Mexico is your sucess story? You do realize that they sneak into the U.S. in droves because there is no way to support their families over there, right?