Algund Eenboom posted:

Heres the chapter from Ways of Looking by John Berger where he talks about animals, our cultural understanding of them, and how it was shaped by the transition from communal to feudal to mechanized production http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM%20161.F08/readings/berger.animals%202.pdf Have fun reading if you wish- go “hog” wild 😄

indigi posted:

October has Lenin vacillating a lot as well as completely unable to admit fault or error. is that a decent pocket profile of the guy or is that image due to Mieville's Trot leanings or something? (idk)

exmarx posted:

he wwas intj i believe.

comedyblissoption posted:

comedyblissoption posted:

but by what mechanism is the capitalist able to sell a product created for more than the cost of the inputs if market transactions are supposed to be nominally equal between parties

Peel posted:

the capitalist can sell the product for whatever the market will bear, which is affected by many different factors.

there needs to be some kind of transformation (he can't buy from a shop and then sell the same products to the same customers at a markup right where he's standing at the cashier), even if it's just taking the inputs to a different market, and you can argue this transformation must always involve some kind of labour, but there's a major leap from there to the claim that the numerical difference in 'value' (as distinct from, but related to, price) is determined by the socially necessary labour time involved in that transformation.

Ferrinus posted:

it is a major leap, but it's also the only logically defensible leap you can make. other explanations, like that "Y" just comes from the capitalist's machinery or the capitalist's incredible bargaining skills, fall apart under scrutiny

V. Illych L. posted:

what really fascinates me with lenin as a character is how human he feels when you read his texts or about his life. he loved kids and animals, though he had no children or pets of his own; there's an anecdote where he really likes a piece of music but basically shuts it down and starts ranting about how he can't allow himself to be sentimental. like, the poo poo he did very clearly weighed heavily on his conscience and he had to brutally suppress his own sensibilities

i remain convinced that someone's going to write a really good opera about lenin one day - his biography has so many amazing story beats, up to getting outmaneuvered at his deathbed by the system he made to win the civil war

Peel posted:

Y doesn't necessarily 'come from' any specific source at all, though. it's just a label applied to the difference between income and outlays, each of which may be determined by any number of specific circumstances. the claim that there's a straightforward unifying essence of this kind is a hypothesis that needs to be established empirically, not something we're obliged to default to by elimination of alternatives

Malkina_ posted:

Lenin was too good for this world.

comedyblissoption posted:

Peel posted:

the capitalist can sell the product for whatever the market will bear, which is affected by many different factors.

comedyblissoption posted:

comedyblissoption posted:

V. Illych L. posted:

as far as i can tell the LTV just assumes that value is a property of the object, I.e. there is such a thing as intrinsic and objective value which can be used in accounting. a lot of its intuitions can be pretty much recreated straight up in neoclassical economics - e.g. under ideal free market conditions, the price of a commodity will reflect the labour investment in procuring it. the difference is not technical, it's ontological; most contemporary economists are deeply skeptical of the idea of value being a property of the commodity itself, being invested in the idea of value existing in the mind of a market actor. this perspective does make sense when you're trying to describe price formation of scarce goods such as art or when discussing things like elasticity, but its main benefit is that it means one can fudge sidestepping marx's critique, which really does mostly follow logically from the value-as-property perspective

comedyblissoption posted:

uncop posted:

You are really describing an ontological misunderstanding that has been the excuse to ignore the theory. The value isn't a property of the object, it *is* the object. Capitalists exchange values, not things. There are no assumptions involved about what exactly those things are, on the contrary the things are abstracted away into the concept of use-value. But I repeat, the value is not a property of the use-value, the use-value is just some concrete body that value takes. Value is independent of its body, it just needs to have *some* body: it can switch bodies at will as long as those bodies are exchangeable for one another. The lifecycle difference should be obvious: a property only exists as long as its object does. But value, in most cases, outlives the things it's embodied in (for example, when oil is burned, its value does not disappear with it but instead takes the body of the end-product that the oil was burned to produce).

mila kunis posted:

is there a good breakdown/summary somewhere of ltv vs marginal utility ?

Impermanent posted:

idiot here: so this conception of value as the thing being traded and the concrete thing being an incidental form of the value is how rent works, right? If you were renting, say, a computer from someone, you might have the body of the computer but its use-value is being held by the owner you are paying rent to?

Aeolius posted:

closer to the other way around; use-value is just what the useful, practical thing is, in its basic operation. value is the socially necessary abstract labor time embodied by the thing.

the "body" of the computer — which is to say, the computer — is both a value and a use-value at the same time, with neither aspect strictly separable from it. it's just that the former considers it along a quantitative dimension, and the latter along the qualitative.

as a renter, you would be more interested in the computer considered as a use-value. to the owner, it's more thought of in terms of being a value. and since the legal claim on it would still belong to said owner, your permit to enjoy it as a use-value is usually conditioned on you not damaging its value beyond standard depreciation.

Impermanent posted:

idiot here: so this conception of value as the thing being traded and the concrete thing being an incidental form of the value is how rent works, right? If you were renting, say, a computer from someone, you might have the body of the computer but its use-value is being held by the owner you are paying rent to?

Theoretically, two people who own two identical computers could limitlessly exchange the use-value between them by exchanging ownership of the two computers. The use-value would, abstractly, keep swapping between them even though the computers haven't changed in any concrete way?

Which means that land rights aren't actually rights to the land, to to speak, but rights to the value of the land. Which makes sense, because people rarely occupy more than a small space of land to live on. You are purchasing the generative aspect of a space, the right to what it produces, more than any material thing. Which sounds like a small point but really i think delineates the difference between private property and personal property, in that in examining something as a piece of personal property valuation of a good is fundamentally oriented around the specific concrete body? ie. I don't actually want to rent my toothbrush out to someone else, even if the price were good. if I had a house on a piece of land to live on, the health of the land and the craft of the house is more important to me than the sell-ability, assuming I am not relating to the house as a commodity object but rather as a place to live?

Which means, i think, that fundamentally the concept of financialization is just an entrenchment of use-value as the primary value of a good, which is why, for example, universities in the u.s. are so expensive - because they presume that the education is a commodity that is essentially rented. you pay for it through loans and then pay back that education over time as an extracted value from the individual - that's why the laws are set up so that you can't default on student loan payments, and that's also why university systems tend to have higher credit bond ratings than the states they are situated inside of.

uncop posted:

The "computer-form" here is not a use-value though, it's the physical body of the value. It's the $1000 that both expect to be able to milk out of the computer if they were to use it for the full 5 years. But "use" means entirely different things for the two: for the lender "using" the computer means lending it, for the renter it means producing something with it. So no use-value is ever exchanged between those two, because they did not have a use-value in common for the computer in the first place. What actually happens is that the physical computer takes on different use-values.

quote:

What chiefly distinguishes a commodity from its owner is the fact, that it looks upon every other commodity as but the form of appearance of its own value. ... His commodity possesses for himself no immediate use-value. Otherwise, he would not bring it to the market. It has use-value for others; but for himself its only direct use-value is that of being a depository of exchange-value, and, consequently, a means of exchange.[3] Therefore, he makes up his mind to part with it for commodities whose value in use is of service to him. All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises them as values. Hence commodities must be realised as values before they can be realised as use-values.

Aeolius posted:

I'm always iffy about the use of the phrase "use-value" to encapsulate a thing being exchanged, financialized, etc, because when Marx discusses it, he notes that in that case it's not being taken as a use-value at all:

Aeolius posted:

Fair enough. I just find that I have an easier time conveying the concept of use-value when I focus on it as a category of thing (this is/isn't a use-value) — a set that includes the set of all commodities — rather than a property of a thing (which renders "use-value" and "utility" more or less interchangeable, and opens up the door to stuff like neoclassical imputations of utils).

T-man posted:

Do big titty bimbos with blonde hair and pussy eating lips and big soft asses produce surplus value? Waiting for your reply.

E: please I need to know by my next shoe shopping trip

T-man posted:

Do big titty bimbos with blonde hair and pussy eating lips and big soft asses produce surplus value? Waiting for your reply.

E: please I need to know by my next shoe shopping trip

uncop posted:

I do treat it as a category as well, but lifecycle-wise it's not too terrible to describe it as if it were a property,

strange feelings re Daisy posted:

We are living inside a horrible novel. Next we'll hear about a factory worker named Johnny Proletarian.

Aeolius posted:

I am duty-bound to launch into a tirade about the slippery slope to positivism here!!

but nah, it's good. I won't say I'm personally convinced of your pedagogic thrust — e.g., I tend to find most people are intuitive dialecticians, and just haven't been made aware (and/or don't particularly care) that that's already what they were doing — but if you've had better luck explaining that way, then more power to you. those hundred flowers blooming, etc.

e:

close enough
https://twitter.com/katemaclel/status/1298473163559333893