(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
|
FirstnameLastname posted:also note it's the tendency for the mean rate to fall Yeah, it's like global warming. You gotta look at long-term macro trends, and it all looks like a whole bunch of whatever for a long time and then suddenly HOLY poo poo EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE WTF
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 11:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 12:53 |
|
|
i wanna chime in to echo another poster that service work is in fact productive labor per marx, and the kind of labor that isn't productive is like, financial bookkeeping and government administration. the math is the same for both and the only difference is whether a particular kind of work makes things to sell or defrays the logistical costs of selling things. a service is a commodity that is consumed as it's produced
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 16:25
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:i wanna chime in to echo another poster that service work is in fact productive labor per marx, and the kind of labor that isn't productive is like, financial bookkeeping and government administration. the math is the same for both and the only difference is whether a particular kind of work makes things to sell or defrays the logistical costs of selling things. a service is a commodity that is consumed as it's produced would generally be a sector ii a or ii b commodity i guess?
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 16:58
|
|
|
if the rate of profit doesnt tend to fall, then it tends to increase or stay the same. which doesnt even make sense to fullblooded capitalists, who are always diversifying their portfolios and making big bets. i cant even imagine a universe where the tendency of the rate of profit was to increase or stay the same. its like imagining a universe where electricity flows like molasses
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 21:35
|
|
|
Thank you dgcf for the great reply, it'll take me a bit to respond.Orange Devil posted:Yeah, it's like global warming. You gotta look at long-term macro trends, and it all looks like a whole bunch of whatever for a long time and then suddenly HOLY poo poo EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE WTF No it's not like global warming. This is a common sentiment on reddit too. As I and others have said, economics is not a hard science. Global warming is backed by hard science. Can you respond to the services are actually productive and fill a need? I've seen you address this problem well in other threads as an issue with the western defense industry. I see it as a major flaw in capitalism - regardless of relation to trpf.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 21:46
|
|
|
I'll start with capitalist support of TRPF. This is partly to address the claim that the west doesn't teach or use the theory. E&Y - one of the big 4, a capitalism giant models TRPF - at a corporate, industry, and to a lesser degree national levels. It's just called something else - the profit stress warning index. They differ from Marx in that they think things can be done to prevent a collapse - a major difference, but they still believe it's a very real risk at a corporate and industry level.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 22:14
|
|
|
Profitability. It's not profit, I'm very aware. But it's also not a cleanly agreed upon term when you leave theory and try to measure it. As an example, this chart is a measure of profitability - by a US institution biased towards defending capitalism. Nothing here is a lie, but unlike the Mila Kunis chart - it doesn't go down: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W273RE1A156NBEA And for the people that are gonna claim that's a corporate profit thing, it's not - here's a chart showing corporate profit, not profitability from the same source https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPATAX
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 22:26
|
|
|
Salt mines - a great example. I think we'll get to the root of our disagreement. I want to also clarify - I'm criticizing the empirical evidence used to support trpf. Not defending capitalism. I agree with your assessment about profitability in the industry declining steadily from the peak. But I'm going to use it as empirical proof that trpf is wrong. The decline is not new to this industry, but it not only still exists - it still fulfills the same purpose of maximizing utility (classical economic term) of salt in the market. How? The reason, at least according to western capitalism, and that I believe, is competition. The Pareto Efficency/Effect - at which point resources have been maximally efficiently allocated. High level, PE says that once efficiently allocated, resources can not be reallocate without harming an existing allocation. In case of the salt industry - there are enough companies today to saturate the market, so starting a new one would be a poor investment because it must take away from existing companies. PE isn't opposite of trpf. Without trpf, PE can't exist on the producer side. But it does provide an end - via a cap on how far competition can go, which means capitalism does not have to inevitably implode. The salt mines of today back this theory.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 23:32
|
|
|
gonna be honest, I don’t know what you’re asserting, what you disagree with, who you’ve read or are reading, why you’re asking, etc. not trying to dunk just don’t have any idea with how to engage with what you’re throwing down
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 23:39
|
|
|
First I'm rejecting the analogy to global warming. 2nd I'm rejecting the claim that western financial world doesn't use trpf or understand it. 3rd I'm angrily ranting at posters claiming I'm making up terms or don't understand profitability. The last post is the one with merit, I'm rebutting dead gays use of salt mines as empirical proof of trpf, by saying its empirical proof of PE.
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 23:47
|
|
|
keep posting, im rejecting
|
|
#
?
Feb 7, 2024 23:49
|
|
|
i miss croup
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:04
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:i wanna chime in to echo another poster that service work is in fact productive labor per marx, and the kind of labor that isn't productive is like, financial bookkeeping and government administration. the math is the same for both and the only difference is whether a particular kind of work makes things to sell or defrays the logistical costs of selling things. a service is a commodity that is consumed as it's produced In the case of government administration I think that's right: in that case the government is not selling a commodity (whether a thing or service, it doesn't matter), only funding operating costs out of revenues. In the case of financial bookkeeping, this is determined by the social relationship of production. Whether it's a cook or an accountant (cooking the books) is not important. Marx Vol4 Ch4 posted:The cook in the hotel produces a commodity for the person who as a capitalist has bought her labour—the hotel proprietor; the consumer of the mutton chops has to pay for her labour, and this labour replaces for the hotel proprietor (apart from profit) the fund out of which he continues to pay the cook. On the other hand if I buy the labour of a cook for her to cook meat, etc., for me, not to make use of it as labour in general but to enjoy it, to use it as that particular concrete kind of labour, then her labour is unproductive, in spite of the fact that this labour fixes itself in a material product and could just as well (in its result) be a vendible commodity, as it in fact is for the hotel proprietor. The great difference (the conceptual difference) however remains: the cook does not replace for me (the private person) the fund from which I pay her, because I buy her labour not as a value-creating element but purely for the sake of its use-value. Her labour as little replaces for me the fund with which I pay for it, that is, her wages, as, for example, the dinner I eat in the hotel in itself enables me to buy and eat the same dinner again a second time. This distinction however is also to be found between commodities. The commodity which the capitalist buys to replace his constant capital (for example, cotton material, if he is a cotton printer) replaces its value in the printed cotton. But if on the other hand he buys it in order to consume the cotton itself, then the commodity does not replace his outlay.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:09
|
|
|
im going to write volume 5
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:10
|
|
|
Eh, I'm hoping I get a rebuttal of PE. If yall wanna defend services as productive and then claim that's what Marx would do, that's on you.
BillsPhoenix has issued a correction as of 00:34 on Feb 8, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:20
|
|
|
tristeham posted:i miss croup
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:25
|
|
|
tristeham posted:i miss croup
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:25
|
|
|
Six Sigma is a services. Say a small bakery hires a 6 sigma consultant. The ideas aren't even applicable, yet this isn't uncommon in the US. Not only does this consultant not provide surplus value, or products - they meet daily with the bakers for 6sigma meetings. The 6sigma consultant did not buy and remove a commodity. Instead they removed labor, reducing what the bakery had produced, eliminating the commodity that way. Under capitalism this had become prolific, with 6 sigma consultants wasting labor in every industry. In communism, manufacturing consultants wouldn't be assigned to every industry.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 00:57
|
|
|
Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:In the case of government administration I think that's right: in that case the government is not selling a commodity (whether a thing or service, it doesn't matter), only funding operating costs out of revenues. I'm talking about this bit of v2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm#1.2 to paraphrase, marx distinguishes between various forms of labor that surround working with finished commodities as unproductive or productive based on whether they're involved in production or circulation. buying and selling is unproductive because you only have to do it because you happen to be living under capitalist relations of production. transport is productive because you've got to get your goods from where they're made to where they're consumed no matter what arcane rituals surround their allocation this is why i specified financial bookkeeping (and basically agree with you); if you're running a mine and paying someone to keep track of how much coal you've got, they're doing productive labor. if you pay someone else to monitor ore prices across the country and figure out where best to sell from month to month, that's unproductive labor (but the amount of money it saves you is probably proportionately the same as the amount of money the productive labor in the previous sentence make you). if you have the same nerd doing both, some of their bookkeeping is productive labor and some is unproductive. baristas, on the other hand, are generally productive laborers across the board
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 01:09
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:economics is not a hard science Yeah, and I think that is very much the point of the issues you are having here. I'll be level with you - I can't follow your reasoning. It does feel to me that you are trying to build an argument based on scientificism, but it is a poor discourse for this topic. "Proving" for/against a social abstract in the way you want is, like I posted before, something that we simply do not have the means to do. There's no supercollider for these disciplines. That doesn't mean that they are not scientific. For example, why bring up Pareto efficiency in this discussion? It's a concept entirely at odds with Marxism, since it is completely non-dialectical: a Pareto optimum is realistically impossible, because the conditions for such are ideal and immaterial - you need a perfectly competitive market without friction or failure/defect as a necessity. Aside from that, there are multiple Pareto equilibria that can result from achieving that efficiency. If someone holds all the relevant wealth of the world and everybody else is just surviving, that is a Pareto equilibrium - you can't make the rest of the world better without making that person lose position. And this is part of why you are getting dunked on: Pareto optimality is about economic efficiency with immaterial conditions. Nobody outside of theoretical microeconomics try to use Pareto, even a majority of mainstream macroeconomists think of it is as a fancy concept and nothing more - back at uni we did exercises where we could definitely find out a Pareto optimum in R with a beautifully constructed scenario much like a physics textbook problem, but loving lol trying to do that with an actual, real economy. That said, what does it have to do with TRPF at all? You are trying to equate Pareto efficiency with capital saturation? That has been shot already back then, there was a whole quagmire with people trying to also equate that with Smith's invisible hand, which is another entirely different concept and that is why it doesn't work Like, context is a fundamental factor here. Do you understand what I mean here? When you say "capitalism does support TRPF", you need to clarify your context because the concept of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is a Marxist category by definition -- neoclassical economics do not think it is a thing, Austrians reject it and other schools use their own terminology and framework to describe that problem in their perspective. In that sense, when I talk about profitability, I mean profitability according to Marxism, as a category of that discipline. Profitability as volume of profit is something out of business, finance and administration schools, it's another thing entirely. You want to use your own definitions and the way you think about those problems? Then show us your work. Elaborate everything you are talking about, develop your thought, demonstrate how and why you have those ideas: the only person that has some awareness of your reasoning process is you, nobody else can read your mind to figure out the perfect argument that is going in your head. Again, being charitable here: the TL;DR of why you are getting poo poo on is that you are coming up here, saying "this is wrong", getting repeatedly told why not, acting like a sanctimonious rear end about it and making a poor effort to explain anything you are raising (like you still haven't elaborated at all why you connected racism and sexism to TRPF) while also jumping around with random terminology and trains of thought that do not connect from the previous points, which somehow supposedly prove your point.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 01:28
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:2nd I'm rejecting the claim that western financial world doesn't use trpf or understand it. Western economists, for ideological reasons, tend to dispute it, but yeah, the financial world itself can certainly notice it from time to time. Deloitte's 2011 Shift Index posted:One of the central themes of the Shift Index, and the topic which generates the most questions each year, is that asset profitability (ROA) has shown a downward trend over the past four decades; a trend illustrating a steady decline in firm performance that not many have even noticed, much less investigated. Indeed, there continues to be a profound cognitive dissonance around this point: on one hand, we all acknowledge experiencing increasing stress as performance pressures mount; on the other hand, we seem unwilling to accept that all of our efforts continue to produce deteriorating results.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 01:46
|
|
|
scary ghost dog posted:if the rate of profit doesnt tend to fall, then it tends to increase or stay the same. which doesnt even make sense to fullblooded capitalists, who are always diversifying their portfolios and making big bets. i cant even imagine a universe where the tendency of the rate of profit was to increase or stay the same. its like imagining a universe where electricity flows like molasses could you rephrase that in the language of one piece please?
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 01:47
|
|
|
I appreciate the response, but attacking PE, or my terrible posting style, doesn't address the issue. There are still salt mines today. They fully fill the salt utility. Why? I was introduced to PE explicitly as the fundamental reason why capitalism is more efficient than communism. Boston Ice mining was the explicit example. This is not a theory I've come up with on my own.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:00
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:I appreciate the response, but attacking PE, or my terrible posting style, doesn't address the issue. we have not yet begun to attack
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:06
|
|
|
tristeham posted:i miss croup Sending up the Croup Batsignal 
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:10
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:I appreciate the response, but attacking PE, or my terrible posting style, doesn't address the issue. buddy, dead gay comedy forums gave you the most thorough, polite, and direct reply to your posts imaginable. read their post and try doing what they say.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:11
|
|
|
To clarify - finance classes at a ranked uni, but not Chicago. That doesn't mean it's right, but this wasn't bar talk. PE as an attack of communism is used in the theoretical perfect world (that admittedly didn't exist) to argue Capitalism will only put labor into Caital until the rate of return (suplus labor extracted in marx terms) is less than the rate of return placing that labor into another piece of capital. This was precursored by a deep dive into the Boston Ice Mining industry, an industry with essentially zero barriers to entry, thus making it extremely competive. The industry did not grow as large as resources possibly would allow, because there was no market demand for it. This introduced the concept of market limits. Next barriers to entry was introduced, as a reduction in competition, providing a limiting factor there. It's certainly not how the theory was introduced 100 years ago, but it has been used that way.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:16
|
|
|
now im gonna kick your rear end
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:20
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:I'm talking about this bit of v2: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch06.htm#1.2 Marx Vol2 Ch6 posted:Of course the dimensions assumed by the conversion of commodities in the hands of the capitalists cannot transform this labour — which does not create any value — into labour productive of value. Nor can the miracle of this transubstantiation be accomplished by a transposition, i.e., by the industrial capitalist making this "work of combustion" the exclusive business of third persons, who are paid by them, instead of performing it themselves. This third persons will of course not tender their labour-power to the capitalist out of sheer love for them. It is a matter of indifference to the rent collector of a real-estate owner or the messenger of a bank that their labour does not add one iota or tittle to the value of either the rent or the gold pieces carried to another bank by the bagful. I agree that hiring third persons (I am assuming Marx means directly, as artisans) would not transform bookkeeping into an activity that creates value, from the perspective of the capitalist paying the bill. It's a cost. However, if we bring in an accounting firm, I think the situation changes. From the perspective of the capitalist who owns the accounting firm, and is paying their accountants a wage, surplus value reappears. The principal of the firm takes it from the accountants.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:21
|
|
|
Cuttlefush posted:now im gonna kick your rear end There's no way you hadn't realized I'm from a western capitalist background. Dead Gay is too, he's just seen the light. We're never going to agree I think.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:23
|
|
|
Aeolius posted:Western economists, for ideological reasons, tend to dispute it, but yeah, the financial world itself can certainly notice it from time to time. It's me. I'm rejecting it, but I'm trying, and failing to do it on empirical arguments, not ideologies. I very much would like to be proven wrong, that trpf is inevitable. But I'm not buying the salt mine argument.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:29
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:There's no way you hadn't realized I'm from a western capitalist background. Dead Gay is too, he's just seen the light. no i knew you were retarded
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:31
|
|
|
On that we can agree 
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:35
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:It's me. I'm rejecting it, but I'm trying, and failing to do it on empirical arguments, not ideologies. My understanding was when scientists would test a hypothesis against the null (that the hypothesis wasn't true) and failed to find any evidence for the null hypothesis, that they usually considered whatever the hypothesis to be supported by the experiment. Perhaps if you are failing to see any empirical evidence against the Tendency For The Rate of Profit to Fall, you should consider more seriously if perhaps your self admitted ideologically based belief that it is false is itself, untrue? Edit: As it is, it's not something that is dependent on people believing in it. Far as I can tell it makes sense that in an entropic system, you can only have so much energy, and since the practicalities and efficiency of space travel seem to preclude expanding into space, the long-term rate of profit is never going to go above a certain amount, and with the depletion of fossil fuels, new lands to exploit, and with new technology requiring ever more labor to research or develop it, profit can only go down in comparison to before all of that. I suppose until the sun expands and destroys the earth that if you really burned poo poo down as much as possible (like with nuclear war) you could seesaw somewhere between absolute zero and the profit brought back in from going between the lowest point and the upper level of maximum exploitation of solar radiance, but a capitalist version of that would be much lower profit per person than a communism based one, and we are a while hell of a lot farther from that even compared to where we are now, not even getting into whatever other resources we can concentrate/expend that would further reduce profitability of various resources extraction industries. Capital could easily wear itself down so much that unless it's nuked every communist government to complete annihilation that even Cuba could run roughshod over a fully depleted USA in around 200 or so years. thechosenone has issued a correction as of 02:45 on Feb 8, 2024 |
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:36
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:To clarify - finance classes at a ranked uni, but not Chicago. That doesn't mean it's right, but this wasn't bar talk. hah you can't disprove by tendencies by example. this is like saying global warming doesn't exist because there was snow last thursday or entropy doesn't increase because you can make a refrigerator, it's not even wrong
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:41
|
|
|
If the empirical evidence is there, then yes! My issue, using salt mines specifically, is that trpf fails to address the lack of a collapse. Profitability has fallen. I brought up E&Y because even western economics has to account for the tendency. But Marx uses it as a building block for an inevitable collapse. Salt mining has not collapsed, and still produces the maximum utility of salt. The application of PE as I was taught does explain this lack of collapse. It must hurt existing salt mines to add a new competitor, because the market is at capacity. So there is no room for growth, but there is also no need for a collapse. So unfortunately for me, my ideology isn't being rejected, it's being reinforced.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:42
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:It's me. I'm rejecting it, but I'm trying, and failing to do it on empirical arguments, not ideologies. "Free of ideology" doesn't exist hth You're entire idea of trying to find empirical arguments is itself ideology
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:45
|
|
|
Pretty sure it’s like global warming.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:47
|
|
|
When you think about it (and I edited in a buncha navel gazing in my above post) there's a lot of similarities between the Tendency and entropic physics if you squint. Which means one could draw comparisons to capitalist ideologies that reject it to people who think perpetual motion machines exist lol.
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 12:53 |
|
|
Orange Devil posted:Pretty sure it’s like global warming. people can theoretically do something about global warming
|
|
#
?
Feb 8, 2024 02:48
|
|