|
cda posted:Ok, so here's my first question. BTW I am using Robert Tucker's The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition as my text. Page numbers are from there. So there's two things here. The process is Commodity->Money->Commodity which is twisting your head here I think since it's more like what a merchant would do rather than what you think of as a productive activity. Like if you go to bestbuy and buy a keyboard for work or something, obviously that retail guy hasn't created that keyboard. However the action of that merchant in transporting goods is itself a transformation of the good because its location in space has changed, a productive activity. I am just going off that single quote so I may be entirely off the mark btw lol
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 18:38
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 10:41 |
|
|
Here Marx is referring to exchange within the supply chain as an activity which is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, in its extended form. Once capitalism has reached the stage of development where it is recognizable as a distinct mode of production, there will be producers of raw materials and non-finished goods that deal to others down the supply chain. An "all-in-one" mode, where the same person harvests raw resources, processes them into a finished good, and sells directly to the consumer, is not efficient enough to compete with the capitalist mode on a society-wide scale, and it begins to be replaced. Exchange between dealers is one of the primary social relations within the capitalist production process that is mediated by money, another one being the exchange of labor-power for wages. It can appear to be distinct from the production process because of the involvement of money, but this is an illusion, since it is required for production to occur. The next sentence is "Exchange appears as independent of and indifferent to production only in the final phase where the product is exchanged directly for consumption." I.e., exchange between buyer and seller is only not part of the production process when e.g. a consumer buys a finished product at a store. This is where distribution actually occurs, and Marx argues that, contrary to appearances, its form is already determined in advance by the structure of production. Terrorist Fistbump fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Feb 9, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 18:46
|
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:Here Marx is referring to exchange within the supply chain as an activity which is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, in its extended form. Once capitalism has reached the stage of development where it is recognizable as a distinct mode of production, there will be producers of raw materials and non-finished goods that deal to others down the supply chain. An "all-in-one" mode, where the same person harvests raw resources, processes them into a finished good, and sells directly to the consumer, is not efficient enough to compete with the capitalist mode on a society-wide scale, and it begins to be replaced. Exchange between dealers is one of the primary social relations within the capitalist production process that is mediated by money, another one being the exchange of labor-power for wages. It can appear to be distinct from the production process because of the involvement of money, but this is an illusion, since it is required for production to occur. Yeah this is a way better explanation of my interpretation. Thank you
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 19:11
|
|
|
admitting posting defeat, shameful
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 19:36
|
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:Here Marx is referring to exchange within the supply chain as an activity which is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, in its extended form. Once capitalism has reached the stage of development where it is recognizable as a distinct mode of production, there will be producers of raw materials and non-finished goods that deal to others down the supply chain. An "all-in-one" mode, where the same person harvests raw resources, processes them into a finished good, and sells directly to the consumer, is not efficient enough to compete with the capitalist mode on a society-wide scale, and it begins to be replaced. Exchange between dealers is one of the primary social relations within the capitalist production process that is mediated by money, another one being the exchange of labor-power for wages. It can appear to be distinct from the production process because of the involvement of money, but this is an illusion, since it is required for production to occur. I see that. The reason I'm having a problem with it is I'm having hard time understanding the scope of terms like "production," "productive forces," "productive activity" "productive process" etc. First I want to be clear that as far as I can see Marx is explicitly not talking about exchanging an unrefined or unfinished good because he covers that in the previous sentence. Perhaps Homeless Friend is right that merely moving it from place to place also constitutes a kind of "finishing," but if so I wish Marx had been explicit about that (and maybe he is somewhere in the sixty gabillion pages of him that I haven't yet read). I didn't have any concerns with the idea that dealer to dealer exchange is "entirely determined by production." It's the designation as a "itself a producing activity" that threw me. It seems to me that if two merchants exchanging a product constitutes productive activity because it is required for production to occur, then there are lots of activities that might then be considered productive activity, such as education, security, transportation...and the sense that I get is that Marx does not want to consider those kinds of things productive, but I could very well be wrong about that.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 21:48
|
|
|
It's been a while since I've read the entire Grundrisse excerpt, so I can't remember exactly how he defines "production" or if he does at all. But in general, when Marx talks about "production," he's referring to the entire sphere of social relations where useful objects are created using a combination of raw materials and human labor. It's central to his entire analysis as he sees it as the main way humans interact with the natural world and each other. The previous sections illustrate this centrality. I think it would be alright if you read with a wider rather than narrower sense of what "production" encompasses. If the production of a certain service is socially necessary to produce goods, then it can be considered part of "production". For example, "guard labor" is an accepted category in Marxian economics, and education is generally considered one of the processes that re-produces the labor force and thus society as a whole.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 22:41
|
|
|
cda posted:I didn't have any concerns with the idea that dealer to dealer exchange is "entirely determined by production." It's the designation as a "itself a producing activity" that threw me. It seems to me that if two merchants exchanging a product constitutes productive activity because it is required for production to occur, then there are lots of activities that might then be considered productive activity, such as education, security, transportation...and the sense that I get is that Marx does not want to consider those kinds of things productive, but I could very well be wrong about that. I dunno what book it is cause I'm too lazy to read all that poo poo, but what you're abutting against is productive and unproductive labor iirc. Security is a great example of this. It might be needed but it's also, strictly speaking, unnecessary for the reproduction of society. Lets say we have a society of 20 people and 5 are security and 15 are farmers. The security do the needed labor of protecting crops from wild animals and breaking up fights between macho farmers. However, that labor does nothing to actually support their own lives. You're sorta running into how things that are considered concrete in common parlance are not actually in reality. Like the best buy worker I mentioned. They would be considered a service worker, but that doesn't actually constitute the whole of their labor and is more a broad generalization. Them unloading a truck is productive and necessary labor. Them making a salespitch to sell a keyboard is not, since that is simply to drive the realization of the surplus value, or put another way drive the further production of keyboards or whatever else the capitalist is doing for example.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 22:52
|
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:https://twitter.com/RealAnarchytube/status/1224523738000982016?s=19 AnarchyTube Base Nuclei
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 23:00
|
|
|
I take a different view than Homeless Friend in what constitutes productive labor. It could very well be that the conditions of production in whatever time and place mandate a quarter of your workforce are employed to guarding the rest of it, otherwise production as a total process couldn't happen. Likewise, retail work may have at one point been the most efficient way to get people to consume products, but as retail moves online, it's looking less and less like the case. In these two scenarios, the farmer-guards would be considered productive labor, and the best buy employee considered unproductive to some degree, or at least not an efficient use of labor compared to the social average, or whatever. There are like 200 pages of Capital vol 1 devoted to talking about technological change as it relates to production, it's a huge topic with lots of approaches. The takeaway is that Marx is analyzing the total process of production and the entire society that is structured around it, with the material limitations of that society as a key factor in the analysis.
|
|
#
?
Feb 9, 2020 23:37
|
|
|
A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:lol anarchists Smh at anarchists
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 00:18
|
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:I take a different view than Homeless Friend in what constitutes productive labor. It could very well be that the conditions of production in whatever time and place mandate a quarter of your workforce are employed to guarding the rest of it, otherwise production as a total process couldn't happen. Likewise, retail work may have at one point been the most efficient way to get people to consume products, but as retail moves online, it's looking less and less like the case. Just because they are necessary for production to happen or increase, doesn't mean they are integral to it. If we say have reached a hypothetical 100% guard efficiency then lets say another guard is added to a total of 6. It wouldn't result in an increase to production but a decrease to both production and the split between the 20. Any increase in production from the presence of security is the result of the increase of surplus labor from the farmer. The guards don't contribute to but consume social wealth, irrespective of their necessity. This isn't to say they are not exploited, if we translate this irl, they are selling their labor power and exploited past their necessary labor time like everybody else. The retail worker in your example is eliminated exactly for the same reason the sixth guard wouldn't be tolerated: they have become unnecessary. The capitalist no longer needs them to realize the value trapped within the commodity. You're right that they might have been necessary in the time before web retail for the most efficient driving of consumption, from the perspective of the capitalist. It's telling then that many aspects of their jobs (tech support, transport, and such then still exist, but its certain nonproductive aspects (not all of them to be clear) are being shown the door due to technological change, as you have pointed out. Homeless Friend fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Feb 10, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 03:42
|
|
|
Homeless Friend posted:Just because they are necessary for production to happen or increase, doesn't mean they are integral to it. Good point and probably closer to Marx's position than whatever soup of various theorists I have floating around in my head lol. But the general point of "production is larger than people making things directly" is something for cda to hang on to.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 05:19
|
|
|
cda posted:I see that. The reason I'm having a problem with it is I'm having hard time understanding the scope of terms like "production," "productive forces," "productive activity" "productive process" etc. If you're reading things chronologically, i.e. you haven't read Capital first, that might be your problem! I strongly suspect that "producing activity" is a very different thing from "productive activity", since being productive means producing value rather than things. Here, I believe Marx is talking about the infrastructure that is socially necessary to facilitate exchange and minimize its costs: ships, harbors, road networks, trucks, railways, trains, warehouses, shops etc. People can't just exchange titles to commodities like in a stock market, they also need to move the concrete stuff where the buyer needs it to be in order to use it. Commodities are generally bought based on how much it costs to move them where they are needed, not just how much the commodities themselves cost to produce. One could make the claim that because producing the exchange infrastructure is socially necessary labor under capitalism, it's also productive, but I believe Marx intentionally avoids making such a claim. I for one disagree with Homeless Friend's claim that logistics is a productive transformation, because productive transformations increase the value of a thing so long as there is demand for the new thing at its value. In practice, logistics is pure cost.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 06:01
|
|
|
Isn't a good of no value if it's hundreds of miles out of reach?
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 06:32
|
|
|
Stairmaster posted:Isn't a good of no value if it's hundreds of miles out of reach? Kinda, kinda not. Usefulness/uselessness is like an on/off switch. If a thing becomes socially useful, it gains all the value that has been congealed into it in production, and if it becomes socially useless, it loses all of it (assuming capitalism). However, making something useful does not need to be a productive transformation of the thing in question, it might as well be a change in social relations that suddenly makes people need that thing. I suppose fashion would serve as a passable example, the exact same clothes have a very variable usefulness based on how society views them in terms of style at a specific time. Perhaps they never become fully useless, but the shifts in demand determine what part of their value can be realized, possibly all the way to zero, at which point they have become useless rather than merely overproduced. The important thing is that the shifts of demand don't add or remove any of the theoretically realizable value. If a fashion completely stops selling in one place but begins selling in another, it makes sense to move the clothes around to be able to realize their value, but that operation only enables you to sell them the same as those people whose products managed to reach those customers without any detours. It's an unfortunate cost rather than an opportunity to sell them for more. Productive transformations are made because the transformed commodity sells for more on average than the original commodity, but commodities between which the only difference is how and how much they have been transported sell the exact same way regardless of that difference. Also, pedantically answering your specific question, not quite! A commodity that is hundreds of miles out of reach is equivalent to a commodity of the same type that is in reach, assuming that transportation is also a commodity available on the market, which it is. But a customer wants to pay the same or less for the far-away commodity plus the transportation as they would have to pay for the locally available one. The commodity only becomes useless for you if its transportation costs were to exceed the value of the commodity itself, and unprofitable to produce for you if the it's sold so cheaply locally that offering a low enough price for the faraway one for you to prefer to buy it would erase its profit margin. uncop fucked around with this message at 07:13 on Feb 10, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 06:56
|
|
|
But by passing borders the market value is changed. You can produce a good for 1.50, ship it for a dollar, and sell it for 5 in another country. Realizing that value for both capitalist and the government where it is captured, laws permitting. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 07:07
|
|
|
Homeless Friend posted:But by passing borders the market value is changed. You can produce a good for 1.50, ship it for a dollar, and sell it for 5 in another country. Realizing that value for both capitalist and the government where it is captured, laws permitting. There are different average market prices in different locations, yes, and this allows for profit in exchange and logistics, but there's also massive profit in flipping houses and stocks. Moreover, average marker prices don't differ just according to state borders but also according to the location within those borders. You get to select the scope arbitrarily if you go more granular than the whole economy taken together. The differences amount to local differences in supply, demand, infrastructure, geography and rent (including taxes and tariffs). The concept of separate national markets with separate national values (rather than simple local average market prices) for the same commodities is a product of imperialist bourgeois marxism. Referencing an isolated national economy was always a simplifying assumption in Capital, because, using Marx's method, a theory of the state and other political institutions that intervene in foreign trade would have been necessary prior to an analysis of the real world economy. Being content with that level of the theory later on has been nothing but purposeful avoidance of the responsibility to produce a coherent marxist theory of the world economy. Fortunately, marxists outside imperialist centers haven't been content with it! Marxist productivity (how much of the same type of concrete product can be produced with the same amount of specific labor) and general economic productivity (how much value can be realized from commodities in general that have been produced with the same amount of labor in general) are the same factor when examining a specific kind of commodity, for example wheat or iron or the like. Using that fact, it's trivial to use bourgeois econometric data to show that after adjustments are made for productivity differences, workers in oppressed countries producing for the exact same thing for the exact same market are paid many times less for the same labor, that most of the value produced by them is drained as imperialist rent. Imperialist marxism erases specifically that fact when it declares that value just mysteriously transforms into a different value when crossing national borders.
|
|
#
?
Feb 10, 2020 07:50
|
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:Oh, the left? Well, it gave us Stalin and Mao, you know, the two Hitlers of communism. I think we should just destroy society instead. Actually they were both Double Hitler so it was more like four Hitlers.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 09:19
|
|
|
cda posted:No, I just started a class about Marxism and literary theory. I did not know the Harvey thing existed but I just looked it up, thank you! i used the david harvey lectures to get into capital, but after going through some 2ndary literature i've realized it's best to treat them as an intro, and just an intro, to marx. harvey doesn't really buy into the whole long-term tendency of the profit rate to fall, iirc. edit: i'd think the grundrisse would be pretty difficult without having read capital, as the grundrisse was marx's preparatory notes for writing capital. i don't think english readers had access to the text until well within the 20th century Finicums Wake fucked around with this message at 09:28 on Feb 11, 2020 |
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 09:22
|
|
|
Is Bernie Sanders a Crypto-Communist? A Bayesian Analysis FEATURED POST Jan 29 2020 The word “crypto-communist” has a paranoid, McCarthyite connotation. But during the Cold War, numerous communist intellectuals and politicians deliberately concealed their commitment to Marxism-Leninism. Why? To be more successful intellectuals and politicians. A few crypto-communists even managed to become national leaders. Fidel Castro gained power in 1959, but only announced his communism in 1961. Nelson Mandela presented himself as a reasonable democratic reformer. Yet after his death, the African National Congress openly admittedly that Mandela had been on the politburo of the South African Communist Party for decades. Ho Chi Minh joined the Communist Party in 1920, but in 1945 he loudly posed as a moderate democratic reformer – famously quoting the U.S. Declaration of Independence to charm the West. Juan Negrin, last prime minister of Republican Spain, was also very likely a crypto-communist. Which brings me to my question: What about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders? Is he a crypto-communist? Sanders has sent decades worth of frightening signals – praising Soviet bloc regimes, honeymooning in the Soviet Union, and such. Indeed, he’s said and done almost exactly what you would expect a sincere Marxist-Leninist who wanted to be a U.S. Senator would say and do. Note, moreover, that Sanders came of political age during the 60s and 70s, when communism made a big comeback in the U.S. radical left. True, this hardly proves that he’s a closeted communist. Alternately, Sanders could be a communist dupe, or a even a true believer in “finding the good in the bad.” The upshot: We have to settle for a probability that Sanders is a crypto-communist, all things considered. When constructing such probabilities, Bayes’ Rule is usually helpful. As you may recall, the Rule states that: P(A|B)=P(B|A)*P(A)/[P(B|A)*P(A) + P(B|~A)*P(~A)]. In this case, we want to know the probability that (A) Sanders is a crypto-communist given (B) his track record. Piece-by-piece: 1. What’s the probability of Sanders’ track record if he is a crypto-communist? Here, I’d go high. Most crypto-communists in Sanders’ position would be look like him. I give this 75%. 2. What’s the probability of Sanders’ track record if he isn’t a crypto-communist? Sanders view have long been extremely unpopular, but quite a few non-communists on the radical left would have shared them. So I’ll give this 1.2%. 3. What’s the prior probability of being a crypto-communist? Even during the 60s and 70s, this would be low, but not astronomically low. .3% seems plausible. 4. What’s the prior probability of not being a crypto-communist? 100%-.3%=99.7%. Plugging in to Bayes’ Rule, I get 15.8% – a low but hardly negligible risk that Sanders is a totalitarian hiding in plain sight. Needless to say, you can alter this final estimate by fiddling with the value of the numerical components. But you’d have to change them a lot to get the probability below 5%. Which brings us to a big related question: When does the risk of crypto-communism become disqualifying for a presidential candidate? I say even a 1% chance should be totally disqualifying, but I fear that most Democrats – and many non-Democrats – will demur. So what risk would they consider acceptable? 5%? 10%? I don’t know, but plausibly revising (1)-(4) to get below a 5% or 10% threshold is no easy feat.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 09:52
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Is Bernie Sanders a Crypto-Communist? A Bayesian Analysis lmao How to make it scientific: pick every number completely arbitrarily (1.2% is definitely accurate to 2 sig figs)
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
I'm screaming internally, I'm quite a fan of bayesianism for sorting between alternative (semi-)unfalsifiable theories and this is a ridiculous mockery of it. You know how no one actually follows naive popperianism, they don't discard anything that cannot be conclusively falsified and also practically superceded using the knowledge of the time. And philosophically speaking, all conclusions about the world rest on some set of unfalsifiable core assumptions. So a soft probabilistic method based on predictive success is necessary to get anywhere in fields that can't reduce their objects to mathematical equations. Love the idea of filtering people based on passing superficial similarity to designated bad guys though, very cyberpunk. Also this person effectively agrees with Stalin on that if someone shows an implicit practical potential to act as if they were morally antagonistic for whatever reason, it's no loss if they're treated the same as those whose actions are consciously informed by that antagonistic morality.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 13:06
|
|
|
A Big Fuckin Hornet posted:lol anarchists
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 15:14
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/ashleyafrawley/status/1226533455082803200?s=21
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:09
|
|
|
No
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:14
|
|
|
whaaaat
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:16
|
|
|
resisting wokeness dot com
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:20
|
|
|
thumbnail is all I'm seeing of this video and it seems apt
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:28
|
|
|
When you take breadtube too seriously
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:29
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/totallynotfilip/status/1227115452549226496?s=20
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:36
|
|
|
GalacticAcid posted:resisting wokeness dot com Lol
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:37
|
|
|
Serf you fucker how do I scrub this from my mind it sucks
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:41
|
|
|
GalacticAcid posted:resisting wokeness dot com Lmao good grift right there
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
She's right.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:45
|
|
|
What's the Hobbesian version of that vid
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:46
|
|
|
Lol ofc https://twitter.com/Zer0Books/status/1226999632573526016?s=19
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:58
|
|
|
what
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 17:59
|
|
|
Grevling posted:She's right. That's what's funny. The core point about capitalism creating the conditions for a post scarcity society is so anodyne that she has to dress it up in this sneering contrarianism to make a splash online.
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 18:15
|
|
|
Mr. Lobe posted:what Zero books were Nagle's publishers and specialise in this brand of sub-spiked pseudoleft contrarianism
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 18:21
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 10:41 |
|
|
Terrorist Fistbump posted:That's what's funny. The core point about capitalism creating the conditions for a post scarcity society is so anodyne that she has to dress it up in this sneering contrarianism to make a splash online. Then why are the responses of most of the people in this thread indistinguishable from those of the extremely hyphenated crowd replying to that thread?
|
|
#
?
Feb 11, 2020 18:23
|
|