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I feel like there could be a MoP where animal labour creates value, but in capitalism specifically it does not.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:13
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uncop posted:Value is a social relation between people. Technically animals or even machines could produce value, but then society would be treating those animals or machines like people: agents that must be negotiated with and can’t simply be harnessed as their owner wishes. If horse labor produced value, horses wouldn’t have owners, they’d be working for wages or as independent commodity producers. This sorta models work animals as a kind of capital, doesn't it? In which case the owner of the animal reaps the value of... whatever labor went into training the animal and goes into maintaining it?
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Aug 26, 2020 14:13
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GunnerJ posted:What is the Marxist argument that only human labor creates value and not animal labor? I can think of my own reasons related to the creativity of the result of human labor, but I am curious whether that has anything to do with what Marxists think. It's not a Marxist argument. quote:The use values, coat, linen, &c., i.e., the bodies of commodities, are combinations of two elements – matter and labour. If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. The latter can work only as Nature does, that is by changing the form of matter.[13] Nay more, in this work of changing the form he is constantly helped by natural forces. We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. As William Petty puts it, labour is its father and the earth its mother.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:18
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GunnerJ posted:What is the Marxist argument that only human labor creates value and not animal labor? I can think of my own reasons related to the creativity of the result of human labor, but I am curious whether that has anything to do with what Marxists think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc5mfspGvR8
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Aug 26, 2020 14:21
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GunnerJ posted:This sorta models work animals as a kind of capital, doesn't it? In which case the owner of the animal reaps the value of... whatever labor went into training the animal and goes into maintaining it? Yes, that’s exactly what animals are to capitalist production. They’re bought and maintained like machines and enter cost calculations right next to machines. Can I get the same task done cheaper with horses or a car? Pigs or a laboratory meat-growing operation?
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Aug 26, 2020 14:22
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Lostconfused posted:It's not a Marxist argument. It is indeed! A thing being a use value doesn’t imply that it is a value at all: e.g. breathing air is both vitally useful and completely worthless.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:27
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the truly massive increase in anti-china sentiment over the last few years does lead me to reflexively push back against it, because a few years from now there’s a possibility we’ve whipped up enough americans to manufacture consent for a war there are absolutely powerful interests who want america to start some kind of limited confrontation with china over their territorial claims, which could quickly spiral out of control feeding into a new cold war is not in our interests and for american leftists, anti-china rhetoric becomes the ally of chauvinism regardless of intention like this isn’t going to go anywhere good in the next decade, especially with biden now trying to appear Even Tougher to outflank the republicans on their right: 
THS fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 14:28
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uncop posted:It is indeed! A thing being a use value doesn’t imply that it is a value at all: e.g. breathing air is both vitally useful and completely worthless. You need way more context than that. Use value and value aren't the same thing.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:30
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THS posted:the truly massive increase in anti-china sentiment over the last few years does lead me to reflexively push back against it, because a few years from now there’s a possibility we’ve whipped up so enough americans to manufacture consent for a war yeah i think it's a pretty textbook case of the building of the sort of bourgie cultural hegemony gramsci observed
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Aug 26, 2020 14:33
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does popular consent even matter anymore? it didn’t really for Iraq
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Aug 26, 2020 14:35
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uncop posted:Value is a social relation between people. Technically animals or even machines could produce value, but then society would be treating those animals or machines like people: agents that must be negotiated with and can’t simply be harnessed as their owner wishes. If horse labor produced value, horses wouldn’t have owners, they’d be working for wages or as independent commodity producers. You need to read Capital again.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:41
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indigi posted:does popular consent even matter anymore? it didn’t really for Iraq It does if you want to start a draft. We can’t beat China with a few drones and enlisted soldiers, you need loving manpower against a nation of a billion and a half. And they’d probably hit our lovely infrastructure with cyber warfare, so whether we’d like it or not, everyone would start losing power and internet connectivity. Support for the war would plummet instantly. Wasn’t the first world war instrumental in fomenting the Russian revolution? Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 14:45 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 14:41
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Cpt_Obvious posted:It does if you want to start a draft. We can’t beat China without a serious effort. yeah but I feel like they had a much more organized and developed left
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Aug 26, 2020 14:45
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indigi posted:yeah but I feel like they had a much more organized and developed left If these riots and the violent response to them continues, the left might get super organized super fast. And when the Chinese government hacks our bread and circus away, people are gonna be pissed at the idiots who started the war.
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Aug 26, 2020 14:47
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Cpt_Obvious posted:It does if you want to start a draft. We can’t beat China without a serious effort. It was primarily because the czar essentially let the country completely fall apart over the course of the war. the train network that was vital to connecting the extremely spread out empire had lost most of it's engines to burst boilers by 1917, there was mass starvation happening as supply lines collapsed, soldiers rose up against their own commanders because of how brutal life in the russian imperial military was, etc
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Aug 26, 2020 14:47
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indigi posted:does popular consent even matter anymore? it didn’t really for Iraq it doesn’t matter if elites are bent on it (though support for the war was high regardless of huge protests against it, and that makes the war hawks job much easier). i would argue it’s better for more people to be against it than for it when it comes to resisting such a war, though. i guess one could take the point of view that nothing matters, but hopefully in a war with china we’d learn from the mistakes of how ineffective iraq war protests were and try a different approach
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Aug 26, 2020 14:57
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Lady Militant posted:soldiers rose up against their own commanders
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Aug 26, 2020 15:00
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indigi posted:this is something I truly can’t imagine happening here and now In Vietnam, privates used to frag their commanders I suppose it's the difference between an era of conscripts and an era of volunteers, but at least its still part of living memory in the US
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Aug 26, 2020 15:19
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indigi posted:this is something I truly can’t imagine happening here and now it happened a bunch in Vietnam, at least
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Aug 26, 2020 15:22
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indigi posted:this is something I truly can’t imagine happening here and now troops need to get btfo for it to happen, tho really i dunno wtf the plan is with china that would have that happen.
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Aug 26, 2020 15:23
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Does anyone know how to dismantle capitalism or at least help the people suffering under capitalism in Italy I am asking for a friend who is very unhappy with his powerlessness in the face of this rot. It's me. I am the friend. I am a friend of myself.
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Aug 26, 2020 15:49
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paradoxGentleman posted:Does anyone know how to dismantle capitalism or at least help the people suffering under capitalism in Italy have you tried meeting with likeminded people?
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Aug 26, 2020 15:50
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Jon Joe posted:have you tried meeting with likeminded people? I'm bad at meeting people, and honestly I wouldn't know where to start. I should've solidified acquaintances when we were still having classes at uni, but it's too late for that.
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Aug 26, 2020 16:08
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find the local demsoc/marxist party or anarchist org depending on your bent and organize with likeminded people
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Aug 26, 2020 16:09
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GunnerJ posted:What is the Marxist argument that only human labor creates value and not animal labor? I can think of my own reasons related to the creativity of the result of human labor, but I am curious whether that has anything to do with what Marxists think. gonna try to answer this but in the simplest terms animals are capital. the amount of maintenance and the quality of life they are provided with is akin to that of a machine in industrial farm or labor centers. all value of a product comes from the time and energy of human labor and why this is ties in to I think one of the most fundamental aspects of marxism but which can be hard to udnerstand which is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. basically if you accept this as being a true phenomenon then it becomes impossible to reconcile with non-revolutionary politics imo. if it wasnt true then basically reformist or even right wing economics and trickle down ideas of economics would actually be true. so the tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that as production models become more efficient, the rate of profit falls in the long term. the reason is because as production becomes more efficient it requires less human labor and is more automated. so imagine you have a widget that requires X human hours of labor and it sells for $Y. well if you can automate the process down so that the same amount of labor creates 10x the widget then you would make 10x the profit. except that this increase in efficiency means 1 important thing which is that over time your price you attribute to this product in a market of $Y has to fall. this is for 2 reasons: first that your competition in the market can copy this form of more efficient production and make their own products at the same new rate and if they lower their prices people will buy more of their product over yours and theyll still make more of a profit than you because theyre selling more product. you also are forced to do the same to compete then. the 2nd reason though and why this increase in the number sold of the item doesnt over the long term counter balance the fall in prices, is that once the market becomes saturated the demand approaches 0 so no matter how cheap you make it no one will buy it and the few that will still need them doesnt approach anywhere near the amount of profit you could generate before when the item had higher scarcity and/or higher prices. and once production reaches a great enough point and the labor required comes even closer to 0 then it becomes an even greater contradiction as to why this item has cost or scarcity in the first place. so essentially the fundamental contradiction within capitalism is that while it leads to ever increasing efficiency in production, this increase is in the long term on the back of capitalist profits, and as the rate of those profits diminish it leads to stagnation in production because capitalists are disincentivized to increase their production because the increase in profits is negligible or non-existant. this leads to the second major feature which is that if capitalists cannot increase profits from increased production then they turn to the other place where they can generate more profit which is exploiting their workforce more efficiently which means workers receive lower wages, cut benefits, social services, etc. for the same work they were already doing. this helps explain why over the past few decades production has been higher than any other time in human history, but wages and benefits for workers have stagnated or decreased even in industrial and post industrial economies. this is also the big reason why marxists focus centrally on the working class, because the problems of society have root in this fundamental class antagonism which has to occur under capitalism of the capitalist drive to exploit workers in the most efficient way possible due to this fall in the rate of profit.
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Aug 26, 2020 16:10
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apropos to nothing posted:gonna try to answer this but in the simplest terms animals are capital. the amount of maintenance and the quality of life they are provided with is akin to that of a machine in industrial farm or labor centers. all value of a product comes from the time and energy of human labor
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Aug 26, 2020 16:17
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Look people, I know it sucks to think of animals as slaves. That it's easier to think of them as just machines and nothing else but the arguments of slave labor, wage labor. Those arguments apply to animals as well. You are falling for the same trap that you claimed Aristotle did. It's just easier to not think about the implications because that's the world we live in.
Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 16:42
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apropos to nothing posted:im not saying theyre similar im saying you cant really compare them politically. venezuela is a multiparty democracy with a social democratic party in leadership, china is a one party state with a i dont even know how to in one phrase describe the CCPs politics but maybe state capitalist is actually fair to say, and iran is a theocracy. so i wasnt saying any of them are comparable to each other, other than they are targets of us intervention but otherwise theyre completely different. i think this is a fair summary of their strategic errors but it flows out of much more than the fact of their repressing some independently-organizing workers, which is something that is characteristic of states rather than of capitalist states. there's always going to be some sort of development program and there's always going to be people unhappy with the final bargain; you either reckon with that or lose legitimacy. lib dot com's got this long, weepy article about how true socialism ended in the ussr when lenin chose to suppress the factory committees in favor of the soviets, for instance https://libcom.org/library/soviets-factory-committees-russian-revolution-peter-rachleff and even if the decision was unnecessary, regrettable, or strategically wrong that doesn't mean it was made with counterrevolutionary aims
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Aug 26, 2020 17:33
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Lostconfused posted:The animal is no different from a slave other than it's not human. You extract it's labor then return a portion to it in terms of feed and shelter for subsistence. The animal would use it's own labor to provide for it self and nothing more. You've put it to work to produce more so that you would extract the surplus value of it's labor, the extra labor it produces above what it needs to live. the animal has no capacity to resist its enslavement on a social basis. it costs nothing to subjugate and dominate an animal on the part of the ruling class. humans resist on a social level that is inconceivable to other animals. slaves resist, slow down work, sabotage work, revolt, fightback, etc. animals do none of these things.
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Aug 26, 2020 17:37
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a fun thing about the law of value is that if you think about it you realize it undergirds the very fact of human existence. it has to be true that it takes less labor on average for a human to keep themselves alive than a human can perform in the time while they're alive, or else it would be impossible for us to ever survive or make anything. like, imagine if by working for twenty four hours you could assemble enough food to keep yourself alive for twenty three hours. wouldn't work animals and arguably even plants enjoy this same property: a cow or something needs to spend some sub-100 percentage of its life-force grazing and seeking out shelter and so on such that it has at least a little left to just chill out or breed or whatever. thus, the cow-labor required to keep a cow alive is less than the cow-labor a cow can perform on a daily basis and it's possible to conceive of such a thing as surplus value generated by a cow however, to a human this means little because they don't need to negotiate with the cow to set the terms of its work. a cow just represents a certain use-value which requires a certain amount of labor to secure and actualize
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Aug 26, 2020 17:38
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apropos to nothing posted:the animal has no capacity to resist its enslavement on a social basis. it costs nothing to subjugate and dominate an animal on the part of the ruling class. humans resist on a social level that is inconceivable to other animals. slaves resist, slow down work, sabotage work, revolt, fightback, etc. animals do none of these things. What the gently caress is this? How do you even believe this to be true?
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Aug 26, 2020 17:38
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Gotta side Lostconfused here, but how useful is it to consiter the question outside of a philosopher's armchair, exactly? Animal labor has been obsolete as the means o' production since we got steam power nailed down. I'd argue that the more germane question would be that of livestock raised for meat, both because it is far more common than animal labor and arguably the greater moral hazard. Personally I've been thinking about the practicalities of both weaning a country raised on animal products off them and effective ways to cover the issue of micronutrients insufficiently present in plant based foods for massive amounts of people.
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Aug 26, 2020 17:40
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apropos to nothing posted:the animal has no capacity to resist its enslavement on a social basis. it costs nothing to subjugate and dominate an animal on the part of the ruling class. humans resist on a social level that is inconceivable to other animals. slaves resist, slow down work, sabotage work, revolt, fightback, etc. animals do none of these things. I'm sorry but what? The fact that you have to domesticate and harness and fence-in (and so on) animals is a clear indication that they're capable of resisting, is it not?
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Aug 26, 2020 17:42
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm sorry but what? The fact that you have to domesticate and harness and fence-in (and so on) animals is a clear indication that they're capable of resisting, is it not? i think this is being analogized to the work you need to do to dig out a mine and then render it safe to work in, or set up and run a complicated machine. to a capitalist, the value of an animal is the amount of labor required to make that animal work, and that includes domestication, training, and safety precautions as well as the actual day-to-day effort of milking it or lashing it as it drags a plow around or whatever it's like how the value of gold includes the incredible rarity and hence difficulty of finding gold
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Aug 26, 2020 17:44
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It doesn't matter how you describe it. You are still spending effort into coercing something into performing labor that you find useful instead of it expanding it's own labor for it's own purposes. And yes this is a purely theoretical discussion, that's why I feel like it should be easier to deal with the moral squeamishness of the whole thing. Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Aug 26, 2020 |
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Aug 26, 2020 17:52
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apropos to nothing posted:the animal has no capacity to resist its enslavement on a social basis. it costs nothing to subjugate and dominate an animal on the part of the ruling class. humans resist on a social level that is inconceivable to other animals. slaves resist, slow down work, sabotage work, revolt, fightback, etc. animals do none of these things. work animals absolutely slow down, sabotage, fight and escape, but i have bolded the part i agree with. personhood is socially constructed, and only the resistance of people is recognized, so it costs people nothing, socially, to enslave animals. that part is no different from the position of enslaved humans i'm not moved by welfare arguments against animal enslavement because of course my material life depends on it, but the rationalization which seems to me to be the reason it doesn't bother me is that the life of free animals is not pleasant either, and a consistent ethic of reducing animal suffering would favor the extinction of many species, domesticated and non-.
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Aug 26, 2020 17:55
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this makes me suspect that a slave should NOT be read as generating surplus value under the law of value, because no sort of nominally legal social negotiation is going on to determine the length of a slave's working day. i'm pretty sure capitalist profit is cast as specifically coming from what looks like a fair trade (i.e. equal exchange value for equal exchange value, i trade you the supplies necessary to keep you alive for a day, you trade me a day of a day of your time) but which involves YOU realizing your labor-power's "value" (the amount of money it takes to regenerate that labor-power) while I realize your labor-power's "use-value" (the thing your labor-power can actually do, which is generate new value, often in excess of its own value as long as you work long and hard enough) there's no trade going on with a slave laborer, just coercion. obviously there's still a struggle between the master to extract work and the slave to withhold work, but the master already formally owns the slave's entire day to day labor output and merely has to solve the problem of extracting that labor with a minimum of effort, which is true for any other piece of already-owned capital. your ability to withdraw labor from a slave is much more stochastic than your ability to withdraw labor from a spinning wheel but then there are other kinds of resources and machinery that might deliver or fail to deliver in random and unpredictable ways and a capitalist just factors those averages into the overall cost
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Aug 26, 2020 17:55
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so you believe that the cows in an industrial farm have the capacity to resist their situation on a social basis? like they can engage in mass coordinated action against their owners? if so then lol if not then congrats we agree that animals are in fact not a class which is capable of class antagonism
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Aug 26, 2020 17:57
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Lostconfused posted:It doesn't matter how you describe it. i don't think anyone denies that animals are functionally being coerced and enslaved or that animals are sentient (as opposed to sapient). surplus value is a more abstract calculation based on prevailing social forces, that's why it's just as possible to investigate theoretically whether slave labor generates surplus value (without this being an implicit denial of a slave's humanity)
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Aug 26, 2020 17:57
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master-slave is not the dominant social relation of a capitalist society, employer-employee is. despite the best efforts of neoliberals, no society has only one operating social relation. our capitalist societies continue to contain families, slaves, and gamer clans.
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Aug 26, 2020 17:59
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