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Marx, Kantorovich, and Novozhilov: What Is Wrong With Stoimost’?

2025· article· W4416337954 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueEconomic Policy · 2025
Typearticle
Language
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPolitical Economy and Marxism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBlameMarxist philosophyValue (mathematics)Face (sociological concept)Value theoryFoundation (evidence)MistakeLabor theory of value

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The program adopted at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961 stated that prices must reflect socially necessary labor costs. Soviet economics held that it is these costs that form value. Meanwhile, Robert Campbell published an article under the title “Marx, Kantorovich, Novozhilov: Stoimost’ Versus Reality” supporting the view that Kantorovich and Novozhilov had revived Soviet economics. However, they had to reject the Marxist theory of value. In the opinion of many Soviet scholars, these economists withdrew from Marxism, which was not a positive contribution to economics. This article analyzes problems concerned with the content of the theory of value, whether it was adequately understood by Soviet economists and whether Kantorovich’s and Novozhilov’s approaches were compatible with Marxism. In fact, they developed interesting concepts of objectively determined valuations and differential costs. These indicators were to be used in the process of setting prices. Both Kantorovich and Novozhilov sincerely believed that their approaches were in line with Marxism. In his works, Novozhilov criticized Campbell’s article. This article attempts to prove that Marx did not complete the theory of value and, in fact, came to a dead end. With this in view, it would be incorrect to blame scholars for withdrawing from such an incomplete theory. The article studies the questions of correlation between Kantorovich’s and Novozhilov’s approaches and of their mutual estimation of each other’s thinking. In addition, the article demonstrates differences and similarities in the concepts of these outstanding economists. Although in correspondence with Canadian historian Vsevolod Holubnychy, Novozhilov tried to prove that his theory of differential costs was developed independently of Kantorovich’s works, this statement seems to be incorrect. The article also marks the influence of Kantorovich’s and Novozhilov’s ideas on the development of the concept of economic reform. The Appendix includes fragments from correspondence between Novozhilov and Holubnychy and excerpts from Campbell’s letter addressed to the author of this article. These excerpts contain quite a just rejoinder to critical remarks by Novozhilov concerning Campbell’s article.

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Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Scholarly communication, Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.915
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.002
Scholarly communication0.0010.002
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.285
Teacher spread0.277 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it