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The entire idea of the monopoly on violence is based on the correct observation that all governance is predicated on violence as an alternative. Persuasion and negotiation (and therefore law and peaceful exchange of power) can be rejected, violence cannot. On the other hand, violence is inherently destructive and risky in a way persuasion and negotiation are not and thus is, ostensibly, to be avoided as much as possible. The theory of the state monopoly on violence isn't "the state must wield violence to keep the unruly in line", it's "the state must possess the threat of overwhelming violence in order to give persuasion and negotiation force". The calculus of rejecting persuasion and negotiation becomes extremely unfavorable when doing so will bring down the wrath of the state. In turn, the state is ostensibly held responsible to its citizens because by sheer numbers those citizens also wield the threat of violence against the state in the form of strike, sabotage, or outright overthrow. The issues arise where state capacity for violence is so great that citizens cannot credibly threaten violence of their own and can be excluded from state-level persuasion and negotiation without any serious risk to the state. It's difficult to do this for the entire population, but relatively easy to do for a controllably sized minority, especially where the force multiplier of wealth disparity in concerned. Either way, the idea of a mutually beneficial freedom-for-security social contact is nonsense, at least as far as citizen-vs-state relations are concerned.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:55
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ronya posted:not really, it's really easy to synthesise. You might not want to sell your groundwater, but your local government might, or your central government might. "Who, exactly, has the right to sell something that may or may not have once been part of a commons?" is a question with a long pedigree, but the nub of the problem is not difficult to grasp This is a lot more complicated than "we have the guns," so I think you're just proving my point here.
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Nov 10, 2020 17:58
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The Oldest Man posted:This is a lot more complicated than "we have the guns," so I think you're just proving my point here. "it's not yours to sell, it's mine to sell" doesn't seem that tricky it doesn't even require capitalism. "the rain falls here, so it's mine" is a conflict as old as sedentary civilization
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Nov 10, 2020 18:01
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Contemporary culture-war issues mainly focus on citizen-vs-citizen claims rather than citizen-vs-state claims... outside of a US fringe, the Hobbesian relation doesn't seem to occupy minds much. Governance not by consent is actually really costly, that's true, and yet great swathes of every developed nation can't plausibly be said to be continually weighing this option in the back of their heads. Your neighbourhood, your town, your region, or your state may all vote for a different vision of society than the nation as a whole, but nation-state borders have not shifted all that much since 1945/1989. People are willing to finesse degrees of disagreement with their imagined community. Family law is the main presence of the state in actually-lived-experience for a vast share of people - in the first world we do expect the state to intervene deeply and personally in the lives of all of its citizens. As far as contractarianism goes, constitutionalism today focuses on claims to process - to invoke state procedures which are due to you by your status as a citizen/human/etc. - and it is here where the overwhelming share of contemporary issues arise
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Nov 10, 2020 18:12
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ronya posted:"it's not yours to sell, it's mine to sell" is a functionally-identical statement to The Oldest Man posted:"we have the guns,"
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Nov 10, 2020 18:23
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The contemporary culture war issues involve one set of citizens successfully convincing the state to marginalize another. The state vs citizen distinction is rarely cleanly defined.
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Nov 10, 2020 18:27
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Disnesquick posted:is a functionally-identical statement to but TOM is arguing for a difference, right? ronya fucked around with this message at 18:35 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 18:31
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ronya posted:but TOM is arguing for a difference... TOM is arguing that Liberalism in general (although from a contemporary-observation perspective: Neoliberalism) attempts to hide that relationship behind a complex deontological framework that can always be reduced to its utilitarian effect of power imbalance being the implicit factor behind private ownership. Neither leftists nor conservatives require those illusions because they recognize the primacy of power.
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Nov 10, 2020 18:38
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Disnesquick posted:TOM is arguing that Liberalism in general (although from a contemporary-observation perspective: Neoliberalism) attempts to hide that relationship behind a complex deontological framework that can always be reduced to its utilitarian effect of power imbalance being the implicit factor behind private ownership. Neither leftists nor conservatives require those illusions because they recognize the primacy of power. is the concept of a contested right really 1) nefariously hidden, or 2) complex, as moral intuitions go, is my point certainly there are leftist theories which reject the notion of rights wholesale, a la the Stirner discussion earlier, but I don't think these are at all contemporarily influential. Most leftists are not Foucouldian anarchists revelling in the upcoming amoral unrestrained exercise of power by the victorious working class, but instead assert particular rights that should be but are not
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Nov 10, 2020 18:50
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Disnesquick posted:TOM is arguing that Liberalism in general (although from a contemporary-observation perspective: Neoliberalism) attempts to hide that relationship behind a complex deontological framework that can always be reduced to its utilitarian effect of power imbalance being the implicit factor behind private ownership. Neither leftists nor conservatives require those illusions because they recognize the primacy of power. Yeah that's it. I was also pointing this out as a field identification guide marker, not making a philosophical argument. Conservatives say I will do unto others else others will do unto me. Neoliberals say I will do unto others because 
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Nov 10, 2020 19:07
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ronya posted:is the concept of a contested right really 1) nefariously hidden, or 2) complex, as moral intuitions go, is my point Because (2) can be immediately ruled-out, from a historical perspective, from contemporary observation and a-priori (e.g. A definition of power is my ability to coerce others to act against their interests and in my interests, therefore if a power imbalance exists, those "rights" are not enforceable and therefore do not exist), that only leaves option (1). The beauty of materialism is that it only requires us to observe what is directly in front of us, rather than formulate an idealist framework. This ties into the origin of Liberalism, which is from a fundamentally religious context. The origin of "rights" used to from a divine being, enforcing a strict hierarchy in terms of monarchy. Liberalism subverted that deontological framework to structure a different (and from their perspective, fairer) hierarchy but, fundamentally, one still rooted in the flawed concept that rights "fundamentally" exist (because they are granted by some higher entity, whether that's the Trinity or The Free Market). Whilst plenty of leftists do fall into the trap of that kind of thinking (and a rules/rights approach to justice, both socially and legally, is the entire intellectual milieu of most peoples' upbringing so it's obviously hard to break from that) the real core is utilitarian, and therefore outcomes focused. "Rights", in a legal sense, could be a useful tool to achieve those outcomes but they have no existence of their own and no source other than human invention and history has proven that any such rights could not co-exist with power imbalances anyway. The rejection of that deontological worldview has absolutely no bearing on any kind of "amoral unrestrained exercise of power", which tbh seems like pretty extreme hyperbole to tie to the rejection of a rules-based philosophical framework in favor of one that is outcomes-based. I generally think Liberals get so wrapped up in their own idealist frameworks that they lose sight of materialist reality. It is fairly clear that if Bezos shot me tomorrow, there's no real way that any form of justice would cause him consequences due to the staggering difference in power between us. The right to not be shot by Bezos therefore does not exist. Since Liberals tell me that I have the right to not be shot by Bezos, my conclusion, based on materialism, can only be that I am being lied to, rather than there being some kind of unexplainable (and unrepeatable) aberration in the observable difference between the ideal and the real. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 19:29
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Disnesquick posted:I generally think Liberals get so wrapped up in their own idealist frameworks that they lose sight of materialist reality. I think this is overly charitable. Idealist frameworks are a technology to square the circle of "I want to rule by force to promote my own self-interest" with "I don't want to give other people ideas that ruling by force is OK since I may not always be on the winning side of that equation."
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Nov 10, 2020 19:49
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The year is 2020 and it's annoyingly difficult to find a completely un-nuanced embrace of orthodox Marxist materialism as 1) the class as the relevant unit of political action, and 2) the class as a materially relevant and actually existing identifiable unit of society as its central actor. Although you sound like you're trying. The framework of historical materialism works as a thesis of class relations because there's no other actors besides classes in the framework. Class, and only class, is the unit of analysis. It is not meaningful as an individual theory, because it says nothing about whether you can convince other individuals to act in some collective manner (with 'the collective' being drawn at arbitrary groupings of individuals, e.g., through some shared sense of justice, as you say, and since this mass upbringing is true as a material fact, it exists by the argument. If it can move people to act, it is materially real), and therefore doesn't bind most of the interesting politics that one would want to explain. This also applies to what is done unto: if you shot Bezos first, he's still dead afterwards, even if all of his wealth and power came to bring the state's vengeance upon you.
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Nov 10, 2020 19:50
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ronya posted:The year is 2020 and it's annoyingly difficult to find a completely un-nuanced embrace of orthodox Marxist materialism as 1) the class as the relevant unit of political action, and 2) the class as a materially relevant and actually existing identifiable unit of society as its central actor. Although you sound like you're trying. I'm not sure I understand this criticism. Are you making the claim that Class Struggle falls apart because people aren't defined by class? Why do we require an individualistic approach at all? ronya posted:The framework of historical materialism works as a thesis of class relations because there's no other actors besides classes in the framework. Class, and only class, is the unit of analysis. It is not meaningful as an individual theory, because it says nothing about whether you can convince other individuals to act in some collective manner (with 'the collective' being drawn at arbitrary groupings of individuals, e.g., through some shared sense of justice, as you say, and since this mass upbringing is true as a material fact, it exists by the argument. If it can move people to act, it is materially real), and therefore doesn't bind most of the interesting politics that one would want to explain. This also applies to what is done unto: if you shot Bezos first, he's still dead afterwards, even if all of his wealth and power came to bring the state's vengeance upon you. This is kind of besides the point. The reality is that Bezos can visit violence upon a worker without recourse, and a worker would not be protected the same way. In fact, this proof is doubly true if you look at the relationship between cops and the public. Cops can and do shoot whoever they want whenever they want, and never punished for such violence. We just saw it happen with Breonna Taylor where the officer was never prosecuted for murder. You are correct in that class is not a magic invulnerability bubble which is vital to Marxism because revolution is the primary source of change that Marx proposed. The Oldest Man posted:I think this is overly charitable. Idealist frameworks are a technology to square the circle of "I want to rule by force to promote my own self-interest" with "I don't want to give other people ideas that ruling by force is OK since I may not always be on the winning side of that equation."
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Nov 10, 2020 20:13
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This is kind of besides the point. The reality is that Bezos can visit violence upon a worker without recourse, and a worker would not be protected the same way. In fact, this proof is doubly true if you look at the relationship between cops and the public. Cops can and do shoot whoever they want whenever they want, and never punished for such violence. We just saw it happen with Breonna Taylor where the officer was never prosecuted for murder. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you mean the bolded as a generalization and not as a specificity that holds in all circumstances...?
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Nov 10, 2020 20:17
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ronya posted:I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you mean the bolded as a generalization and not as a specificity that holds in all circumstances...? No. I mean that cops never receive consequences for their actions, and can and do shoot whoever they want without recourse even when such infractions are recorded and publicized. There are a handful of anomalies, to be sure. But they are exceptions that prove the rule, so to speak. For example, look at the George Floyd murder: The very cop who murdered George Floyd had murdered before and the state swept the whole thing under the rug by Democratic Presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar: https://www.mintpressnews.com/chief-prosecutor-amy-klobuchar-dismissed-charges-cop-killed-george-floyd/267933/ quote:Chauvin was involved in a fatal accident in 2005, killed Wayne Reyes in 2006, shot another man while in uniform in 2008, and had a litany of complaints against him. To be fair to Klobuchar, the Reyes shooting happened in October 2006, as her time as state prosecutor was coming to an end and she was campaigning for the senate. By the time Chauvin’s case finally made it to a grand jury, she had relinquished her role. It was only after they literally burned the police station to the ground that any real justice was pursued, because the big ape with the big club realized "oh poo poo, those little guys have torches."
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Nov 10, 2020 20:24
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Okay, I'm not arguing with alternative facts. Let's leave it at there.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:27
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ronya posted:This also applies to what is done unto: if you shot Bezos first, he's still dead afterwards, even if all of his wealth and power came to bring the state's vengeance upon you. Cpt_Obvious posted:This is kind of besides the point. The reality is that Bezos can visit violence upon a worker without recourse, and a worker would not be protected the same way. In fact, this proof is doubly true if you look at the relationship between cops and the public. Cops can and do shoot whoever they want whenever they want, and never punished for such violence. We just saw it happen with Breonna Taylor where the officer was never prosecuted for murder. Ronya I'm curious if this was the point you were making; Bezos has an entire infrastructure to do violence for his benefit when needed and is physically inaccessible without significant effort and difficulty. It's obvious that the reciprocity of violence that incentivizes peers and near-peers to adopt influence strategies other than violent coercion does not exist for him relating to 99.9999% of the other people in the world any more than it exists for the US president ordering a drone-strike against someone he wants dead. ronya posted:Okay, I'm not arguing with alternative facts. Let's leave it at there. ???? The Oldest Man fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 20:28
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ronya posted:Okay, I'm not arguing with alternative facts. Let's leave it at there. Wow dude. You really are going to stand there and tell me that a guy who killed 4 people and was never prosecuted was not above the law?
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Nov 10, 2020 20:28
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Here's an LATimes story about the same thing: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-05-29/chauvin-shootings-complaints-minneapolis-floyd Derek Chauvin, officer arrested in George Floyd’s death, has a record of shootings and complaints quote:SEATTLE — Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer arrested in the death of George Floyd, opened fire on two people during his 19-year career. Eighteen conduct complaints were filed against him, two of which resulted in reprimands.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:33
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ronya posted:The year is 2020 and it's annoyingly difficult to find a completely un-nuanced embrace of orthodox Marxist materialism as 1) the class as the relevant unit of political action, and 2) the class as a materially relevant and actually existing identifiable unit of society as its central actor. Although you sound like you're trying. Yes the year is 2020. Next year will be 2021 and last year was 2019. As a man as familiar with calendars as yourself, I am aware of these year-based facts. I'm not sure why this is germane to a discussion on modern Leftism however? Amusing japes aside, my actual point here is that "the year is" statement is an implicit nod to the kind of "history's end" nonsense you used to hear from Liberals before their ideology failed in 2008. Most branches of Leftism, particularly Marxism, are inherently rooted in a sense of evolving history, and must, therefore reject Fukuyama's Folly. Class theory doesn't try and be an individual theory though, except to say "as an individual you are powerless and only class solidarity can take you away from being on the painful end of the club". Historical materialism is an explicit rejection of individuals as the major component of the historical narrative. "Convincing others" is very much in the domain of praxis rather than Theory and a vastly more satisfying problem to try and solve. You will always find people who'll argue about how many angels can dance on the head of the pin and, occasionally, they come up with something genuinely useful, in that it can directly highlight potential routes to achieving the desired outcomes. Assuming I had the actual desire to, I'd be highly unlikely to shoot Bezos because: 1. His vast power compared to me would likely to prevent me from having the opportunity to do so. 2. I'd be afraid of retribution against myself and my family. So all of his wealth and power would materially protect him, whereas we are afforded neither of the above. His power to kill me without repercussion materially exists whereas the converse does not. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 20:39
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Also importantly the death of Jeff Bezos or almost any other single person wouldn't change the balance of power between state and citizen. His company and its power dynamic warping influence would persist. His wealth would persist. The state would dismiss it as a fluke and/or enact collective punishment. Individual considerations are have almost an entirely calculus than collective ones.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:43
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Also cpt might be being a little hyperbolic buts its substantially less realistic to act as though police aren't largely permitted to use any amount of force they wish for any reason, especially against marginalized populations.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:47
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fool of sound posted:Also cpt might be being a little hyperbolic buts its substantially less realistic to act as though police aren't largely permitted to use any amount of force they wish for any reason, especially against marginalized populations. This is true, there are certainly members of the ruling class or the ownership class who might be protected against violence by the state. For example, if a cop shot Jeff Bezos, he'd probably go to jail eventually. I was speaking mostly of working class individuals who are subject to violence by law enforcement based on the whims of those law enforcement agents. However, if a cop wants to smother a worker to death for 10 minutes in front of a crowd recording it happen, he will not be prosecuted unless the workers prove the Monopoly on Violence to be the illusion that it actually is. For example, burning the police station to the ground.
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Nov 10, 2020 20:50
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ronya posted:I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you mean the bolded as a generalization and not as a specificity that holds in all circumstances...? This is a silly rhetorical device. Nobody in history has ever made these kind of statements with the intended meaning of "a specificity that holds in all circumstances" rather than "overwhelmingly likely". This is the kind of avenue that ends up with some odd application of Lebesgue Measure theory to moral philosophy. fool of sound posted:Individual considerations are have almost an entirely calculus than collective ones. I genuinely could not parse this. What did you mean? Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 20:57 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 20:53
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Cpt_Obvious posted:This is true, there are certainly members of the ruling class or the ownership class who might be protected against violence by the state. For example, if a cop shot Jeff Bezos, he'd probably go to jail eventually. I was speaking mostly of working class individuals who are subject to violence by law enforcement based on the whims of those law enforcement officials. Also, the state actually punishing members of its enforcement class is far rarer than the state reacting to their actions and the two should not be considered the same. Paid suspension is not a punishment, it's a holiday; being transferred is almost a punishment but the end result is that the same officer is still being paid by the public to perform the same actions, now on a new population; having to attend classes is again almost a punishment but should not be considered on the same level as prison. Actual charges for doing violence are vanishingly rare, and actual convictions are even rarer- and that latter point is in part because the state has a vested interest in making sure that the people who can be called up for jury duty trust and believe police forces by default, and because media sources who want access to the police need to keep them happy in how they report on actions taken. Just look at what happened to the poor old "bad apples" metaphor.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:05
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Disnesquick posted:I genuinely could not parse this. What did you mean? Basically that theories about how power dynamics work across a society don't nessicarily hold true at an individual level, and that using the layer to critique the former is a waste of time.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:13
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fool of sound posted:Basically that theories about how power dynamics work across a society don't nessicarily hold true at an individual level, and that using the layer to critique the former is a waste of time. Think you might have forgotten to type "different" in the original post, chief.
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Nov 10, 2020 21:14
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Somfin posted:Think you might have forgotten to type "different" in the original post, chief. Oh whoops
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Nov 10, 2020 21:19
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Disnesquick posted:Yes the year is 2020. Next year will be 2021 and last year was 2019. As a man as familiar with calendars as yourself, I am aware of these year-based facts. I'm not sure why this is germane to a discussion on modern Leftism however? Amusing japes aside, my actual point here is that "the year is" statement is an implicit nod to the kind of "history's end" nonsense you used to hear from Liberals before their ideology failed in 2008. Most branches of Leftism, particularly Marxism, are inherently rooted in a sense of evolving history, and must, therefore reject Fukuyama's Folly. It's a jape. But if I were picking a point where Western leftist theory largely discarded this mode of analysis, I'd have picked 1968, not 2008. I don't mean "revolutionary praxis", I mean "actually-existing reality". If you, Bezos-shot, wished to assert any claim to justice, either by appeal to state process or to public support, you would assert it in terms of rights. As you yourself have said, rights discourse is the dominant milieu. It is this assertion that would move people to act against their interests (however infinitesimally, by e.g. giving you the time of the day) to act in yours. You might not succeed, of course, but nobody here ever claimed to already live in a utopia. In the meanwhile, most of the people one would be interested in pursuing a rights claim against can be credibly pursued on the basis of rights. Indeed these are the rights claims most are interested in* - e.g,. over groundwater, or more prosaically, over e.g. healthcare. Countries generally agreed to have a right to healthcare, and even effective delivery of that right, are still going to have instances and individual people where this right idiosyncratically or systematically fails (because, again, not a utopia) - but this does not invalidate the concept of it as a right, either materially (because it is actionable as a claim to whatever degree) or ideally. In scenarios these rights are contested, it would come down to shifting coalitions and institutional inertia and some idealism, rather than overwhelming manichean power (hence 1968). Re: #1, #2. I don't think your #1 and #2 are sufficient; I'm going to play annoying philosophical nitpicker and hold this strictly to the against/in-interests definition you've offered. By the same token, #1. His vast power compared to you also removes you from interactions with him, and #2. His vast wealth compared to you also removes any interest he might have from shooting you, Random Internet Person i.e., Bezos, our unfortunate stand-in for a generic 0.1%er, is paid by his massive power and wealth into not shooting you, relative to e.g., random family member (who is statistically much more likely to murder you). You have nothing to offer him. As with #2, incentives count as coercion. The flaw here. I think, is from playing fast and loose with the word 'coercion' - you're tacitly bundling assumptions of just and unjust acts in there anyway. It's assuming the conclusion re: Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence. * personal anecdote time: I grew up in one of those fun countries where monarchs retain sovereign immunity in a meaningful way, i.e., where the crown prince bludgeoned or shot and killed a number of people in various incidents across the 1970s and 1980s and then went on to be king, anyway (during which he continued assaulting and occasionally killing people in a variety of increasingly farcial incidents - various servants, staff, etc.). So the Bezoseque hypothetical is not all that fantastical! Nonetheless you may be unsurprised to learn that the politics of that country was still very exercised about rights, in a way that drives its political coalitions, rivalries, and the material aims they articulate and pursue - especially rights contested between people and groups of people likely to interact with each other, and not the especially scenario of being killed by the unruly monarch.
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Nov 10, 2020 22:28
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ronya posted:It's a jape. But if I were picking a point where Western leftist theory largely discarded this mode of analysis, I'd have picked 1968, not 2008. China has the largest educational system in the world and they lean heavily on teaching dialectical materialism. So, you should probably reframe your claim to "The capitalist West had abondoned this worldview." More to the point, I don't think "rights" is a very useful way to frame this discussion. Frankly, it's an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction, and at some point you have to address the reality that it doesn't really contribute anything of meaning. For example, should people be able to say whatever they want? Well, maybe. There are very hurtful or intimidating things that can be said, and I don't think something like Holocaust denial deserves any sort of protected legal status. More to the point, rights are repeatedly cast aside whenever they inconvenience the big ape with the club. Just look at the camps that exist in our own country, or guantanamo, or Mccarthyism, etc. Even viewing them as goals isn't entirely helpful. Why should someone be able to spit the n-word whenever they want? It doesn't help our society, it doesn't protect us from tyranny, it doesn't really accomplish anything useful.
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Nov 10, 2020 22:44
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Cpt_Obvious posted:China has the largest educational system in the world and they lean heavily on teaching dialectical materialism. So, you should probably reframe your claim to "The capitalist West had abondoned this worldview." Yes - I did say 'Western'. Indeed in many other countries the civil-rights framing sailed by. I'm not very up on my contemporary Chinese communist theory, but to my knowledge the theory does emphasize that ideals drive material behaviour (revolutionary ideals (革命理想高于天), rather than bourgeois ideals, but still non-material factors regardless). Its materialism is a little leaky. To be equally material, Western context: rights claims shape coalitional behaviour and mass politics in the large, and shape one's immediate social relations (to e.g. one's workplace) in an immediate fashion. Welfare states today are large. The reach of the regulatory capitalist state is long and govern virtually every sphere of economic interaction. People are strongly motivated not only toward rights claims for themselves and their immediate community but also how these rights are contested on the other side of their countries, amongst people they have never met and will likely never meet. Thread all of these together, and the way to reshape bureaucracies across a massive human superstructure is to tweak its mandate in how it should interact with individuals in their roles as citizens, or residents, or humans, or whatever. This doesn't answer "which rights claims" but hopefully addresses the why. It's also the case, at the same time, that in liberal democracies there are 5-15% of people who don't think that this is what politics should be really for or about, but they'll be perpetually outvoted. To them, it'll look like the status quo is a static big ape, even whilst to others the political sphere is clearly a responsive and rapidly-evolving arena. Ahem. Although usually I would put people unreconciled to the permissive society and people who missed some past irredentist boat in this category.
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Nov 10, 2020 23:18
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I've been going back through the beginning of Capital recently so I could probably write up a primer on the labor theory of value, or the "law of value" as Marx called it. I'd just do it as some definitions: Commodity: A commodity is something that satisfies a need or want and that's produced for exchange. It didn't matter to Marx whether it was a luxury or life necessity, whether it was immediately consumed or worn down through repeated use, etc. Commodities have both use-value and exchange value. Use-Value: A use-value is something's ability to satisfy a need or want. Lots of things have lots of different use-values, not just commodities. One use-value of air, for instance, is to be breathed in such that it keeps you alive. A hat's main use-value is that it keeps your head warm, although it can also enhance your appearance or signify your rank. Gold has a few different use-values, like looking pretty, conducting electricity, or filling cavities. An important point about use-values is that they're largely incommensurable; you can't freely trade them for each other. Obviously, both a slice of pizza and a hot dog might be used to sate your hunger, but you can't choose between sating your hunger with a sandwich and slaking your thirst with some water. No matter how much gold you have, you still need to breathe, etc. Exchange Value: A commodity's exchange value is how much of some other commodity it can trade for in the public market. So, a bottle of beer might trade for one hat, or two toothbrushes, or three eggs, or a fraction of an ounce of gold. Unlike use-values, exchange values are commensurable; so long as there's some kind of community of traders, you can just keep trading and trading and trading, turning one thing into another and into another. You're more likely to be trading them for a specific commodity that's come to be used as money (like gold or silver) than bartering them for each other, but in principle anything can be traded for anything else so long as supplies exist. Depending on how good you are at haggling, you might be able to hawk your hat for four eggs rather than three, but there are still basically stable ratios determining how many of commodity X trade for how many of commodity Y. An important thing to understand is that exchange value has nothing to do with use-value (except that something has to have some use-value, any at all, to be up for exchange in the first place; no one's going to buy your mud pie under most circumstances). That is to say, a sandwich - which keeps you alive, because you're a living being that needs to eat - is clearly infinitely more important to you than a lump of gold, which doesn't really do anything. And yet, you might need an entire wagon of sandwiches to get someone to part with their lump of gold. What gives? How are we figuring out how much of one thing should trade for another? Well... Value: Value, according to Marx (but also, like, Ricardo and other liberal economists, although Marx took it farther) is the average socially-necessary labor time required to produce something. To make that determination, we're assuming that all labor can be expressed as a function of generic, unskilled labor (an hour's work by a doctor or chef can't be replicated by an hour's work by someone with no training, but the doctor and chef themselves went through so-and-so hours of labor to acquire their skills, and so we can just treat their labor as regular labor with a combo multiplier) , and also bearing in mind what kind of labor is necessary in the context of a given level of social and scientific development (so it's easier to make bolts of cloth once we've invented power looms). Does this mean that a commodity's value decreases if, thanks to technological innovation, making that commodity gets easier? Yes! Does this mean that a commodity's value increases if, due to shortages, that commodity becomes rarer and harder to find or make? Also yes! Something's value changes with historical context. Imagine what you could get for your smartphone if you time traveled with it back into the '50s, for instance. Exchange value is downstream from value; the reason one thing trades for more than another thing is not because the first thing is more useful, but because the first thing is harder to make or get. You can just breathe in air wherever you are (for now...), which is why air "has no value" - it'd be ridiculous if someone tried to sell you a gulp of fresh air (for now...). But you do need to go to some trouble to make a sandwich, so it's not crazy for someone to try to sell you a sandwich. And gold is quite rare - if you want a gold nugget, you need to go to a load of trouble surveying, assaying, panning, mining, whatever; even if you were lucky enough to just trip over a gold nugget in your back yard, the average socially-necessary labor time required to produce a gold nugget, calculated across all human beings currently searching for gold, is still vast. So, putting it all together, Marx's law of value begins with the understanding that things trade for each other based on how hard they are to make or get, not based on what kind of good they'll do you.
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Nov 10, 2020 23:38
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ronya posted:It's a jape. But if I were picking a point where Western leftist theory largely discarded this mode of analysis, I'd have picked 1968, not 2008. I picked 2008 as as the date for Liberalism (in its guise as neoliberalism, I guess), not western leftist theory. I men, really its been failing since it superseded Social Democracy, or could even be regarded as the failure of Western Social Democracy but 2008 is really where I'd pin down as the point where neo-fascism (or whatever you want to call the current incarnation of the naked assertion of power by the aristocracy with ethnonationalist overtones) started to replace it across the West. ronya posted:I don't mean "revolutionary praxis", I mean "actually-existing reality". If you, Bezos-shot, wished to assert any claim to justice, either by appeal to state process or to public support, you would assert it in terms of rights. As you yourself have said, rights discourse is the dominant milieu. It is this assertion that would move people to act against their interests (however infinitesimally, by e.g. giving you the time of the day) to act in yours. Simply put: No, I wouldn't. I don't assert things in terms of rights because I don't think its a useful framework anymore. The left has no way to assert any rights. What it needs right now is power and leverage. Rights discourse has been the dominant mileu, sure, but increasing numbers of people see them as the joke they are. "Rights" was the Bourgeois revolutions' goal in the fight against monarchy. Socialism is a fight for equality. I know that, without leverage, I have no access to "justice", whatever that means in a system that asserts rights exist but without enforcement. It's not that I think you're wrong within your framework, but that I regard that framework itself as obsolete. ronya posted:Re: #1, #2. I don't think your #1 and #2 are sufficient; I'm going to play annoying philosophical nitpicker and hold this strictly to the against/in-interests definition you've offered. By the same token, #1 is identical to my first point: His power would prevent a would-be assailant from getting close. #2 is irrelevant to a discussion around someone's capacity for action. ronya posted:The flaw here. I think, is from playing fast and loose with the word 'coercion' - you're tacitly bundling assumptions of just and unjust acts in there anyway. It's assuming the conclusion re: Weberian monopoly on legitimate violence. I'm not making any claims about just or unjust acts, implicit or explicit, nor appealing to legitimizing framework for violence, whether monopolistic or otherwise. As I mentioned, I find these kinds of complex idealist systems to be old-fashioned and not particularly useful in examining the day-to-day of power and its effects. In all honesty, I find it a real stretch to even bring Weber into the picture because I've not made any reference to a "state", in any sense of the word. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Nov 10, 2020 |
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Nov 10, 2020 23:40
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But what is the comovement problem?
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Nov 10, 2020 23:50
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This is an interesting flip you've made. Declaring the older ideology, Liberalism, as the cool new kid while simultaneously deriding the younger ideology, Marxism, as old and unfashionable. Doubly interesting because with a hand wave you exclude the single largest concentration of humans, China, as "not real materialists" despite the contributions of Mao and others to the incredibly young Marxist-Leninist-Maoist school of thought. In fact, two of the largest and most influential societal upheavals of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese communist revolution, both were Marxist in scope, goal, and method. It also ignores the contributions of Marx and others to our own lives in the western world. The reason we use words like "working class" or "blue collar" is that despite the anti-materialist teachings we learn in school, there is something very tangible about the realization that the world is very different depending on wealth. It ignores the foundations of labor unions and contributions to Keynesian economics as well.
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Nov 11, 2020 00:04
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Crumbskull posted:But what is the comovement problem? Classical theories (incl Marx) of business cycles usually assert in some form that business cycles occur when investment increases at the expense of consumption or vice versa - for Marx the organic composition of capital keeps increasing from ever-increasing investment (accumulation) and corresponding decrease in consumption (immiseration) This is not what we observe in business cycles, which is that investment and consumption both increase at the same time during booms and decrease during busts - i.e. that they co-move together It's possible to explain this in various Marxist ways but it's always necessary to extend the theory
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Nov 11, 2020 00:09
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e: nah, I shouldn't take obvious bait
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Nov 11, 2020 00:15
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ronya posted:Classical theories (incl Marx) of business cycles usually assert in some form that business cycles occur when investment increases at the expense of consumption or vice versa - for Marx the organic composition of capital keeps increasing from ever-increasing investment (accumulation) and corresponding decrease in consumption (immiseration)
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Nov 11, 2020 00:30
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| # ? May 29, 2024 11:10 |
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ronya posted:Classical theories (incl Marx) of business cycles usually assert in some form that business cycles occur when investment increases at the expense of consumption or vice versa - for Marx the organic composition of capital keeps increasing from ever-increasing investment (accumulation) and corresponding decrease in consumption (immiseration) Interesting, thanks!
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Nov 11, 2020 00:32
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