tangential topic from the transcendental materialism thread - thought it worth starting a new thread so revol isn't detracted from serving up some reheated kantian metaphysics of experience
revol68 wrote:
the issue with applying the LTV to oil and the like is that it assumes competition and there is very little of it in the oil markets.well yeah, there's all the assumptions of political economy he adopts, few of which apply to oil; perfect competition, no barriers to entry, infinite potential supply...
none of those things necessarily negate the LTV, or render it inapplicable to oil production - all these things - lack of effective competition, barriers to entry/efficient accumulation, limitations on supply of product, monopolistic ownership of non-reproducible means of production, impediment of price formation, etc.. were all (and to an extent still are) present in agricultural production at the time marx was writing capital (sure there are differences as well) - and the lengthy section on surplus profit transformation into rent in vol3 of capital shows how the labour theory of value (and pretty much everything else contained in vol 1-3, production, accumulation, distribution, barriers to efficient accumulation, value production, prices of production formation, equalisation of profit, fictitious value, differences between production and distribution of surplus value, etc..) can and is applied to circumstances just like this - that part of capital is pretty much a case study in the application of the whole edifice and general structure of marx's political economy to a specific historically determined instance, where all the perfect assumptions of an ideal type capitalist economy don't maintain
there was a thread a week or so ago where this was touched on a bit - (http://libcom.org/forums/theory/labor-theory-value-28042010 - the few posts towards the end)
another quick point....
i agree it's a retarded thing to say - but did you actually mean to say the bit in bold?