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we should work a lot less
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:04 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 10:23 |
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Keynes was also making a lot of bad assumptions, like that we'd all be collecting dividends from capital markets and that the TRPF wouldn't be compelling us to work longer hours despite ourselves. And Marx made worse assumptions that let him to call for us to straight up abolish labour!
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:07 |
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Maynard James Keynes
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:10 |
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Yandat posted:we should work a lot less
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:11 |
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TBH reducing the work week to 30 hours would be a huge improvement if you pulled it off for everyone and made it absolute and made the returns livable. Like, how many people are currently working way longer than that for almost nothing.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:36 |
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The irony is that the length of the working day hasn't decreases at all in the west post-keynes. With the notable exception of France
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:43 |
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quote:Working conditions will aim to enhance the humanity and dignity of all workers. The working week will be 30 hours. Child care for workers will be provided by the socialist government at no cost to the parents. There will be cultural and athletic opportunities for all workers during and after working hours. This is part of PSL's program, and most of the other demands that they have for a "socialist" government sound just like capitalism considering they talk about wages, paid leave, working weeks, income, etc. Even a charitable reading of the Critique of the Gotha Program doesn't sound anything like what PSL is describing here for socialism.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 04:53 |
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Infernot posted:http://liberationschool.org/program-of-the-party-for-socialism-and-liberation/ The difference between capitalism and socialism lies in who controls the means of production, and how economic decisions are made. Money, wages, etc., are all tertiary concerns. Socialism will behave in ways that the people themselves determine, and the important thing is that it's the people making that determination.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:07 |
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socialism is when the government does things and the more the government does the socialister it is
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:09 |
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Yandat posted:socialism is when the government does things and the more the government does the socialister it is
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:10 |
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Yandat posted:socialism is when the government does things and the more the government does the socialister it is
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:20 |
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The difference between capitalism and socialism lies in who controls the means of production, and how economic decisions are made. Money, wages, etc., are all tertiary concerns. Socialism will behave in ways that the people themselves determine, and the important thing is that it's the people making that determination. But I suppose this is assuming you're a Marxist or one of those other groups who piece together Marx's critique with their own strand of whatever.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:25 |
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Keynes was also making a lot of bad assumptions, like that we'd all be collecting dividends from capital markets matt bruenig rn
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 05:34 |
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Infernot posted:Socialism is whatever people say it is then, am I right? Marx set out to describe capitalism in a detailed way, and by disregarding "tertiary" concerns such as money and wages you're destined to just recreate capitalism with a worker controlled economy that's still subject to the law of value, TRPF, and most of the other aspects of capitalism. Hence why Marx and Engels went into depth about the necessity to cease commodity production and Marx wrote tomes about the way commodities are circulated, produced, and exchanged. Being able to overcome commodity production means realizing a global communist state, and in the meantime you need a transitory stage to develop towards that point. Socialism is that state. The PSL isn't campaigning to become the world's socialist government, it wants to take control in the United States, and even if you realize socialism in the most powerful and advanced economic state in the world you won't be able to fully escape the logic of commodity production, because we will still have to trade with capitalist powers for the things that we need until global revolution is realized. The assumption that you can avoid the constraints of the global order, and somehow realize Communism in One State is ahistorical and unscientific.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 06:15 |
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Being able to overcome commodity production means realizing a global communist state, and in the meantime you need a transitory stage to develop towards that point. Socialism is that state. The PSL isn't campaigning to become the world's socialist government, it wants to take control in the United States, and even if you realize socialism in the most powerful and advanced economic state in the world you won't be able to fully escape the logic of commodity production, because we will still have to trade with capitalist powers for the things that we need until global revolution is realized. quote:Will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone? This seems like a problem of semantics but I think if the PSL and others don't understand what the whole point of the dictatorship of the proletariat is and how it differs from socialism / communism (if you'd like to make the stage distinction) then that is anti-Marxist and unscientific.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 06:37 |
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Infernot posted:The transition away from capitalism isn't socialism, I'd hazard that that's standard for even most Leninists who make the distinction about the lower and upper stages of communism (wherein they say socialism is the lower stage, communism the higher stage). The dictatorship of the proletariat would be what PSL is describing, where the working class takes control and begins transitioning to socialism. You are right in the fact that you couldn't realize socialism in one nation which is why it doesn't make sense to say they'd have a transitory "socialist" state to wait for global revolution, as far back as 1847 Engels talked about this in the Principles of Communism. This is all pure semantics, and you're assuming the Marxist-Leninist PSL doesn't know what the point of communism is, because they're selling Americans on the promise of shorter work weeks and better pay.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 06:44 |
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https://twitter.com/Reuters/status/1005531825631055872 no
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 06:48 |
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Yandat posted:we should work a lot less
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:04 |
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Dystopian
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:06 |
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:This is all pure semantics, and you're assuming the Marxist-Leninist PSL doesn't know what the point of communism is, because they're selling Americans on the promise of shorter work weeks and better pay. It isn't semantics when they blend two distinct Marxist concepts in their program, unless they're purposefully using vaguer language to appeal to most Americans while knowing the difference (which doesn't seem to be the case considering they go into detail about revolution and abolishing private property).
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:18 |
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Even though everyone who's ever voted for PSL is an rear end in a top hat I respect them for not trying to do prison abolition
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:29 |
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Jeb! Repetition posted:Even though everyone who's ever voted for PSL is an rear end in a top hat I respect them for not trying to do prison abolition lol
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:39 |
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quote:Penal institutions will be organized on the principle of social education and rehabilitation. Those convicted of unlawful acts will maintain political rights while participating in their rehabilitation.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:39 |
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"social education" hell yes bring on the camps
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:46 |
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Infernot posted:I think it's kind of implied here in their program That's not prison abolition, it's just making prison more humane and constructive
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 07:48 |
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Socialism is worker control of capital, there's no necessity that it be global, not have wage labor, or paid leave or even that the logic of the commodity haa been overcome (!). Simply calling it a 'lower stage' is being reductionist.
rudatron fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Jun 15, 2018 |
# ? Jun 15, 2018 09:56 |
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i generally think the people who want to abolish money and wages and stuff are masturbatory navel gazers. money and even limited markets are an easy way to handle resource distribution between individuals or small groups for the foreseeable future. unless one of you utopian communists sees a way around scarcity without inventing clean fusion power and a space elevator. that said the way forward from capitalism is decommodifying everything it takes to achieve a decent living. we will always have limited luxuries and personally I think the best way to distribute that is a market economy instead of like, rationing them out as equitably as possible. So even if we aren't paying for houses and healthcare and food and stuff out of our wages, how do you handle people who want cigarettes still? How do you handle people who want to go camping or on road trips. I guess some of the insane tankies online think there just shouldn't be anything that isn't provided to everyone equally but the truth is people want different things, and I'm ok with people getting my share of caviar or whatever
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 11:12 |
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'Socialism is worker control of capital' is fine as a definition but it really misses much of the point about what makes it a good thing if that's all it is. A completely anarcho syndicalist society where everything is a worker cooperative is still driven by the logic of the market and capital accumulation while a representative democracy which directs all industry is prone to overriding the wishes of the workers it represents. Either will probably be better than what we currently have but they lack the emancipatory oomph that drives a revolution. Desirable socialism has to mean something like worker control of capital which can effectively prioritise social needs over everything else which is why a break from commodity form and any sort of capital accumulation needs to feature, even if it's not dominant.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 11:43 |
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Larry Parrish posted:i generally think the people who want to abolish money and wages and stuff are masturbatory navel gazers. money and even limited markets are an easy way to handle resource distribution between individuals or small groups for the foreseeable future. unless one of you utopian communists sees a way around scarcity without inventing clean fusion power and a space elevator. that said the way forward from capitalism is decommodifying everything it takes to achieve a decent living. we will always have limited luxuries and personally I think the best way to distribute that is a market economy instead of like, rationing them out as equitably as possible. So even if we aren't paying for houses and healthcare and food and stuff out of our wages, how do you handle people who want cigarettes still? How do you handle people who want to go camping or on road trips. I guess some of the insane tankies online think there just shouldn't be anything that isn't provided to everyone equally but the truth is people want different things, and I'm ok with people getting my share of caviar or whatever My main problem with that logic is markets have to expand and we live on a finite planet with many resources projected to run out within our lifetime. No one's gonna have cavier once the fisheries run dry. We are gonna have to tighten are belts in the coming decade no matter what economic system we are under, so you might as well make it equitable and rational.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 11:47 |
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The fact that we don't live in post-scarcity is why the abolition of markets is important
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 11:53 |
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Dreddout posted:The irony is that the length of the working day hasn't decreases at all in the west post-keynes. With the notable exception of France not if jupiter has anything to say about it!
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 12:20 |
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Dreddout posted:My main problem with that logic is markets have to expand and we live on a finite planet with many resources projected to run out within our lifetime. Markets don't have to expand, because markets are just systems of exchange. Their purpose is to facilitate exchange and only ever have to be as small or as large as they need be to perform that function. When people say that the economy has grown or that the markets have grown, what they're really talking about is a growth in the value of private capital. It's private investments which have to grow, because otherwise an investment isn't worth the risk if it doesn't generate a profitable rate of return. The seeking of profits as essential to the process of capital accumulation, is what drives the commodity logic of production. Instead of producing things or services for their use value to be enjoyed, you produce them as commodities for their price value so you can acquire money, which has the ultimate utility since it can be exchanged for anything you need or want. Social control of production is what will ultimately overthrow commodity logic, because it's private property which warps the incentives to produce. An individual, if they can accumulate enough capital, has no need to care about the negative consequences of the capital accumulation process. A society however will always bear the negative costs of production, which is why economies only have to grow or shrink in accordance to social planning and utility. That doesn't mean you can immediately go from revolutionary overthrow to the overthrow of commodity logic, because you'll only ever be able to trade things for something that other parties will actually want - and so long as capitalist powers still remain in the world some of those things will be traded as commodities in exchange for money. The question then becomes, how do you get around to the point where you abolish money? Any actually existing society will need to calculate the costs of all economic activity, and until we can accurately measure costs in terms of energy, materials, and labor, money works well enough as an abstraction of value to represent it. The existence of money in itself doesn't recreate the incentive to produce commodities, because the point of socialized production is inverted from privatized production. A capitalist economy wants to have as much money as possible to represent the growth of dead labor, but a socialist economy wants as little money to exist as possible. That's because capitalists want to maximize gains, while socialists seek to minimize costs. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 15, 2018 |
# ? Jun 15, 2018 13:22 |
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'Minimize costs' and 'maximize gains' are mathematically interchangeable, they both represent the extraction of surplus. It's also not quite true either - a slave economy has 'low costs'. An anarcho syndicalist society, where everything is a worker cooperative, has only shifted the logic of commodity production & incentives from the 'individual' level to that of the 'firm' level - it will exhibit the same distortions and contradictions as any market economy. The 'agent' of capital accumulation, which follows systemic incentives in pursuit of its self interests, at the expense of everyone else, will simply manifest at level of inter-cooperative competition. It's capitalism Jim, but not as we know it. rudatron fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Jun 15, 2018 |
# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:08 |
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prolix
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:13 |
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I don't care about prolix I just post the pro-clicks
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:16 |
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It's important make a distinction between 'markets' as 'the end consumer experience of purchasing commodities' and 'markets' as 'the capitalist experience of converting commodities into money, or money into capital' - they can be two sides of the same exchange, but not always, and in particular, end consumer purchasing only plays a role in the conversion of commodities into money - they're a 'sink' of commodities, that cannot simply transform that commodity into a commodity of higher value (as a company must do), because they have to consume it. What this means, is that you can totally separate the 'market' involved in consumption conceptually, from that involved in 'production', i.e., cut out the entire M->C or the MCM cycle. You pay people a wage, let them spend it, and then just 'burn' the money when you receive it. The entire economy could be centrally planned, and if you just kept all the stupid lovely walmart storefronts, most people wouldn't notice a difference. They only know that they get money, and then they have to spend that money on poo poo they need.
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:23 |
rudatron posted:Socialism is worker control of capital, abolish capital yo
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:27 |
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i'm using 'capital' as a stand in for 'means of production/capital goods'
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:33 |
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rudatron posted:'Minimize costs' and 'maximize gains' are mathematically interchangeable, they both represent the extraction of surplus. It's also not quite true either - a slave economy has 'low costs'. I've posted this a few times, and I'm just going to keep posting it! https://jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black quote:All of this lays the groundwork for raising the critical question of profit. There are two ways to think about the function of profits under capitalism. In the Marxist conception, capitalists’ restless search for profit drives the pace and shape of economic growth, making it the ultimate “motor of the system”— but it’s judged to be an erratic and arbitrary motor that ought to be replaced by something more rational and humane. In mainstream economics, on the other hand, profits are understood simply as a benign coordinating signal, broadcasting information to firms and entrepreneurs about how to satisfy society’s needs most efficiently. read on to find out!!
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# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:40 |
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# ? May 26, 2024 10:23 |
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rudatron posted:'Minimize costs' and 'maximize gains' are mathematically interchangeable, they both represent the extraction of surplus. It's also not quite true either - a slave economy has 'low costs'. Extraction of surplus is only necessary for profit seeking in the vast majority of cases. Minimizing costs are only relevant to capitalists in the sense that it helps them maximize potential profits, but it's not the actual point of commodity production. A capitalist could resort to extremely high cost production methods which guarantee higher profitability, because it either creates an exclusivity of a product which makes it impossible to meet its demand and achieve an excessively high price point, or the costs are externalized onto society through pollution or subsidies. Socialized production only needs to produce a supply which meets its demand and no more, with surpluses only being sought as a buffer against catastrophe. There's a lot of utility in having a surplus of food, and zero utility in having a surplus of big screen tvs. The cheaper the costs of production are, the more likely you are to meet its demand in social utility. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Jun 15, 2018 |
# ? Jun 15, 2018 15:47 |