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(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)
 
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Halser
Aug 24, 2016
I'm not really learned enough to criticize it myself, it's why I wanted to bring it here.

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The Voice of Labor
Apr 8, 2020

unless you're trolling or totally brain wormed, don't discount your intuitions. it's platonic point and a necessity for socialism and democracy that having ethics and being able to reason are things everyone can do. if something seems wrong to you, or right, there's probably a good reason you think that way even if you don't have the scrabble words to express it or the althuser citations to back it up

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


To summarize the idea in a very practical way: unequal exchange (as conceived by Arrighi) can be understood with someone like myself who works remote for foreign companies to earn in USD. I get paid a better wage than local for the same (or equivalent) work, but someone working there earns much more than me for the same work.

Cockshott seems to glitch his brain when considering productivity differentials and forgets entirely about composition of capital (technology, machinery, methodologies) and labor composition (education, savoir-faire, tacit professional knowledge, etc) not being the ultimate determinant factor of wages - it is organized class action. It was very well into the industrial revolution that chartists and the labor movement began to fight back in England and actually gain the first wage increases, because almost none of the gains of scale and productivity were being shared with workers. Nowadays, a skilled worker who has a relevant trade in the main Western economies earns almost always above the productivity differential factor in comparison to someone in the periphery, but the productivity differential itself isn't enough to make for the wage differences.

Incidentally, that plays a strong factor into neoliberalism: unequal exchange makes foreign labor so cheap that takes out the inherent advantage of the productivity differential (being able to produce more, better and lots more adjectives here) by cratering labor costs.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Halser posted:

I'm not really learned enough to criticize it myself, it's why I wanted to bring it here.

and you are totally awesome for doing so and please do it anytime

(I just posted before writing the rest and elaborating, lol)

Aeolius
Jul 16, 2003

Simon Templeman Fanclub
Cockshott is full of poo poo. He's correct about the idea being "pre-Marxist" only if we're describing it as the source of profits, period, which absolutely no loving person is. It's not the origin of profits, but it is an objective trait of the way trade is conducted in a global economy structured by imperialism. Marx's illustration that profit arises on the basis of equal exchange is not an argument that no one ever takes advantage of less-powerful actors anymore.

Someone was probably also mugged within a ten-mile radius of Cockshott within the last few years, too. "Ridiculous!" he cries. "That's not where profit comes from!"

Cockshott posted:

If there's no unequal exchange, why are Indian wages so much lower than those in the US? Surely unequal exchange is the only explanation?

No, the cause is the lower development of the forces of production.

He's swinging against straw. Unequal exchange isn't an independent causal variable; it's a phrase to describe a less-obvious outcome of trade between partners with hugely unequal endowments of productive factor — and we can objectively measure it, and many people have undertaken to do so. The whole reason the neoliberal order has been so adamant about proponing "free trade" arrangements between the core and periphery is that it is to the advange of the core.

Hell, he even notices the phenomenon himself in his steel example: one hour of US labor would trade for about six hours of Indian labor, he says. That's unequal exchange, the thing he describes as bunk. He just loving touched it and then denied it's there, because he's laser focused on this category error where he thinks people are propounding it as a theory of profits. He's correct on the point that Indian steel can't command a higher price just because there's more (non-necessary) labor-time embodied in it, but that's not actually a point under contention.

What we're really looking at here are relative movements in value. It occurs as part of the very process that brings about a general rate of profit, and also describes why you tend not to see, in practice, rates of profit varying in exact proportion organic composition of capital.

In the real world, a trade scenario in which one hour of X's labor commands two hours of Y's labor will end up disproportionately enriching X's real flesh-and-blood population over Y's. Not to say that Y has no incentive to trade — we're talking, remember, about a more advanced nation trading with a less-advanced one. Imports from X will probably contain goods not even produced by Y, or much improved ones. It's not that the US is literally trading steel for steel with India.

The state of this exchange also can tell you interesting things about the relative positions of the two trading partners. Here's an example:

quote:

The results we obtained for the last four decades (from 1978 to 2018) highlight the existence of an unequal exchange between the United States and China, at the expense of the latter and in favor of the former. The respective changes in labor contents integrated in the traded goods were very different in the two countries. For China, we see a strong rise until the middle of the 2000s, then an abrupt fall, and finally a stabilization in the early 2010s, but, for the United States, we see a much more moderate evolution of steady increases. We then find that between 1978 and 2018, on average, one hour of work in the United States was exchanged for almost forty hours of Chinese work. However, from the middle of the 1990s—a period of deep reforms in China, especially in fiscal and budgetary matters—we observed a very marked decrease in unequal exchange, without it completely disappearing. In 2018, 6.4 hours of Chinese labor were still exchanged for 1 hour of U.S. labor. Could the erosion of this U.S. trade advantage then explain the outbreak of its trade war against China?

Where at the beginning of reform and opening up, we got more than 40 hours of Chinese labor for one hour of US labor (a whole drat workweek!); now that number is down to 6.4 — maybe lower, since 2018. This actually speaks to a remarkable pace of overall technical improvement in Chinese industry.

To sum it up, we're speaking of an unequal, real outcome inscribed in the formally "equal" arrangement of free trade. Economists are so high on the Ricardian fable of comparative advantage that this one eludes them.

Interestingly, it's not even the only such issue they miss. There's a completely separate phenomenon sometimes called "circular and cumulative causation," wherein differing returns to scale also completely upend comparative advantage, which tends to assume constant returns to scale. We know from subsequent scholarship that increasing returns to scale is the overwhelming norm of capitalist industry (I need to dig it up but I've seen studies suggesting that around 80% of firms see this outcome). In an industrial world leveraging economies of scale, trade between increasing returns to scale and decreasing returns to scale (such as a principally agrarian economy, or similar cases where land is the limiting factor of production), the former gets a progressively better and better deal, and the latter gets a progressively worse deal. Nicholas Kaldor wrote a bunch on this stuff, for what it's worth.

(As an aside, years ago I was arguing in D&D about how I was going through all these college texts looking for signs that anyone is actually including these details, but coming up empty. My characteristically smug interlocutor suggested that maybe I should be checking the graduate-level materials, without recognizing which names I was dropping — Varian, MWG, Ljungqvist & Sargent, Romer, et al.)

Anyway, if you want to understand UE, don't bother with Cockshott. My go-to recommendation is Zak Cope's "Divided World, Divided Class," though I am sure in the last decade and change there may have been better books on it (in particular, I haven't read Cope's more recent "The Wealth of (Some) Nations"). Still, I tend to point to that one first because it was the one that really made it click for me, because he was the first person I've seen actually crunch some numbers and attempt an empirical estimate of the scale of it for a given year.

Or:

Aeolius posted:

if you're looking for content from an active marxist economist, i'd recommend michael roberts before cockshott; he's got that same "he'll answer if you ask him stuff" thing going, but also he's better in a bunch of important ways, including "understands the TSSI," "understands unequal exchange," "doesn't post transphobic screeds"

Aeolius has issued a correction as of 22:09 on Feb 17, 2024

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous
Shott through the Cock, and you're to blame
Pauly, you give Marx a bad name

Halser
Aug 24, 2016

The Voice of Labor posted:

unless you're trolling or totally brain wormed, don't discount your intuitions. it's platonic point and a necessity for socialism and democracy that having ethics and being able to reason are things everyone can do. if something seems wrong to you, or right, there's probably a good reason you think that way even if you don't have the scrabble words to express it or the althuser citations to back it up

I'm not really discounting my intuitions, just recognizing that I don't currently have the knowledge to analyze what he's saying point by point and in the overall idea in a way that's convincing enough to myself.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

To summarize the idea in a very practical way: unequal exchange (as conceived by Arrighi) can be understood with someone like myself who works remote for foreign companies to earn in USD. I get paid a better wage than local for the same (or equivalent) work, but someone working there earns much more than me for the same work.

Cockshott seems to glitch his brain when considering productivity differentials and forgets entirely about composition of capital (technology, machinery, methodologies) and labor composition (education, savoir-faire, tacit professional knowledge, etc) not being the ultimate determinant factor of wages - it is organized class action. It was very well into the industrial revolution that chartists and the labor movement began to fight back in England and actually gain the first wage increases, because almost none of the gains of scale and productivity were being shared with workers. Nowadays, a skilled worker who has a relevant trade in the main Western economies earns almost always above the productivity differential factor in comparison to someone in the periphery, but the productivity differential itself isn't enough to make for the wage differences.

Incidentally, that plays a strong factor into neoliberalism: unequal exchange makes foreign labor so cheap that takes out the inherent advantage of the productivity differential (being able to produce more, better and lots more adjectives here) by cratering labor costs.


Aeolius posted:

good post

thanks a lot for the explanations and the recommendations. It's hard for me to get in the mood to spend hours reading, but spotting this bit while watching his videos got me quite curious about this topic in particular.

also I had no idea about the transphobic stuff lol

Halser has issued a correction as of 20:35 on Feb 17, 2024

my dad
Oct 17, 2012

this shall be humorous
As a sidenote, I'm reasonably sure Serbia still has the longest average working hours in Europe, and absolutely poo poo pay, and lemme tell you from experience that those hours sure as gently caress aren't unproductive. (although you will absolutely hear this about us and the Greeks)

Tsitsikovas
Aug 2, 2023

Comrade Koba posted:

i prefer parenti efficiency tbh

Just listened to all his Real History tapes, or at least all that I could find online (TUC Radio is the best source ive found, so far), which doesn't seem like all of them. Nevertheless, good stuff.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Aeolius posted:

Cockshott is full of poo poo -- great post follows

Exemplary Marxist posting, ty

e: both in attitude and content, big karl energy

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


my dad posted:

Shott through the Cock, and you're to blame
Pauly, you give Marx a bad name

took me a while to figure out this one but goddamn lmao

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003

Aeolius posted:

Marx's illustration that profit arises on the basis of equal exchange is not an argument that no one ever takes advantage of less-powerful actors anymore.

Marx assumes equal exchange and equal supply/demand a priori for the purpose of examining the process of capitalism under laboratory conditions, because he's doing science.

Cockshott can't be disputing that, can he?

Aeolius
Jul 16, 2003

Simon Templeman Fanclub

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

Marx assumes equal exchange and equal supply/demand a priori for the purpose of examining the process of capitalism under laboratory conditions, because he's doing science.

Cockshott can't be disputing that, can he?

I cannot claim to know PC's mind; I'd like to think he knows better and is just making a mistake amid his enthusiasm to box a shadow. But I've also seen dumber turns from smarter people, so, who's to say?

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


The thing is that while Capital established unequal exchange between labor and capital in the sphere of production, commerce is... well, because the unequal exchange in capitalism is already set in production, that is embedded in commerce, so there's implicit inequality even though there's formal equality. It's... well, not finished.

And thus we get into one of those esoteric places of Marxism. Since Marx would have needed to finish the last book of Capital to then move with a full framework into international commerce, the man would have needed maybe like 20 more years of life to elaborate his word on that. It is a done deal when looking at capitalist production, sure thing, but as Engels himself adds while editing the last volume of Capital, there have been lots of changes both validating the ideas while also requiring development of further theory. Trade and international commerce was an important deal.

...Which brings our absolutely golden man Lenin to the scene, as imperialism neatly delivers unequal exchange in international commerce. IMHO to the best of my knowledge that was basically the big answer to it -- if you agree with the theory on imperialism, unequal exchange is just "well yeah ofc", you don't need to have lots of formalism to agree with it. A bunch of decades later Arrighi basically details those trade relations with more modern economic theory into one neat combined effort.

The problem is that some Marxist professors do not accept unequal exchange as laid by Arrighi because, AFAIK, pure eurocom dogmatism. Unequal exchange makes things harder in terms of basic theory, because there's no more neat general method to apply to all cases and you need to get dialectical. Ironically, those guys end up being anti-Marxist doing so, lmao

Halser
Aug 24, 2016

Aeolius posted:

I cannot claim to know PC's mind; I'd like to think he knows better and is just making a mistake amid his enthusiasm to box a shadow. But I've also seen dumber turns from smarter people, so, who's to say?

from the way he explains UE in the videos I mentioned, it does seem like he's arguing with a different definition of it other than the generally accepted one.

Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

my dad posted:

As a sidenote, I'm reasonably sure Serbia still has the longest average working hours in Europe, and absolutely poo poo pay, and lemme tell you from experience that those hours sure as gently caress aren't unproductive. (although you will absolutely hear this about us and the Greeks)

Average working hours are a stupid as gently caress metric.

I remember diving into this back when these kinds of numbers were weaponized against Greece during the Eurocrisis. Because IIRC Greece (at least at the time) had one of the lowest women's participation rates in the workforce. So that plus pension age stuff driving down "participation" was used to attack Greeks as lazy. Though if you look at the average working hours of people in employment Greece was all the way at the top of the EU stats. So how is that laziness?

But you could use the same stats, easily, to attack NL as lazy. Because NL has one of the highest women's participation rates in the workforce, but that's gone hand-in-hand with having the highest % of part-time employment in the EU (mostly by said women). So if you measure the average working week of all Dutch employed people we end up (shock!) all the way at the bottom of the EU averages. So lazy right? But it's because more people work at all, so how is that lazy? Anyway, I predicted this could be used to attack the Dutch for being lazy, and lo and behold, since Covid was declared over, and especially in the last 6-12 months or so, due to continued labour shortages, Dutch press has been saying exactly this.

"We", the regular Dutch workers, could solve all these problems (that capital has been having) if we just stop being lazy and work more hours. We'd solve the shortage of teachers and nurses if all teachers and nurses just work an extra hour or two a week. That sorta stupid poo poo. Ofcourse completely ignoring that most families already have both adults working and childcare is expensive as gently caress so these parents working more hours and having to put their children in daycare for longer would net cost them money. There was a proposal for free daycare but it got killed because it'd be impossible to put into practice because the daycares were already unable to find enough personnell. The braingeniuses in charge ofcourse completely ignored that hey maybe people would be able to work more hours if daycare was freely available, including working at said daycares. Especially if you'd pay these workers well. But that ofcourse was the second argument against this plan, that it'd be way too expensive. So just keep offloading the cost of child-rearing on parents and being mad those parents won't work more. Ofcourse it would've also helped to not let Covid tear through our population which has caused half a million long-Covid patients (on a total population of 18 million), most of whom are unable to work but ehhh what can you do?



Anyway, my point is, any of these numbers used to compare populations is always going to exclude a whole bunch of loving material factors that shape that society in the way it is and that cause regular working people to make their decisions about whether to work and if yes how much and which, surprise, shock, have nothing to do with cultural laziness or other dumb racist poo poo like that.

Joe Chip
Jan 4, 2014
I just finished Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" and while I agree with the main thrust of the work one thing struck me. In the introduction he refers to the "capitalists" in Rome. I've always thought of capitalism as a modern invention but I couldn't think of what differentiates the exploitation of the late republic and modern capitalism. Obviously wealthy Romans had slaves but in the latter part of the book he refers to specific reforms that Julius Caesar made mandating a certain percentage of freedmen working on estates for wages which to me sounds a lot like what Marx was talking about where a laborer has no choice but to sell his labor and be exploited. Is there a substantive difference between what capitalism is today and the exploitation characteristic of the late republic? And if so, what is it?

If the answer is "read Capital vol. 1" I can accept that too.

Joe Chip has issued a correction as of 05:46 on Feb 20, 2024

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

Joe Chip posted:

I just finished Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" and while I agree with the main thrust of the work one thing struck me. In the introduction he refers to the "capitalists" in Rome. I've always thought of capitalism as a modern invention but I couldn't think of what differentiates the exploitation of the late republic and modern capitalism. Obviously wealthy Romans had slaves but in the latter part of the book he refers to specific reforms that Julius Caesar made mandating a certain percentage of freedmen working on estates for wages which to me sounds a lot like what Marx was talking about where a laborer has no choice but to sell his labor and be exploited. Is there a substantive difference between what capitalism is today and the exploitation characteristic of the late republic? And if so, what is it?

If the answer is "read Capital vol. 1" I can accept that too.

i havent read that book and i dont know a lot about roman history, but "capitalism" doesnt mean the invention of wage workers or capitalists. those things could, and did, exist for a long time as smaller parts of the overall society in systems past. what distinguishes capitalism is when capitalists became the dominant class, capitalist relations became the dominant property & production relations, and wage labor became the dominant form of labor in society

Joe Chip
Jan 4, 2014

fart simpson posted:

i havent read that book and i dont know a lot about roman history, but "capitalism" doesnt mean the invention of wage workers or capitalists. those things could, and did, exist for a long time as smaller parts of the overall society in systems past. what distinguishes capitalism is when capitalists became the dominant class, capitalist relations became the dominant property & production relations, and wage labor became the dominant form of labor in society

This makes a lot of sense. I was trying to square the circle of "well maybe land isn't *quite* the same as the means of production" but just accepting that these things existed but weren't dominant until much later clears things up a bit.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


Modes of production can co-exist and did so in all of our history. There's modern slavery, after all.

Marx references Aristotle as the first Western thinker who worked in what could be called "proto"-political economy; in his philosophical inquiry on the nature of value, Aristotle eventually differentiates economics from what was then called chrematistics:

Capital Vol 1, Chapter 4: The General Formula for Capital posted:

NOTE 6: Aristotle opposes Œconomic to Chrematistic. He starts from the former. So far as it is the art of gaining a livelihood, it is limited to procuring those articles that are necessary to existence, and useful either to a household or the state. “True wealth (ὁ ἀληθινὸς πλοῦτος) consists of such values in use; for the quantity of possessions of this kind, capable of making life pleasant, is not unlimited. There is, however, a second mode of acquiring things, to which we may by preference and with correctness give the name of Chrematistic, and in this case there appear to be no limits to riches and possessions. Trade (ἡ καπηλικὴ is literally retail trade, and Aristotle takes this kind because in it values in use predominate) does not in its nature belong to Chrematistic, for here the exchange has reference only to what is necessary to themselves (the buyer or seller).” Therefore, as he goes on to show, the original form of trade was barter, but with the extension of the latter, there arose the necessity for money. On the discovery of money, barter of necessity developed into καπηλικὴ, into trading in commodities, and this again, in opposition to its original tendency, grew into Chrematistic, into the art of making money. Now Chrematistic is distinguishable from Œconomic in this way, that “in the case of Chrematistic circulation is the source of riches (ποιητικὴ χρημάτων ... διὰ χρημάτων μεταβολῆς). And it appears to revolve about money, for money is the beginning and end of this kind of exchange (τὸ γὰρ νόμισμα στοιχεῖον καὶ πέρας τῆς ἀλλαγῆς ἐστίν). Therefore also riches, such as Chrematistic strives for, are unlimited. Just as every art that is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, has no limit to its aims, because it seeks constantly to approach nearer and nearer to that end, while those arts that pursue means to an end, are not boundless, since the goal itself imposes a limit upon them, so with Chrematistic, there are no bounds to its aims, these aims being absolute wealth. Œconomic not Chrematistic has a limit ... the object of the former is something different from money, of the latter the augmentation of money.... By confounding these two forms, which overlap each other, some people have been led to look upon the preservation and increase of money ad infinitum as the end and aim of Œconomic.”

(the funny "oeconomic" is just to keep on the Aristotelian conception and differ from the modern usage of "economic")

In defining chrematistics, Aristotle had set up the basic groundwork to solve the problem of why wage labor was exploitative, something he comments on a bunch of occasions. In a similar way to how like Maxwell was right there in regards to figuring out relativity when he pondered some deeper stuff about gravity, Aristotle got near (but tbqf nowhere near as Maxwell) a notion of historical materialism. Being a creature of the slave labor societies, says Marx, impeded him of realizing further, however.

And that is an example of why patricians have capitalist elements but are not capitalists -- the presence of elements and ideas doesn't constitute a social paradigm as a definite imperating circumstance. Likewise, it can also be argued that mandating freedmen to work in latifundia is feudal, as it is an imposition to work on the behalf of landowning classes without an actual labor market to provide the value referential for wages. If we consider a historical analysis that includes the Eastern and Far Eastern modes of production, things become even more complex as those societies had much more substantial levels of development and state organization: there are proto-industrial relations in the form of Chinese early experiences of manufactories intermingled with statutory labor that wasn't necessarily tied to local land, etc.

With all that said, I think Parenti was playing loose with the definitions in order to make it easier to advance the topic (haven't read that book). While patricians were aware of chrematistics and thus of wage labor, slavery as the predominant mode meant the impossibility of a labor market and thus of surplus value exploitation through that labor, as slavery provides "pure" surplus-value (even though it is less productive and efficient). Freemen labor by wages was a way to address the problem of urban unemployment while improving the productivity of latifundia (iirc my marxist econ for antiquity) as this effectively forced the patricians to put some capital into labor. Also, it wasn't a general attitude: patricians who were into chrematistics got powerful ofc, but there were many others who didn't share the "mercantile mentality" of those and opposed them. This can be neatly observed by seeing the differences of Crassus and Pompey - the latter being a much more astute public administrator and keen to the necessities of the Roman state against patrician privileges.

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


also I'll always repost this whenever this thread puts me across it

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 1, note 34 posted:

Les économistes ont une singulière manière de procéder. Il n’y a pour eux que deux sortes
d’institutions, celles de l’art et celles de la nature. Les institutions de la féodalité sont des institutions artificielles celles de la bourgeoisie sont des institutions naturelles. Ils ressemblent en ceci aux théologiens, qui eux aussi établissent deux sortes de religions. Toute religion qui n’est pas la leur, est une invention des hommes tandis que leur propre religion est une émanation de Dieu ‒ Ainsi il y a eu de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.
” [“Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. ... Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any”] (Karl Marx. Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse a la Philosophie de la Misère par M. Proudhon, 1847, p. 113.) Truly comical is M. Bastiat, who imagines that the ancient Greeks and Romans lived by plunder alone. But when people plunder for centuries, there must always be something at hand for them to seize; the objects of plunder must be continually reproduced. It would thus appear that even Greeks and Romans had some process of production, consequently, an economy, which just as much constituted the material basis of their world, as bourgeois economy constitutes that of our modern world. Or perhaps Bastiat means, that a mode of production based on slavery is based on a system of plunder. In that case he treads on dangerous ground. If a giant thinker like Aristotle erred in his appreciation of slave labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right in his appreciation of wage labour?

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003

Joe Chip posted:

I just finished Michael Parenti's "The Assassination of Julius Caesar" and while I agree with the main thrust of the work one thing struck me. In the introduction he refers to the "capitalists" in Rome. I've always thought of capitalism as a modern invention but I couldn't think of what differentiates the exploitation of the late republic and modern capitalism. Obviously wealthy Romans had slaves but in the latter part of the book he refers to specific reforms that Julius Caesar made mandating a certain percentage of freedmen working on estates for wages which to me sounds a lot like what Marx was talking about where a laborer has no choice but to sell his labor and be exploited. Is there a substantive difference between what capitalism is today and the exploitation characteristic of the late republic? And if so, what is it?

If the answer is "read Capital vol. 1" I can accept that too.

He doesn't mean capitalists. He means optimates, who certainly would have been capitalists if they were around today. Michael Hudson's The Collapse of Antiquity is an excellent companion to Parenti's book, superseding it in a number of ways.

The optimates operated off slave and wage labor, but their mode of accumulation was the accumulation of land, not money capital. This they did through buying distressed estates, most often smallholders who fell into debt to make ends meet and then compounded into a sum they could never pay back, thus losing the land. The lenders were the same optimates who would acquire the land. The landless peasants now had to go to work in the cities or continue to work on the land they used to own for a pittance. Or they hosed off into the forests or joined the barbarians. Or died. It wasn't good.

Eventually, the pretext of this perpetual debtor class (that persisted because the Roman government refused the periodic cancellations practiced since the Bronze Age) working fields they used to own is abandoned, the debt is "forgiven" (made irrelevant) by binding them and their heirs to the land forever as serfs, transitioning from antiquity to the feudal age.

To answer your question, the substantive difference is land.

Isiah 5 posted:

8 Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!

9 In mine ears said the LORD of hosts, Of a truth many houses shall be desolate, even great and fair, without inhabitant.

10 Yea, ten acres of vineyard shall yield one bath, and the seed of an homer shall yield an ephah.

Joe Chip
Jan 4, 2014
I suspected the fact that Roman wealth was held in land rather than what we would consider "capital" today had something to do with it but Parenti focuses more on the class antagonism created by exploitation rather than the means of exploitation. I'll be sure to check out Hudson's book, thanks.

ETA: And I really need to finish Capital. I'm not at all surprised that Marx addressed wage labor in pre-capitalist societies.

Joe Chip has issued a correction as of 18:23 on Feb 20, 2024

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

I appreciated the admission that this was all a waste of time and that he's a dumbass

I haven't been doing a bit, this was just a dumb post, not an admission of anything. I'm genuinely confused that, as a confessed member if a capitalist society, how my beliefs in what that society taught me are considered a troll.


I think the answer to the question is socialism. If it's not, I honestly have no idea what the question is.

Rodney The Yam II
Mar 3, 2007




It's not your beliefs but your inability or unwillingness to address the very thorough and clearly stated questions by the experts in the thread who are volunteering their time for your educational benefit. If you are questioning your beliefs, put them down for a second and stop trying to disprove Marxist concepts out of hand. It seems like you would benefit most from simply trying to learn more rather than prove anything.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
I'm attempting to reply to the question.

I think the answer is socialism. If it's not, I'm very lost.

Bald Stalin
Jul 11, 2004

Our posts
It's not a bit. This time will be different. This time OP will understand when I reply to them.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

dead gay comedy forums posted:

lmao. mfer links investopedia

literally one of the greatest moments for a mathy econ student is when they decide to look into solving that problem: how to achieve optimal market conditions in which all businesses attain continuous stability without imposing monopoly pricing (which is bad for society) or without market failure. Incidentally, they figure out that means net zero profit to the whole market. Curious thing

The problem is then figuring out what sort of condition leads up to that. They hit the blackboard. In this state, what would be profit in another world means that all enterprises reinvest on themselves equally. In this equal situation, after squaring a lot of maths, all companies on the market also happen to achieve perfect distributive pricing: complete market efficiency.

So they go, great! They fine tune things and discover that instead of having multiple enterprises, economies of scale and effort can be attained by consolidated all companies into one single organization - remember, no adversarial monopoly condition here in relation to society - so there is even greater reinvestment efficiency (again, net zero profit).

This clicks something in them. How to bring those mathematical models into the real world?

Outside of the Austrian school, everybody understands that market policy has to be determined by the state. So these mathy guys go: "well, for a optimal market, the state can organize conditions to create an equal distribution of profits, leading into zero net profit in the whole market..." and then they go holy poo poo.

Can you guess what happened there?

Socialism happens here. The state has organized a perfectly equal distribution of profits. There is a single "company" at end stage, which is indistinguishable from the state, and is an optimal market.

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Part of my struggle is poor communication.

I think the larger part is, US capitalism is so ingrained, some of these questions are very difficult.

Here I'm cautious of the same approach of my education, but in reverse. Where the answer to questions then were always "capitalism is more efficent", now I'm feeling like the answer is always communism.

I'd like to be able to infer it myself, rather than be lead to the answer.

Son of Sorrow
Aug 8, 2023

More efficient at what OP

Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002

BillsPhoenix posted:

I'd like to be able to infer it myself, rather than be lead to the answer.

Sounds like you're saying that if anyone tries to teach you anything you will reflexively reject the points and seek counterexamples, purely out of a need to feel like you came to the answer without anyone's help.

The optimistic reading is that you've now positively identified the root problem and why you remain perpetually confused by everything. Step 2 is fixing it

hubris.height
Jan 6, 2005

Pork Pro
as long as Bill Phoenix is back at it in here, was the answer to the riddle about economists that they realize the only way to maximize profitability across all actors is through central planning

also, I'm starting small with the communist manifesto, it's a quick read but my time is spoken for. I'll return to capital and the endless discussion of linen and jackets when I'm done with it. actually sort of excited to start it again

Al!
Apr 2, 2010

:coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot:

Son of Sorrow posted:

More efficient at what OP

Dreylad
Jun 19, 2001

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

Sounds like you're saying that if anyone tries to teach you anything you will reflexively reject the points and seek counterexamples, purely out of a need to feel like you came to the answer without anyone's help.

The optimistic reading is that you've now positively identified the root problem and why you remain perpetually confused by everything. Step 2 is fixing it

if he is an econ major then I get why there's that reflex.

Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002

Dreylad posted:

if he is an econ major then I get why there's that reflex.

Nah I get it too, I think it's an understandable reflex upon really fully seeing and accepting how much bullshit there actually is on all fronts at all times, in the US especially

But you gotta move past it somehow

Dreylad
Jun 19, 2001
I can't imagine spending 4 years on a degree and then realizing that they never covered or barely covered the fundamental engine that drives pretty much all modern economies and may not even have given you any real way to analyze it.

Al!
Apr 2, 2010

:coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot:

Dreylad posted:

I can't imagine spending 4 years on a degree and then realizing that they never covered or barely covered the fundamental engine that drives pretty much all modern economies and may not even have given you any real way to analyze it.

bitcoin?!?!

Al!
Apr 2, 2010

:coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot::coolspot:
sitting in lotus position and humming as i envision a perfect capitalist utopia with perfectly efficient exploitation

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...

hubris.height posted:

as long as Bill Phoenix is back at it in here, was the answer to the riddle about economists that they realize the only way to maximize profitability across all actors is through central planning

Not calling you out, just wanting to note I'm not the only poster here that doesn't find that question crystal clear.

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hubris.height
Jan 6, 2005

Pork Pro

BillsPhoenix posted:

Not calling you out, just wanting to note I'm not the only poster here that doesn't find that question crystal clear.

lol that's very fair

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Outside of the Austrian school, everybody understands that market policy has to be determined by the state. So these mathy guys go: "well, for a optimal market, the state can organize conditions to create an equal distribution of profits, leading into zero net profit in the whole market..." and then they go holy poo poo.

Can you guess what happened there?

this was the question I was referring to. im not an econ major so I spent the twilight hours thinking about it as I dozed just trying to find something that fit there and came up with 'central planning???' '

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