Slop.

The value of linens is equal to the amount of labour required to take them off

Can someone explain if I've understood wrong?

LTV never implied that a commodity's market value perfectly represents the labour hours required to produce it, just that markets are unstable (?) until prices converge on that labour-derived value.

With OnlyFans or other services like it, there is still socially-necessary labour required to produce the content. It's like saying LTV doesn't take into account other forms of entertainment or art. Labour is still required to commodify one's likeness, nude or otherwise - how is that any different?

I remember marx saying something about nature being just as much a source of wealth as labor

Marx’s critique of the Gotha program (1875):

First part of the paragraph: "Labor is the source of all wealth and all culture."

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence theconditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Capital vol 1:

The use-values coat, linen, etc. – in brief, the commodity-bodies – are connections of two elements, natural matter and labour. If one subtracts the total sum of all different instances of useful labour which lurk inside the coat, linen, etc., there always remains a material substrate left over which is present naturally without the interference of man. Man can only proceed in his producing like nature does herself; i.e., only change the forms of material. And what is more, in this labour of formation itself he is constantly supported by natural forces. Labour is not, therefore, the only source of those use-values which are produced by it – material wealth. Labour is its father, as William Petty says, and the earth is its mother.

Marx's theory of labor value is particularly misunderstood because it is confused with the pre-Marxist labor theory of value from which it diverges significantly. (And honestly, people who haven't read him underestimate just how forward-thinking he really was).

Marx's theory of labor value is deeply related (I had previously stated "specifically", which is too strong a statement) to the growth in relative size of industries. Industries whose proportion of gross value added/revenue is greater than their proportion of workforce employment grow as a percentage of the economy, while the others shrink. This is the famous "law of value". As industries grow and shrink and compete, they find equilibrium at a point where every industry's gross value added/revenue is proportional to how many workers they employ.

That is the other side of the LTV that is much less known than the part about predicting the prices of commodities, but is very important to emphasis.

Marx's LTV is a statistical law, and even more than that, it doesn't even say that industry prices are proportional to the labor input

In fact, in pretty much any study of industrial prices you will find, the LTV predicts prices with less accuracy than the theory that industries tend to reach equilibrium in profit rates. This is not a problem for Marx's theory. In fact, this very difference in "rational prices" predicted by the LTV and the actual prices is what drives the time evolution of capitalist systems (and leads them to crisis after crisis).

the idea of the average productivity that a given laborer would be compared to, has a low standard deviation. I'm not sure if this is my ignorance on the subject or if hes pulling this out of his ass, but did Marx really imply this anywhere?

He probably did, since standardization of production of production techniques and their effect on human society is a significant topic in Marxism. But this has nothing to do with the LTV. And furthermore, Marx was keenly aware of the existence of Artisanal industries and their difference from Mechanized industries. The process of conversion from the former to the latter is a major topic in Marxist theory. I don't know how dense you (not youYangJingyu) have to be to argue about Marx when you don't even know what topics he covered.

He claims that Socially Necessary Labor Time does not have a rigorous mathematical definition because Marx was too bad at math to give it one. While I agree that what is "Socially Necessary" is up for some amount of debate, I feel like this is again a stupid thing to say when he is referencing the average. What rigorous mathematical definition is required to figure out an average?

There is a fair bit more to this. Predicting labor theory of value prices is a very standard thing to do in the field of economic planning (if a bit computationally expensive). There is an exact formula for this (search up Leontieff matrices and input-output models) and even capitalist economies publish this data yearly. It's not as easy as calculating an average though.

I don't have much to add but i think the idea of a Marxist analysis of shoving things up your butt is hilarious

As far as I know, there's nothing implying the standard deviation for labor is small except in factories where the job is largely to do repetitive and simple tasks, which is where proletarianization is at its most extreme. This is clearly different from OF work, which is a much more complicated process.

Others have done a good job explaining the differences, but again it's important to note that price doesn't always coincide with Value, and this is especially true when we reach artisinal fields, because artisinal goods are inherently more unique.

Liberals don't read Marx, but instead treat him and his works as if it was the Necronomicon

Plus it's goofy for anyone to pretend Onlyfans production isn't a form of labor, it's a service regulated through competition

particularly the idea of the average productivity that a given laborer would be compared to, has a low standard deviation. I'm not sure if this is my ignorance on the subject or if hes pulling this out of his ass, but did Marx really imply this anywhere?

The lib confused price with value, simple as, prices on average converge to a common range in any given sector, how he confused that fact with the reality of wage differentiation is beyond me

Liberals don't know what wages, value, profit, or even capital are, they operate off intuition (that's always wrong) and gut feelings about concepts they can't define

"who's going to pay for insurance without employers" levels of discourse and what answers I've got, you've got as well.

Why didn't Marx think of all this, and why didn't he consider the worker, whose output is decreased because he sprained his wrist after wanking, all have the same answer. None of it matters. Socially necessary labour time is a reasonable abstraction, based on the fact that a gross total is produced over some time period, which gives us an average time required per unit. Questioning this is the same as questioning average speed over x distance at t time. It's saying averages and expectations, extremely frequent functions in maths, physics and chemistry, have to be justified every time.

The answer the idiot neoliberal really wants is what divine source of idealisation Marx, and therefore contemporary Communists are using. That's what price=value is. It's saying that the deaf, blind and dumb hand of the market is a divine pointer for some ideal number. We're materialists, we neither expect the metaphysical to affect thee results nor do we ascribe divinity to what is merely a function of the material.

The liberal approach of "whatever is gained is earned, whatever is earned is deserved" is the result of capitalism creating a distribution impossible to justify and work difficult to quantify. Every neoliberal, every SocDem, every fascist hills this to be true implicitly, even if they put up a bunch of caveats when their feet are held to the fire. I don't think the higher stage of communism will require marketing, but there will still be some service work and they will be either impossible or extremely impractical to remove from the total output. I don't really have a way to quantify them either, if not labour time. I mean, deliveries made and tables served are one thing, but papers signed, phone calls made, lines of code written? Companies are trying that shit and finding out on real time that it creates perverse incentives.

Honest suggestion: don't bother. People with a good reason to reject reality will come up with a hundred excuses by the time you disprove one. Trying to prove something to one's interlocutor's satisfaction and have them admit that is a fool's errand almost every time.

Addressing Common Criticisms of the Labor Theory of Value | zhenli真理

While not directly addressing the economics, when I hear:

What rigorous mathematical definition is required to figure out an average? It really feels like hes trying to appeal to the complexity of modern western economics and their obtuse formulas (which ironically seem to have far less predictive power about reality than anything Marx ever said) when there is nothing particularly mathematically complicated about calculating this average...

It makes me think the neolibruls are doing the equivalent of arguing that the geocentric model is right and the heliocentric model is wrong because the math needed for predicting the location of celestial bodies is more complicated using the former than with the latter.

Well the problem is that you are arguing with a strawman, and then using another misunderstanding to address the straw man.

This is not what Marx's, which is really Adam Smith's LTV says. Marx says that labor is generator of all value. This is undoubtedly correct. Without the human labor placed into the existence of an app, servers, cameras, diets, algorithms, etc. none of this would exist. This is simply true. In this way, even the poorest model stands on the shoulders of the labor that came before.

If this is socially nessecery labor is a pretty simple ROI calculation. Does this labor create enough value to allow itself, as an economic behavior, to continue? I would say that for many OF models, there may come a point of diminishing returns, such as if they become older, or wish to change their social media image. In this way there may be OF models that are doing necessary labor, and those that are not. But the whole system of OF may not be socially nessecery labor of there is say, a climate crisis, or a collapse in the larger economic structures of demand in society.

A reminder for this is that socially nessecery labor value is not a moral judgement of that labor, it is simply a way to separate labor and exchange which is able to replicate itself from labor and exchange which cannot, or have more intricate relationships with exchange value to sustain itself. Basically, many items will be made up of both socially nessecery labor value and exchange value, which is the value that can be made through scarcity/expertise. But again, the value doesn't exist at all without the labor to transform it.

Simply because similar kinds of labor may have radically different exchange-values does not 'disprove LTV'. If anything, the fact that one has to have years of advertising and streaming ("being previously famous") to be a top OF model lends credit to the idea that one has to put in more labor to receive exchange value.

The problem is that we simply do not actually measure anything outside the factory in terms of labor hours. As you have said, it is a lack of accounting, not a lack of evidence.

Edit: Exchange value is also called 'price' depending on the analysis.

The massive problem in their argument is this (fundamentally sexist) assumption that labor plays no part in the economic success of sex workers and it all comes down to genetic lottery. There’s plenty of women with OnlyFans pages (and hey, men, but we all know this meme was created with women creators in mind) that are conventionally attractive yet are making sub-average earnings off of it because they don’t put in the work needed for high engagement. Conversely, there’s plenty of women who are in “niche” territory (plus size, mature, amputee, etc) that make above average because they put that work in. Subscriber interaction, regular content release (and the shooting and editing involved), networking with other creators to do collabs, and hours and hours online doing promo work, all of those play a way bigger role than genes.

This argument isn’t rooted in economics, it’s male anxiety and resentment. Men that hate that the feminine allure has power over them get angry and thus find ways to trivialize it, with “they’re lazy bums who get stuff for nothing just by being hot” a common one.

More generally, I just ask people who question it, where does profit come from then? How does a business make money without someone to do the labor?

Beyond the effect of natural endowments and the "hidden" labor that goes into marketing, first mover advantage probably plays a role here, too. If you're on the platform earlier, you have less competition and more time to amass followers, and having followers probably makes it easier to amass more followers, from things like word-of-mouth advertising, being promoted or ranked highly on whatever the platform uses to determine visibility. There's probably also some time decay in profitability; users might get bored of one model and migrate to others, so the person who's at the top might not be there permanently and you'd have to look at lifetime earnings rather than earnings in a given month to decompose labor and non-labor contributors to income.

someone please god tell me if marx did in fact consider celebrity worship, which seems like the main phenomenon at play in the pay disparity here, but this doesn't seem like the kind of thing the LTV is attempting to explain in the first place

"this screwdriver can't drive staples so it's a useless tool"

The very premise is baloney because it assumes an OnlyFans account is a single perfect spherical worker. Successful OnlyFans accounts have teams people working behind the scenes for marketing, analytics, training, editing, and lots of heavily contract workers to respond to fans.

This top earner is actually 10,000 times more attractive than the median one. If they are a 10, then the median earner must necessarily be a .001

Why are we even expecting the earning:labor ratio to be linear on any digital platform? IIRC Marx has labor:value being linear but earnings arent linear to value.

Well at least you had an opportunity to discuss your views, if you want to REALLY punish yourself when it comes to economic theory you should check r/askeconomics. This is a real neoliberal echo chamber. I remember when I was a baby leftist and wanted to check what they had to say about MMT and they just resorted to using the same debunked mainstream economic arguments.

Finally, I remember marx saying something about nature being just as much a source of wealth as labor (I think its something particularly about use-value but thats where my understanding gets murky, would love to have that clarified)

Human nature, or species-being, to Marx is that we are able to envision the tool before we chip the rock to make it. The thing that took us from primate to dominance is that dialectic of hand and eye, something that has been complicated by non-human human tool use we've since learned in animal science. Labour is changing one thing into another with conscious intent to make the more complex thing.

When Marx is talking about nature as a source of wealth, he's describing metabolism. This is the unguided conversion of one thing into another. A rock metabolises atmospheric nutrients into terrestrial. A river metabolises rock into soil nutrients. A bee metabolises nectar into honey while the flower invests soil and solar energy into its reproductive structures that are ecologically intertwined with the higher trophic level of the bee. All of the natural use-value is held by the river, flower, and bee but none of it is consciously guided as we can quantify consciousness. Societal labour and its division are built on the natural division of metabolism, and the metabolic rift is the primary contradiction between what nature can metabolically provide and what we extract.

edit: I highly recommend the work of John Bellamy Foster, Kohei Saito, and James O'Connor on this. They've done a lot to define eco-Marxism.

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