Labor theory of value is incredibly easy to dismiss. Value is about what people will pay for things, not how much work they took to make. Bam there we go.
the free market assigns the value created by laborers. it's as simple as that. the buyer wouldn't get this value in their life, at a price the market decided they pay, without the work of the laborer. the value wouldn't be created without the laborer, or any of the capital or tools that it took to create labor (since labor created the capital and the tools). much like machines, it's labor all the way down.
> it's labor all the way down
This is completely orthogonal to value. Sure things wouldn't exist without people to make them. That doesn't mean that the labor it takes to make something constitutes its value.
i feel you and the other poster are mybe talking past each other..
$1 banknote is equal to $10000000 banknote in labor.
For a start, Marx understood well that the price assigned to a commodity by a market and its value were often out of sync. If you’re confused about the difference between those things, think about Dogecoin as a particularly extreme example.
But here's a deeper dismissal for you anyway https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/fht0ti/marxs_...
it even conveniently brings up your doge argument
The labor theory of value was accepted wisdom prior to the late 19th century: it originates with Adam Smith and David Ricardo. It's wrong (or more accurately, not a good conceptual framework) but it's not obviously wrong, let alone "idiotic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_value
There's no reason to believe that Smith wouldn't have latched onto the much better solution. So being hell-bent on the incomplete answer from the 1700s is a unique peculiarity of Marxist theory.
Yes, later than both Smith and Marx. Marginalism didn't go mainstream until the 1890s, though the necessary pieces were there waiting to be assembled from about 1870.
Based on Marx's own flawed logic! https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2014-05-02
How much is a glass of water worth? Should it change if it takes me 5 seconds or 5 years to procure? Using labor theory to assign value makes no sense and is not a workable model for anything for anything other than justifying Marx's own circular logic.
Honestly it reminds me of like Marx's non-rigorous "eh whatever" approach to dividing by zero in his mathematical work. While one can define division by zero in non-standard analysis, that involves some actual rigor in how your treat it according to your definitions, not just shrugging your shoulders and doing it.
Can't speak to the division by zero, but it doesn't come up in any of Marx important work. His mathematical manuscripts don't have any significant relationship to his work on political economy.
The revolutionary approaches have not succeeded thus far, granted. There is a branch of Marxism about revolution, but what we're talking about here is a description of capitalism. Marxist revolutionary activities have nothing to do with how potent that analysis is.
No it's not. For one, it can only assign values to things which are actually exchanged. When you look at things on the scale of states, this isn't always a possibility. You can't put the ISS on craigslist and see what it sells for.