Talk:Law of value/Archive 1

Smith's hidden hand
I took the pen to the ludicrous statement "This assumption is a simple faith or belief, but not really explained." Only an economically illiterate marxist could say that! Not only does Smith explain it, in the same paragraph, but so have countless economists since (try Milton Friedman), game theorists John Von Neumann, Robert Axelrod) evolutionary biologists (Richard Dawkins) and philosophers Dan Dennett, Robert Nozick). The invible hand is a well understood concept. ElectricRay 22:47, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

LOV/LTV
Not sure why there's a separate article as the same ground is covered in the labor theory of value.--Jack Upland 06:20, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

I would agree. The law of value should probably just refer to the other discussions of LTV, exchange-value, or Marxian value and then briefly explain the meaning of the phrase "law of value" itself. Instead this page tries to do all the work of explainiing related terms instead of just "law of value". Also as with many things on this page, Smith's invisible or hidden hand have nothing to do with the "Law of Value". --Cplot 00:51, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

NPOV
"The problem with Austrian economics however is that it has no explanatory power at all; all we can say about a realised price is that it reflects a subjective preference. And there are billions of subjective preferences, all different. Of course, the Austrian economist is not "subjective" at all about his own bank account, he wants his money to be there, regardless of any subjective preference by anybody else." How is this NPOV? It reads like an attack ad against Austrian economics. Cholling (talk) 14:55, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

dead link
—Preceding unsigned comment added by Alex1011 (talk • contribs) 08:07, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Steve Keen
I moved the last sentence of the first paragraph in the Steve Keen section to its own paragraph, and added a Marxist counter-critique (I think):

This raises the question of how we know which part of the new value is due directly to the worker, and which part is due directly to the machine (although indirectly to any worker involved in the production of that machine) - neither of which of course can produce products without the other, unless we suppose full automation.

Kjk2.1 (talk) 20:47, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

It was recently suggested by Michael Hudson that Marx knew about the depreciation problem:

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2009/04/26/michael-hudson-the-financial-barbarians-at-the-gate/

From the 39:20 mark onwards, Hudson explains:

"Well, what Marx said was that the earlier economists... had left out an element of value that was very important, and that was the depreciation on the machinery. And Marx said if a capitalist, an industrialist, invests in machinery and plant and equipment, they have to recover the cost that they've spent on plant and equipment.  Just as a bondholder would not only get interest, they'd get the principal, the capitalist not only makes a profit on his investment, but as the machinery wears out, he gets to recapture the capital that he actually put into the machinery, so that he can buy new machinery and upgrades.  And Marx said that even if the machinery doesn't wear out, it becomes technologically obsolete as efficiency and productivity of new inventions rise."

Kjk2.1 (talk) 03:11, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

This article is too long
This article is too long and requires significant amount of effort to summerize some of the original documents. The original could go to sub topics. The length of the article discouraged online readers to read, thus find the information he wants in a short period of time. Any one agree with me?Calvingao (talk) 23:18, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

As the main author of the article, I agree that the article is somewhat long. However this concept plays a very central and controversial role in Marxian economics and therefore a substantial article is appropriate. I agree however that the article could be abbreviated. One problem is that people started inserting all kinds of bits e.g. about Austrian economics and Che Guevara which have nothing directly to do with the topic but represent criticisms or other interpretations of the concept. Could we discuss first of all what parts are particularly problematic, and how we would like to change the article to improve its format? User:Jurriaan talk) 22:10 20 March 20-09 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.182.183.8 (talk)

Well, for one thing, the little section on Jim Devine should clearly be removed. To suggest that he originated the notion that critics of the law of value were actually critiquing a 'labour theory of price' is wrong; off the top of my head, I know that this argument was made at length by Moishe Postone in Time, Labor and Social Domination in 1993. Maybe the section could be rewritten to take this into account, but probably it should just be deleted. I would also move to erase the Che quotation, and possibly the Engels as well, as they do not add anything to the flow of the article. dwachsmuth (talk) 20:48, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

Footnoting
I am in the process of footnoting the article. Hope to get the rest done soon. User:Jurriaan 26 September 2010 2:05 (UTC)


 * I have completed the first round of footnoting of my article on law of value. I have to check and improve the formatting yet and sort out a few details there. Also, some additional reference material needs to be filled in. I hope to work on this, within the next month or so.User:Jurriaan 2 October 2010 23:05 (UTC)


 * I would appreciate it if people do not simply stick in POV tags but explain their reason for doing so on this talk page. Otherwise it is not clear what the nature of the objection to the citation provided is. User:Jurriaan 18 October 2010 00:58 (UTC)

Alteration without explanation
Somebody substituted "Marx argues that the law of value begins to regulate social reproduction to the extent that wage labour, or the capital-labour relationship, becomes the dominant form of production." Can the author of this idea please provide citations which prove that Marx argues this? 11 february 2010 11:25 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.144.162.215 (talk)

Size split?
 Split  - Article is over 100 kB, and should be split, starting with "Criticism". Thoughts? Suggestions?--Jax 0677 (talk) 19:12, 26 December 2012 (UTC)


 * As the author of the article, I strongly object to the intentions of wiki editors who have no scholarly knowledge or competence about the topic to butcher the article on the ground of their schematic whim that more than 100 kb is too much. Have a look e.g. at the article on the Glass-Steagall Act which is 292 kb long. Nobody has cut up the article into bits. Why? Because even if the wiki editors don't have any legal knowledge, they can nevertheless understand that the Act and subsequent modifications and controversies belong together in one reference article. If editors who have no competence or knowledge start to carve up articles on which I have spent a lot of hours, not only is this very annoying, but the quality of the text also goes downhill. I accept major alterations only from editors who have thorough experience with the subjectmatter, not just any Tom Dick or Harry who just feels like cutting up other people's articles according to their own aesthetic preferences and whims. User:Jurriaan 27 December 2012 01:24 (UTC)


 *  Reply  - WP:OWN--Jax 0677 (talk) 08:16, 27 December 2012 (UTC)


 * Your cryptic reply is not only cryptic, but also misplaced. It does not respond to the case presented. I am fully aware that I do not "own" any wikipedia article I write. But that is not the issue here. The issue is whether an editor is competent and knowledgeable to edit an article, or whether the edits performed just reflect the arbitrary whims and fancies of somebody who doesn't really know what they are talking about, or what they are doing. I am likewise fully aware that wikipedia is an encyclopedia which anyone can edit, but that does not mean that anybody SHOULD edit anything. They should edit that which is within their competency to edit. If the article is vandalized, I am just going to reset it. User:Jurriaan 27 December 2012 2:41 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.48.162 (talk)

This page is a complete mess.
I don't even know where to start. It looks like it's going to need a major rewrite, as it consistently breaks Wikipedia policy, throughout the entire article. In particular, it violates the Manual of Style (it reads like a rant on someone's personal home page), it's full of original research, and it has very little in the way of legitimate sources. For example:

The basic idea of the law of value was expressed very clearly by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations[27] when he wrote:

The citation provided is merely a link to The Wealth of Nations.

I'm going to give this article a very quick run-through and try to fix some of the absolute worst excesses. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 04:01, 4 April 2013 (UTC)


 * OK, I ran through it and tried to tag it as best I could, with quick fixes where appropriate. Many of the edits that I did were to bring it into better compliance with the Manual of Style, replacing the dashes (-) with emdashes (–); fixing minor grammatical and syntactic errors (comma splices and missing commas); minor copy editing ("it is true that he said" → "he said"); and removing excessive italicization.  I think that I was actually fairly forgiving when tagging original research, though some sections were chock full of it.  In those sections, I usually used a template, with some of the worst examples highlighted.  The citations for this article are a complete and utter mess.  I'm going to try to do another run-through, fixing up the citations a bit.  Furthermore, I hope that I can separate the notes from the references.  I really want to fix these examples:


 * Continually citing the same few sources repeatedly, without using ref names
 * Synthesis – or, at least, tag it as such
 * Long, unwieldy blocks of references following weasel words (I was relatively forgiving of this in my first run-through, because I wanted to focus on style, rather than citations)
 * Vague allusions to references, such as "I read it somewhere in a book" or "An article I read in The Economist". I can't believe anyone actually thought these qualify as citations!


 * I'll try to tag some of the worst examples of over-reliance on primary sources, because it seems to lead to WP:OR and WP:Syn quite often, as we see here. However, it could take a long while before the references are fixed, given the number of them and the size of the article.  It's not something that I really relish starting on. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 18:28, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

NinjaRobotPirate insults
The page is not a "complete mess", and indeed I have been complimented for writing it, by scholars - it is merely that it does not conform fully to wikipedia standards. Since however you are only insulting me for my effort, I will just leave the editing for now, and watch you turn the page into a mess. If people want to refer to the original article, they can consult the version at 31 March 2013 in the archives. User:Jurriaan 6 April 2013 13:09 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.48.162 (talk)


 * Nobody has insulted you, Jurriaan. The problem seems to be that you don't understand how articles on Wikipedia are supposed to be written.  You're conducting original research, and that's not what Wikipedia is about.  Your research may be brilliant and totally correct, but it's still not allowed on Wikipedia.  We only report what others have said.  When you say things like, "Marx said this, and he meant this."  That needs a citation.  You can't just link to what Marx said and interpret it yourself.  That's against the rules of Wikipedia.  If you want to interpret what Marx meant, then you must cite a respected academic who has interpreted the statement.  You can't do it yourself.  Otherwise, I could come in here and say, "Marx said this, and meant UFOs were abducting capitalists."  You see why this is problematic?  For an essay on your personal home page, this is probably quite well-written.  For an article on Wikipedia, it's a complete mess, and I think it will probably have to be rewritten. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 13:38, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Nobody has insulted me? Suppose that you worked across several years at an article which a lot of people want to read, and then your effort is called "a complete mess", how would you like that? What you challenge me to do, amongst other things, is to provide an additional 70+ footnotes to reference various claims. I have no problem about doing that in principle, but that way, I would get more complaints that the article is simply too long. At the moment it is 263KB and 40,000 words. I do not know what the maximum length for a wikipedia article is. The only thing I can think of, is to condense the article down to a much shorter length, so that many referencing problems would not arise. User:Jurriaan 6 April 2013 20:50(UTC)


 * Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and nobody owns the articles (even if you're the primary author, over a span of years). We've all had the experience of having a cherished sentence, paragraph, or article edited to a state we find subjectively worse.  I've written a few things that I think were pretty insightful, only to have someone else summarily delete it, for lack of a source.  Or they change the grammar around, so that it sounds like a child wrote it.  It happens.  If you don't want your stuff edited, insulted, or deleted, the best thing to do is to just put it on your own personal home page, so that nobody else can touch it.  Unfortunately, Wikipedia does have some rules, and some people take them very seriously.  You may not believe me, but I'm actually fairly lax compared to many other hard-liners.  I might be a bit abrasive sometimes (and I apologize for that), but I think you'll agree that the edits I made to the page might make it look significantly uglier and less authoritative, but they're really not all that bad.  I barely removed anything, and most of the edits that I made were:
 * Requesting citations. Personally, I think it's important to let readers know that a statement, while potentially correct, has no citations to back it up.
 * Tagging original research. Wikipedia is not a publisher of original research, even when it's correct.  That means, you're not allowed to interpret what Marx means, even if 9 out 10 scholars privately agree with you.  You must find a source where one of them says it, and then you can quote them.  It's just the way that Wikipedia works.  Instead of deleting what you've written, I've merely tagged it.
 * Tagging improper use of primary sources. Secondary sources are preferred.  Using primary sources leads to original research, unless you're directly quoting from the primary source.  You're not allowed to interpret what Marx wrote in his books, because that would be original research.
 * Tagging synthesis. I think there were only one or two cases of this.  Synthesis is when you say something like "There was no consensus among the economists", then list three economists who all disagree with each other.  Instead, what you need to do is find a source which states that none of the economists agreed with each other.
 * Messing around with the citations. I'm hoping that most of these changes won't be contentious.  For example, I folded most of the repeated citations into named references.  I moved a lot of the direct Marx quotes here, as well, since they can't technically be used as a source.  Also, I tried to move all the helpful notes here, so that they don't clutter the References section.  Hopefully, I didn't mess up and include something that shouldn't belong there, but it's entirely possible.  If you want to move them back out, it should be relatively straightforward to do so.  If it looks tricky, then just remove the "group=notes" part, and it should go right back to be a standard reference, instead of a note.
 * This article is soooo long, I had to break up my edits, making the history look pretty ugly and repetitive. I'm sorry about that, but it wasn't really easy for me to edit the main article.  I'm currently using an older laptop, with somewhat limited memory, so editing the main article causes my system to crawl.  I didn't even touch the Criticism/Response sections, because it's just too much work, and I think those sections really need to be split. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 22:09, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I've tried my best to create an accessible article which deals with all aspects of this concept and its history. That article is dated 31 March 2013, and it is there as a reference. But it does not conform to wiki standards. I guess therefore I will have to let the article be wrecked, so that it conforms better to wiki standards. All I can say is, that if you split the references into separate "notes" and "references", it is just going to be more confusing to the readers, not enlightening. It doesn't really add anything that makes the article better. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, but the trouble is, that you get people who think they can edit anybody else's article. They can't, and they just leave a big stinking mess. But I have grown weary of correcting all that again. User:Jurriaan 7 April 2013 20:45 (UTC)
 * WP:OWN. It's not your article.  I don't know how many times people have to tell this to you. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 20:24, 7 April 2013 (UTC)


 * If you knew who you were talking to, you wouldn't talk like that. OF COURSE I know it is not "my article" even although I wrote it. It is just that if somebody re-edits my work, the least that I (who made the effort to create the article for people to use) might expect is: (a) that they are really knowledgeable about the subjectmatter, and (b) that the re-editing actually results in a significant IMPROVEMENT of the article. User:Jurriaan 8 April 2013 16:03 (UTC)


 * I know exactly to whom I'm talking, and this kind of narcissistic rage – "How dare you edit my article! You're not qualified to change it!" – is specifically against Wikipedia's rules.  In fact, if a 13 year old kid came in and deleted all your unsourced statements, replacing them with sourced analysis from a third party scholar, it would be more valuable to Wikipedia, and it would be upheld by any administrator.  If this bothers you, then you should simply leave Wikipedia. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 18:11, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * "Narcissistic rage?" You get worse all the time with your insults! How this can be reconciled with wikipedia norms is beyond me. How about some cogent argument, instead of cursing? It would not bother me at all, if a 13 year old kid referenced the text better than I have. If that is actually what happens. But what actually happens is that an editor changes the article without this improving the article, and indeed making the article worse. My concern is not with narcissism, but with article quality. I am just stating my criticism of edits which don't make the article better but make it worse than it was. That is what bothers me, and that is why I hardly work on wikipedia anymore. Let me just note that you describe yourself as someone who boasts on his talk page "I'm here to loot, pillage, kill, and edit Wikipedia articles" to which you are "apathetic." That is exactly the kind of attitude we do not need in wikipedia, if we are concerned to improve articles! User:Jurriaan 8 April 2013 21:21 (UTC).


 * So, which is it? Do they have to be really knowledgeable about the subject matter or not?  You can't have it both ways.  Your average 13 year old editor is not really knowledgeable about the subject matter but is quite capable of quoting reliable sources.  If you have no problem with uninformed editors editing this page, then cease your complaints about it.  It's not conducive toward collaboration, and it intimidates editors who would otherwise contribute.  I came to this page because it was listed in WP:Cleanup, as an editor was complaining about your WP:OWN and WP:OR.  I barely even changed anything at all in the article.  You should be thankful that no hardliners have been attracted to this article.  All I've done is tag your WP:OR and move items that were not references out of the References section.  I've barely touched your precious writing, and, in fact, I did make it better.  I corrected your grammar and spelling mistakes, as well as pushing the article into better compliance with Wikipedia policy.  If it bother you so much that this article is now more compliant with Wikipedia policy, I have no idea how to continue any meaningful dialogue with you.  I would further request that you sign in and properly sign your posts.  Further: please not change your posts, then re-sign them.  And, I would finally add, yes, we do need more people who are apathetic about the articles they edit!  Avoiding bias is the whole point of one of Wikipedia's core policies, WP:NPOV! NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 20:31, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * A distinction is normally drawn between copyediting and content editing. For copyediting purposes, in-depth knowledge of the subject "may" not be required, since it consists basically only of a linguistic tidying and attention to notation, punctuation, typography and style (the purely formal aspects of a text). In content editing, the concern is with the actual meaning, format and message of what is said. However, these two types of editing are often not so easily separable, since, by e.g. changing formal aspects of the text, you also change the meaning. For instance, one previous editor deleted the word "currently" from the definition of "socially necessary labour", regarding it as a linguistic redundancy, even although it is a crucial component of the definition, which has featured in important debates about Marx's value theory. Wiki editing is additionally a special kind of editing, since it seeks conformity to a specific model of what a text should look like. But it frequently happens that in the desire to make an article conform to wiki rules, the quality of the article is actually destroyed - because in truth the editors do not know how to say what the article previously said in a better way. It is quite possible nowadays for a child of 13 to reference a wiki article, I don't doubt that. Marx himself already claimed that "any child" could understand the necessity to work for human survival. But even if a kid succeeds in this, it doesn't necessarily result in a better article, beyond mimickry. I do have a problem with uninformed editors editing this article (or any other), if it means that the quality of the article goes downhill. That is quite a legitimate concern to have, and it has nothing to do with psychopathology. Except for some copyedits, you haven't really improved this article, all you have done in your "editing" is to insert a lot of tags to the effect that the text is, according to you, not compliant with Wikipedia policy in all kinds of ways. Well thanks very much. Of course you are biased, it is merely that you don't make your biases explicit beyond what you say on your talk page. The idea is not to just ram into an article somebody wrote on a whim, but to edit articles for which you have to competency to edit. You don't have a comprehensive knowledge of the literature about the law of value, you just thought you would jump in to sort out the text. But actually you make it even more difficult for the reader. User:Jurriaan 9 april 2013 21:02 (UTC)

Reverted edits
Are you serious, Jurriaan? You just reverted the page, because you think the [citation needed] tags are ugly? I don't even know where to begin. Let's just start with the most outrageous aspects:


 * 1) You tagged this as a minor edit.  I don't think you understand what a minor edit is.
 * 2) You removed markup demanding citations, without providing citations.
 * 3) You are engaging in rather extreme WP:OWN behavior.
 * 4) You are not making any effort toward building consensus and have unilaterally reverted good-faith edits, simply because you think the resulting markup is ugly.
 * 5) You are reverting to a version of the page that looks more authoritative, when the authoritative prose is full of original research, despite the template on the top of the page clearly requesting the original research to be replaced with sourced statements.

I don't want to get into an edit war. To the best of my recollection, I've never once engaged in an edit war, partly because I try to stick to editing articles about which I am apathetic. If you push me, however, I will fight you on these edits. I'm going to give you the opportunity to explain your reversion, using better arguments than your edit reason, which I interpret as "I think [citation needed] is ugly". I would like to believe that you have better reasons than that, and that your humor is going above my head. If, however, that is your reason, then I request that you either revert your contentious edit or assure me that you will not engage in a pointless edit war with me, if/when I revert it back to my latest edit.

This is thoroughly unacceptable behavior. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 22:33, 10 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I haven't got time right now to go into everything about this article in depth. I emphasize again that I have never suggested that I "own" this article, and I welcome alterations IF THEY RESULT IN A BETTER ARTICLE. It is legitimate to protect this article with stewardship on this basis, against alterations which do not improve the article but merely cause more trouble. I agree, that the article developed over the last eight years does not fully conform to wiki standards, although it was well-liked and was read by a very large number of people who said they found it useful. The main objection has been that the article is too long, and also that there are original research concerns. This raises the question of what would be an acceptable length, and I do not yet know what the answer to that is, I aim to find that out. If the article was shortened, many concerns about original research would not even arise. Of course, the subject of the "law of value" has been very important in the history of the Marxist movement and has affected hundreds of millions of people worldwide; hence, a substantive article is worth doing, and I provided a pilot article accordingly. No doubt it is not entirely satsifactory, okay, but it is there at least as a reference for a better article in the future. But if you simply insert heaps of tags in the article requesting additional sources, you are not "improving" the article thereby. You just make it harder to read. You are simply stating, on your "apathetic" editing whim, that there are many things wrong with the format of the article. Of course, I could place an additional hundred references, but this doesn't solve the problem of length, and makes things worse, not better! Presumably, the point is to make the article more concise, and then we have to discuss the best way to do that. If however you seriously want to work on the content of this article, then (1) it requires that you are scientifically, scholarly and technically knowledgeable about the subject, and (2) that you discuss your proposed surgery first on the talk page. As regards (1), I have no evidence so far that you as ninja with your "apathetic" attitude are knowledgable about the subjectmatter at all, and therefore prima facie you are not wellpositioned to make major changes to the article, beyond such things as spelling, typography and the like (a copy edit). As regards (2), you are required to discuss major proposed alterations of the article on this talk page first, not simply slash and burn according to fancy. On your own talk page, you declare your intention to "kill and loot" articles etc., but this kind of crude and uncivil attitude is not wanted in wikipedia. It makes me very wary about your editing operations. Let's get clear first of all about what your true motive is in running roughshod over this article - is it to improve the article and make it a better article, or is it simply to dot the i's on other people work, and state in great detail your displeasure about somebody else's text? If you want to be a wikipedia editor, you have to do things with the right motivation: to create good articles which conform to wiki standards. If you don't, all your alterations will be wiped out again, until the article is locked, and agreement is reached on what would be the best format. Let me note, additionally, that citing original sources is explicitly not prohibited in wikipedia. It is merely that it should be done fairly sparingly and judiciously, and the sources should not be made to say more or different things than they do say. In the case of Marx, since the texts are perpetually contested, it is sometimes necessary to refer to original sources, and that has been accepted in many other articles about Marx's works. Most of all, bear in mind that the main aim is to create articles which genuinely, usefully and accurately inform the reader about the subjectmatter, and not to pander to pedantic-bureaucratic whims about formalities without honorable motives. User:Jurriaan 12 April 2013 19:41 (UTC)
 * You are wrong on almost every count, Jurriaan. WP:V is one of the most important policies on Wikipedia.  WP:NOR is another.  Your article is in direct violation of these policies, and my edits brought it into better compliance.  I resent your WP:OWN behavior, and I am reverting the article back; if you insist on an edit war, I will request WP:arbitration.  I have attempted to reason with you, and I have sought intervention from an uninvolved admin, but it looks like neither is proving productive. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 17:02, 13 April 2013 (UTC)


 * It is a waste of time discussing with you because you ignore everything I say and make false accusations. I will continue to reset the article, until there is an arbitration ruling by the administrators which takes into account different views. I do not wish this article to be defaced and wrecked by some kind of teenage mutant ninja turtle who doesn't even know about the subject. That is not why I wrote the article in the first place. User:Jurriaan 13 April 2013 23:13 (UTC)


 * OK, fine. Have it your way.  I was hoping that it wouldn't come to this. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 02:22, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

I see essentially two components to NinjaRobotPirate's edit, tagging and copyedits both very good things. I don't see any major content changes, so I'm not understanding the objection. I've reverted to NinjaRobotPirate's version, since I can't imagine anyone but Jurriaan will object. TippyGoomba (talk) 03:11, 14 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry, I made a mistake. When I referred to "original sources" I meant PRIMARY sources, in other words reference to what Marx himself said rather than what somebody said about Marx. Primary sources are not prohibited in wikipedia. User:Jurriaan 16 april 2013 21:49 (UTC)

arbitrary break
Fyi, if someone doesn't come along and source these statements, they should be axed. This article is an WP:OR nightmare. TippyGoomba (talk) 02:50, 18 April 2013 (UTC)
 * If we advertise this article in the appropriate WikiProjects, we might be able to get some more volunteers and experts. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 04:59, 19 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Ninja won his case, so I have to comply with the ruling. I think it would be a good idea to get some constructive help from volunteers and (especially) experts. I can stick in a lot more references, if required and pending time available, but I don't think that will address the problem of article length, nor the original research concerns. User:Jurriaan 19 April 2013 10:16 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.64.48.162 (talk)
 * I posted notes requesting help at WP:WikiProject Socialism, WP:Wikiproject Philosophy, and WP:WikiProject Economics. If that doesn't help, I guess we can try hitting up some higher level noteboards (WP:Cleanup...again) or request assessment. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 20:19, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Comments from an uninvolved editor

Jurriaan, you've written an excellent monograph and I'm going to assume you're an expert in this area. I also assume you've published in the peer-reviewed literature. As I'm sure you're aware, a perfectly factual, useful journal submission can be rejected out of hand if the tone is wrong, or the formatting is strange, or any of a number of other reasons that have very little to do with the quality of the underlying research. Learning to be an effective academic means, in part, learning how to present your research in the way that's acceptable to the gatekeepers, even when that means making the article worse. I've been on both sides of this fight both here and with my peer-reviewed scientific work. If you continue to contribute here, you'll stay saner longer if you can accept that in return for a planet-wide audience you'll have to write articles that are worse than they need to be. Most of the time that tradeoff is worthwhile. (If you want an appreciation of where these rules are actually helpful, drop by WP:FTN.)

NinjaRobotPirate & TippyGoomba: WP:TROUTs to you both. No, this article is not a nightmare. It's not a mess. What I see is an article that's a couple weeks away from being ready to go up for WP:GA. Yes, there are WP:OR and other problems: we've got an expert at hand who can help solve those problems. Denigrating the article is not an effective way of motivating that expert.

I'd like to help get this article to WP:GA. Jurriaan, would you be up for that? NRP & TP? Jurriaan, if we need to cut the article length in half (not saying we have to, just stating a hypothetical) what would be the best way to do that? NRP & TP, can you prioritize the WP:OR concerns so we know what needs to be addressed first?

Looking forward to working with all of you to move this article to GA.

Garamond Lethe t c  01:05, 20 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, it seems like a very well-researched article, but it's chock full of WP:OR. Parts of it seem very well-written and neutral (and sourced fairly well), but then it devolves into highly POV rants, where it castigates Marxists and Marxism.  Obviously, the rants need to go, but I'm not sure what to do about the more neutral parts, which are lacking sources.  If we remove the rants, split the criticism/response into a different article, and compress some of the longer sections, that would probably bring us close to 50%, without doing all that much work.  However, I wouldn't really know where to start, and any edits I made would probably be too contentious.  Just marking up the article sparked an edit war, so actually changing the words would probably cause World War III.  As I'm admittedly not an expert in this area, I have trouble seeing which parts are absolutely necessary, which parts are tangential cruft, and which parts should be summarized down to a single, concise paragraph.  I'm also unsure of how to handle the anti-Marxist bias in this article.  I was hoping that maybe a Marxist or two might stop by, to give us some insight into pushing it further toward NPOV. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 05:09, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Yeeeesh
Holy shit, this is a mess. For starters it's a straight fork of Labor theory of value (which has its own problems, mind you). It has the worst case of Too Long; Didn't Read disease that I can recall having seen. It is an amorphous blob of a rambling essay, venturing far afield but offering little illumination. I'm not sure what to say other than to make the suggestion that this be taken apart with a mercilessly-wielded chainsaw. Carrite (talk) 03:04, 20 April 2013 (UTC)


 * That seems to be a common reaction to this article. However, I don't think the chainsaw solution would work for Jurriaan, the primary author of this article.  In the spirit of consensus, I think we need something with a bit more subtlety and finesse than a chainsaw.  I'm hopeful that we can find a way to summarize the key concepts, without turning this into a hatchet job. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 05:42, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Reply to comments

 * Thanks Garamond for your comment. Yes I have published in peer-reviewed journals, and yes I've worked professionally as academic editor and translator of scholarly articles and books. I wrote the article in a slightly humorous vein, in the light of thirty years experience of Marxist discussions about the topic inside and outside universities. It wasn't really aimed so much at academic initiates, but more at the general reader interested to learn more about the topic. It was not intended to be biased in favour or against Marxists, but it was intended to deal fairly evenhandedly both with Marxists and anti-Marxists. After all, both Marxists and non-Marxists have also said pretty silly things about the law of value, which can in no way be reconciled with Marx's own text. There has been a need for a fairly nuanced overview article such as this, because there doesn't exist one; many different Marxist factions cannot even agree on what the law of value means, although there exists a sort of mainstream understanding of it. And so the article has been viewed more than a quarter million times. If you have any scholarly knowledge about the topic, you know that "law of value" is not the same as "labor theory of value", and indeed I have explained this in the article itself (specifically on request of readers). The real trouble with many Marxist wiki articles is, that every leftist Tom, Dick and Harry wants to have his two-bits worth on the subject without having any competency in the field. So you get horribly malformed results such as the current commodity fetishism article, which has become very waffly indeed. Because a lot of people read that article, there are also a lot of opportunists who want to meddle with the article, even if they have no knowledge at all about the topic. I hope we can avoid another such mishap with this article. As regards reducing the length, I think we could possibly try two things: (1)cut the article into three separate articles, i.e. "law of value", "criticism of the law of value", and "Law of value in Soviet-type societies", and (2) cut out those paragraphs which digress too far from the actual topic. However, starting new wiki articles has nowadays become so complicated, that I do not actually know if I can do that anymore. User:Jurriaan 20 April 2013 23:09 (UTC)

Yes, it does read as though written for non-academics, and you did a very good job at that. Some parts of it are quite neutral and unbiased, but there are a few places where it does get critical of Marxists. This isn't supposed to happen in a Wikipedia article, which are held to a rather high standard, called WP:NPOV. In essence, I suppose you could call the resulting committee-written articles "waffly", though the better ones avoid this, by refusing to take any hard stance, reporting only what mainstream academics and experts have said, rather than what individual Wikipedians believe. This necessarily frustrates some editors, who have strong opinions on the matter.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

The first problem here is that you're lecturing the reader on a common mistake that Marxists make. Wikipedia isn't a soapbox for you to lecture on the correct interpretation of Marx. We can only report on what other, reliable sources have said. We can't make assertions ourselves. Second, you can't just say that Marxists in general do something. You have to point to specific examples, such as, "NinjaRobotPirate, in his essay Why the Law of Value Is Stupid, misinterprets the law of value, according to Jurriaan." Or, if you can find a source which specifically says this, you could write, "According to Jurriaan, many Marxists misinterpret the law of value." You can't just assert something and then tell people, "Just trust me on this. I've done the research." That's specifically against Wikipedia's policies. Third, you're making rather strong statements about the validity of what Marxists believe, though it doesn't turn into an outright attack until the next paragraph, when you ridicule Marxists for forming a philosophy before they even knew all the facts. This has nothing to do with the Law of value, and it's just going on a rant about Marxists and Marxism. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 16:47, 21 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I agree that in wikistyle I should really cite a publication by a scholar who makes the point. Sometimes I could not remember the source or hoped others would fill it in, but they haven't. I haven't published in a refereed journal specifically on the law of value, and I haven't lectured for 25 years or so. I could give many more illustrative examples, but that would increase the length of the article. I am certainly critical of many Marxists but I do not intend to lecture or ridicule Marxists here, what I intend is to state a simple truth, i.e. the circumstance that Marxism emerged as a doctrine long before even many basic texts by Marx became available to read, nevermind the readership as such, which was small. This is true, and nobody can deny it, since we know very well when Marx's writings were first published, when Marxism first emerged, how much literacy there was, and who actually studied Marx. The Marx-scholar Hal Draper has shown with numerous examples just how much and how badly Marx's ideas have been misrepresented in his magnum opus 'Karl Marx's theory of revolution (5 volumes). If Marxism was already formed before all of Marx's main writings became available (nevermind the more obscure ones), then that can become a problem for the interpretation of the texts. It isn't just me saying that, e.g. the German celebrity Marxist Michael Heinrich also argues this when he pleads for a rereading of Marx. I never claimed that this article on the law of value is completely satisfactory. I challenged others to improve it. If others can improve it, they are welcome, and they have been welcome for eight years already. It is just that very few wikipedians have taken up up this invitation in that time, until NinjaRobotPirate started tagging the text User:Jurriaan 22 April 2013 19:05 (UTC)

Maybe focus on the first, older and actionable tag?
the other two are probably spurious. I'm not sure it's proper to cast it as strictly Marxian either which may be the basis of a split. Lycurgus (talk) 19:47, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Proudhon and the "law of value"
The article starts:

"The law of value (German: Wertgesetz) is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics.[1][note 1] Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work:"

However, Proudhon was the first to coin the phrase "law of value" to describe the regulative principle of economic exchange:

“value varies, and the law of value is unchangeable: further, if value is susceptible of variation, it is because it is governed by a law whose principle is essentially inconstant – namely, labour measured by time.” -- Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère (Paris: Guillaumin et Co., 1846) I: 60

Labour was “the centre around which useful and exchangeable value oscillate […] the absolute, unchangeable law which regulates economic disturbances” (Système I: 62)

It was a central concept of Proudhon's, not Marx -- Marx may have taken it up, but he did not invent the term. Nor did he invent the concept which, as Proudhon indicated, can be found in Adam Smith and the difference between "natural price" and "market price".

I note this simply to state the fact -- I doubt that any Marxist would be interesting in the truth, they probably think "The Poverty of Philosophy" is an honest and accurate polemic and that Proudhon advocated labour-notes! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.40.192.105 (talk) 15:04, 16 June 2015 (UTC)

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