Buck Turgidson posted:

Cheston posted:

Is there a good companion for Capital vol. 1? Like an online course or another book?

Cheston posted:

Is there a good companion for Capital vol. 1? Like an online course or another book?

SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

D&D 1972: Marx
AD&D: Lenin
BECMI: Stalin
3rd Edition: Kautsky
4th Edition: Mao
5th Edition: AOC

GURPS: Trotsky
Pathfinder: Deng

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

I'm referring to mode of production as well.

Over half the economy is state-owned. All the major industries are state-owned. This is not capitalism. To insist that any instance of capital accumulation into private hands (or worse, any accumulation of capital at all) means a country is capitalist, seems no different to me than to suppose that any public ownership of capital means a country is not capitalist. So Norway is not capitalist, for example. Nor does the presence of capitalists in China make China capitalist, unless the presence of royalty in Spain makes Spain a feudalism. There is a difference between an economy having capitalist elements in it, which China's certainly has, and a country "being Capitalist." To say "China is capitalist" is to suppose, among other things, that the Chinese state is under the control of the capitalist class and works in the interest of the capitalist class. It doesn't. "Managing capitalism" to build productive means via capitalistic processes doesn't make China capitalist any more than paying rent to a landlord makes America a feudalism. The principal aspect of the economy is not capitalist, so China is not capitalist.

That China has become the workshop of the world and is outcompeting the West on the West's own terms doesn't make them capitalist, either. Socialist economies are superior to capitalist economies because they can take the monopolies that capitalism necessarily creates, and utilize their economies of scale without pulling rents out of the rest of the economy as capitalists are incentivized to do. The idea of Dengism - as I understand it, anyway - is to build productive forces via both domestic accumulation of capital into private hands (confiscated once monopoly is achieved), and turning Western imperialism against itself by happily accepting all the capital the West exports their way only to seize it at the state's convenience.

I think the thing that confuses people - including myself - about China the most, is not being able to understand how Dengism ever worked. Like I get the principle of it, but I don't understand how China managed to do it without the state falling under the control of the capitalist class. Especially when you consider that capitalist actors chief among them the US were working hard to make sure that happened and yet it somehow... just didn't. It's especially especially perplexing since the USSR did in some ways a very similar thing right around the same time and immediately self-owned in spectacular fashion. So I think there is a tendency to suppose that China probably is capitalist (in the sense that the CPC is captured by the capitalist class) and they're just really good at hiding it.

I'd be interested to hear opinions on if China was capitalist at some point in the recent past. I don't actually know. Would it be accurate to say that the principal aspect of the economy in maybe the 80s and 90s, was capitalist? It seems like it would have had to be at some point, but perhaps not - I don't know.

quote:

By property relations, I mean the relationships among the direct producers, among the class of exploiters (if any exists), and between the exploiters and producers, which specify and determine the regular and systematic access of the individual economic actors (or families) to the means of production and to the economic product,

gradenko_2000 posted:

Woodpeckers work on the excavation of wood. The bills are their tools. Striking their sharp-nosed hammers with a signature mechanical sound, they can bore mouth-sized holes into tree trunks, like shafts for mining ants and termites, beetles and their grubs. Because the tools are at one with the bodies of the birds, they cannot be concentrated. No master woodpecker can collect bills and pile them up on a central site and tell the other members of the population, their faces strangely flat, to submit to his command and get access to the tools they need to break through the bark or refuse and starve in freedom: for this reason, if for no other, property relations among woodpeckers are impossible. Their equipment for metabolism cannot be distributed between owners and non-owners, nor can it be collectively controlled by a commune.

This is the essence of ‘property relations’: a matrix of positions for the members of the species vis-à-vis the means of production. Or, in the more elaborate definition given by Brenner:

– a set of rules, as it were, for how humans relate to their equivalents of bills and beetles.1 Now humans create, of course, toolboxes infinitely larger and more varied than their own bodily organs. ‘Nature,’ Marx says, is their ‘original tool house,’ out of which they assemble advanced implements for spinning, boring, grinding, pressing, cutting, throwing, pumping and any number of other activities. Humans alone can fan out over the earth as a whole, construct instruments out of whatever useful material they encounter and annex them to their bodies: make the earth an ‘inorganic body,’ in Marx’s words – a sort of prosthetic extension of themselves.2 No other species can be so flexible, so universal, so omnivorous in relation to the rest of nature – but for the very same reason, no other species can have its metabolism organised through such sharp internal divisions.3 If a broad set of extra-somatic tools is a distinctive feature of Homo sapiens sapiens, it is also the point where that species ceases to be a unity. Precisely because the bills required for breaking through the bark of matter may draw upon all forces of nature and open the wide earth for appropriation, some humans can be cut off. A material, a machine, a prime mover can become private property. The individual might need them like she needs her own lungs, but they are outside of her body, caught by others in a net, versatile and off-limits, and so she may have no choice but to go via a master to access them: she is snared in property relations.

Before that capture happens, human beings are a bit like woodpeckers, in the sense that they are united with their means of production – not physically, but socially. On the land, in the household and the guild, farmers and artisans possess their own tools, the individual producer relating to the earth as ‘the workshop of his forces, and the domain of his will,’ still at one with the means ‘like the snail with his shell’.4 Capitalist property relations begin the moment that bond is broken. Deprived of what they need for their subsistence, ex-farmers and ex-artisans no longer own anything but a capacity to perform labour, or labour power, naked and unequipped, a mere potential screaming for tools with which to work. On the opposite side of the fence, they confront a class monopolising those same means of production as private assets. A historical divorce has occurred, in which producers and means have been separated from each other.

But the distance cannot be allowed to last. If people who own nothing but their own labour power never got in contact with the means of production, they would be unable to work and feed themselves: ‘No boots can be made without leather.’5 If, on the other hand, the land, the frames, the piles of leather remained untouched by the fingers and hands of working people, nothing would come out of them, and they would be of no worth to their proprietors. While the separation is the unshakable foundation for capitalist property relations, it has to be overcome, momentarily but continuously, for society to reproduce itself: producers and means must be reunited. Now the capacity of a living person to perform labour – her ability to exert muscles and mind, expend energy, operate her body parts during hours of concentration and strain – is quite a different thing from a pound of leather or a mule or a wheel; indeed, these are incommensurable entities. Hence their reunification can come about only via the mediation of a universal equivalent against which anything can be exchanged and in whose reactor all qualitative characters dissolve: what we know as money.

The worker needs money too. She sells the right to dispose of her sole property – her labour power – for specified periods of time, in return for a quantum of the universal equivalent – the wage – with which she can purchase the goods needed for her metabolism. Both at the end and at the beginning of the cycle, she possesses commodities: first her labour power, then a sack of potatoes and a fresh set of cutlery and a dingy apartment covered for another two weeks. The formula she follows is Commodity – Money – Commodity, or C – M – C for short.6 The one C is distinguished from the other by its qualities, or its use-value: bare labour power is of no utility to its owner, but food and utensils and shelter are essential objects of consumption. But now consider an agent who starts off with money. Venturing out on the market, it is he who purchases labour power and means of production – say, a hundred workers ready to weave and be paid for two weeks at a time, a factory building, a steam engine, power looms, warp and weft – and thereby affect the reunion like an indispensable matchmaker. The result is a fine calico, which he sells on the market. For this he gets money. The cycle has come to a first end, in accordance with an opposite formula: M – C – M, beginning with money and ending with money, the commodity phase a mere passage to the ultimate goal.

But why change money for money? One sum of money cannot be distinguished from another in quality, only in quantity. The sole point of the exercise is the difference between the amount of money thrown into circulation and the amount yielded at its end – to pocket an increment in exchange-value, or, simply put, to make more money. The full formula is thus M – C – M´, the M with a prime signifying that the sold commodities command higher exchange-value than the ingredients acquired to produce them. Our agent has garnered a profit. That is the whole purpose of the procedure, and given the chasm between labour power and means of production as commodities on a market, there can be no other. The two are brought back together in the hands of the capitalist, inserting himself as a permanent ‘middle-man’ or screen between the partners, purchasing them with the single aim – he has spent money, after all – of reaping a monetary gain.7 In a society that has undergone the historical divorce, capital is the necessary medium for arranging a productive rendezvous between incommensurable entities that can never be discontinued nor fully completed. The interpolation must never cease.

‘I conceive that a capitalist will not risk his money in business without he covers a profit,’ said cotton manufacturer G. A. Lee from Manchester to a Parliamentary commission in 1816.8 He would never do so if he expected to make a loss. If the business forecast told him he would get back 95 percent of his initial outlay, the capitalist would be wise to keep the money in his bank account; if it said he would stand a good chance of getting 100 percent of the expenses covered but no more, he would still be prudent to abstain from the investment. The effort would be pointless. One might perhaps imagine a capitalist who repeatedly banks on his own losses, but this person would be a mad deviant guaranteeing his own disappearance; similarly, one could visualise a capitalist who keeps placing his assets in ventures that give him zero in return but no losses – perhaps this is a philanthropic gentleman who appreciates the outlets for what they actually do. He would certainly not be a very successful capitalist, rather running the risk of being overtaken by others who have adopted the full formula: anything else than the profit motive requires sacrificial dispositions on his part. The sole rational goal for him as a capitalist is profit. Logically and historically, the quest for it is inscribed into capitalist property relations as their one ‘driving fire’.9

So the capitalist cares naught for the material qualities of his goods: ‘He does not manufacture boots for their own sake,’ nor cutlery to put on his own table, nor houses to accommodate his children, but items to be sold to others. But he cannot sell the idea of boots or cutlery or houses. For his goods to attract demand, they must be such articles, endowed with a minimal use-value of allowing for walk on uneven terrain, scooping up food or shielding against cold and rain. To earn his profit, the industrial capitalist must take a detour through nature, setting up some version of ‘the metabolic interaction [Stoffwechsel] between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence’ within his precincts. Here the materials of nature are appropriated not for their own concrete comforts, but for the sole purpose of embodying exchange-value: ‘Use-values are produced by capitalists only because and in so far as they form the material substratum of exchange-value, are the bearers of exchange-value.’10

...

Capital is quantitative in nature: thus it recognises no end point. It reconverts the profit from the first circuit into more labour power and means of production for the next, moving on relentlessly through reinvestment, ‘expanded reproduction’ or simply accumulation of capital; it resumes production on a larger scale, and on a larger scale again, so that the Stoffwechsel ‘changes into a spiral’.16 For every consecutive circuit, capital will ceteris paribus appropriate greater chunks of nature.

...

If output were to be fixed, the profit from the first cycle could not be reinvested in additional machinery and workers in the next: it would have to be consumed, devalued or both. The only way for capital to throw it back into production and keep accumulating at the same rate of profit would be to pay workers less, fire some of them while output stays the same, avoid taxes or obtain subsidies and other services from the state – measures whose potentials would quickly be exhausted. ‘When growth is impossible, further accumulation of profits by capital can only have the effect of continuous transfer of income from wages to income from property,’ or, ‘in other words, if profits cannot be made by growing the pie, it is to be done by cutting the rest in smaller slices.’18 That strategy is doomed to hit a wall. Rates of exploitation cannot rise indefinitely; at some point, the rate of profit would inevitably slide down towards zero, and since it is the lure of profit that motivates investment, capitalists would simply cease operations and refuse to set production in motion – or move their capital to someplace else, where the constraint on output does not apply. Then there is also the hypothetical possibility that GDP could grow while throughput stays flat or falls thanks to a declining material intensity of production, a decoupling of value and nature.

Whence, then, does profit come? Hidden within the production phase – C…P…C´ – there must be some source of increase in exchange-value, something with the curious ability to create more such value than it costs: what is it? The Marxian answer to this riddle is, of course, labour power. If it takes four hours for a power loom weaver to produce cloth whose exchange-value equals her wage, she might well go on working for another four or six or eight hours, even though her reproduction – potatoes, cutlery, rent – has already been secured. If I buy a bicycle, the cost of it bears no relation to the distance I can go with it; within its physical capacities, I can spin the pedals for a time entirely unrelated to the price.19 A similar blessing is bestowed upon the capitalist, with the critical difference that the commodity of labour power does not have a particular use-value like the bike (transportation from A to B) but the general use-value of generating fresh exchange-value: once she has worked for the four hours required to cover her wage, the operative can be spun to continue manufacturing cloth, or whatever other commodity is being produced, for sale on the market. During the remainder of the day, she produces surplus-value, which becomes profit when related to the invested capital as a whole, so that capital accumulation is in fact the production of surplus-value: ABC of Marxism, and still the most plausible account around. After all, labour is the activity that sets anthropogenic products apart from those of raw nature; if profit had any other source, ‘money would be growing magically on trees’ and capitalists could just walk around picking it like a golden fruit.

Thus capitalist property relations give rise to 1) the profit, 2) the compulsion to chase it incessantly, 3) the necessity of growing material throughput – all stemming from the fundamental intra-species fracture. Capital is the expanding gas forming in the cracks and hollows between the better part of humanity and the rest of nature. By its very definition, it is the circulatory, spiral-like process of valorisation or self-expanding value; but it is also – by its very definition – the relation between capitalists and workers, for capital exists ‘only by sucking in living labour as its soul, vampire-like’; but if labour is its soul, extra-human nature is its utterly corporeal body. In the tracks of self-expansion, capital must deposit a ‘mass of commodities’ that is ‘constantly growing,’ a mountain range of transformed matter rising through the social ridges.21

Azathoth posted:

I miss Zorak

croup coughfield posted:

ferrinus is a voight-kampff test for mods and you're failing

Ferrinus posted:

did WE have an argument at any point? like involving your own beliefs about anything?

quote:

When reading predictions on the collapse of dollar hegemony, it can be hard to grasp what it means in material terms:

The USD is going to begin to sink to its true value.

But what is its “true value”? 🧵

Despite only accounting for ~10% of global trade, 85% of global trade settlements are made in USD. This creates a continuous demand for USD above and beyond what would otherwise exist. In this way, the value of the dollar is massively propped up relative to other currencies.


Countries must hold a large portion of their foreign reserves in USD because up until recently, the dollar was required to purchase crude oil on the international market, leading to the emergence of the petrodollar.


This requirement to pay for crude with USD is maintained primarily through a simple agreement: in exchange for depositing their dollars back into banks on Wall St and Lombard St, OPEC states are defended militarily by the US.

This recycling of petrodollars back into US banks is a key mechanism behind why the US has been able to finance federal deficit spending for decades with no reduction in purchasing power of the dollar. But the foundation of this arrangement is beginning to show cracks.

The cracks in dollar hegemony are materializing in seemingly mundane ways. Those wanting to buy Russian energy now must pay in Russian rubles. China, through its BRI, is structuring loans in Chinese yuan. It may seem absurd to learn that the world didn’t already operate like this

The ultimate irony is that this loss of hegemony was precipitated by the US itself earlier this year when they illegally seized Russia’s dollar reserves, conclusively demonstrating to the rest of the world that the sovereignty of reserves held in USD is an illusion.


So if the USD is indeed losing value, why is the Euro falling against the USD?


The Euro is currently falling as a result of their subservience to the US in its proxy war with Russia. EU exports are becoming more expensive due to skyrocketing energy costs and govts around the world are rebalancing foreign reserves in anticipation of impending EU turmoil.


However, increased demand for rubles, due mostly to Russia’s new insistence on being paid for gas in its own currency, demonstrates that the buoyancy provided to the USD by forcing the EU’s head under water is likely short lived.


What then is the “true” value of the USD? What portion of current demand for dollars is “real”?

Some estimates believe this could be as little as 30% of its current value. If so, the cost of imports would more than triple (eg. a $30k imported vehicle would now cost 100k).

With demand for USD decreasing as foreign reserves shift to more diverse baskets of currencies, the dollar will depreciate. This will start gradually but can easily snowball, especially if triggered by a disruption to the continuity of the US government.

A selloff will rapidly flood forex markets with USD and crash its price. The Fed may intervene to prevent the entirety of the excess demand from evaporating, but ultimately an equilibrium price will be reached that is founded on real demand for US exports.



The lowered USD may temporarily make US exports more attractive, HOWEVER, a large number of US exports rely heavily on having inputs of cheap raw materials and labor. And as we already saw, the cost of these imported inputs will dramatically increase as the dollar value falls.

The proxy war in Ukraine was an attempt by the US to use the EU’s economy as a desperate buttress against dollar hegemony erosion. But ironically, this move will only serve to precipitate a more dramatic collapse, as the US increasingly isolates itself through sanctions.

Conversely, the sanctions are also directly fostering the strengthening of trade between countries outside the western hegemonic structure.




The true value of currencies in a post-USD hegemony global economy will be determined by the demand for goods/services they produce.

So how much will a unit of western labor be valued relative to global south labor once the largest mechanism of imperialist exploitation crumbles?

To afford a washing machine, the average Sri Lankan needs to labor for 4 months. It takes the average person in the US half a week.

The US’s new equilibrium point will either involve socialism or it will involve a historic collapse of living standards. There is no third option.

After hundreds of years marked by colonialism and imperialism, we are entering an age in which the unique contributions of individual countries to the global economic web will finally be reflected in their currencies, leading to more just stores of value.

The US’s military protection of OPEC countries of course comes with an important caveat: do NOT under any circumstances try to create an alternative to the petrodollar!

Danann posted:

dedollarization is going to make for some interesting times shame about all the fascists though

In Training posted:

NY has diamond mines?

StashAugustine posted:

ive been thinking about the dreaded culture war (specifically wrt abortion) and wanted to get some orthodox marxism injected into this idea: is it correct to view the more socially reactionary faction of the bourgeois as people who view their social class as a proxy for their economic position? ie """woke capital""" (i hope ive put enough scare quotes on that) views the issue as defusing and redirecting social unrest while the reactionaries think of an attack on social order as a direct attack on economic order? i assume smarter people have already written about this

AnimeIsTrash posted:

This is something I have been wondering about too. It just seems like a "fight" between 2 bourgeoisie in which one lost. I guess for a more materialistic explanation for abortion it's just they were concerned with white birthrates?

Danann posted:

https://twitter.com/bidetmarxman/status/1547237104593145856

dedollarization is going to make for some interesting times shame about all the fascists though

Ferrinus posted:

it's better to think of capitalism as a bunch of stupid and autonomous feedback mechanisms butting heads with each other rather than being the execution of any kind of master plan. banning abortion has both benefits and drawbacks, and those accrue to different sectors of capital, and which sector gets its way at a given historical moment is kind of random

The Voice of Labor posted:

the smarter and better educated labor is, the less likely it is to suffer capital's bullshit

MSDOS KAPITAL posted:

lmao

or they'll just come up with more sophisticated arguments to convince themselves and each other that capital's bullshit is good, actually