>>507565052>because me setting up a $400 yurt on some land no one is using is illegalThen what are you doing complaining about capitalism instead of the state imposing such laws with no alternative? Come the fuck on.
I will use the rest of this post to shit on Mandel's "proof" of the labor theory of value.
Mandel tries to “prove” the labor theory of value using a reductio ad absurdum: imagine a fully automated society where no human labor exists. Since production would no longer generate income and products would still be made, yet no one would have money to buy them, value would supposedly vanish. Therefore, he concludes, human labor must be the source of value.
Preliminaries: even now we have mostly automated factories. Suppose all firms in a sector go fully automated. Intermediate goods go in, consumer goods come out—no labor involved—yet the final products still have prices and exchange value. That alone pokes a hole in the premise.
The logical critique is where Mandel gets nuked. His form is:
¬T ¬V (no labor, no value)
He flips that into T V (labor implies value), thinking he's proven the labor theory.
But that’s a textbook denial of the antecedent fallacy.
“If I help you with physics, you’ll pass” “You failed, so I must not have helped.”
Wrong. You could’ve just sucked or studied on your own.
Even if no labor means no value, that doesn’t prove labor creates value, let alone that abstract labor time determines exchange value.
Then there’s the economic critique. Mandel assumes general automation = superabundance = zero value. But abundance isn’t guaranteed just because robots make stuff. Scarce inputs can still limit supply. And even with full automation, scarcity can remain. Suppose a basic income exists, distribution happens via vending systems, and prices emerge via supply-demand competition. No labor involved, yet prices (hence exchange values) still emerge.
The labor theory fails. At best, he proves labor can be involved in value creation.