[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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Moon Shrimp: Sep 7, 2013

namesake posted:

Marx correctly deconstructs the idea of the worker ever getting 'the full fruit of their labour' in the Critique of the Gotha Programme though. Replenishment of capital used in production has to come from the value they produce unless they're running the business down and there are social deductions to make like maintaining public goods or supporting non-value producing people (kids, elderly, sick, full time students, etc) so I don't see the argument of 'market conditions creating the need for competitive levels of investment' being different from that.

It's just an argument for why syndicalism and co-op market socialism or whatever is inherently flawed rather than capitalist exploitation frameworks.

The difference to my mind is that the market is insatiable; in order to compete well you must keep exploiting to the maximum amount allowable and reinvesting and growing. In a system like Marx describes in his critique this value that's set aside for maintaining things and supporting those who can't work is a set amount.

# ? May 24, 2021 21:25

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# ? May 24, 2024 20:20

indigi: Jul 20, 2004; ^{how can we not talk about family

when family's all that we got?}

V. Illych L. posted:

under free-market conditions there would be no capitalist profits either, it's a systematic inefficiency which a lot of contemporary economists just sort of write off as statistical noise or consider inexplicable/a product of genius/whatever

this seems like one of those "no true capitalism" shibboleths

# ? May 24, 2021 21:28

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

indigi posted:

this seems like one of those "no true capitalism" shibboleths

actually believing that free-market conditions are attainable (or desirable) is still a fairly fringe position among economists in my part of the world. as others have noted, marx's big contribution is moving away from this view and examining what the devil is actually going on with profit, which is genuinely a very difficult question to answer without going into a political critique of capitalism. it's much easier, and makes you much more employable, to not look too closely at profits.

# ? May 24, 2021 21:31

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

I feel like Marx's writing you just have to put up with a tendency to ramble. Like that section is good and making a good point but you could cut half the sentences and it would still work

# ? May 24, 2021 21:33

indigi: Jul 20, 2004; ^{how can we not talk about family

when family's all that we got?}

we need an update of Capital as a series of Mitch Hedberg style one-liners

# ? May 24, 2021 21:37

namesake: Jun 19, 2006; "When I was a girl, around 12 or 13, I had a fantasy that I'd grow up to marry Captain Scarlet, but he'd be busy fighting the Mysterons so I'd cuckold him with the sexiest people I could think of - Nigel Mansell, Pat Sharp and Mr. Blobby."

Moon Shrimp posted:

The difference to my mind is that the market is insatiable; in order to compete well you must keep exploiting to the maximum amount allowable and reinvesting and growing. In a system like Marx describes in his critique this value that's set aside for maintaining things and supporting those who can't work is a set amount.

The point is to rebut any moral argument about a system being bad because the worker doesn't receive the full value they produce and implying systemic theft that should be undone - there's almost no conceivable system where a worker receives the full value they produce. The issue with any economic system lies in how the value is removed from the worker and what it goes towards, and so market socialism falls into the same bracket as capitalism in that there is a systematic drive to increase the total value produced and increase the difference between that amount and the amount the worker personally gets to spend on themselves, even without a comparable class structure and exploitation created by private property etc.

# ? May 24, 2021 21:38

Moon Shrimp: Sep 7, 2013

namesake posted:

The point is to rebut any moral argument about a system being bad because the worker doesn't receive the full value they produce and implying systemic theft that should be undone - there's almost no conceivable system where a worker receives the full value they produce. The issue with any economic system lies in how the value is removed from the worker and what it goes towards, and so market socialism falls into the same bracket as capitalism in that there is a systematic drive to increase the total value produced and increase the difference between that amount and the amount the worker personally gets to spend on themselves, even without a comparable class structure and exploitation created by private property etc.

Ah ok, I see. I agree completely.

# ? May 24, 2021 21:43

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

StashAugustine posted:

I feel like Marx's writing you just have to put up with a tendency to ramble. Like that section is good and making a good point but you could cut half the sentences and it would still work

he's a high-powered german intellectual, this comes with the territory. if anything it's a miracle he's as legible as he is - reading guys like heidegger or hegel or adorno is like wading through dense fog

# ? May 24, 2021 21:43

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

V. Illych L. posted:

under free-market conditions there would be no capitalist profits either, it's a systematic inefficiency which a lot of contemporary economists just sort of write off as statistical noise or consider inexplicable/a product of genius/whatever

but yes, a market socialist economy would face the precise same pressures in terms of forced reinvestment etc. intra-firm exploitation would be replaced by inter-firm competition and squeezing and you'd almost certainly see the rapid emergence of a sort of psuedo-bourgeois class of strategically placed firms leveraging their size and power to basically extract a surplus from smaller/weaker ones

this society would still be more efficient in the sense that less money would be extracted from the productive economy, but you'd have a lot of the same structures in place as under capitalism. this is why i am not a market socialist.

what do you mean by free-market conditions here? certainly there would be no capitalist profits if there were no state enforcers to keep private property private, terrorize people into fulfilling contracts, etc but usually those are still allowed by people calling to reduce regulations or w/e

# ? May 24, 2021 21:47

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Moon Shrimp posted:

I don't want to pick on you, but the capitalist doesn't merely steal surplus value, they must also compete with other capitalists for a share of the market. This puts pressure on them to squeeze as much work as possible out of their employees and to develop more efficient technology and methods so they can lower their prices under their competitors. I'm not saying this just to be pedantic; it's important to realize that even if the workers owned the business themselves they would have to contend with these same pressures and hence exploit themselves (something that Richard Wolff doesn't talk about very often for some mysterious reason).

I don�t feel picked on at all but I�m not entirely sure what the source of the difference is. What you�ve posted doesn�t seem at odds with what I�ve posted except maybe in terms of emphasis/importance.

# ? May 24, 2021 21:55

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

by "free-market conditions" i mean the conditions taken as the null model by most neoclassical economists, including assumptions like perfect information, rational actors etc

# ? May 24, 2021 21:55

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

basically, under neoclassical theory, an ideal free-market economy would mean that all profits would have to be reinvested in the firm in order to keep market share. i should probably have written "ideal free-market conditions" but i thought i clarified that in the following post

# ? May 24, 2021 21:57

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

oh my "capitalist profits" are you pointing to like, specifically the money that a ceo keeps for nonproductive personal uses and channels into private yachts, jeffereys epstein, etc? yeah technically speaking competition should pauperize bosses as well as workers

# ? May 24, 2021 22:00

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

i am talking about profits as in money taken out of a firm by owners rather than reinvested in that firm

e. i'd appreciate it if you stated plainly what you're driving at here or if you're going to do one of those condescending faux-socratic posting procedures

# ? May 24, 2021 22:03

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

V. Illych L. posted:

i am talking about profits as in money taken out of a firm by owners rather than reinvested in that firm

e. i'd appreciate it if you stated plainly what you're driving at here or if you're going to do one of those condescending faux-socratic posting procedures

please believe me: i was asking because i didn't know what you meant by "profit" (i took it to mean all the surplus over c+v, not just the part of the surplus that gets taken out instead of reinvested), and now that i understand what you're referring to i agree. hence marx often referring to the "abstinence" of good capitalists and also of liberals praising bezos for operating amazon at a "loss" (read: just reinvesting all profit into amazon) for so many years

# ? May 24, 2021 22:07

Moon Shrimp: Sep 7, 2013

DirtyRobot posted:

I don�t feel picked on at all but I�m not entirely sure what the source of the difference is. What you�ve posted doesn�t seem at odds with what I�ve posted except maybe in terms of emphasis/importance.

They're not at odds, I was picking on you by annoyingly clarifying points rather than disagreeing.

# ? May 24, 2021 22:14

StashAugustine: Mar 24, 2013; Do not trust in hope- it will betray you! Only faith and hatred sustain.

V. Illych L. posted:

he's a high-powered german intellectual, this comes with the territory. if anything it's a miracle he's as legible as he is - reading guys like heidegger or hegel or adorno is like wading through dense fog

Oh yeah definitely, if nothing else him getting angry at people keeps it interesting. I wonder if it's just a difference in style with German language

# ? May 24, 2021 22:21

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Moon Shrimp posted:

They're not at odds, I was picking on you by annoyingly clarifying points rather than disagreeing.

ah okay. no worries

# ? May 24, 2021 22:32

indigi: Jul 20, 2004; ^{how can we not talk about family

when family's all that we got?}

linen is good when you need a coat and want to make it out of 20 yards of something

# ? May 24, 2021 22:56

Oolb: Nov 18, 2019

I am Jeff Bezos.

# ? May 25, 2021 00:44

DirtyRobot: Dec 15, 2003; it was a normally happy sunny day... but Dirty Robot was dirty

Oolb posted:

but doctor, I am Jeff Bezos!

# ? May 25, 2021 01:36

The Voice of Labor: Apr 8, 2020

StashAugustine posted:

I feel like Marx's writing you just have to put up with a tendency to ramble. Like that section is good and making a good point but you could cut half the sentences and it would still work

remember when you were a kid and you'd get, like, 3 or 4 video games a year? if the games were short, you'd be bummed out. same thing with books back in the day. they'd have to be long because there were so comparatively few of them

# ? May 25, 2021 01:43