Talk:Law of value

Comment by the author

I wrote this article because there was nothing on it in the wikipedia, and not for the benefit of either Marxist doctrinaires or Friedmanite fanatics, nor for the benefit of an intellectual elite, but for the interested general reader who wants to find out more about the abstract concept of the law of value and what it signifies. A law of value was implied by Ricardo, as Marx himself suggests, but only Marx & Engels referred explicitly to this term by name as a specific concept, and the economics literature correctly attributes the idea to them. I have used a few quotes from Greenspan, Smith, Soros etc. to elucidate what is involved in the concept and show its possible relevance to modern discussions about market forces. This is perfectly acceptable procedure, and done in many wikipedia articles to clarify the intention of an author, and distinguish it from others. I would prefer it if this article was not changed by every Tom, Dick and Harry who wants to get in his two-bits worth about the law of value or about Marxian economics, but only by qualified scholars, i.e. people who have really studied this concept thoroughly from the relevant literature. User:Jurriaan 27 February 2007 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.170.247.40 (talk • contribs)

Additional comment

The labour theory of value is not the same thing as the law of value, and any qualified economist knows that. The labour theory of value is not unique to Marx & Engels (e.g. Ricardo subscribed to it), but the concept of the law of value is unique to Marx & Engels. The accusation of bias is not valid since I carefully discuss the pro's and con's of the concept, and different interpretations. At most one could insert "Marx argues/says..." or "Marxists say..." etc. to make it clearer that a partisan view is involved. But most of it is perfectly clear from the context. The references to Austrian economics were inserted by somebody else, not me. I have just tried to indicate how Marx would have responded to them. User:Jurriaan 27 February 2007

This page is in conflict with communist principles

especially at the 'why it doesnt work' section. taxation and subsidies to producers by government- the government controls the labour and they dont need taxation countertrade (forms of barter)- its not required

Author's reply

Whether or not the page conflicts with "communist principles" is not at issue here. The question in this wikipedia reference article is only whether or not it fairly represents the concept, what distinguishes it from other related interpretations, and the criticisms made of it. It is evident that when Marx refers to the law of value that he means a principle of exchange which will hold true "other things being equal". In other words, it is a generalisation about economic exchange he is making. The "counteracting influences" I mention refers to important cases in which relative exchange-values of traded products cannot be proportional to the labour-time expended on producing those products, i.e those counteracting influences distort the proportional relationship between exchange-values traded, and labour-time. There exists an article on countertrade on wikipedia and from this you may learn that countertrade is, according to researchers who have studied it, much more pervasive in the world economy than often supposed. Admittedly, this article is a difficult one to write, because neither Karl Marx nor David Ricardo explicitly formalised their definition of the law of value. Marx evidently took the idea itself as obvious, but sought to ascertain how it applied in a capitalist economy. Ricardo never referred to "the law of value" (only vaguely to "the law of values"), this is Marx's language, but Ricardo did support the thesis that the value of commodities is generally determined by labour-time, except for special cases. Marx's initial criticism of Ricardo is however that Ricardo develops his economic categories in the wrong order, and thus really assumes what has to be proved. Nevertheless Marx's treatment is clearly a further development and critique of Ricardo's theory. Because of the lack of explicit definitions, I have cited a couple of quotes by Marx & Engels in which they discuss what they call "the law of value" in more detail. The article as it stands contains plenty references, but I will endeavour to footnote the article better in future. I do not have all my sources easily available, as I researched the topic in the 1980s and wrote largely from memory. An additional problem is that among Marxian scholars the "law of value" remains a somewhat controversial topic, about which there is no perfect unanimity. All I have tried to do in the article is to convey the basic sense of what it means, how it contrasts with conventional equilibrium economics, and what criticisms are made of it. User:Jurriaan 18:06 18 June 2007 (UTC)

Author comment

I agree that said sentences could be construed as an attack on Austrian economics which is insufficiently neutral. However, this problem could be solved perhaps by simply rephrasing the statement in the form of a question that states what the problem is about: "However, this raises the question of what is the explanatory power of Austrian economics, if all we can say about a realised price that it is a subjective preference, given that there are billions of subjective preferences which are all different. How can we explain in that case why the Austrian economist is not "subjective" at all about his own bank account, since he wants his money to be there, regardless of any subjective preference by anybody else?". A relevant Jewish joke is the following one: "Why does a Jew respond to a question by asking another question? Reply: Why shouldn't a Jew ask a question in response to another question?". The hidden assumption is that somebody has the right, power or means to ask the questions which someone else must answer. But insofar as wikipedia aims to provide useful information about what a concept means, I think it is legitimate to alert readers to what the questions raised by the given concept are. User: Jurriaan 22:19 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I previously adjusted the text somewhat to accommodate the Austrians. I am in the process of identifying every citation of the concept in Marx & Engels. I have taken the POV tag off User: Jurriaan 12:28 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Original research and primary sources concerns

This article has consistently received a high score from readers, and it consistently attracts 3,500-4,000 readers per month, despite its length. The average number of readers is in fact going up somewhat. Why? Because, across eight years, I have done my best to provide, for the first time, a very clear article on what the law of value is really about, what its significance is, and what the controversies about the concept have been, in the history of the Marxist movement. After all, the concept has been of enormous importance for Marxian economic theory and policy, in Western Europe, the Eastern Bloc, China and Cuba. I suppose there must be something "original" about this effort of synthesis, since the Marxist academics have never provided anything like it themselves. Nevertheless, all the arguments, facts and claims made in the article have already been made before in the scholarly literature. I've tried to footnote things as much as possible, so that readers can consult the sources for themselves. Reference to primary sources is not prohibited in wikipedia, and in the area of Marxology it is rather essential, since without this referencing, the Marxists quickly start to whinge that the statements made are not "orthodox" or "politically correct". Moreover, it is essential to distinguish between what Marx himself said, and what the Marxists have made of what Marx said, subsequently. I am happy if people want to improve the article, if indeed it is an improvement. But I am not keen for people who don't even know the literature to butcher the article. It takes a bright person to understand just how good this article is, and just one wiki editor to turn it into jabber-blabber waffle, just like what happened with the commodity fetishism article. I can only hope my work across eight years has not been in vain. User:Jurriaan 25 Feb 2013 15:00 (UTC)

Reduction edits

NikkiMaria has slashed the number of bytes of the article by 124,814, which I guess works out to a 47% content cut from what it was (including the extra bytes due to NinjaRobotPirate's insertion of a "forest" of tags). It's a pretty good job by Nikkimaria I think, although a number of important points are now of course lost from the article. All I need to say here for now, is that if people want to read the "full monty", they can still do so, by consulting the version of 31 March 2013 filed in the archive history of this article. The issue of whether the article should be cut up into three pieces has not been addressed so far, but, probably, if the article length has been shrunk by half already after Nikkimaria dealt with it, it is much less urgent to cut up the article into smaller pieces. User:Jurriaan 2 May 2013 23:34 (UTC)