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maybe he'd have a good response but what I infer here is that so long as it doesn't cause 80% of the human population to die, capital has to be propped up at any cost. which is sort of an argument as to why we shouldn't have that system anymore. we've scuttled resilient systems for extremely efficient ones that if they suffer any kind of turbulence poo poo the bed and die.
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Jun 22, 2020 01:10
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| # ? May 26, 2024 13:24 |
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Doctor! It hurts when I exploit people and planet for profit! What should I do?
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Jun 22, 2020 05:51
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I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit. Lenin posted:Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle “is the most widely applicable means” of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is entirely untrue. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses. The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals — do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the “economic” struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle? The very opposite is true. quote:Why do the Russian workers still manifest little revolutionary activity in response to the brutal treatment of the people by the police, the persecution of religious sects, the flogging of peasants, the outrageous censorship, the torture of soldiers, the persecution of the most innocent cultural undertakings, etc.? Is it because the “economic struggle” does not “stimulate” them to this, because such activity does not “promise palpable results”, because it produces little that is “positive”? To adopt such an opinion, we repeat, is merely to direct the charge where it does not belong, to blame the working masses for one’s own philistinism (or Bernsteinism). We must blame ourselves, our lagging behind the mass movement, for still being unable to organise sufficiently wide, striking, and rapid exposures of all the shameful outrages. When we do that (and we must and can do it), the most backward worker will understand, or will feel, that the students and religious sects, the peasants and the authors are being abused and outraged by those same dark forces that are oppressing and crushing him at every step of his life. This is the best time for socialist organizing in the US since the 1930's. I have seen some socialists wring their hands and throw away a golden opportunity anyway. "It's about race not class", "many of the rallies are being organized by liberals", "the protesters are against police brutality, not capitalism". I feel these claims are sometimes made in bad faith but moreover they are backwards.
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Jun 22, 2020 06:15
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people want the perfect moment to come to them when you really have to go out and make that moment. which is an incredibly trite thing to say but I think it applies
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Jun 22, 2020 06:20
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit. Very well said.
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Jun 22, 2020 06:20
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit. buen post
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Jun 22, 2020 06:22
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit.
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Jun 22, 2020 06:26
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit.
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Jun 22, 2020 06:30
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit. 
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Jun 22, 2020 06:32
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I am born again and bathed in the blood of the lamb! *puts noose around jeff bezos*
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Jun 22, 2020 06:40
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i say swears online posted:I am born again and bathed in the blood of the lamb! *puts noose around jeff bezos* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9oW91Iv8D8
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Jun 22, 2020 06:50
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senators and generals lined up against a wall somewhere in a ruined dc, revolutionaries not shouting "workers of the world, unite", but "hail satan!"
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Jun 22, 2020 06:54
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit.
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Jun 22, 2020 07:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ43Hq7jFeo
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Jun 22, 2020 07:44
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strange feelings re Daisy posted:I've been thinking about "What is to be done?" in relation to the demonstrations and riots quite a bit. for me this was the best and most clarifying part of WitBD and the slickest summation of what’s wrong with so much of the existing western left. workers have already been struggling for better general economic conditions for years and years - that’s why they have unions or a minimum wage or whatever. socialism isn’t about getting workers the best deal, it’s about realizing that the power of the working class is more than just bargaining power, and that that power can and must be turned to ending EVERY injustice, not just lovely wages and long hours
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Jun 22, 2020 08:24
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I can’t watch this video right now because I’m at work so I apologize in advance if this question is answered. but how did they publish music in the USSR? like, did they have record labels? did the state do it? how were artists paid?
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Jun 22, 2020 15:26
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5ticIELm1Y
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Jun 22, 2020 15:31
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https://twitter.com/joebiden/status/1274910217508196352?s=21
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Jun 22, 2020 15:47
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https://twitter.com/mydadisold/status/1274937865856847873?s=21
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Jun 22, 2020 16:09
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welcome, malcolm x
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Jun 22, 2020 16:11
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this is true. I've read theory about this
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Jun 22, 2020 16:15
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Stalin is also POC btw https://twitter.com/Queer_Kara/status/1270128073451556864?s=19 gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 16:30 on Jun 22, 2020 |
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Jun 22, 2020 16:17
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ah,
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Jun 22, 2020 16:26
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last I heard Harvey had taken the Xi pill, so not totally surprising but still: lol
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Jun 22, 2020 18:20
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Jesus loving Christ David Harvey really is the modern kautsky
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Jun 22, 2020 18:44
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Hullo CSPAM communism thread, I've been reading Capital and I have a question that I'm hoping the theory-knowers here can clear up for me. So, it's a well-known fact that in "perfect competition", the price of a commodity is the same as its cost of production. Of course the whole idea of perfect competition is bunk and capitalism tends to monopoly, but as far as I know Marx engages capitalist political economy on its own terms in Capital, at least in Volume 1 (where I am), and therefore implicitly assumes & relies on it. It is my understanding that this is one of the classical theoretical justifications for the labour theory of value also, though Marx appeals to commensurability (probably, again, assuming familiarity with classical political economy). My question is, assuming perfect competition, how can surplus value exist? (Of course I am not disputing that it does actually exist - otherwise businesses everywhere would be in ruin! - but I am looking for the theoretical justification) In fact Marx anticipates this question in Chapter 7, and lays out one run-through of the M-C-M cycle (the yarn of the spinner), ending by saying: Karl Marx posted:Our capitalist stares in astonishment. The value of the product is exactly equal to the value of the capital advanced. The value so advanced has not expanded, no surplus-value has been created, and consequently money has not been converted into capital. He then "examines the matter more closely" and determines that "[T]he value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes" and thus, for the capitalist that employed the spinner, "27 shillings have been transformed into 30 shillings". But shouldn't perfect competition drive the actual price (no matter the labour embodied) to 27 shillings? And if the value of labour-power is less than the value created by labour-power because the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence for the allotted hours, then does perfect competition make no sense at all? Because, supposing it took, on average, 12 hours of labour (inputs included) to produce the means of subsistence for 24 hours, then since the cost of production of that labour is the cost of the means of subsistence for 12 hours, couldn't one produce then in 6 hours the means of subsistence for 12 hours and exchange that for the means of subsistence for 24 hours? Basically I'm just really dumb and confused - obviously there must be satisfactory answers to these questions, since as one can see in Chapter 7 Marx must have encountered them. Any help would be appreciated.
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Jun 23, 2020 12:01
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e-dt posted:Hullo CSPAM communism thread, I've been reading Capital and I have a question that I'm hoping the theory-knowers here can clear up for me. "Perfect competition" is not a concept of classical political economy, it is not assumed and the price of a commodity does not equal its price of production. The price of production of a commodity is an observed industrial average and even in a hypothetical scenario where all producers within the industry were the same, the final buyers do not necessarily compete at all relative to each other, perhaps because they aren't capitalists at all! The same products end up being sold at different final prices because that price is out of the industrialists' control, merchants will resell them at whatever price they can fetch wherever they can fetch it. But what makes a commodity a commodity is that it's perfectly reproducible and trivially interchangeable with others of the same kind. Their potential to fetch the prices they did was determined at the point of production. The different final prices they were sold at don't arise from any difference between them, so their deviation from the industrial average price is just statistical noise in the big picture. The assumption Marx makes in vol. 1 is that commodities are sold at their values, i.e. that those industrial average prices directly correlate with the amount of labor the industries employ. The point is to not yet have to go looking for the labor performed in one industry labor on the balance sheets of other industries. But that assumption is a consciously incorrect one that Marx uses for the sake of example the same way as you are consciously taught an incorrect model of physics at school, and it's discarded in vol. 3 where Marx talks about how exactly labor performed in one industry appears on the balance sheets of others. The answer to how labor creates surplus value is that the commodity labor that the capitalist buys (labor power) is a completely different article from the concrete labor process that creates value. They are only considered the same by economics because of philosophical confusion about using the same word to refer to multiple different things. The capitalist buys labor power at its full value (the cost to reproduce the worker, make it possible that an equivalent worker comes to work the next day). But, in a hypothetical scenario where the labor force does literally nothing, the capitalist has made a loss because at the end of the day they have their constant capital left as is, but the variable capital for the day (the money investment in having that worker available for that day) has been spent forever. It's called variable capital because its value at the end of the day varies depending on practical labor relations on the shop floor. The task of the capitalist is to make the variable capital grow as much as possible in relation to the total capital advanced every day. More competition between capitalists doesn't help the worker at all, because it doesn't make the wages relative to surplus value go up, it makes them go down. The only kind of competition that can make the wages go up toward the surplus value is a non-market competition between the laborers as a class and the capitalists as a class. The bourgeoisie build an organized monopoly of means of life for the proletariat so that they'd have to beg for any capitalist to let them work, and the proletariat builds organized monopolies of labor power so that capitalists would have to beg them for any worker to come to work. The double organizational discipline by the employers on one hand and its own connecting organizations on the other makes the proletariat the first exploited class that learns to really leverage its numbers to contest political power, which is meaningful because exploited classes don't really have much apart from numbers. uncop fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 13:20
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Actually that reminds me of a question I had. How come computer touchers get more cash money? Is it just their ability for disruption is easier (just delete a database lol)? What forces are in play?
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Jun 23, 2020 13:48
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dex_sda posted:Actually that reminds me of a question I had. How come computer touchers get more cash money? Is it just their ability for disruption is easier (just delete a database lol)? What forces are in play? computer touching is (still) a relatively specialized skill, such that you need relatively high wages to attract and retain workers consequently, all of these "learn to code" bootcamps, non-college training courses, and tutorials are intended to proletarianize computer-touching, so that it either becomes easy/simple enough that "anyone" can do it, which creates such a large labor pool that wages will crash, or that so many people will know how to code that there will be a large labor pool... causing wages to crash
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Jun 23, 2020 14:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:computer touching is (still) a relatively specialized skill, such that you need relatively high wages to attract and retain workers ahh, that makes sense. So it's simple demand for computer skills (because of the advancement of technology) outgrew the pace at which you could train them, making them a relatively numerous specialist class, and therefore be in a better position in the talks with capital. Got it.
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Jun 23, 2020 14:05
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wasn't stalin from georgia, making him literally caucasian
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Jun 23, 2020 16:16
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https://twitter.com/Bencjacobs/status/1275231110134468611
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Jun 23, 2020 17:58
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lol
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Jun 23, 2020 18:08
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e-dt posted:Hullo CSPAM communism thread, I've been reading Capital and I have a question that I'm hoping the theory-knowers here can clear up for me. the key to the beginning of capital is that value and use-value are two totally different and unrelated things. value is how hard something is to get or make (gold has high value because you have to look for it, then mine it out of the ground, or whatever). use-value is what something actually does (gold's use-values include things like "looking pretty", "serving as a dental filling", "conducting electricity", etc). value can be mathematically measured in terms of man-hours, so all values are interchangeable - an amount of gold that takes 100 hours to find, dig up, and refine can be fairly traded for an amount of hats that took 100 hours to sew. use-values aren't quantifiable at all and aren't really fungible - both a slice of pizza and a sandwich can sate your hunger, for instance, but pizza sates your hunger while air oxygenates your blood and it'd be insane to trade one for the other whenever you trade on the free market, you're giving up a thing's use-value but realizing ("getting", basically) its value. say a hat takes 4 hours to make, and its use-value is that it keeps your head warm. if you spend 4 hours making a hat, you've now got a hat you can use to keep your head warm. if you trade that hat away for a toothbrush that takes 4 hours to make, or a tiny amount of gold that takes 4 hours to get, or, say, $4 (pretending 1$ = 1 hr), you can no longer use that hat to keep your head warm. however, you got something that takes 4 hours to make, just like your hat took 4 hours to make, so that's fair, right? no one's being cheated profits come from a special commodity that we all have: "labor-power". just like a gold nugget or a hat or whatever, labor-power has a value, i.e. it has an amount of time required to make it. "making" labor-power means feeding, clothing, sheltering, birthing, raising, etc. workers. ignoring for a moment the need to raise and teach children, a single day of a factory worker's time has a definite cost to make - they need a day's worth of food, they need 1/30th of an outfit that will wear out after a month, they need 1/365th of a house that will collapse if it goes unrepaired after a year, etc. etc. say it takes 4 hours to put together that "basket of goods" of food, clothing, shelter, whatever. that means that if you trade that worker $4, or a hat, or something else that takes 4 hours to make/represents 4 hours of time in order to get that worker to work for you for a day, you've made a fair trade exactly as marx describes above - value for value, something that takes 4 hours to make (a day of labor) for something else that takes 4 hours to make (a hat). totally fair, no one's getting cheated but, remember, when you trade something away, you lose its use-value, and only realize its value. when a worker trades away his labor power in exchange for $4, they're getting $4 - exactly what that day of labor-power is worth! but they're giving up what that labor-power does. what does labor-power do? well, a hat keeps your head warm - trade it away, someone else's head will be warm. labor-power creates value - trade it away, and someone else will actually get to appropriate the value you create in your day of work. just like how war a hat keeps your head has nothing to do with how many hours that hat took to make, how much value you create in a day of labor has nothing to do with how much it cost to keep you alive for the day. you might laze around or you might work very hard! so if a capitalist pays you $4 (what it costs to keep you alive for that day) but has you spend that day making two hats (each of which took four hours to make), that second hat is surplus value. it's the difference between the value of your labor-power, and the use-value of your labor power. the capitalist isn't ripping you off or conning you - they're paying you exactly what your labor is "worth", no more and no less - but they are benefiting from the fact that value and use-value are totally different things, and that human labor is the ultimate source of all value. this is my favorite part of Capital Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 18:14
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Bryter posted:last I heard Harvey had taken the Xi pill, so not totally surprising but still: lol Communist led country taking over management of the capitalist world system would mean the beginning of the golden age of man
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Jun 23, 2020 19:12
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Ferrinus posted:so if a capitalist pays you $4 (what it costs to keep you alive for that day) but has you spend that day making two hats (each of which took four hours to make), that second hat is surplus value. it's the difference between the value of your labor-power, and the use-value of your labor power. the capitalist isn't ripping you off or conning you - they're paying you exactly what your labor is "worth", no more and no less - but they are benefiting from the fact that value and use-value are totally different things, and that human labor is the ultimate source of all value. this is my favorite part of Capital this makes it seem like they are ripping you off though, and what your labor created is "worth" double what you were paid. I assume I'm misunderstanding something
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Jun 23, 2020 20:45
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e-dt posted:Hullo CSPAM communism thread, I've been reading Capital and I have a question that I'm hoping the theory-knowers here can clear up for me. Neoclassical economics hides a lot of assumptions in the lines of its graphs and in this particular case it's that the cost curve doesn't mean pure cost of production, it's cost of production and whatever rate of profit is then required to maintain whatever the particular argument the graph tries to show (so in perfect competition it's high enough to keep all the firms in the market and stop it turning into imperfect competition). It hides the stage at where surplus value is created and instead points at the moment it's realised, shouts VOILA and calls it a day. I disagree with uncop though, Marx spends the earlier parts of the book pointing out why market distortions can only relocate profits, not create them (all the stuff about being always being able to buy at 10% below market value and the increased costs of pottery that tributaries of the Roman empire had to pay) and then does work under the assumption of perfect competition to examine the ultimate source of profit - the extraction of surplus value which others have gone into. indigi posted:this makes it seem like they are ripping you off though, and what your labor created is "worth" double what you were paid. I assume I'm misunderstanding something Nah the whole point is that the capitalist pays whatever is required to keep the worker alive enough to work which is the cost of the worker but the labour the worker does is actually a seperate thing, as it's a bit of labour thrown into the industrial production chain and so is detatched from whatever the cost of keeping a worker alive is. That's the key concept. This might seem a little weak but it's really easy to establish that labour is not just a commodity like any other, it has very unique characteristics - it can only be rented, possesses an independent will (because a person is always attached to it), etc.
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Jun 23, 2020 21:18
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uncop posted:helpful things Ferrinus posted:more helpful things namesake posted:even more helpful things Thank you for helping me clear up my confusion! edit: The more/even more just refers to amount of things not amount of helpfulness, you were all very helpful e-dt fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Jun 23, 2020 |
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Jun 23, 2020 21:27
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indigi posted:this makes it seem like they are ripping you off though, and what your labor created is "worth" double what you were paid. I assume I'm misunderstanding something well i should note that they are not ripping you off on their own terms. they're fairly trading exchange value for equal exchange value (one hat for one toothbrush, one hat for one day's labor, one toothbrush for one day's labor), so, by the terms of the free market, no one is being cheated and no punishable wrong has been done. you have to start thinking about the creation of value and not just its exchange to see where and why there's a problem. put another way, you have to realize that it's at the point of production, not the point of exchange, that capitalists gain their profits - and that's why socialism can only happen by transforming the mode of production (seizing the factories and running them ourselves, for instance) rather than at the point of exchange (forcing the employers to pay us higher wages with more benefits in trade for our labor) this was an important thing for marx to hammer out in capital's early chapters because he was trying to figure out where and how profit actually comes from, at all. like, how can two guys make a trade, and then one of them is richer ? it can't just be that one is ripping another off (i sell you something for $100 that should really only be worth $90) because while that surely happens sometimes it's impossible for everyone to be simultaneously doing it
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Jun 23, 2020 21:33
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one thing i love about the LTV is how self-evident it is if you really drill down into it. like, think about it: if human labor couldn't produce more value in a given time than it cost to refresh itself for that time, human life and civilization would be impossible. we'd be flatly incapable of keeping ourselves alive because the nutrition required to keep us alive for 24 hours would take 25 hours to gather up or whatever
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Jun 23, 2020 21:36
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