If you'll call it "grave underlying instability" instead of "crisis", then we'll be in agreement.

The global economy is not in an immediate crisis — Uber

Two things... #1, we aren't very good at predicting the next economic crisis. Only in retrospect have we seen crisis coming.

#2, somewhere down the line is the diminishing supply of petroleum that can be extracted by less energy than the oil itself contains. This won't be a "falling off a cliff" crisis, because the returns on drilling and extraction will taper off. The petroleum crisis will also not happen in the next 5 or 10 years. But at some point in the not-distant future, the "secret sauce" that has driven the world economy for the last century will become more and more difficult to get at a reasonable cost. The collapse of the petroleum industry will be a very big crisis. [There will be lots of oil in the ground as we slowly fade into the sunset, but economic feasibility will rule out spending $1 of energy to get 40¢ worth of energy out of the ground.]

It will be a very big crisis for two reasons: #1, petroleum and natural gas are the critical feed stock for transportation, chemicals, plastics, heating, and manufacturing of all kinds. Without inexpensive petroleum, the current world economy will pretty much grind to a halt. (Coal can't take the place of petroleum, and all the renewable energy in the world won't produce chemical feedstocks.)

Then, if that wasn't crisis enough, there's global warming, population, etc. And there are some less well known potential problems too. Peak phosphate production is about 20 years away, and without a growing supply of phosphate, everything else being equal, there won't be enough fertilizer to maintain crop production for 8+ billion people.

I'm 71, so I won't be around to see the denouement, but the interplay of these various factors -- too many people, too much heat, not enough petroleum, fresh water shortages, agriculture shortfalls, industrial problems of supply, and so forth, should produce synergistic crises that will be hell on wheels.

Whether Marx was right or wrong will be the least of our concerns.

All I know is that I want cheesecake. But if I had to guess, I would say that it has something to do it being Marx's 200th birthday, Marx being born in Germany, China liking Marx, a gesture of goodwill, and China wanting to benefit from improved relations with Germany. If I guess correctly, do I win cheesecake?

You can get some NY style cheesecake if you look at the whole thing very superficially, as if all answers are in plain view. You don't get any Chinese cheesecake that way, though.

You can get some NY style cheesecake if you look at the whole thing very superficially, as if all answers are in plain view. You don't get any Chinese cheesecake that way, though. — frank

I think I'd prefer the New York style of cheesecake, because then I could eat it with my hands like a real life savage of New York, instead of fiddling around with those pesky sticks that the Chinese are forced to use.

Just face-plant straight into it. That's what I do.

I agree with your analysis. Humanity as a whole is facing many deep challenges and it's not entirely clear that we can solve all of them.

Yes we can call it an underlying instability, I agree.

I don't know if there's ever been this much agreement on a philosophy forum before. Should we pop open a champagne bottle to celebrate?

There are, apparently, game-theoretic Marxists, so I'm not sure why you believe simply being sympathetic to the use of game theory would lead one to be a capitalist. In any case, as I understand it, to apply game theory to economics you need to come with certain background assumptions about what a rational agent is, and of course for Marxists, there is no non-historical conception of rationality, and so they would perhaps be likely to suspect that if a game-theoretical model leads to capitalism as a choice of economic system, then the dice were loaded from the beginning. — MetaphysicsNow

If you would allow me to address this, I believe that communism requires a level playing field for all actors on the global arena. Hence, why I believe that the communism we have witnessed already have all been premature. This begs the question if we will ever be 'mature' enough or developed enough to move onto communism, and since (in my opinion) many of the attempts at implementing communism have been premature and unsuccessful, if this has soured any future attempts at implementing it?

Furthermore, I don't think Marx saw the role of the state and private enterprise in making credit ubiquitous for the masses to engage in capital intensive tasks. Is that a common criticism of Marx?

Finally, did Marx assume a steady state economic model, if I may ask?

I'd be highly interested in a thread on Marx's Capital if you are ever interested in making one.

Hence, why I believe that the communism we have witnessed already have all been premature.

This hits a certain "nail on the head". Marx famously had England in mind as the country sufficiently developed enough to make socialism a reality - he was very clear that socialism would only succeed once capitalism had developed productive forces to the required capacity (he seems to have thought that only capitalism could accomplish this, but I'm not sure whether he was correct about that). Russia was way too backward economically, as far as Marx would have been concerned, to provide a viable context for socialism - and in the long run that seems to have been proven, although things may have been different if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin (far from certain). Lenin tried to adapt Marx (theoretically as well as practically) so that Russia could become a model socialist state, but arguably failed.

How about a book club on Capital? Starting with volume 1 of course. I have some side-projects to put to bed before embarking on that, but I'd welcome the opportunity to reread it whilst having an ongoing discussion about its contents. I'll try to set something up over the summer.

This hits a certain "nail on the head". Marx famously had England in mind as the country sufficiently developed enough to make socialism a reality - he was very clear that socialism would only succeed once capitalism had developed productive forces to the required capacity (he seems to have thought that only capitalism could accomplish this, but I'm not sure whether he was correct about that). Russia was way too backward economically, as far as Marx would have been concerned, to provide a viable context for socialism - and in the long run that seems to have been proven, although things may have been different if Trotsky had succeeded Lenin (far from certain). Lenin tried to adapt Marx (theoretically as well as practically) so that Russia could become a model socialist state, but arguably failed. — MetaphysicsNow

Yes, (was the gift a nudge from China indicating that Germany is ready for communism, one has to wonder).

Anyway, I think China learned their lesson from Russia in their own attempts at "communism". Hence, why they took a mercantilist turn with their massive population that could provide the world with most if not all their needs. I wonder about the future that the core party in China envisions for itself. Will it go back to its roots or not? Time will tell.

How about a book club on Capital? Starting with volume 1 of course. I have some side-projects to put to bed before embarking on that, but I'd welcome the opportunity to reread it whilst having an ongoing discussion about its contents. I'll try to set something up over the summer. — MetaphysicsNow

Yes, please. Keep me in the loop if and when you get around to starting a book club on Marx's Capital.

Thanks!

Anyone who thinks Einstein's essay on socialism is scholarly work knows nothing of economics. Einstein was a genius in the areas of physics and to a lesser extent, mathematics. When it came to other topics, he was an amateur, and that is not what he is known for at all.

Anyone who thinks I need to read Capital Vol. II to know that Marx was completely wrong about pretty much everything he wrote about, is making an unfounded assumption. I read through a great deal of Marx, including all volumes of Capital, and spent a couple years in college wading through his collected works. Marx was simply wrong on everything. He was wrong on the reason religion exists. He was wrong to claim Jew's God is money. He was wrong in his racism. He was wrong in his understanding of capitalism, as we know workers' living standards have improved over time, and did not go to a poverty level. We know the labor-theory of value is false, and Marx never gave any coherent reason to believe in it. We know that history is not a class-struggle, as most people's political views are not even determined by their economic status, but by other factors, including political personality traits which are strongly linked to biology. This is why many wealthy people are leftists, and many poor people are to the right. The only real link between economic status and political positions is that poor people tend to be more extreme in their views, which can be extremely right-wing as well as left-wing. This is why when countries develop a middle class, their politics becomes more centered. Marx's so-called class-conflict, therefore, has zero empirical support.

Marx just made up nutty ideas as he went along. He was not even remotely close to a genius like Einstein, when it comes to his work in physics, not in a childish essay On Socialism.

The fact philosophers are even taking Marx seriously at this juncture shows that philosophy as a discipline is hardly up there with math and physics.

There are so many false and ridiculous statements here, one hardly knows where to start.

If you bother to look at this thing called evidence (much of which I cited earlier from reputable sources), you would know that workers are no longer making progress in Western capitalism. Half of Americans have not seen their real wages rise in over 4 decades. And even the progress they made back in the day, how did they do it? By organizing into unions and socialist parties, demanding higher wages from capital and putting pressure on governments to act. It was worker movements directly inspired by Marx that called for higher wages, better benefits, shorter work hours.

Another important point that was recently articulated by Piketty in his major book on modern capital and inequality: the huge progress that workers made in the middle of the 20th century in the West was largely a consequence of the worls wars, which destroyed a lot of capitalist wealth and left workers in a more powerful bargaining position. Once that process ended in the 70s, it was back to capitalism as usual: manipulative and exploitative. That's why capital wealth keeps soaring way beyond average economic growth while workers and the poor fight over the scraps.

The labor theory of value being false does not take much away from Marx because this was not his creation. It was widely assumed at the time. The utility theory of value is also false. I don't see you condemning modern economics for it.

The reason for mentioning Einstein is not to compare him to Marx, but to show Marx's influence on other major intellectuals.

Uber: Marx stated that workers would go to the lowest level of poverty, and that most definitely did not happen. Under capitalism, we saw the greatest decrease in poverty the world has ever seen. You keep ignoring reality to favor a dogma, which is nothing to be proud of. Marx has been wrong on basically everything he ever predicted.

Marx had no influence on Einstein. Einstein used the labor theory of value, which other economists came up with long before Marx. Marx's entire theory is dependent on that theory, which has been long discarded in economics, because it makes no sense. Moreover, Marx claimed that commodities had a value, which was different from its price, which literally means that Marx was engaged in a non-scientific project, since there is no way to objectively measure his so-called "value" claims. No one interested in science would ever waste time on such nonsense.

Einstein was far more brilliant than Marx. Einstein figured out spacetime, both space and time cannot be separated, and that spacetime was curved. That idea was so far beyond anything Marx could have contemplated that comparing Marx with great minds like Einstein is foolish. Plus, Einstein's theories have the added bonus of being correct and of great value, even allowing us to have such things as GPS. Marxism, on the other hand, left millions dead.

@LD Saunders

Marx stated that workers would go to the lowest level of poverty, and that most definitely did not happen.

Where does he state that? Marx recognised that real wages could go up as well as down in capitalist systems.
You may have read Marx, but you don't seem to have understood him.

@LD Saunders

We know the labor-theory of value is false,

We know no such thing. As I stated in my earlier post in which I questioned how much of Marx you had actually read, I said that there is empirical evidence to suggest that the labour theory of value is actually true. Sure, we can debate that evidence if you like, but the fact that there is such evidence to be debated already falsifies your claim that we know it to be false. It may not be true a priori, but that's not the same thing as being false.

Sanders:

To claim that Marx was wrong on everything that he predicted ignores his ideas on the global expansion of capital in search of cheap labor, his ideas on having a shorter workday from the 12 and 14-hour cycles workers experienced at the time, his ideas on ending child labor, and his ideas on establishing a national central bank to control finance. If you bother to actually read Marx, and not just some right-wing caricature of Marx, you would find that Marx got many profound things very right (as practical predictions and as normative ideals). Of course, he also made many mistakes and had some bad predictions, as I've already acknowledged with the labor theory of value and some of the issues related to it, like the transformation problem. No one here is defending every single feature of Marxism; we're just pointing out that Marx was an influential thinker who had some good ideas, and some bad ones. You're the only one who's distorting reality here.

Your blind quest to glorify Einstein because of what he got right also conveniently ignores all the things Einsten got wrong: his basic ideas on quantum physics have all been debunked experimentally, he spent the last 20 years of his career on a useless quest to unify gravity and electromagnetism. GR has been enormously successful theoretically and experimentally, but we know it's not the final word on gravity. We know solutions to the field equations yield non-sensical results in many different situations (beyond the Cauchy horizon in black holes, the moment of the Big Bang, etc). So in a strict ontological sense, even GR gets some things about gravity wrong.

This is what happens when you deal with vast intellects that did, said, and wrote a lot of important stuff. Some of that important stuff is bound to be wrong, and you hope at least some of it turns out to be useful for later generations.

Uber: We do know the labor theory of value is false, and have known this for a long time now. The value of an object does not exist. Prices exist, and those are determined by supply and demand factors at the margin. The amount of labor going into a commodity is meaningless in setting prices, it's basically how much people value the item versus its supply that matters.

Uber: Einstein made great inroads into quantum mechanics, in addition to being the person who came up with the General Theory of Relativity and the Special Theory of Relativity, as well as discovered atoms, etc., etc. Trying to claim that Einstein was anything less than an amazing genius is ridiculous, and comparing him to the lunatic claims of Marx is childish at best. There is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing Marx came up with, that a young teenager can't easily grasp. That's not true for Einstein's relativity theories, especially the general theory. The math background alone to understand that theory takes a great deal of effort.

Marx was wrong on everything, and it's comical that anyone would claim otherwise. In science, we ignore false claims. In philosophy, apparently, false claims are the very ones people get all excited about. No wonder philosophy has such a low rating these days as an academic discipline ---- it's less than worthless to cling to false ideas.

Ok but why exactly are you regurgitating this to me like a broken record? I have already said the labor theory of value is "fictitious." What is the point of repeating this?

The source of our disagreement is that I maintain Marx's thought has a lot of merit beyond the labor theory of value. You obviously don't since you seem unaware of any other Marxist ideas.

There is still no successful theory in economics that can determine prices. Prices can vary based on supply, demand, speculation, wars, natural disasters, and dozens of other interacting phenomena.

The claim that Marx was wrong on "everything" (your unfiltered and unqualified word) is objectively ridiculous.

The only comical thing here is you trolling the people on this thread who are trying to have a meaningful discussion.

Bravo!

I have already said the labor theory of value is "fictitious."

I think LD Sanders was responding to the wrong person, and had me in mind when he threw the "theory of value is false" in your face. Having said that, I'd rather pick this up with you than LD Sanders, as I stand a good chance of getting a meaningful discussion of the idea.
I'm willing to admit that the labour theory of value cannot be proven in an a priori way, and that Marx shouldn't have wasted his time trying to do this - and let's be honest he spends hardly any time at all trying to prove it - a paragraph or so at the beginning of Capital. However, it seems pivotal to his economic theory, particularly since it underpins his explanation for the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit, which is the bell that tolls the ultimate demise of capitalism. These days, Marxists economists who still hold to the labour theory of value regard it as an empirical theory that commodities exchange at prices which are determined by the role of labour in the production process, and there are some statistical studies that support this. So, whilst Marx might make sense without a metaphysically loaded labour theory of value (where exchange value is regarded as some mystical stuff) can it make sense without a labour theory of value of the kind that regards prices as determined by the function of labour in the production process? I believe some Marxists have tried to push this kind of line, but it never really made sense to me.

'Marxism' is a catch-all word for many different concepts and theories bundled together, not all of which need the labor theory of value. For example, historical materialism is in many ways the foundational theory of Marxism, and it neither needs nor presupposes anything about the labor theory of value. As I mentioned before, historical materialism is widely used as a method of analysis among historians, even non-Marxist ones.

Second, these two things can be totally true, as objective empirical facts, at the same time:

1) The labor theory of value is false.

2) Capitalism is an economic system that very often exploits workers and the poor so the rich can accumulate more wealth.

Even though Marx bungled the first point, a lot of his critique about the second point still stands.

1) The labor theory of value is false. — Uber

I'm relying on Value, Price, and Profit (K. Marx). It doesn't seem false to me. Granted, production has changed since Marx's work was written. Automation (computers, robots) have greatly reduced the amount of labor required to create wealth. A great deal of wealth is produced by the manipulation of currencies, stocks, bonds, etc. -- which went on in KM's day too, but it was more localized, wasn't instantaneous (programmed buying and selling several times a second) and it wasn't globalized on line, as it is now. Wealth from finance, which isn't very closely linked to any actual physical process, is a primary source of wealth for the 1%, as Piketty showed (haven't read him, either -- just about his book).

Still, outside of the automated factory, or the automated egg laying operation, labor is still required to produce wealth; it doesn't appear without labor being applied to material. The share of the value that labor receives is still smaller than the share of the value (wealth) created.

What is wrong with that understanding?

How do you overcome the transformation problem? How do you convert labor value into numerical prices and wages? Furthermore, what physical factors should represent labor value? Number of hours worked per day? Mechanical output of human muscles per unit time? Productivity? Efficiency? There are a lot of fundamental problems here. I am skeptical of all deterministic theories of value in economics (labor, utility, etc). It's easy to recognize that value is constrained by the fundamental physical conditions of the world, but once prices and wages emerge in energy-intensive economic systems, they become subject to highly critical, stochastic interactions. Hence they are extremely difficult to predict.

However, if you take the labor theory of value as a loose guide about how society organizes production, the way many Marxists do nowadays, then yeah I suppose it still has some merit.

@Bitter Crank

A great deal of wealth is produced by the manipulation of currencies, stocks, bonds, etc.

I believe you and I are largely on the same page, but in terms of Marxist economics, one thing that bothers me about this remark is that Marx is pretty clear that real wealth (i.e. surplus value as profit) cannot be created through the mere circulation of capital and, arguably, manipulation of financial instruments is precisely and only that. It's clear that the illusion of wealth can be created in this way, but illusions that are in the end exposed for what they are (and when they are exposed, they manifest in one form of economic crisis).

@Uber

'Marxism' is a catch-all word for many different concepts

Agreed, and I'm guilty of being one of the people that tend to compartmentalise Marx's economics from the rest of his theorizing. I happen to think that you can drop the historical materialism (particularly the materialism part) and retain the economic part without contradiction, although I could always be wrong about that.
The transformation problem has a number of different attempted solutions - Kliman's is the one I'm inclined to go for, if only because it seems to involve the most sympathetic reading of Marx's economic theory. There are of course, as you point out, problems with measuring the role of labour in the production process, particularly when the notion of labour in use is that of socially productive labour (and so no straightforward count of hours or calories expended is going to do the job). However, these are problems that seem in principle manageable.
As for the labour theory of value (as understood by contemporary Marxist economists) being determinisitic, the evidence for it is statistical, so it seems to be regarded as a stochastic theory rather than a strictly deterministic one.

@jkg20

I have already said the labor theory of value is "fictitious."

I think LD Sanders was responding to the wrong person, and had me in mind when he threw the "theory of value is false" in your face. Having said that, I'd rather pick this up with you than LD Sanders, as I

I think LD Saunders was more having a dig at me, not you - but perhaps you just meant people like you who (I assume) hold some form or another of the labour theory of value.
For Marxists who try to eliminate the labour theory of value, apparently it is still a fairly active controversy
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2018/04/05/did-marx-have-a-labour-theory-of-value/
Like the blogger there, I don't really see how Marx makes sense without some form of LTV, but always worth keeping an open mind.

[Delete] @Baden

Value is a complicated concept that would merit its own discussion. But under any sensible understanding of it, labor would surely play an important role, just not an exclusive one. That's how Marx can still make sense without the labor theory of value: labor can play a crucial role in the valorization process and capital can frequently marginalize labor for excessive profits. To me this is an easier position to defend rather than worrying about how to interpret a few dozen passages, often unclear ones at that, in the thousands of pages that Marx wrote. That's what Kilman and others are doing. They've given up on trying to establish any kind of mathematical equivalence between labor power and prices, so they're falling back on, "well if you interpret Marx this way or that way then it can make sense."