|
wow generalissimo sanders!
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 14:15 |
|
|
# ? May 10, 2024 13:48 |
|
now do ron paul
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 14:31 |
|
https://twitter.com/grindingpoet/status/1253759688166068227?s=21
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 15:58 |
|
if I have to see that meme one more time
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 17:10 |
|
can someone explain 'the transformation problem'. please don't flame me for being a dumbass if my understanding is correct, what is said is the labour theory of value falls apart because say for a product A: - company X uses fixed capital (raw materials, etc) worth 10 labour hours, and labour time of 90 hours - company Y uses fixed capital worth 90 labour hours, and labour time of 10 hours say the rate of surplus value is 50% - the labourer works 5 hours to sustain himself, and 5 hours of surplus labour in a 10 hour workday. Say each labour hour is worth 10 dollars. then: On the market, each company's good is theoretically valued the same - 100 labour hours * 10 = 1000 dollars. Company X spends 100 dollars for fixed costs, 450 dollars for labour. And earn a profit of 450 dollars. Company Y spends 900 dollars for fixed costs, and 45 dollars for labour. And earn a profit of only 45 dollars. This is supposed to be silly for some reason and should explode the labour theory of value, but I don't quite understand why. One of the reasons I read is that capital intensive should do better than labour intensive ones, but surely the rise of China is a huge glaring counterpoint to that? Secondly, don't socially necessary modes of production between firms in a society tend to converge towards the ones that yield the most return to the capitalist, so company Y would be out competed eventully and there wouldn't be these wildly differing modes of making this product out in the wild?
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 18:29 |
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:if I have to see that meme one more time
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 18:36 |
|
mila kunis posted:can someone explain 'the transformation problem'. please don't flame me for being a dumbass I think the reasoning goes something like this: Both company X and Y start off spending 100 dollars for fixed costs, 450 dollars for labour and earn a profit of 450 dollars. Company Y then does something clever and can spend 150 for fixed costs and only 350 dollars for labor and earn a profit of 500 dollars. Company Y using less labor makes more profit. Checkmate lib. The problem is, like most right / neoliberal Econ arguments, it over simplifies and treats that situation as static. What will happen is there will be price cutting by Y to take away market share from X, reducing the rate of profit for Y. X will adapt (or others will enter the market) using similar technology and further reduce price. The more capital intensive they get, the more price cutting will happen, and the further the rate of profit falls.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 18:51 |
|
Lumpy posted:I think the reasoning goes something like this: that seems to be the opposite of my understanding here. by spending more on fixed costs versus exploiting labour, company Y would be be reducing their profits. since they pay the full face price on fixed costs, but can pay labour half of the value they produce.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:03 |
|
I hope lady juche destroys america
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:09 |
|
mila kunis posted:that seems to be the opposite of my understanding here. by spending more on fixed costs versus exploiting labour, company Y would be be reducing their profits. since they pay the full face price on fixed costs, but can pay labour half of the value they produce. I sort of oversimplified, but yes. That's the gist. Like I said, as your costs move more and more towards fixed costs, your rate of profit falls. Why? If you bought 1000 in capital equipment, and did nothing with it, you'd have 1000 in capital equipment. No value is created, because there is no labor transforming that capital into a new commodity. As companies automate, they get closer and closer to this idealized situation. If you could buy the "BallPointPenOmeter 2000™" that would simply have ballpoint pens fall out of it when you held the button on it down, the price of ballpoint pens would effectively be zero, since you could produce an infinite amount for the fixed cost of the machine. If I had to put materials in to the machine, the cost of pens would simply be the cost of the materials, since anyone can make as many pens as they want for the fixed cost of those. EDIT: the capitalist dream is to reduce labor costs by _less than_ the increase in capital costs. This doesn't work LONG TERM for the reasons above, and because as you automate, you reduce the socially necessary labor time to create your product, which reduces its value, and reduces the exploitation you can pull off. In the sort term, you can increase profit via automation, but this is not stable. Lumpy fucked around with this message at 19:21 on Apr 26, 2020 |
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:15 |
|
This is an actual major factor that doesn't get discussed when people advocate for leftist governments taking over. They much more often than not get coup'd by the military due to the military largely siding with the right. Such as in Bolivia and Thailand. One of the major factors of Venezuela still standing is because the military leans overwhelming pro-PSUV.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:16 |
|
punk rebel ecks posted:This is an actual major factor that doesn't get discussed when people advocate for leftist governments taking over. They much more often than not get coup'd by the military due to the military largely siding with the right. Such as in Bolivia and Thailand. One of the major factors of Venezuela still standing is because the military leans overwhelming pro-PSUV. the generals and officers are rightwing but the troops plainly loved bernie
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:24 |
|
AnimeIsTrash posted:I hope lady juche destroys america
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:24 |
|
Shear Modulus posted:the generals and officers are rightwing but the troops plainly loved bernie aren't there basically two types of people in the us mil: the right wing idiot murderer, and the (various-shade-of)left wingers who just want to pay for their college or whatever? it makes sense the second category would like bernie
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:31 |
|
punk rebel ecks posted:This is an actual major factor that doesn't get discussed when people advocate for leftist governments taking over. They much more often than not get coup'd by the military due to the military largely siding with the right. Such as in Bolivia and Thailand. One of the major factors of Venezuela still standing is because the military leans overwhelming pro-PSUV. Presumably if america gets to the point of instability that foments a leftist insurgency a lot of the troops would be among that insurgent faction It's almost like the government is trying to get this to happen with vet benefits getting cut and poverty/homelessness on the rise
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:31 |
Dreddout posted:Presumably if america gets to the point of instability that foments a leftist insurgency a lot of the troops would be among that insurgent faction Well yeah that’s always been the long game (title of Mitch McConnell’s book) of the republican white nationalist party as a reaction to the civil rights/great society programs: destroy the managerial state in order to create enough instability to exploit as a pretext to install a Christian theocracy in place of democracy The Handmaid’s Tale style. Like i mean Steve Brannon and other republicans are completely explicit about this A4R8 fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Apr 26, 2020 |
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:39 |
|
Lumpy posted:I sort of oversimplified, but yes. That's the gist. Like I said, as your costs move more and more towards fixed costs, your rate of profit falls. from my VERY limited understanding, the transformation problem is: what if there are two DIFFERENT products, one of which requires much more variable capital than the other? why aren't the most labor intensive industries also the most profitable? (or are they?) (or does the race to the bottom you describe here mean it's a moot point?)
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 19:47 |
|
Ferrinus posted:from my VERY limited understanding, the transformation problem is: what if there are two DIFFERENT products, one of which requires much more variable capital than the other? why aren't the most labor intensive industries also the most profitable? (or are they?) (or does the race to the bottom you describe here mean it's a moot point?) Ah, I wasn’t clear on that in the original post. I thought it was two firms in the same industry.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 20:13 |
|
Lumpy posted:Ah, I wasn’t clear on that in the original post. I thought it was two firms in the same industry. i think that is how mila described it but iirc the transformation problem has to deal with different industries. cursory googling reveals that marx just postulated a transformation factor whereby more capital-intensive industries were just better at turning investment into dollars?
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 20:20 |
|
https://twitter.com/VerastralC/status/1254416287780003840?s=19
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 20:52 |
|
mila kunis posted:can someone explain 'the transformation problem'. please don't flame me for being a dumbass To understand the transformation problem, it'd serve you better to look at Ricardo rather than at Marx. It arises from when you one hand claim that value is average market price (actually "price of production", but average market price should be the same if average supply and average demand are assumed to be equal) is labor-time, but on the other hand claim that market competition equalizes profits. Both claims could only be true at the same time if all enterprises used (proportionally) equally as much labor-time to produce their equal profits. If two different industries that employ very different amounts of labor for an equal amount of product in terms of money also gain the same profit, then logically either the different kinds of workers' time has added different amounts of value or the products haven't been sold anywhere near at their values. The transformation problem was read into Marx because economics interpreted him as basically a ricardian economist bent on fixing the issues in Ricardo's formulation, and a huge weight was put on Marx's formula in Capital vol. 3 where he develops a ratio between constant capital (non-labor commodities in production) and variable capital (labor power in production) and produces a seemingly unfinished mathematical formula using those variables to explain how industries with different ratios unequally share value produced in order to equally share in profits. The issue Marx left for those interpreting him as that sort of ricardian is that he left no explanation as to how these values that should be converted into average prices can be known in the first place, and why should anyone care to know them. You may have noticed a difference between Ricardo's formulation and Marx's formulation. Namely, for Ricardo value was average market price, while for Marx value is not average market price and average market price is only arrived at through transformation of value. Actually Marx identified even *more* transformations concrete labor has to go through: first into abstract labor-time (how much socially perceived labor is in that specific type of actual labor), then into a sum of money, and finally into the average price of a product of industry. But he regarded them as objective transformations that can be taken as given in society rather than mathematically solving every step somehow. I find Fred Moseley's argument that there is no transformation problem at all left in Marx very convincing. The mass of output prices minus the mass of input prices in the whole economy during an analytic examination period is just immediately the mass of value produced, the transformation from numerous kinds of concrete work to money has already been done by society. We have the tables on how many hours of concrete labor of each type industry has employed. We have the tables on how much money each industry has invested in what. We have the tables on how much the products of industry sold for. Marx has simply laid out a claim that the numbers in those tables should be approximately convertible to one another using certain mathematical formulas, and a claim that if they indeed are convertible as expected, then his theoretical law of value is in action in the economy, with all its implications like the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and so on. uncop fucked around with this message at 21:09 on Apr 26, 2020 |
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:05 |
|
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:08 |
|
lol what a waste of 30 bucks
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:14 |
|
uncop posted:To understand the transformation problem, it'd serve you better to look at Ricardo rather than at Marx. It arises from when you one hand claim that value is average market price (actually "price of production", but average market price should be the same if average supply and average demand are assumed to be equal) is labor-time, but on the other hand claim that market competition equalizes profits. Both claims could only be true at the same time if all enterprises used (proportionally) equally as much labor-time to produce their equal profits. If two different industries that employ very different amounts of labor for an equal amount of product in terms of money also gain the same profit, then logically either the different kinds of workers' time has added different amounts of value or the products haven't been sold anywhere near at their values. this was helpful, thank you i dont want to poo poo up this thread too much, do you have pms or some way to contact you if i got further questions mila kunis fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Apr 26, 2020 |
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:15 |
|
Could goku beat capitalism tho
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:17 |
|
First thing to note is that "the transformation problem" was an attempt by Marx to explain how a known phenomena in economics (tendency toward equalization of the rate of profit [across industries or investments of capital]) does not contradict his theory that surplus value/profit is created by labor and labor alone. (worth nothing that the classical economist solution to the phenomena of equalization of profits is a soft clearing of the throat followed by several minutes of silence) The broader explanation is pretty elegant, the "problem" is mostly a myopic "gotcha!" imo that exposes more that someone didn't really get the important part of the solution. Say you have 2 industries, uhhhh, fukken dicksucking factory and a shitpost factory even though these 2 industries have a different amount of labor that goes into their final product, the capitalist is still reaping a generalized rate of profit on his investment, regardless of where he invests, say fukken 8%, so why is that? Marx wrote a bunch of formulae to explain economic production under his labor theory of value but used a Money in -> Money + surplus value out approach that didn't bother to get crunchy on what the actual inputs were in the capital side other than they were generally constant in relativity to each other in what he called its "organic composition", when you get into things like the means of production, the cost of labor power, etc. there really aren't any numbers to peg these concepts to that aren't hopelessly incomplete if you're looking at an ACTUAL economy. The larger concepts are what matter. The "gotcha" is basically math nerds malingering him for not accounting for this in totality, so IF THERE IS a generalized rate of profit (which we know there is), THEN IT FOLLOWS that your so called "low organic composition" industries (large amount of labor power [farming etc]) should have HIGHER PROFITS than "high organic composition" industries (large amount spent on raw mats and means of production [tooling]), and since they DO NOT, then your theory must indeed be FALSE SIR The broader picture is that when we understand labor (and nature) as the primary source of all value in an economy, we're understanding that labor power is necessarily a FINITE commodity with a relatively fixed cost in its PRODUCTION (not necessarily its final cost to the capitalist), labor power is produced by the subsistence of a human being on the commodities of society and resides in a finite pool. Regardless of 1) what you're buying 2) what you're selling 3) what your SPECIAL AMAZING process is and how efficient/innovative and 4) what you hope to profit, the special commodity that can imbue surplus value into capital known as labor power is a finite resource of society, and the throughput on your process (which magnifies labor power based on its efficiency and creativity/technical advancement) can only use so much of it at once. what's more, where we have competition (everywhere) we have labor power being inefficiently applied across all manner of industries and in varying capacities to give us a generalized overall value at the end of the day. shortfalls in certain aspects of production in a given chain are windfalls in others, in the same industry and across industries, because labor power it is possible to expend in a given observed period is a finite, and in a lot of ways, discrete (a man, a set of hours, etc) resource. This expended labor power is redistributed through societies production schemes and arrives finally at a market price for purchase / consumption. You can take an industry like a shitpost factory and another like a dick sucking factory and see how labor power is more or less efficiently maximized towards the ends of creating the end profit, you can also do so with shops of the same industry, maybe even in the same town, where a better production trick hasn't spread yet, but once we scale up and look at the magnitudes and ratios and inject competitive markets, these differences cease to exist and cease to matter, they do not change the fact that at the end of the day, labor is the only thing that can create a surplus value in capital, as capital on its own... doesn't do anything.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:45 |
|
smarxist posted:"low organic composition" industries (large amount of labor power [farming etc]) should have HIGHER PROFITS than "high organic composition" industries (large amount spent on raw mats and means of production [tooling]) am i crazy or should we not be calling industries with more workers and less machines "high organic composition" since more of their composition is literally composed of organisms
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:50 |
|
Top City Homo posted:could be a social liberal or a liberal socialist
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:50 |
|
dex_sda posted:lol what a waste of 30 bucks Nonsense, that money theoretically helps to keep the lights on here, it's not like it was donated to the Sanders campaign or something If credulous dupes paying lowtax to have little icons of their faves sustains these dead gay forums, that's alright with me
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:55 |
|
Ferrinus posted:am i crazy or should we not be calling industries with more workers and less machines "high organic composition" since more of their composition is literally composed of organisms capitalism is a land of contrasts the concept is just "organic composition of capital", terming one "low" or "high" is based on the nature of industry, its high because it's a higher ratio of technical composition of capital to value composition of capital. lower ratio = more spent on labor in general = low organic composition
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 21:59 |
|
hey some twitter account nicked my av! https://twitter.com/SovietPostingAI/status/1253838359228710917
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 22:00 |
|
So what your guys's opinions on Rojava and libertarian socialism? Does is it seem like a realistic alternative to push left wing politics as an alternative to liberalism and social democracy?
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 22:24 |
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:if I have to see that meme one more time
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 23:18 |
|
punk rebel ecks posted:So what your guys's opinions on Rojava and libertarian socialism? Does is it seem like a realistic alternative to push left wing politics as an alternative to liberalism and social democracy? not the best thread for this question personally I am partial to anarchist thought and have seen many examples of it successfully implementing socialist ideas in small scale but I have to admit there are legitimate questions. first off, it requires a bigger buy-in from the population, and sowing those ideas takes time - not ideal when faced with counter-socialist enemies that will try to gently caress you over. second, who knows if the egalitarian way to do governance works at nation-state scale, poo poo has not been attempted (zapatistas and rojava are the biggest and while they aren't small, they aren't that big either). some stuff does need bigger centralisation (crisis response) and it's a balancing act that looks like it works in ~1 million population states, but could very well topple over as it grows. finally, it's hard to say if it's realistic as a way to push it. it's way more revolutionary-minded than lib/socdem thought, even if it doesn't go as far as ML. That said I'm optimistic about it, there are pockets of it growing successfully. How has Rojava handled the coronavirus situation, I'm curious? I know the Zapatistas did very well.
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 23:52 |
|
also, bakunin is a fuckboy lol there are way more coherent approaches to anarchism done later
|
# ? Apr 26, 2020 23:54 |
|
mila kunis posted:this was helpful, thank you ask them in here imo
|
# ? Apr 27, 2020 00:04 |
|
Ferrinus posted:ask them in here imo agreed, I like the occasional effortpost
|
# ? Apr 27, 2020 00:05 |
|
dex_sda posted:not the best thread for this question Good post. Rojava is a good indication because it worked with 2 million people, but yeah scale is important. The issue is that much like Zizek, Chris Hedges, and Adam Curtis point out is that the Left doesn't really have an alternative to Capitalism. And any attempts tend to hop back to statism, even in Venezuela which tried cooperatives but stopped due to meandering results (the reasons why can be disputed). And yeah I don't see an official Socialism thread so I assumed this was it from reading the OP which just lists left wing literature. It has a strange thread title.
|
# ? Apr 27, 2020 00:22 |
|
my very novice opinion is that Rojava worked/works well enough to try to thread the needle of having a socialist project where you necessarily do not / cannot have a state of your own.
|
# ? Apr 27, 2020 00:31 |
|
|
# ? May 10, 2024 13:48 |
|
punk rebel ecks posted:Good post. it's fine, it's just many peeps here are partial to ML so you gotta be prepared for some roasting when talking about anarchism (then again, critique may be just what you're looking for) The big advantage of anarchism imo - and why I think it could be a decent approach - is that it's much more realistic to sell it on a local level. A lot of the tenets of socialism it extolls are ideas that speak to people and can be implemented in existing structures (subduing/eating them in the process), so slowly organising in an area that doesn't have strong socialist sentiment is possible and you can have a great effect spreading left wing thought this way. It's just important to keep it in perspective.
|
# ? Apr 27, 2020 00:32 |