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Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor o

Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. One of the ways that Marx posited capitalist extract surplus value is to have the increase in quality of life always lagging the increase in efficiency. Our quality of life does increase, but only if capitalists are able to increase greater surplus value from our labor than that quality of life increase accounts for. > don't forget that we're going to take down the world economy with it Interestingly enough this is one of the major focuses of Capital vol III: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Marx argued that eventually the Capitalist pressure to increase efficiency through automation means that while production continues to be more efficient, precisely because of this the ratio of profit to capital expended decreases. For Marx this was the ultimate threat to Capitalism itself.

vba616 3y ago
>Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. I don't understand the train of thought that lead to the sentence above. "Marx's Labor Theory of Value" is a well-known phrase, but its meaning is probably more precise for you than me. Do you not think, broadly speaking, there is some economy of scale with longer hours (compared to 15/week), that gaining experience more quickly has some value, that overhead like shift handoffs or putting work aside for the next day becomes more significant the shorter the day/week is? I'd also suggest it's plausible that automation changes the nature of work to increase the efficiency of long hours. The more education and thought a job requires, the longer it takes to "get up to speed" and to hand off work to other people.

vba616 3y ago

>Personally I find the fact that Keynes's 15-hour work week never materialized despite massive improvements in automation to be fairly strong evidence in favor of Marx's Labor Theory of Value. I don't understand the train of thought that lead to the sentence above. "Marx's Labor Theory of Value" is a well-known phrase, but its meaning is probably more precise for you than me. Do you not think, broadly speaking, there is some economy of scale with longer hours (compared to 15/week), that gaining experience more quickly has some value, that overhead like shift handoffs or putting work aside for the next day becomes more significant the shorter the day/week is? I'd also suggest it's plausible that automation changes the nature of work to increase the efficiency of long hours. The more education and thought a job requires, the longer it takes to "get up to speed" and to hand off work to other people.