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JeffersonClay posted:No that doesn't make sense at all. If they could make more money by firing a lot of people, they'd be doing it right now. this is why the great recession involved no-one superfluous being fired, and why the recovery of profits since then has involved everyone who wasn't fired then being rehired to do the same job, not shifted into temp work it is also why eugenics definitely works and is not an insane dream held exclusively by the terminally stupid, because we are now all in JeffersonClay's imagination where the only thing separating the untermensch from the Superior Man is that the Superior Man recognizes it would be immoral to mix his seed with the filthy creatures born to serve him fast food
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Oct 7, 2016 05:02
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rudatron posted:Omg Such arguments are equally applicable under conditions of non-zero growth. Capitalists do not set the price of labour unilaterally.
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Oct 7, 2016 05:02
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say what you will about the hamprince but he is fuckin constant
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Oct 7, 2016 05:03
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Homework Explainer posted:say what you will about the hamprince but he is fuckin constant fishmech is gone and the forums need an equally strong(ly autistic) substitute to pick up the slack e: it's lucky your username is less self-descriptive. "i'm sorry timmy, but the assignment asks you to use fractions to prove that two quarters equals one half, not that stalin's Great Purge was a logical reaction to capitalist subterfuge, no matter impressive it may be that an 8 year old is aware that that happened Constant Hamprince fucked around with this message at 05:09 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 05:04
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Constant Hamprince posted:Such arguments are equally applicable under conditions of non-zero growth. Capitalists do not set the price of labour unilaterally. rudatron fucked around with this message at 05:15 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 05:13
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rudatron posted:Who has the power then? Historically, the Julio-Claudians.
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Oct 7, 2016 05:15
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So, then the final outcome is either barbarism, or socialism? Fascism, or communism? Welcome to Marxist dialectics.
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Oct 7, 2016 05:18
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I can't tell if that's ironic or not.
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Oct 7, 2016 05:24
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If your going to use the fall of the republic, as an analogy to the outcome of the crisis of global capitalism, wouldn't that suggest a military coup d'etat on a global scale? What kind if world do you think that's going to give you?
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Oct 7, 2016 05:30
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Well, I mean, ideally, one with substantially more circuses. I've never even been. It's not an analogy, it's a direct parallel. The accumulation of capital (in the most literal sense) by the upper classes led to the immiseration of the middle class and explosive growth among the proletarii, destabilizing the foundation of the republic. No, it doesn't suggest anything resembling a global coup d'etat, and only a fascist imagines that the Romans had anything to do with fascism. I'm still not sure to read your response in an ironically dumb "welcome to the Republican Party  " way, or what.
Tacky-Ass Rococco fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 05:39
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rudatron posted:Now - stay with be here - what happens when every single capitalist is under the strong incentive to exploit labour harder, because growth is no longer occurring? If there it's no growth, anyone you fire is going to stay unemployed, like in some kind of Great Depression. That wasn't true before, when there was no growth. Who has the power then? Wouldn't this new context create a new set on incentives and therefore a new collective response? there are a number of misconceptions here - as i've said before, zero growth conditions do not create an added impetus to 'exploit labour harder' because under growth firms are already incentivized to maximize profits by reducing costs. zero growth does not change the fundamental balance of the labour market so long as population growth is also zero. zero growth but an expanding population would of course result in increased competition for a fixed number of jobs and therefore bring wages down, but that's what one would normally expect when growth per capita is negative. - zero growth does not mean that 'anyone you fire is going to stay unemployed'. even with no growth, people still retire, quit jobs to relocate, change careers, etc. mass unemployment as in the great depression is a consequence of negative growth, as is the case in a recession or depression. - under conditions of zero overall growth, companies can still grow and increase their profits by expanding their share of the market at the expense of others, assuming they are not monopolies. private sector companies shouldn't be monopolies, but that of course that requires a functioning regulatory regime so in the case of the us: LOL
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Oct 7, 2016 05:48
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Except that investments cannot be made under conditions of zero growth without cutting labour costs, because then there is no return on that payment. In an environment of growth, you pay the return based on that growth, and that's easier to do than cutting labour costs in a lot of cases, so why bother? But when cutting labour costs is your only option for bringing a return to your investment, you and all your capitalist buddies are going to cut labour costs, come hell or high water. In an environment of growth, the presence of other options means that the capitalist class won't act as collectively, as they would when it's the only option. It's that collective action from shared incentives that means that labour gets exploited harder under conditions of zero growth. So in your 'parrallel', the existing state is replaced with a military dictatorship, that created an empire that can only survive by continually expropriating the resources of its neighbors, that then collapses when it cannot do that any longer - and you think this 'parallel' has nothing to do fascism? The prediction here, then, after applying that example to the entire globe, is that crisis of capitalism less to ww3, and then the inevitable end of life of earth due to m.a.d. That is, indeed, one possible outcome predicted by Marxism, it being the 'barbaric' option in 'barbarism versus socialism'. rudatron fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 05:59
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rudatron posted:that created an empire that can only survive by continually expropriating the resources of its neighbors, that then collapses when it cannot do that any longer - and you think this 'parallel' has nothing to do fascism? What now?
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Oct 7, 2016 06:04
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rudatron posted:Omg Well, to start, "increasing labor exploitation" =/= firing a bunch of people, which was the assertion.(Why would you fire people that you are now extracting more surplus value from?) Second, no one can explain if there are these untapped profits to be made by "increasing labor exploitation" (whatever that means. Lower wages? Longer hours?) why don't the profit hungry capitalists do that, right now? If its as easy as you say for all of them to solve the collective action problem and collude to simultaneously exploit the workers more, what are they waiting for? Ze Pollack posted:this is why the great recession involved no-one superfluous being fired, and why the recovery of profits since then has involved everyone who wasn't fired then being rehired to do the same job, not shifted into temp work I cannot for the life of me decypher the rest. Aeolius posted:so after subjecting more than 200 years of history illustrating the dynamics of capitalist economies to exacting scrutiny, your conclusion is that economic crises happen because the total IQ of the capital class has yet to hit some still-unspecified threshold? People who make dumb investments lose a lot of money -- that's what caused the great depression. JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 06:33
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rudatron posted:That is, indeed, one possible outcome predicted by Marxism, it being the 'barbaric' option in 'barbarism versus socialism'. To be honest, I thought Rosa's implication of 'barbarism' was more of a blade runner style dystopia.
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Oct 7, 2016 06:42
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Guys, a depression happens precisely because (and when) the rich have the incentive to hoard all the money that would have otherwise been used as investment capital.
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Oct 7, 2016 06:47
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JeffersonClay posted:Well, to start, "increasing labor exploitation" =/= firing a bunch of people, which was the assertion.(Why would you fire people that you are now extracting more surplus value from?) Second, no one can explain if there are these untapped profits to be made by "increasing labor exploitation" (whatever that means. Lower wages? Longer hours?) why don't the profit hungry capitalists do that, right now? If its as easy as you say for all of them to solve the collective action problem and collude to simultaneously exploit the workers more, what are they waiting for? There isn't some vast conspiracy by each individual capitalist to collectively exploit workers, it's just in their best interest to do so in order to maximize profits. You can also fire some people while still extracting surplus value from those who weren't fired. Think of like when wages aren't raised or benefits are cut or reduced. I could be wrong though.
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Oct 7, 2016 08:36
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JeffersonClay posted:Well, to start, "increasing labor exploitation" =/= firing a bunch of people, which was the assertion.(Why would you fire people that you are now extracting more surplus value from?) Second, no one can explain if there are these untapped profits to be made by "increasing labor exploitation" (whatever that means. Lower wages? Longer hours?) why don't the profit hungry capitalists do that, right now? If its as easy as you say for all of them to solve the collective action problem and collude to simultaneously exploit the workers more, what are they waiting for? Recessions allow for increased labor exploitation because they flood the labor market with desperate people who will work their fingers to the bone for some bread. Capitalists are prevented from collective action when the economy is stable because anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws keep them from burning our entire society down. Increasing labor exploitation = firing workers and forcing the old workers to pick up the slack while simultaneously cutting wages and benefits.
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Oct 7, 2016 12:38
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com - "Capitalists don't fire workers during good times because they're nice" anti-com - "why?" Repeated X12.
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Oct 7, 2016 13:06
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asdf32 posted:com - "Capitalists don't fire workers during good times because they're nice" Because they can get more money if they don't and there is such thing as a labor market. But when times aren't good and capitalists can't increase their profits otherwise, they will slash jobs and benefits and their workers will have nothing they can do about it.
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Oct 7, 2016 13:25
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The Kingfish posted:Recessions allow for increased labor exploitation because they flood the labor market with desperate people who will work their fingers to the bone for some bread. Capitalists are prevented from collective action when the economy is stable because anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws keep them from burning our entire society down. Yes! One thing marxists don't get is that the sustainability of capitalism in a theoretical vacuum is completely irrelevant. Even if we decide it's inherently unstable because of "contradictions" or whatever we're arrived at something as interesting as "it would be bad to be ruled by the judicial branch alone". The Kingfish posted:Capitalists don't fire workers during good times because they're nice Why?
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Oct 7, 2016 13:32
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asdf32 posted:Why? Because there is a labor market.
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Oct 7, 2016 13:33
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this thread just proves that while not all liberals are stupid, those liberals who seek to "prove" Marx false are exceptionally stupid
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Oct 7, 2016 13:49
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Fiction posted:this thread just proves that while not all liberals are stupid, those liberals who seek to "prove" Marx false are exceptionally stupid 
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Oct 7, 2016 14:50
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JeffersonClay posted:you could also conclude from these data points that capitalism is a robust system capable of recovering from crises without collapsing or morphing into a fundamentally different system. Except for all the times it did morph into a completely different system? The fascist takeovers in Italy and Germany, and the communist takeovers in Russia, China, and various third world countries made clear demonstrations that capitalism won't always recover from anything fundamentally unchanged. quote:Property owners already charge the maximum rents they can get in the market. What are all the capitalists going to do if the rate of return on capital continues to fall? Go galt? Eat the factories? They're going to accept whatever meager return they can get because all the alternatives are worse. You are describing this apocalyptic scenario where capitalism has achieved maximum economic growth and simultaneously minimized the share of production capitalists can skim from the system. Sounds pretty drat good to me. Unless of course, the capitalists start bringing in black shirts to beat and rape workers so they quit shirking their duties with all this striking nonsense. The fascists forced through several rounds of wage cuts during their reign to maximize capital accumulation, and experimented in ways to increase productivity like forcing longer hours, or even transforming depoliticized rural farmers into a docile proletariat which wasn't willing to strike or resist in the first place. America could just as well have become a fascist or communist country, if it wasn't for the massive corrective action the government took in the New Deal. Even that wasn't sufficient without war mobilization, which essentially transformed the United States into a command economy. The maximum rent a landlord can extract now is limited by peoples' willingness to pay in a local market. That's why gentrification is such a destructive process, as it forces out the working poor in favor of a well to do middle class which is willing to pay a lot more in rents. In a time of economic stagnation or recession, people will be willing to pay more of their earnings proportionally in rent than they would be in better times when they were earning more money. That means the capitalist is extracting even more share of the production from the system, because they're not going to lower rents unless they absolutely have to. The end result from pricing in goods, rents, taxes, and etc. is that working people are reduced to subsistency - and the superfluous sectors of the economy fall apart without a consumer base with spending cash. Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:If there's bound to be a revolution when capitalism exhausts itself by reaching the limits of its exponential growth, why not just chill out until then and enjoy our iPhones? It's cool, guys. Like Zimbardo said, there's no guarantee that the revolution could be won. There's also, in the immediate present, the urgency of overthrowing capital to rescue workers from its grossly exploitative processes as well as to address its widespread ecological damage. Your iPhone was assembled by wage slaves who have to be saved from killing themselves by installing nets. Not caring about the exploitation which guarantees your comfort through an availability of cheap goods, is textbook labor aristocracy rationale. There's a lot of incredulity ITT at the notion that if capitalists could just fire people to make more money, then why aren't they - but that's exactly what's been happening through the processes of outshoring and illegal labor exploitation. Workers in your country of operations are laid off, or forced to train their foreign replacements before they're laid off, so you can move your operations into a country where the labor demand for wages are much lower. This massively cuts your costs at the expense of workers in your home country. Laid off workers who can't afford to re-educate or retrain themselves, are then forced into industries where their labor isn't at the same premium and they have to accept reduced pay for greater work hours. The Reagan Revolution basically returned profitability to the United States by deindustrialization through outshoring, and cutting domestic labor costs by forcing laborers into a service economy where they can no longer demand a premium for skills they can't apply any more. Entire sections of the country are reduced to abandonment zones, and urban decay is a reality for millions of people. Constant Hamprince posted:there are a number of misconceptions here This isn't an issue of "Zero Growth" as if any real world example could achieve perfect stagnancy, it's an issue of the economy being incapable of guaranteeing returns on capital. The Great Depression was precisely such an example, because capitalists could no longer make sound investments which would guarantee profit from capital gains. So they hoarded their capital instead of investing it into the economy. The resulting liquidity crisis made it impossible for businesses to function, millions of people were forced out of work, and governments had to take over the role of primary investor into the real economy. When the economy reaches a point of stagnancy, and capital can no longer be accumulated, a recession or depression follows naturally. In these situations capitalists will do whatever they can to guarantee their own incomes and profitability, often times to the point of barbarism.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:25
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asdf32 posted:com - "Capitalists don't fire workers during good times because they're nice" JeffersonClay posted:Well, to start, "increasing labor exploitation" =/= firing a bunch of people, which was the assertion.(Why would you fire people that you are now extracting more surplus value from?) Second, no one can explain if there are these untapped profits to be made by "increasing labor exploitation" (whatever that means. Lower wages? Longer hours?) why don't the profit hungry capitalists do that, right now? If its as easy as you say for all of them to solve the collective action problem and collude to simultaneously exploit the workers more, what are they waiting for? This has already been explained to both of you, and the thread, yet both of you (and now hamprince) seem unable to make any kind of intelligent response. Also blaming the great depression on 'dumb people' is the most facile bullshit possible. Where did this influx of stupidity come from, that wasn't there before, that could somehow create the great depression? It's blaming systemic faults on individual character flaws, and no different in substance than blaming poverty on 'dumb poors'. Deimus posted:To be honest, I thought Rosa's implication of 'barbarism' was more of a blade runner style dystopia. rudatron fucked around with this message at 15:35 on Oct 7, 2016 |
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Oct 7, 2016 15:31
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rudatron posted:Also blaming the great depression on 'dumb people' is the most facile bullshit possible. Where did this influx of stupidity come from, that wasn't there before, that could somehow create the great depression? It's blaming systemic faults on individual character flaws, and no different in substance than blaming poverty on 'dumb poors'. Well no, it is plausible that a massive wave of laziness and stupidity afflicted large segments of the working population starting around 2007-2008, coincidentally with a financial crisis.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:35
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Right. People weren't making "dumb" investments in the late 20s, they were trying to make sound investments based on the data they had available at the time, without realizing that they were entering into a massive speculative bubble which would pop in the near future. One of the most defining aspects of the Great Recession in 2008, was how much collusion went on to commit fraud in the financial markets and dupe investors into making choices based on bad information. When the major actors (big banks) in the market realized the bubble which had been created through systemic fraud, they covered up those facts from the rest of the marketplace until they could protect themselves from the fallout.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:38
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:People weren't making "dumb" investments in the late 20s, they were trying to make sound investments based on the data they had available at the time, and even then, it's not enough to just say "shocks, therefore depression"; investments (not even necessarily dumb ones) catastrophically backfire all the time without causing a black thursday situation, let alone a subsequent debt-deflationary spiral and a mass destruction of capital. we might point to a stock market dip as one of the first dominos to fall (though that also begs the question — why not whatever business failure(s) resulted in underperforming or failing assets? why not whatever conditions led to the failure? etc), but the point is to figure out just what keeps systematically and repeatedly lining them all up just so. an actual crisis theory might examine the financial system, to study how it led to a much more interconnected economy such that one failure affected all. details like aggregate private-sector indebtedness might come into play as an indicator of systemic vulnerability. a theory even better, still, would inquire as to the causes of that growth of debt, and the aggregate dynamics of investment. and a superlative theory would finally investigate what real relations form the ultimate ground of said phenomena, and how they reproduce themselves (and their outcomes) over time
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Oct 7, 2016 15:50
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The increasing sophistication of technology is also putting a bit of a damper on the inevitable working class revolution - supposing rich people eventually make Skynet, they won't actually need to engage in Capitalism as a system. They just use their robots to kill everyone else and turn the resources into whatever they want, no market, no consumers. If you don't get a revolution before then, it's game-over, welcome to global genocide. I wonder if the people arguing that capitalism is the only answer, will feel the same way when their body is being consumed to manufacture another maserati.
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Oct 7, 2016 15:53
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i'll admit i didn't expect 'recessions create downward pressure on wages' to be controversial but well, it's a socialism thread i suppose, in fairness, there is recent evidence that wages are pretty rigid in terms of downward movement, but there's also exceptions to that e.g. greece, so a sufficient campaign against workers can still move them down 'stagnant' japan has had skyrocketing inequality during the lost decades incidentally
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Oct 7, 2016 16:15
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:This isn't an issue of "Zero Growth" as if any real world example could achieve perfect stagnancy, it's an issue of the economy being incapable of guaranteeing returns on capital. The Great Depression was precisely such an example, because capitalists could no longer make sound investments which would guarantee profit from capital gains. So they hoarded their capital instead of investing it into the economy. The resulting liquidity crisis made it impossible for businesses to function, millions of people were forced out of work, and governments had to take over the role of primary investor into the real economy. When the economy reaches a point of stagnancy, and capital can no longer be accumulated, a recession or depression follows naturally. Thats a reasonable attempt at explaining the great depression assuming you know nothing about monetary policy.
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Oct 7, 2016 16:48
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Constant Hamprince posted:Thats a reasonable attempt at explaining the great depression assuming you know nothing about monetary policy. all you loving do is say "clearly you don't understand x" without every explaining anything in depth. you are so bad at this
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Oct 7, 2016 17:30
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the normal monetary policy response to a depression or recession is to lower lending rates to banks to increase liquidity and get people(banks) investing again. unfortunately, the fed and other national banks(japan in particular) have abused this to the point where we are in uncharted territory. they literally have no idea what is going to happen.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:31
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and if the current speculative bubble bursts, which it will, they will have no tools to combat the resulting slump. this is exactly why the stock market and corporations have completely recovered from the recession, but normal people haven't
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Oct 7, 2016 17:32
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and please do not say stimulus(which is the only vaguely leftist response) because it's not going to pass the watered down bullshit stimulus we got in 2009 was only passed via a completely democratic dominated house and senate, obviously times have changed
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Oct 7, 2016 17:36
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it'd be pretty interesting to chart the change in elite consensus from 'stimulus now oh poo poo' to ' not sure how to go about it though
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Oct 7, 2016 17:41
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It's worth noting that capitalism as we think of it never actually recovered from the Great Depression. Military spending and other state interventions into the economy keep our nation's only competitive industries functional. High-technology, military, pharmaceuticals, and agriculture; America's most profitable industries are all heavily subsidized.
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Oct 7, 2016 17:47
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Karl Barks posted:and if the current speculative bubble bursts, which it will, they will have no tools to combat the resulting slump. wow good job kiddo you already know most of the right economics words, now all you have to do is work on putting them in the right order consistently and you'll be management material 4 sure
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Oct 7, 2016 17:50
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Constant Hamprince posted:wow good job kiddo you already know most of the right economics words, now all you have to do is work on putting them in the right order consistently and you'll be management material 4 sure lmao and you do the exact thing i said you do in response
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Oct 7, 2016 17:51
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