They're fudging it by making this about the speed at which things can be produced. That's not matters, what matters is maximizing profits. Obviously how fast something can be made is a factor, but it's not the only one, and it's therefore not a rigorous quantification.
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Hypothetically you could replace workers with robots because of lower input costs of some kind, or less volatility, or less liability, etc. The choice doesn't matter, what matters is the monetary arbitrage is ultimately amounts to.
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And again, profit maximization is still iffy in this sense because the world is volatile and not everything is liquid. This is where commodity markets and liquidity and all that come in, which I've talked about in plenty of detail before.
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And insofar that there's some tight feedback loop that allows you to treat things fungibly, that's when you can actually have a rigorous theory of value. Marx came close but didn't quite see it: instead he uses vague verbalisms comparing "use value" and "exchange value".
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But the point here is that at no point does the fact that people historically used "labor hours" working well enough as a proxy for social/economic evaluation come into play. Capital doesn't exploit it, it never gave a shit: it would have the same dynamics no matter what
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And for the record, Marx actually makes the argument that even if there's variation and qualitative differences in labor, that it all averages out when you zoom out, so pretending he wasn't making some a-priori argument is just cope anyway.
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And yes, it's true that people may have been primed for this kind of drudgery with protestant work ethic and it might be true that conservative pundits use puritanical ideas of labor to justify stratification, so what? Those are irrelevant to the fundamental *structure*
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All these people get the arrow backwards because "well the neoclassicals used the LTV herp derp", not realizing that you can only get a labor theory of value in the first place by making people interchangeable, and that these neoclassical theories were largely normative
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All that being said, there's one very simple thing Marx got right that doesn't require any acrobatics: as the modern market first formed, the people who already had feudalistic power had a gigantic head start. That most definitely has to be accounted for in economics.
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But this is a much fuzzier issue when you don't gloss over it with slipshod mathematics that fetishizes this or that ethos. Anyway, arguing against scripture requires jumping through so many hoops to unpack and untangle pretenses...
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what it was was an effective way to get peasants and workers to think about the value that they were creating and not fairly compensated for, but it's far from the last word on a theory of value
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Replying to @DanielleFong
It does illustrate morally an idea of someone losing relative power despite working no less harder than others, but even then it does so in a fuzzy way and ignores all kinds of nonlinearities.
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Replying to @interpretantion
yeah a modern marx might instead start with whole earth discipline / systems dynamics imo
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