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I Want To Believe (in Marx's Labor Theory of Value)
Content warning: this post contains MARXISM. If seeing Marx's massive beard or even hearing his name is too traumatic for you, stop reading now.
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Recently I found one interesting article, not interesting in itself, but how it illustrates arguments about psychological necessity of faith and belief frequently discussed here.
Yes, it is Marxist article written by professional Marxist in Marxist journal. Last chance to avert your eyes from forbidden lore is now.
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Yes, it is very obscure, but if post about civil war in furry community can pass there, this might too.
If you are interested how I got there, the route was Anatoly Karlin -> devcroix -> journal article by distinguished academic historian -> academic journal dedicated to Marxist theory
Was Stalin a Marxist? And If He Was, What Does This Mean for Marxism?
(tl;dr: yes he was, it means lots of things for Marxism, none of them nice)
This is not the article I wanted to share.
This is the article.
Unfree Labour and Value Productivity: Challenges for the Marxian Labour Theory of Value by another academic, not distinguished enough yet to deserve his own Wiki page.
So what is it all about?
Labor theory of value(LTV), the cornerstone of Marxist thought. If LTV fails, whole Marxism crashes to the ground.
Narrator voice: it failed, it was debunked many times, starting in 1890's. Somehow, it had no effects on world historical events of 20th century.
So, what exactly is this article about?
According to Big Beard Man's theory, it does not. (Practical Marxists later strongly disagreed, but this is not topic of this article)
But why is it? (except that Marx said so) What is the distinction between wage and slave labor, slave and animal labor, animal and machine labor?
Author examines these distinction, and finds them rather arbitrary.
No need to read 40 pages of Marxspeak(I hadn't either), this table summarizes the argument and the dilemma.
So, Marxist author in this article deboonks cornerstone of Marxist philosophy and watches the whole thing tumbling down in its own footprint like the towers on Nine Eleven.
This had been done many times before, this is not the importance of this article, the importance is in his last sentences.
It is not about materialism and science, it is about faith.
The author still has faith, still needs to believe, still wants to "stick with Marx", still wants to "affirm" the tenet he just destroyed, still considers himself Marxist and begs desperately fellow professional Marxists to help him (these are the only people who would ever read this journal, I am possibly first non-Marxist to stumble on this article)
This is completely natural human behavior. Rationalist credo "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be" is deeply abnormal for human beings.
Are you laughing at him? This is exactly the same thing as all who people who wish wistfully "if only I had faith in God" "if only I could belong to Church".
I'm not a Marxist and don't see any problem here. Unfree labour still has costs. You still have to obtain your slave labour, feed them, protect them from dying from exposure and disease, prevent them escaping. Surely Marx would agree, if asked, that a labour camp produces surplus value?
Anyway, how can machines not produce value under Marxism? We're all agreed that a steel mill's productivity has a lot to do with the tools and machinery they have available to them. So obviously the machinery produces value. Marx had experienced industry, he knew machines existed... How could he have missed this? How could anyone have missed this?
The real problem is that labour doesn't have a relation to quantity or quality. If I have a really disorganized factory with stupid, clumsy employees, there's lots of labour but little output. The crappy output doesn't become more valuable because people worked hard. That, I believe, is what goes against LTV.
Anyway, Marx was not a Marxist. Confusingly, he was Marxian. I believe there's a quote where Marx says he's not Marxist. And he's certainly not Marxist-Leninist, they're wildly different ideas thrown together.
The fact that an idea is stupid does not mean that someone as intelligent as Marx could not have agreed with it. Kant believed that you can know a priori the geometry of space and Popper thought that evolution theory was not scientific.
If machines do produce value, then the capitalist isn't stealing from the proletarian, they are producing wealth together. There is no exploitation and the ethical side of marxism falls entirely.
This I think is another point of view that is problematic for Marxists but also for other people: namely that capital is literally a tool for capitalists to produce value. In the same way hammer and sickle is a tool for worker/farmer to produce goods, Tesla, Inc. is just a tool for Elon Musk to produce cars. Famer does not necessary have to make the sickle from iron ore and a tree, he has to rely on other workers and their capital producing it. In this sense the capitalist is just more complex type of worker.
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If people act like the LTV is true, then it's still true in some way. Just like you shouldn't try to prove that Islam is not true to a bunch of bearded dudes trying to separate someone's head from their body for saying Mohammed was technically a child molester, you shouldn't try to prove that the LTV is false to the striking workers who are disaatisfied with their wages. And if you act as if something is true, it's not so different from it being true.
It's very different. The fact that sometimes you have to take into account that people are wrong about things doesn't change a damn thing about whether or not those things are, in fact, true. You shouldn't try to argue theology with a schizophrenic who thinks they're Jesus, but they still aren't.
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the persistently high cost of service sector goods lends some credence to a form of labor theory of value. It does not explain why Saylor Swift earns so much (it's not like she works 1000x harder or puts in 1000x more hours) but it explains why plumbers still can charge a lot even if there is competition.
She provides more than 1000x the value. Do the same exact production, with the same exact experience, but substitute Taylor Swift with a random woman singing the same exact songs. How much of the stadium would be full? How much would each ticket go for? I would say much less than what it is now.
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That only seems to present a problem if we assume all labor is the same value.
If we assume some labor can be more scarce than others, say an expert or those with exceptional natural talent, the situation resolves itself.
But, what is scarcity, but a description of how much effort (labor) is required to obtain something? The record companies probably do put in 1000x the effort to recruit someone like Taylor Swift. Talent scouts, marketers, etc. Of course the LTV requires people be willing to expend labor in exchange for the product. But, the record companies only expend the labor cultivating talent because they expect to receive value in return. The labor required to create a talent acts more like a price of production on a standard economic graph. Products that return less value than required to create simply flop and don't stay on the market very long.
If we've described scarcity in terms of labor, I think the labor theory of value holds together, although I think it does become one of those equations where you can solve for any of the variables.
This seems backwards. You're arguing that people are willing to trade lots of labor to recruit Taylor Swift because they expect to receive value in return, which implies that she creates tons of value above and beyond the labor she actually outputs. Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.
Value is created by a combination of skill/knowledge/organization, labor, land, and customer demand. Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs and aren't a Marxist anymore, and none of the Marxist claims about inequality follow.
I'm not sure you can separate it quite like that. You can boil the current demand for Taylor's labor down to the results of the previous labor (voice training, practice, focus groups, marketing, etc). Or, really, the 3 hours spent at a concert isn't the only labor being sold, it's the cumulative labor that was required to create that concert.
Which would explain why skilled labor pays off so much more than unskilled labor. A skilled laborer is selling the labor they spent training over and over again, whereas the unskilled laborer only sells the labor they are currently preforming.
This is kind of what I was trying to get at towards the end of my post. It really feels like you could boil down all of economics to any of the inputs, as you can generally convert them to each other (if nothing else, then by converting to money first). Not entirely sure how useful it is at that point though.
It's possible I should have been more clear and direct, but I was talking about LTV in the abstract, not specifically about marxist principals. LTV is also associated with Adam Smith.
I, personally, think Marx's ideas were disastrous, but not really because of LTV. I think they were disastrous because they tend to destroy very important incentive structures which end up destroying most of the value in a society.
LTV, on the other hand, seems like not that bad of a take for someone operating in the mid 19th century (and a pretty good take for someone operating in the late 18th century like Smith was).
It was bad take even back then. A common counterargument used was that of literal gold digger during Gold Rush who lucked out and struck gold vein on his very first day. It is easy to understand example showing that value is created by demand as opposed to some "unit of labor". Of course there are other example of where value is created by some cosmic luck besides finding mineral riches or ancient treasures buried underground - ideas being another prime example. A lot of transformative scientific or product ideas were invented randomly or as a byproduct of something else, they are product of talent and circumstances. LTV was dead on arrival.
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I think it's like half of the puzzle. Or maybe slightly less. It's almost equivalent to the "Supply" half of "Supply and Demand". Which means that it's ignoring demand. A pizza rotting in a warehouse takes the same amount of labor/talent/capital/ingredients to produce as a pizza in a highly popular restaurant. Lots of Soviet failure stories involve factories producing tons of unnecessary items that ended up unused because they were being measured according to oversimplified metrics. Tiny nails when measured by quantity produced, gigantic nails when measured by gross weight. Food rotting in warehouses instead of being distributed because someone forgot to care. You can make two products with nearly identical amounts of labor, skill, and ingredients, and have wildly different output value based on which of them is actually needed by the people around.
In a sufficiently competitive market where there are lots of fungible inputs, lots of people who could perform the same tasks, lots of customers who want whatever is produced, and the outputs themselves are mostly fungible, then yeah, the price of goods will drop down to approximately the price of its inputs, which can convert to labor. Which basically says that if you simplify and fix Demand as a constant, and fix all of the non-labor parts of Supply, then labor is all that's left. It's an important component, and certainly better than having no economic theory whatsoever, but you need to actually satisfy customer desires if you want to actually create value.
I think that's only because you're only focused on Marx's side of theory.
Smith's theory is about the labor the buyer is willing to expend to obtain something. To quote the wealth of nations:
Which, I think is the other half that you're missing.
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I am a very weird human being. When I first read this stuff on LessWrong as a teenager I remember being very annoyed by how smug they seemed about "hey, breaking news, you should believe true things and not false things." As an adult, yeah, fine, if anything they were understating it. I'm not pretending to be some kind of rational agent, but I don't explicitly come out and try to believe false things, what the fuck?
But I still don't understand how people can do this and it still frightens me that it's not even uncommon. They still know on the inside that it's still not true, right?? There's no Men-in-Black neuralyzer that comes along if you pretend you don't know it long enough... right?? Why does he want to believe something that isn't true?
Personally I don't even think "you should believe true things and not false things" is actually that universal or valuable. Something's truth value definitely plays a part in the calculus, but that isn't the ultimate determinant. I'd prefer to believe, falsely, that a woman is attracted to me if that motivates me to then go and flirt with her - and that flirting can actually make her attracted to me anyway. There are plenty of other areas where this same principle applies.
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I have similar peeve, but because of exactly the opposite reasons: this whole credo is obvious bullshit. Even rationalists like Yudkowsky do not really practice it, take as an example his annoyance with Roko's Basilisk idea leaking or his secrecy around methods how he can get out of the box pretending to be AI. Why doing that, just set the truth free. If it destroys countries or even the whole humanity, then it should be destroyed, right? The cold truth is defined as the highest value so what is the problem.
Anyways, there are many ways how one can save "belief in untruth". One way is to defer to an authority: I cannot evaluate if Many Worlds or Spontaneous Collapse interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, but I think expert A is trustworthy so I take his word for it. But in a way this is is belief about expert and not belief about the thing, so it is cheating a bit. Another way to do that is to have epistemic humility, Scott Alexander himself once remarked how he was able to argue untrue points very effectively toward people with less knowledge and his takeaway was to be a lot more skeptic when it comes his own views as he could also have been misled. Ironically rationalists themselves accept this premise, their whole shtick is how AI can lie to reach its goals. Similar idea is also expressed by yet another rationalist glib of it all adds up to normality, which basically urges you to be skeptical about too "weird" conclusions and sticking to your intuition a bit, even if evidence seems strong.
Now given the utilitarianism of rationalists I do not trust them at all, there is nothing preventing them to lie to me to reach their goals of maximizing utils or whatever. In fact they are quite upfront about this. The third one is right there in the rationalist Bayesian thinking idea. All it takes for me to defend any belief is to set my prior to very low value so it is incredibly hard for it to be flipped in my lifetime. And I can still signal my sophistication: my credence of idea X being true shifted a bit in light of new circumstances and recalculated posterior, but I still find it unlikely for X to be true. That is unless Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky or other gurus of rationalist faith say otherwise, then my posterior will shift dramatically.
Now maybe this all sounds too harsh, I do not really mind it as much. But one really has to treat rationalism as yet another pretentious internet fad, as an infotainment. There are very useful things I learned and for it I am very thankful. But I think dropping the guru sounding shit or weird stuff like defending value of insect life or polyamory or any of the awfully convenient overlap of supposedly cold rationalists with hippie/techbro Silicon Valley culture and ethos is advised. But sometimes I think I am not harsh enough - listening to Yudkowsky lately I would not be surprised if he founded some Unabomber style cult set out to bomb datacenters to prevent AI apocalypse, which would be logical step if they really believed in the Truth of apocalypse so firmly and unshakenly. So there is that.
Good lord, it’s been a long time since I’ve read such uncharitable interpretations of single sentences. With analysis like this you can make anyone look bad.
The "analysis" does not really depend on that single "sentence" - although I also think calling it just as a sentence is uncharitable. It is not some random sentence from Sequences, The OP called is as a credo, it is oneliner that is tied to rationalism and Yudkowsky especially.
What I was getting at was the overall tone of some of the rationalist writing that I think "the credo" shows very well: it is edgy sounding guru oneliners that are sometimes literally used in normal conversation - the credo in particular I think was for instance said by Aella in her interview with Lex Fridman unironically.
I also admit that I am maybe too harsh, maybe I am taking it all too uncharitably. It is just internet infotainment, there is not that much going on and rationalists do have also oneliners like "it all adds up to normalcy". And then one reminds himself that normalcy includes saving ants, or AI apocalyptic doomerism and then I am not as sure what charitable take on rationalist utilitarianism should look like when taken as an actual moral philosophy that is adopted up by the unwashed masses.
Also as a closing point, I thought in this manner due to the fact that the OP described how normal people including Marxists do not adhere to the credo. I found it paradoxical as I do not find rationalists strictly adhering to the credo either, in that sense they do have much more in common with Marxists: they do have materialist utilitarian moral philosophical system (or one can almost dare say theology) build up ground up from first principles with some transhumanist transformative project. It is a philosophy created outside of mainstream, a system created by outsider "basement dwelling" philosopher with prolific writing and slight ties to rich donors. I wanted to point out this myopia to OP.
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I suppose he doesn't get an upvote?
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I think you either misunderstand or are deliberately misrepresenting the point to dunk on the nerds here. Obviously you shouldn't post nuclear codes on Twitter just because they're true - we're talking about the nature of beliefs. "Dangerous information exists" isn't incompatible with the idea that you should try to believe true things, and not random shit that would be convenient. That's just common sense!
Nothing you said here is even remotely like belief in untruth. Trust authority figures? Also a means of determining the truth, because the whole reason you're trusting them is that you think they're right! Be sceptical of clever-sounding arguments? Don't rush to believe weird things just because you think you have evidence? That's literally just Yudkowskian rationality stated informally! He would probably say something more like that in Bayesian terms, your odds of hearing a good argument for X are not that much higher given that X is true, and also that prior probabilities exist, but it's the same damn thing.
I can't find it on a cursory Google, but one of the Sequence posts on this is about how confident it's reasonable to be in your priors, and "so low no reasonable evidence could ever make a difference" is, obviously, too low. Again, common sense.
Gosh, it sounds like being so willing to lie could have bad consequences that a consequentialist might want to avoid. Seriously though, there's whole reams of decision theory stuff about how you shouldn't lie! Partly in fact for exactly this reason. A good basic sketch from the Olden Days of why in rat terms you should not in fact abandon all ethics to be "utilitarian" is here.
See above. It's not actually logical.
Yeah, agreed, it bothers me a lot too. Yudkowsky in particular seems to just not have much sense of... PR, image, not seeming weird, and it's very annoying. The only thing that annoys me more than LessWrong rationality is how terrible the criticisms of it are. I'd take a hundred weird mystical descriptions of common-sense reasoning over one "these people are weird and cringey which is of course equal to 'wrong' because 'wrong' is just another word for 'bad'" dunking.
As @georgioz says, rationalists have many blind spots. The main one I've found is the 'Not made here' problem, or whatever it's called, where everything has to be invented from first principles. This means rationalists actually miss the Truth quite a bit.
For instance, observe how instead of accepting that emotions are real and digging into the science of trauma that has been building for decades, rationalists prefer to throw it all out and come up with their toy model that reduces human being to automatons.
Rationalists are foolish in many ways, and the most tragic thing is that they think their belief in Truth and Reason means they aren't taking anything on faith, or having any untestable beliefs. Unfortunately for them, there is no way to objectively measure reality outside of human perception, so Truth and Reason are just another God they believe in, albeit with very sophisticated and labyrinthine scriptures.
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The credo is much stronger than that, it puts the Truth as ultimate value, not as just something aspiring or something one "tries" to adhere to but abandons for something else in presence of "dangerous" information. The credo is not "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be unless it is dangerous to do so". Of course you can argue what you do, but then there is no need for edgy sounding guru lines like the credo. You would then just have ordinary thing like "try to tell the truth whenever you can" - it almost sounds something people like Peterson could say actually.
Of course it does. I can say that I believe New York Times or Eliezer Yudkowsky or The Pope or I can trust the Science. If you pick up bundle of beliefs some of them are for sure going to be untrue. This is a common way how people get to believe untrue things. And this is also the way rationalists pick up their beliefs, unlike some scientific sounding first principles reasoning. So again, there is not that much of a difference between rationalists and just regular informed people, in fact from what I noticed rationalists are putting too much faith into their own thought leaders.
Slow down, we are talking about rationalists, I am not that sure how far the appeal to common sense can carry you here. Again, I am maybe too harsh as most rationalists are just normal people who actually have some common sense, except that the whole rationalist ethos is about overcoming commonsensical reasoning on many things and there really are some people over there that can take these things maybe too literally. That's my whole point.
Except if it is dangerous to tell the truth, we already covered that, right?
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I think the much more rational approach is to be clear to yourself about where your beliefs come from, especially if they didn’t come from your own investigations. If I’m convinced that Ukraine is doing well on the counteroffensive, that’s fine, as long as I’m clear with myself and others I try to convince that I’m basing this on news reports and not on defense analysis or talking to people on the ground or even talking to people in the military. I think personally it’s almost as important as the idea of putting some sort of certainty quantification on statements.
I believe in “many worlds” at about 60% certainty, but I’ll be honest that my understanding comes from listening to science communicators explain it on TV. Putting it that way at least gives you (and me if I’m willing to be honest about the implications) a baseline of knowing just how seriously to take my claims based on this belief.
I think that all this language about how one is rationalist but one should also put numerical credences (ideally down to decimals) to one's beliefs and how one should be careful about context of information and source of my views and how in the end it should all kind of feel "normal" - it all is the usual way of how rationalists say a simple thing everybody knows in a complicated way. Man, practice some source hygiene, work on your thinking and trust your intuition a bit. On most beliefs one would be in line with majority of informed people.
Paradoxically it is always the weird shit where rationalists are touting their supposed first principle revolutionary approach, where they are espousing mantras like that which can be destroyed by the truth should be. I am talking about things like saving ants or taking drugs or defending some sexual deviancy or other defense of some weird shit that nerds really want to rationalize. Guess what, my intuition screams "red alert".
Information in areas where you are not a specialist will always be no different than any other well informed person. That’s sort of the point. A lot of rationalists seem to take information from blogs and video and so on. This is fine. For most purposes, cosmology as explained by popular science communicators is just fine. Where it becomes a problem is when you use that geeky layman understanding and pretend it’s more than it is. It leads to a kind of arrogance where you assume you know all the relevant details without doing a deep enough dive to really know what’s going on.
Likewise, while I don’t think it’s necessary to go down to decimals of certainty, I do think, especially when reasoning about things, to have some idea of just how sure you are about a given conjecture. If you’re not pretty darn sure then it shouldn’t be the lynchpin of that argument or prediction. If you’re pretty sure, fine, give it importance, but I’d never advise making a major decision based on something that you’re less that 80% confident in.
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Why wouldn't you believe (or pretend to believe) something that isn't true if there are such massive benefits to be accrued and such huge incentives for doing it?
Try looking at the stock market sometime. Do people really believe that a nothing EV maker in Vietnam is worth more than Ford?
It concerns me that "believe" and "pretend to believe" aren't very obviously flagrantly different things.
They can't be. The PR system of the brain demands that the mind fools itself in order to conform and fool others. If a somewhat honest person were to consciously lie every day, there would be friction against their values. They wouldn't be able or willing to keep up the act. Thus believing and pretending to believe must meld together, at least partly.
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"Believe" and "pretend to believe" are very different things. The latter can be rational in many situations, if dishonest.
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I hate to sound like a broken record on incompetence=evil, but the difference is that confessional Christian regimes tend not to kill millions of people on accident, and when they do it’s a result of empowering ruthless people with vague mandates rather than something inherent in the system. Doctrinaire Marxist regimes have a much worse record.
I mean there’s also that believing Christians tend to be much better citizens than committed marxists.
It’s not that faith is justified by results. It’s that if you play that game, you’re kinda pushing people towards Christianity or a small number of basically-Christian faiths.
If good system somehow keeps empowering "ruthless people" who kill millions of people, what exactly makes it good?
Well, this is hotly debated. Limiting ourselves to modern times, do you consider British Empire to be "confessional Christian regime"?
Anyway, there is no comparison.
Marxism does not claim to be religion based on faith, Marxism claims to be science, describing objective laws governing history, Marx wanted to be someone who explains evolution of human society just like Darwin explained evolution of life.
It is appropriate to judge Marxism by scientific standards (Prager university tier takes "Marx was sleeping with his maid, therefore Marxism is BS" are embarrassment).
It is appropriate to ask whether Marxist predictions - tendency of the rate of profit to fall, immiseration of the proletariat etc... came true. It is appropriate to ask whether Marxists got ever close to delivering what they promised.
Citizens of what? Citizens of bourgeois and feudal states certainly not, committed Marxists were undermining them as hard as committed Christians were undermining pagan states.
Citizens of Marxist state? All achievements of USSR - victory in civil war against overwhelming odds, breakneck speed industrialization and development and then victory in greatest war in history, were due to sacrifice of tens of millions of true believing Marxists.
Yes, when the true believers who really believed they were building better world died off, the later generations lost their faith and sold everything for blue jeans and chewing gum. And they lost their faith, because the great promises never came true, and they knew thay are not coming true, because they were supposed to happen here on Earth, not in heaven after death.
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Now this is nothing new, the draft version of the famous Communist Manifesto was called Confession of Faith.
Also I think that Marxism can actually be saved if viewed under the lenses of earlier works by Marx, especially The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts. For instance this passage:
and later
See, the ultimate product of labor is not a commodity or service, it is the worker itself and through him the whole society. The proletariat embarks on the project of producing The New Soviet man, that is the true valuable product. This is something that machines or animals or slaves or even wage laborers cannot do, because animals and machines are ontologically incapable of such a thing while slaves and workers are alienated from their labor by capitalists. In fact capitalists themselves are alienated from their own labor, working on communist project would help them. You see, seizing the means of production and creating socialist society is only intermediary step before free proletariat finishes the project and abolishes private property by recreating and transforming the man itself into a new social species-being (so called socialist "humanizing"), it is only then that the communism will finally be successfully tried. In the meantime we have to prepare grounds for attempt number 49.
See, the Marxist faith restored all it takes is just a little bit of New Age sounding quackery, welcome to 19th century German philosophy. You can forward this to the OP, they can thank me later.
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He who says the humanities can’t produce anything useful—let him read this article!
Anyway, I see no problem here. Taking out a cornerstone does not mean a theory is wrong, just that it is unsupported. So why not ask for another cornerstone?
This isn’t limited to Marx. When the quantum physicists undermined classical mechanics, the conclusions of Newton were still (mostly) valid. Since then, finding the bridge from quantum effects to macro-scale gravity has been an open question. Physicists would strong prefer not to take it on faith that quantum gravity just works.
This was the big project of Marxists like Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen in the late 20th century: try to salvage Marx's conclusions, without accepting his premises.
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