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Cory Doctorow had a good piece recently on rents vs. profits that I felt was pretty good.
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Apr 21, 2024 01:12
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Finished chapter 3, and looking forward to starting part two (of capital Vol 1), mostly because it looks like a short brisk read and then I will be starting chapter 7 which I've been looking forward to after hearing it described itt One question I did have regarding C-M-C is specifically the money hoarding and international spending of spice for debt settlement. I'm going to butcher it, but my question is, what exactly was Marx getting at regarding hoarding? Is it meant to be implicated as a cause for the reason of falling value for money? The reason inflation is a given is because the money is always being hoarded? Additionally, there's the footnotes regarding how easily France was able to pay off foreign debts that were quite large sums, but I wasn't really sure what context that was meant to provide for me, would anyone take a stab at explaining those?
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Apr 23, 2024 20:11
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Cory Doctorow had a good piece recently on rents vs. profits that I felt was pretty good. i'm broadly suspicious of any claim that we are returning to feudalism because of apps or whatever, i think it's just the old antisemitic good industrial capitalists vs bad financial capitalists canard with extra steps. under capitalism, rents as well as interest are collected by various auxiliary actors because it ultimately saves time and money that a commodity-producing industrial capitalist would have to spend to do the same thing. i'm not convinced that rents are uniquely defeating profits now in a way that they weren't before, especially because they still completely depend on profits in a way they never did in the time of serfs and castles
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Apr 23, 2024 21:54
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Ferrinus posted:i'm broadly suspicious of any claim that we are returning to feudalism because of apps or whatever, i think it's just the old antisemitic good industrial capitalists vs bad financial capitalists canard with extra steps. under capitalism, rents as well as interest are collected by various auxiliary actors because it ultimately saves time and money that a commodity-producing industrial capitalist would have to spend to do the same thing. i'm not convinced that rents are uniquely defeating profits now in a way that they weren't before, especially because they still completely depend on profits in a way they never did in the time of serfs and castles I'm kind of landing in the same place, yeah. The rentier class of today is quite powerful in its own right, but it's fundamentally dependent upon the framings and language of capital to persist — its self-understanding, its basic systems of balance-sheet accountancy, etc. I think if this piece were written in the antebellum south, it might instead suppose that "capitalism becomes the slave mode of production." And yet, industrial US slavery was recontextualized from older forms of slavery, and kicked into grotesque overdrive by the imperatives of profit-making. This is a lot like the rentier case described above; you can even see this in the ledgers of plantation-owners, where slaves were specifically regarded as fixed capital. See, e.g.: https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c0606/c0606.pdf quote:The slave industry consisted of two types of firms. One owned or rented the capital goods (slaves) and used them as factors of production to produce a marketable commodity (labor services) or combined them with other factors to produce marketable commodities (cotton, railroad services, gold, etc.). The other owned those capital goods (female slaves) which were used to produce new capital goods (slaves). Some firms, usually plantations, engaged in all three, producing labor services, agricultural products, and new slaves. This exactly captures the division between Department II (producing consumer commodities) and Department I (producing the means of production) from Capital vol. 2, but even more viscerally upsetting! Aeolius has issued a correction as of 22:22 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 22:14
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hubris.height posted:One question I did have regarding C-M-C is specifically the money hoarding and international spending of spice for debt settlement. I'm going to butcher it, but my question is, what exactly was Marx getting at regarding hoarding? Is it meant to be implicated as a cause for the reason of falling value for money? The reason inflation is a given is because the money is always being hoarded? In antiquity, temples were the storehouses of money, but not stacked as coins. The precious metals were made into statues, some simple and mass produced, some as ornate showpieces. This is how value was stored as a hoard. The Parthenon was like this. The great statue of Athena was designed to be broken down again. When war broke out, coins were needed to satisfy the new labor demands, such as to pay rowers for the fleet. They melted the gold statues and minted coin. Without the hoard, there would be no way to satisfy this need without reducing the commodities in circulation or increasing the velocity of money through financial engineering.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:26
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Ferrinus posted:i'm broadly suspicious of any claim that we are returning to feudalism because of apps or whatever, i think it's just the old antisemitic good industrial capitalists vs bad financial capitalists canard with extra steps. under capitalism, rents as well as interest are collected by various auxiliary actors because it ultimately saves time and money that a commodity-producing industrial capitalist would have to spend to do the same thing. i'm not convinced that rents are uniquely defeating profits now in a way that they weren't before, especially because they still completely depend on profits in a way they never did in the time of serfs and castles Could this whole episode be simply an anomaly because of ZIRP and the rise in technology companies dominating the stock market since the late '90s and especially since 2008? It seems like a pretty unique situation that wasn't going to last before something broke and the old manner of doing things came back with a vengeance. There is little juice left in the start up culture as evidenced by AI being a Hail Mary, and it's hard to run an unprofitable business when not having VC money thrown at you chasing any kind of growth as investment opportunity. Also, I usually expect something in return for a feudal society unlike one of capital bleeding everyone dry and moving on.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:29
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That article about rent states "For an economist, ‘‘profit’’ is income obtained by mixing capital – tools, machines, systems – with your employees’ labor" Psedu babble about Marx, Smith, and italicized rent and profit doesn't mean the article has anything to do with Marx. Landlords are poo poo though, no disagreement there.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:57
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Starting with tools - they have a use value and exchange value. Labor was used to create them. Tools don't have any magical property unique to capitalists?
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Apr 23, 2024 23:04
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The Uber example. The author admits labor was used to create the software. He then explicitly claims that Uber is extracting rent, not profit. Where we've covered extensively, this profit is exactly what capitalists do. They don't fully pay labor. The product is software instead of a hammer doesn't change the nature of this exploitation. Without exploitation, there is no profit for the capitalist. This is always true. Right?
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Apr 23, 2024 23:08
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BillsPhoenix posted:The Uber example. The author admits labor was used to create the software. If I buy a car, and then I rent it out to someone else, is the amount of money I get before the wheels fall off back to equal to what I paid for it? No. I get more, or I wouldn't do it. That's Rent. My profit comes from Ownership. That is over and above the labor exploitation that went into the manufacture of the thing, which I had nothing to do with. Rent, especially land rent, is unanimously considered to be parasitic in classical economy, unnecessary overhead that degrades a nation's ability to compete with other nations in the acquisition of Wealth. Marx's contribution is to demonstrate that a similar parasitic relationship necessarily exists within the process of production as well. Software licensing is Rent. Anyone in business who uses Windows, regardless of what they produce, pays Rent to Microsoft. Imagine you rent an apartment. You have to pay the Rent. To get the Rent, you go to work. The money you get is less than value you create, and you give it to someone who is getting more $ out of their tenants than what they paid for the building. There is a Double Exploitation here. See? The Uber issue is somewhat complicated. Uber strikes me as simply an obfuscated employment arraignment. The independent contractor form is all kinds of hosed up, but the substance is that they are employees. Apps taking a cut of sales, like Steam or App store? That's ordinary Rent.
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Apr 24, 2024 00:29
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Uber's not really complicated, in fact I'd argue it's less complicated, only in a way that's unintuitive to lay on the model of companies that we tend to understand as laymen. I can sell you the tool that you mix with labor, or I can rent it out to you. I can rent you the space in the office building you use for your tech startup and in this way a piece of the exploited labor of your employees flows up to me, your landlord. With the Uber model, I (and efficient capitalist) cut out the middleman (you) and rent out to the "employees" directly -- who are additionally alienated from even me as independent contractors, huge dub here -- the mechanism of their own exploitation. The tool/space/service I rent out is the Uber platform and imprimatur. They labor, for the most part with their own tools even, and the profit I gain from their exploitation isn't diluted by any middlemen. It's the platonic ideal of the 2010s tech disruption paradigm: you strip everything away except for the part that gets rents flowing directly to you. Everything else is everyone else's problem. It's no wonder that they all stuck by Uber through years and years and years of heavy losses, even after it was clear that driverless cars were never going to work: Uber is real, actual capital innovation in a form that is explicitly comprehensible to capitalists.
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Apr 24, 2024 05:13
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on the topic of commodity fetish, somebody a month or so back explained it like how when you order a burger at a restaurant, it’s as if the burger is a little god that commands a cook to spend time out of their life to prepare the ingredients and cook the burger, commands the waitstaff to spend their energies moving the burger to you, etc. The burger is the agent that acts on the world, and human society around it is just an assembly of components that have been created to serve the burger. I don’t know how complete of an explanation that is, but it’s really good and I can’t stop thinking about it
386-SX 25Mhz VGA has issued a correction as of 07:19 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 07:16
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:an assembly of components that have been created to serve the burger best metaphor for the united states of america i've ever seen
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Apr 24, 2024 12:11
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I am beholden to the burger god.
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Apr 24, 2024 13:28
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Comrade Koba posted:best metaphor for the united states of america i've ever seen
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Apr 24, 2024 14:49
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Comrade Koba posted:best metaphor for the united states of america i've ever seen
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Apr 24, 2024 16:05
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:on the topic of commodity fetish, somebody a month or so back explained it like how when you order a burger at a restaurant, it’s as if the burger is a little god that commands a cook to spend time out of their life to prepare the ingredients and cook the burger, commands the waitstaff to spend their energies moving the burger to you, etc. The burger is the agent that acts on the world, and human society around it is just an assembly of components that have been created to serve the burger. I don’t know how complete of an explanation that is, but it’s really good and I can’t stop thinking about it yeah, it's a great way to think about it Marx grabs the term from the emerging field of anthropology, which comes from a Portuguese synonym of sorcery ("feitiço") then translated to French ("fétiche") to describe objects that, although made by regular people, have magical powers much beyond their appearance. The statuettes and carvings seen in certain Western African or Congo Basin nations of the time became the ubiquitous reference for that category. Psychoanalysis would use it later in a way that (funnily enough) is very similar to Marx's intention, but the contemporary popular understanding of "fetishism" became something else that complicates things
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Apr 24, 2024 18:04
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dead gay comedy forums posted:yeah, it's a great way to think about it that makes a lot of sense!
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Apr 24, 2024 18:11
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Apr 24, 2024 18:31
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swiggity swag it's time get stabbed
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Apr 24, 2024 19:02
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just like an iphone!
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Apr 24, 2024 19:05
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is althussar or g.a. cohen worth reading? i somehow ended up reading steven rigby's marxism and history which is largely an attack on these two and ascribing to marx a hard economist determinism outlook and i'm wondering if my time would be better spent with actual marxists by reading for marx or karl marx's theory of history instead
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Apr 24, 2024 19:41
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i like althusser's stuff on the state ideological apparatus contra the legal apparatus or whatever but you have to just grit your teeth and bear the occasional anti-stalinism
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Apr 24, 2024 20:06
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really my bigger concern with him is the whole "murdered his wife" thing
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Apr 24, 2024 20:09
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fellas,
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Apr 24, 2024 20:22
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Chomsky came up with manufacturing consent, which is an incredibly useful tool for explaining how the media works, but also he was friends with epstein and is probably a pedophile or something (and an anarchist, which is even more damning from an intellectual standpoint). Sometimes bad people can be right about things in the world, I don't think much of althusser's writing was about how it's good to have psychotic episodes and strangle people.
Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 22:11 on Apr 24, 2024 |
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Apr 24, 2024 22:07
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Ferrinus posted:i like althusser's stuff on the state ideological apparatus contra the legal apparatus or whatever but you have to just grit your teeth and bear the occasional anti-stalinism I like the overdetermination stuff also
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Apr 24, 2024 22:41
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For Marx has some interesting stuff in it. Read the Capital seems mostly impenetrable.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:46
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Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:If I buy a car, and then I rent it out to someone else, is the amount of money I get before the wheels fall off back to equal to what I paid for it? I read an excellent article and watched an excellent video on this just now, but it's in portuguese, so. https://reunioes.sbpcnet.org.br/72RA/textos/CO-VirginiaFontes.pdf basically, you don't have to directly own the means of production to extract surplus value from labor. While uber drivers technically own the means of production(the car and the phone), Uber does control the means through which the worker has the ability to use the means of production and connect with the consumer market. Nowadays, you effectively can't just use your phone and car to make money as a driver, you have to use their platform to find customers, and as such your ability to effectively use the means of production you own is taken from you. It's a sort of abstraction on the historical form of domestic labour, as I see it.
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Apr 25, 2024 03:26
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So I posted over in the DSA thread and it looks like I opened a can of worms. A poster recommended that I ask my question over here, too. Can people break down Trotskyism for me? Can people also break down why a lot of leftists don't like Trotskyism? I've done a little reading myself and I dig some of their ideas but then I see them get decried on the internet and I don't entirely understand why.
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Apr 25, 2024 03:57
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hell yea one of the very best classics
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Apr 25, 2024 04:02
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The Trotskyist org here preys on college students with cult tactics to operate what's essentially a Ponzi scheme to extract money and grow their numbers. They end up ruining "Communism, Marxism" for these young people and often mentally harm them. I've seen them criticize black anti imperialist decolonial Marxist leninist Maoist revolutionaries for being Wrong. This is all why I don't like them. How they end up with these hosed orgs and positions/theories I'm sure someone else itt will explain theoretically.
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Apr 25, 2024 04:06
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So Trotskyism was initially about rejecting the idea of "socialism in one country" in favor of permanent global revolution, which is a pretty legitimate criticism, but in practice it meant they spent their energy opposing and undermining the one country that was actually trying to do socialism and that carries over today in terms of opposition to China, Cuba etc. which they see as "bourgeois communism". So they're wreckers basically. And then on top of that the Trot orgs are full of incredibly annoying/insane people
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Apr 25, 2024 04:13
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its basically the trots have been annoying for almost a century at this point and everyone else is sick of their poo poo
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Apr 25, 2024 04:18
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Trotskyism these days has become kind of a broad and vague term and essentially meaningless. Trotsky's ideology just wasn't very workable and didn't pan out in history, and now that that moment is over it's pretty irrelevant either way because there's no current material equivalent for the early USSR that exists right now (and likely there never will be again for obvious reasons). Most of them are people who bought really hard into the anti-communist propaganda of the western empire about stalin being just as bad as hitler and desperately need a political category to distance themselves from stalin and post-stalin ussr. It's not exactly forward thinking or useful in general. The same applies to propaganda about the perfidious chinese or the violent machismo of the cubans and they want to distance themselves from those too. He's kinda a historical lifeboat for people to latch onto when they realize that liberalism is bad but can't escape from the goofy ideas they've been exposed to their whole lives so they pick a guy who got killed but totally had it right all along you guys. Usually people who bring up trotsky seem to be just looking for an excuse to argue over historical events that don't matter very much to the present moment or they're bought into some silly anarchist ideas but realize on some level that anarchism is the stupidest poo poo a person can believe so they go to trotsky instead. Flournival Dixon has issued a correction as of 04:23 on Apr 25, 2024 |
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Apr 25, 2024 04:19
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I guess I'm not answering anything about the specifics of trotskyism but like the idea of a world revolution and some kind of active war against the international bourgeoise emanating from a socialist state was kind of a stupid idea even before nuclear weapons existed?? Like it'd be great if nations didn't exist and we could all just be on the same page at the same time and spontaneously decide to overthrow capitalism but it's just not how anything actually works. It almost feels unscientific to act like capitalism can exist indefinitely in the first place and that its failure is not inevitable, which is surely disproven by the development of neoliberalism and the hilariously failing empire we currently inhabit.
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Apr 25, 2024 04:34
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Mukulu posted:So I posted over in the DSA thread and it looks like I opened a can of worms. A poster recommended that I ask my question over here, too. Can people break down Trotskyism for me? Can people also break down why a lot of leftists don't like Trotskyism? I've done a little reading myself and I dig some of their ideas but then I see them get decried on the internet and I don't entirely understand why. IMO, the most relevant thing first is to differentiate the present-day notion of "Trotskyism" from the line of thought that often is referred to that name, which is the Fourth International (founded by Leon Trotsky, hence the name). The reason for such is that because of the first (people like alluded above) other socialists/communists might disregard learning about some seriously good stuff from seriously good people, like The Black Jacobins by CLR James (who is a Trotskyist in the latter sense). Because of that, there are Marxists who differ between "Trotskyite" and "Trotskyist". Trotskyist would be the respectful form, while the other refers to the general usage of today. With that said, the big deal with the Fourth International is the defense of a concept called Permanent Revolution in opposition to another called Socialism in One Country, which was the line affirmed by the General Assembly of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin. By corollary, Socialism in One Country means the failure of the revolutionary process of the Soviet Union into militant action against the international capitalist order, thus it could not be considered a proper dictatorship of the proletariat - it has become degenerated, lapsing into incapability to carry out its purpose and harmful to the workers it is supposed to serve. Therefore, that state should also be opposed for that failure. The problem started, however, when sharper commentators mentioned that what the Soviet state did and was doing was very much in line with what Trotsky himself defended. Marxists at the Fourth International did point at him personally that they had difficulty to see why him at the helm of defeating Kronstadt was righteous but Stalin doing the same wasn't. Good Leon, as always, had great intellectual prowess but was a complete political dumbass; his luck there was that others agreed to the position of international militancy in contrast to Socialism in One Country, even though they disagreed with the Soviet Union being a "degenerated workers' state". That's a reason why the Fourth International did not oppose nor sought to replace the Communist International (aka the Third), much to the chagrin of Trotsky, who of course proceeded to alienate even those sympathizers. As Leon proceeded to go from place to place and bang hard on the drum about the necessity to oppose the Soviet Union, organization got bogged down as vanguards argued among themselves about the situation and, in some cases, leading to infighting instead of putting efforts against the capitalists. As such, this poo poo caused a lot of troubles for communist parties worldwide, creating the meaning that we nowadays associate to Trotskyites -- political wreckers that believe themselves to be more Correct than everybody else. This position is what most Marxist-Leninists refer to when using the term. Political organizations that use the term "Trotskyist" to describe themselves with 100% of sincerity and intention in the year of our Lord of 2024 and act as if the Comintern still exist are 9 out of 10 times poor excuses to anything resembling a political vanguard, while lacking any theoretical discipline and foundational principle in relation to the Fourth International.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:00
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Mukulu posted:So I posted over in the DSA thread and it looks like I opened a can of worms. A poster recommended that I ask my question over here, too. Can people break down Trotskyism for me? Can people also break down why a lot of leftists don't like Trotskyism? I've done a little reading myself and I dig some of their ideas but then I see them get decried on the internet and I don't entirely understand why.
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Apr 25, 2024 05:27
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trotskyism is basically the proposition that only white people can do socialism right
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Apr 25, 2024 05:51
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Lasting Damage posted:dgcf already did a great job describing the who and the what, but it might also be helpful for you do describe some of these ideas they have that you like, to make sure other posters understand what you mean by Trotskyism. I'd be interested to hear what specifics of it sound appealing, to me it feels like it appeals to countermaterialistic anarchist style moralizing but I'm far from like the average normal person when it comes to thinking about politics and how things should work as opposed to how they actually do according to my understanding of history and material reality. People in this thread might poke fun at you for elaborating but nobody's going to be that mean unless you're a real dipshit about it and refuse to read capital for months and months and months on end all the while insisting that you've found the specific anti-coat equation that disproves the whole thing.
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Apr 25, 2024 06:44
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