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(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)
 
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dk2m
May 6, 2009

hubris.height posted:

I couldn't get my head around this and I've been ruminating on it, feel like a total buffoon. I get if you are making a commodity and the labour over time remains constant you get the same value out of it. Is it that the use-value is decreased by N being increased? A statement that commodity use-value is decreased by its availability? Maybe it's just the wording messing with me and I did get it.

So here's my take on this quote. Here's the same translation of the quote in the version I'm using. I'm also slightly expanding on this quote as I think the logic of the preceding section is useful for me atleast:

quote:

As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form. The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity.

But it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time; more, if productivity rises; fewer, if it falls.

For this reason, the same change in productivity which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount, if it cuts down the total amount of labour-time necessary to produce the use-values. The converse also holds.

I think other posters have already done a good job on expanding on it, so just my take. I'll start with the first part of the quote:

quote:

As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form. The same labour, therefore, performed for the same length of time, always yields the same amount of value, independently of any variations in productivity.

For Marx, productivity is called "labor in its concrete useful form". What he means by this is "socially useful labor". He says this earlier in Chapter 1, where labor becomes socially useful through the social division of labor to make specific physical commodities, in his terminology called "use-values". Said simply - divisions of labor making goods people actually want is socially useful. In his terminology, this would be stated as productive labor creating use-values.

In the immediate next sentence, he says that this "ceases to have any bearings when we abstract from its useful form". This is where it gets confusing, because he's using Hegelian dialectics here, rather than what we would traditionally call analytic or mathematical logic. In dialectic logic, we are concerned with the tensions and stresses of processes, which means we zoom from the particular to the abstract in ways that is not intuitive. Marx is doing this constantly in the first chapter, which makes it quite difficult to grasp what is going on sometimes.

Regardless, why should productivity cease to have bearing on labor in its concrete form? Well, let's zoom back a bit. Labor, as he understands it is the fundamental abstraction of all commodity production. I actually like thinking of labor as "human intervention" because of this. To make anything, someone has to DO something. Even in the case of machinery or automation, a human being must interact with it for it to become productive. That could be someone pushing buttons, it could be maintaining it, it could be setting it up, etc. Regardless, human intervention in its broadest sense is required to produce anything, regardless of it's a capitalist mode or production or not.

Now, let's go back into the capitalistic mode of expression.

This abstracted, zoomed out view of sheer labor is what makes things happen. In such cases, going back to his preceding ideas about the relative equivalences of commodities, we can make a statement that in order for commodities to be compared with each other (we are now zooming back in!), they all must depend on the zoomed out sense of labor.

This, Marx defines as "value", which becomes later "exchange-value".

What value, or exchange-value, actually is depends on the time it takes for the zoomed out human intervention/human labor to make possible. Why does this matter? Because commodities have to be exchanged which each other, and because there are 2 factors in play: quantitative factors (15 X = 30 Y) and qualitative factors (what he calls "social divisions of useful labor for use-value" or more simply, labor making things people actually want)

So now, how does the zoomed out, abstracted value (again, in terms of abstract human labor) relate to productivity? For Marx, productivity is related to labor making things people actually want, which is not zoomed out, but very concrete and meets real needs. In the zoomed out form of labor, value is created by the amount of time it takes to make something. That seems pretty intuitive - under capitalism, we are trying to organize society to mechanize in order to create goods that can be exchanged. Everyone, except the owner, has to pitch in to make this work. The owner just simply waits until everyone else completes their job to produce the use-value, or the physical commodity.

So then, those units of time are invariant to any questions of productivity, which needs to be thought of socially useful labor to create use-value. That's because 1 hour of labor in the abstract has no dependent basis on performing it with hand tools, or the latest machinery - it is still 1 hour of labor.

Now he says:

quote:

But it provides different quantities of use-values during equal periods of time; more, if productivity rises; fewer, if it falls.

To re-iterate (mostly for myself, this is helpful in retaining definitions!), use-values are physical commodities - the things people actually want. When labor becomes productive, it increases the quantity of the things people actually want during the same 1 hour of using machinery instead of hand tools. We can create 30 handbags instead of 1 handbag.

Now, this is where it gets interesting. He says this:

quote:

For this reason, the same change in productivity which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount, if it cuts down the total amount of labour-time necessary to produce the use-values. The converse also holds.

We have now created productive labor - that is positive socially directed divisions of labor - which has increased the fruitfulness of labor by increasing the amount of use-values - we have 30 handbags instead of 1. Great! But what about value? The thing that mediates exchanges, and the zoomed out, abstracted expression that allows goods to be transacted on market exchanges?

Well here, something interesting happened. Value actually went down. That's because when we now go and sell a handbag, it must be compared against another commodity to figure out what it's worth. What has happened is that the value, the exchange-value, of that handbag has decreased. This is actually quite analogous to the notion of "economies of scale".

This may actually be quite a problem, though. We are still expending 1 hour to create 30 handbags, but the single handbag is only 2 minutes of time. This is where the problem of magnitude shows up. Qualitatively, labor (call it "the handbag artisan") was used to generate the use-value, the handbag. Productivity in this sense is just a byproduct - labor is labor. Quantitatively, we have numerically increased the amount of handbags that could be made in a single hour. This is the effect that is materialized into the world.

The exchange-value (which is labor unit time) of a use-value (the handbag) should decrease. This is all yet again, hinting at something much larger - of surplus-value. Do we need 30 handbags? Is labor compensated for it being more productive? Are use-values tracking with value, which we now understand as labor?

I hope that helps, please correct me if anything here is wrong.

dk2m has issued a correction as of 19:54 on Mar 5, 2024

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BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Hubris height, you're getting a lot of dumbass replies.

By Definition: 1 hour of labor = 1 hour of labor.
1 hour work making a coat = 1 hour work making a coca cola.
This applies to all labor, so 1 hour of Joe Biden working as president = 1 hour working to make a coat. Literally the same value.
1 hour of any labor = 1 hour of any other type of labor.

From there it's math - 1 hour of labor divided by # of products made.
1 hour / 1 coat = 1 (baseline productivity use value)
1 hour / 2 coats = .5 (double use value, half exchange value)
1 hour / .5 coats = 2 (half use value, double exchange value)


An over simplified look at capitalism is roughly opposite. 1 can of coca cola = 1 can of coca cola.

This is useful for capitalism vs Marxism comparison, but capitalism is not just flipping the math, it's 1 product = 1 product, instead of 1 hour = 1 hour.


Ready for my probe professor.

BillsPhoenix has issued a correction as of 20:36 on Mar 5, 2024

hubris.height
Jan 6, 2005

Pork Pro
first, thank you everyone for all these posts and explanations. I genuinely feel like I understand the entire chapter thus far better for having read these posts.

BillsPhoenix posted:

Hubris height, you're getting a lot of dumbass replies.

By Definition: 1 hour of labor = 1 hour of labor.
1 hour work making a coat = 1 hour work making a coca cola.
This applies to all labor, so 1 hour of Joe Biden working as president = 1 hour working to make a coat. Literally the same value.
1 hour of any labor = 1 hour of any other type of labor.

From there it's math - 1 hour of labor divided by # of products made.
1 hour / 1 coat = 1 (baseline productivity use value)
1 hour / 2 coats = .5 (double productivity, half use value)
1 hour / .5 coats = 2 (half productivity, double use value)


An over simplified look at capitalism is roughly opposite. 1 can of coca cola = 1 can of coca cola.

This is useful for capitalism vs Marxism comparison, but capitalism is not just flipping the math, it's 1 product = 1 product, instead of 1 hour = 1 hour.


Ready for my probe professor.

pretty sure if I'm understanding everyone else in here, those equations explain the exchange value, not use values. If you have two coats you have two use values, but the exchange value has been reduced because all labor is considered equal on the market.

additionally, I'm just starting but marx goes through great pains to make it clear you can't make something equal to itself, there needs to be an equivalent and relative form of value for it to make any sense. literally '20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen is no expression of value"

Orange Devil posted:

And also if you think about it from like, a grand strategy game player's perspective, your society has a specific, finite amount of labour power to spend. So spending it on any one thing brings with it the opportunity cost of not being able to spend it on anything else. If 10% of your labour force is producing coats, they're not buildings houses and schools, or producing medicine, etc.

Which is why while improvements in productive output per labour unit might degrade the exchange-value of any one item of said commodity, it increases the overall wealth of the society as you now either have more of said commodity or can create the same number of commodities using less labour, meaning you free up labour to do something else.

Ofcourse in capitalism somehow that increased overall wealth isn't quite enjoyed by all members of said society equally. Very curious. Wonder how that happens, maybe Karl M. has something to say about that later on.

embarrassingly effective analogy, I just had a follow up question. I'm pretty sure I know the answer, would it be better to measure the worth/exchange value of a nation based on its labor outputs rather than GDP?


fart simpson posted:

maybe you can think of it kinda like this, b/c imo all of this makes more intuitive sense at a higher level like macroeconomics. im going to oversimplify but you can get the idea:

the total amount of "value" that a society can produce is relatively fixed; it increases by increasing the size of your work force. now, thinking of that, imagine theres some new technique that allows people to make twice as many coats in the same amount of time and all the coat factories use the new technique. if you still have the same number of people employed in coatmaking, and theyre still putting in 8 hour days making coats, then the total amount of value produced by the coat industry has not changed, even though you have twice as many coats entering the market. what it means is that each coat contains half the amount of labor as they did previously, and so the value of any one coat is half as much as before

just wanted to make sure you get a dopamine fix for two really great explanations as well

The Voice of Labor
Apr 8, 2020

you should be. the use value of a commodity is unaffected by the duration of time it takes to make something. your "productivity" is a stand in for socially neccessary labor. 1 coat takes 1 hour to make, in the hypothetical, assume you have two coat factories, factory a rolls out two coats per hour, factory b rolls out half a coat every hour. socially neccessary labor to make a coat is 1 hour per coat (average production time per coat across the coat making industry. coats are still coats, use value is unchanged

The Voice of Labor has issued a correction as of 20:33 on Mar 5, 2024

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Edited the term productivity and use value to align. I can't understate how frustrating it is the same terms have different meanings between western and marx. It's why yall think I'm insane.

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

BillsPhoenix posted:

Hubris height, you're getting a lot of dumbass replies.

By Definition: 1 hour of labor = 1 hour of labor.
1 hour work making a coat = 1 hour work making a coca cola.
This applies to all labor, so 1 hour of Joe Biden working as president = 1 hour working to make a coat. Literally the same value.
1 hour of any labor = 1 hour of any other type of labor.

From there it's math - 1 hour of labor divided by # of products made.
1 hour / 1 coat = 1 (baseline productivity use value)
1 hour / 2 coats = .5 (double use value, half exchange value)
1 hour / .5 coats = 2 (half use value, double exchange value)


An over simplified look at capitalism is roughly opposite. 1 can of coca cola = 1 can of coca cola.

This is useful for capitalism vs Marxism comparison, but capitalism is not just flipping the math, it's 1 product = 1 product, instead of 1 hour = 1 hour.


Ready for my probe professor.

for a guy who never read the books you sure are getting every single thing wrong

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Maybe this is what I've had wrong the whole time.

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

Is it like a grand strategy game?

Does exchange value equal use value when laying ground work?

Who knows. Went read marx when you can post about it.

In Training
Jun 28, 2008

Why would the use value of a coat change if you have 2

Son of Thunderbeast
Sep 21, 2002
If you have a coat, the use value of the second one is lower because you're already wearing one. QED theoryailures

Brain Candy
May 18, 2006

BillsPhoenix posted:

Edited the term productivity and use value to align. I can't understate how frustrating it is the same terms have different meanings between western and marx. It's why yall think I'm insane.

i don't think you're insane, i think you were trained wrong as a joke

FirstnameLastname
Jul 10, 2022

BillsPhoenix posted:

Maybe this is what I've had wrong the whole time.

what point are you starting from
like what are the a priori you're using to build your reasoning from because unless you're just trying to gently caress with people i think you have something you're assuming to be a fundamental truth when it isn't, or something like that, and it's loving up the rest of your logic

Orange Devil
Oct 1, 2010

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

hubris.height posted:

embarrassingly effective analogy, I just had a follow up question. I'm pretty sure I know the answer, would it be better to measure the worth/exchange value of a nation based on its labor outputs rather than GDP?

I mean, do you know what GDP is? Like, look into what it actually measures if you never have and you are quickly going to find it is a transparant and absolute sham. So given that GDP has very little if any value as a measurement, using anything else that's based on something tangible would probably be better. But for any measurement the question is "better to do what?" Basically what, exactly, are you interested in measuring and for what purpose?


Edit: and like, this is super fundamental. The government of a country like China might legitimately be interested in measuring the prosperity and wellbeing of its citizens, because it is earnestly committed to the goal of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. Capitalist governments don't give a flying gently caress about the wellbeing of their citizens. See Chapter 10 of Capital for lots and lots of bloodboiling examples. So surprise surprise, they are also not at all interested in measuring the wellbeing of their citizens accurately.

Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 21:52 on Mar 5, 2024

The Voice of Labor
Apr 8, 2020

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

If you have a coat, the use value of the second one is lower because you're already wearing one. QED theoryailures

to you, but the market for coats doesn't consist solely of you. it consists of everyone.

hubris.height
Jan 6, 2005

Pork Pro
no I do not know what GDP is, I just have been conditioned through exposure to believe it's some sort of bellwether for the economic might and health of a nation. in hindsight, the idea of a quantifiable better is pollyannish, and furthermore probably way too reductionist to be of value

I think I get what you mean. by what metric do you want to measure success and "economic health". sort of like an engineering problem -- what question are you trying to answer? GDP answers the question of how much richer I'm getting if I'm a capitalist. in contrast, if I'm looking at industry-wide productivity and see we have a surplus of commodities and we've been running overtime, if my goal is reduction of human misery that is time spent laboring, I make a different decision than someone looking at the GDP for that same workload

e: "to do" fixed

hubris.height has issued a correction as of 22:23 on Mar 5, 2024

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003
there's also different ways to calculate GDP, and in the case of the US those methods are designed to make what they're doing look good. that's why going into debt increases GDP.

Son of Sorrow
Aug 8, 2023

GDP is a measurement of the production of only one commodity: money. That's why poo poo like derivatives and other financial instruments are included in it, and why it's effectively unable to represent actual economic productivity (the production of needed physical goods and services). To me a more ideal metric would be the measure of aggregated social need met by domestic production, which would require a rather radical reformation of society.

Son of Sorrow
Aug 8, 2023

Juche economics

Rodney The Yam II
Mar 3, 2007




Bill i still want to know more about the triangles and stuff! Please explain b4 they probe you again

Aeolius
Jul 16, 2003

Simon Templeman Fanclub
sometimes moving from mainstream econ to marx gets tricky not just because of the different ways they discuss value, but also the crossover between utility and use-value.

i found it easier to make the switch from speculative attempts to quantify subjective utility (bad, dumb, wrong) to simply counting commodities as "use-values" (good, wise, correct) once i stopped thinking of a commodity having a use-value but rather being a use-value.

incidentally,

BillsPhoenix posted:

This applies to all labor, so 1 hour of Joe Biden working as president = 1 hour working to make a coat. Literally the same value.

bill, please continue talking us through this point: What commodity does Joe Biden contribute to producing? How does the argument you've made here apply to the classic "BillsPhoenix spends one hour making mud pies" thought experiment? What do the words "socially," "necessary," and "abstract" mean in the context of value? Does that change any of your earlier answers?

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003
marx also uses "simple labor" as a theoretical base unit. he acknowledges that such a thing as "complex labor" may also exist, meaning that 1 hour doing one kind of labor does not necessarily equal 1 hour of another kind.

386-SX 25Mhz VGA
Jan 14, 2003

(C) American Megatrends Inc.,

Raskolnikov38 posted:

mods and admins gently caress off

….

Liberalism: A Counter-History (Domenico Losurdo) - Excellent historical analysis of liberal thought from a Marxist perspective, showing its essence, strengths, and limitations.
I just want to call this out and say thanks, this book probably gave me a better understanding of recent Western history than the sum of everything else I’ve encountered in my life.

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

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

dead gay comedy forums posted:

didn't read this before because I was writing the post lmao

now put that post + what I wrote above and guess what happens?

Going through old notes and found the answer.

"State Capitalism".

I had forgotten all about this because it doesn't really exist. There is technically a theory answer though, and state capitalism is it.

The other ones are free market (no govt interference at all, or only govt for defense)

The ever popular laissez-faire, which the US teaches that the US is the best example. Govt does defense, and greater good regulation only.

And controlled capitalism. Add welfare to the above govt.

dk2m
May 6, 2009
IMO, utility itself became associated with “marginal utility”. The modern economists still need a way to find out why any good is desierable. Marx himself uses the word utility in several places in Chapter 1

quote:

We use the abbreviated expression ‘useful labour’ for labour whose utility is represented by the use-value of its product, or by the fact that its product is a use-value. In this connection we consider only its useful effect.

quote:

Finally, nothing can be a value without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.

The confusion is what the word has become since the days of classical economists. Marx is still very much in the tradition of Ricardo, Smith, and so on. Conceptually, even people like Smith believed in the point that Marx made at this next quote - Smith was famously against the landlord class because he saw landlords as belonging to feudalism, of which capitalism was trying to rebel against.

quote:

A thing can be a use-value without being a value. This is the case whenever its utility to man is not mediated through labour. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, unplanted forests, etc. fall into this category. A thing can be useful, and a product of human labour, without being a commodity. He who satisfies his own need with the product of his own labour admittedly creates use-values, but not commodities.

Adam Smith said this:

quote:

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

These are essentially identical points made against the landlord class. There are some things that have utility to man without labor - it is what the Earth naturally provides.

What has happened is that neoclassical economists use “marginal utility” in order to create representational views of reality. Basically, they abstract away reality and create graphs of supply and demand, which have equilibrium that are the optimal meeting point. Reducing the complex arrangements of capitalism, with massive social structures in place to keep it running like contract law, private property agreements, hell even the markets themselves, they blur what utility is by giving it magical properties. The assumption that everyone is a rational agent, constantly looking for information to make their choices, is what drives utility. The classical economists would obviously disagree with this.

But anyway, the way I understand use-value is that it is something that is a good that people want. It has value once it becomes commodified - that just means when it has to be exchanged on a market.

386-SX 25Mhz VGA
Jan 14, 2003

(C) American Megatrends Inc.,
idgi

BillsPhoenix
Jun 29, 2023
But what if Russia aren't the bad guys? I'm just asking questions...
Honestly, this thread has convinced me most of the terminology confusion is intentional. Not by Marx, but by Western powers, controlling the early English translations.

Like Gebrauchswert is probably not the same word as "utility" when Adam Smiths work was translated to German.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3
Nov 15, 2003
that is the infamous liberal, John C Calhoun

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

Have any of you had more successful conversations with western trained economists, than the... mess that I'm attempting here?

I've literally never got beyond "capitalism won, reagan won, McDonalds won, Marx was a fascist" in discussions (those were said by others, I've shitposted them here)

386-SX 25Mhz VGA
Jan 14, 2003

(C) American Megatrends Inc.,

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

that is the infamous liberal, John C Calhoun
oh yeah ok makes sense!

Halser
Aug 24, 2016

BillsPhoenix posted:

Honestly, this thread has convinced me most of the terminology confusion is intentional. Not by Marx, but by Western powers, controlling the early English translations.

was that your previous username?

dk2m
May 6, 2009

BillsPhoenix posted:

Honestly, this thread has convinced me most of the terminology confusion is intentional. Not by Marx, but by Western powers, controlling the early English translations.

Like Gebrauchswert is probably not the same word as "utility" when Adam Smiths work was translated to German.

I’m not sure why you think that. Utilitarianism as a philosophical concept was around for hundreds of years. The basic idea of “utility” was fleshed out by Bentham, but it itself was part of Thomas Hobbes’ analysis of social utility, or that which does the most good. It was originally social and ethical theory, but classical political economists took that concept as the basis of some sort of objective value to understand what makes a good necessary. Marx is a part of that classical political economy tradition.

That tradition can’t be overstated - Ricado’s value theory is almost identical to Marx’s, and Ricardo was one of the business elite of England that was pushing for capitalism. For example, in The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, written in 1817:

quote:

The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production

….

In speaking, then, of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.

What he ran into was how to measure this. This is the problem that Marx solves with his understanding of value, exchange value and use-value.

How!
Oct 29, 2009

BillsPhoenix posted:

Going through old notes and found the answer.

"State Capitalism".

I had forgotten all about this because it doesn't really exist. There is technically a theory answer though, and state capitalism is it.

The other ones are free market (no govt interference at all, or only govt for defense)

The ever popular laissez-faire, which the US teaches that the US is the best example. Govt does defense, and greater good regulation only.

And controlled capitalism. Add welfare to the above govt.

nvm sorry I don’t even want to engage

DJJIB-DJDCT
Feb 1, 2024

BillsPhoenix posted:

Question about my poor posting.

Have any of you had more successful conversations with western trained economists, than the... mess that I'm attempting here?

Daily, over breakfast, nightly over dinner.

Not about economics, of course, but the weather, the theatre season, our plans for the weekend...

dk2m
May 6, 2009
The only breakthroughs I’ve had are in round-about ways, mostly by using Modern Monetary Theory. Neoclassical economics does two things very well - it removes the political from political economy and it appears as scientific due to it’s aversion to social dynamics. It frames itself as scientific by saying it’s not worried about the why, only the how. That’s not true for classical economics which are about how to structure a society away from feudalism. Neoclassical economics is about how to remove any notion that society is involved at all. It’s all just rational, free agents making decisions independently.

Thomas Piketty can also be a useful reference point, as he does try to use math and statistics to “talk” the same language as modern economists. He stops way too short of his diagnosis of the in-equalities that are a feature of neoliberalism in the same way that Sandel and Rawls does, but there’s a starting point. Trying to tax the rich is fine, but it misses important points around why a global system requires untaxed wealth to run in the first place. It’s not an oversight that requires additional state overhead, like Piketty believes - it’s a completely intentional system that goes back to the days of the British East India charter.

For the most part though, modern economists intentionally do not look to past thinkers. It’s one of the unique fields to be in where the history of its own field is not taught, and is heavily propagandized to root out any heterodox thought by exiling professors and industry professionals that do have have knowledge. It leads to wacky scenarios where the humanities department in Universities are calling for students to radically and critically change the consciousness of the world by recognizing power and privilege, while telling those same students that there’s only way that economics can be organized, and don’t even bother looking to the past because it’s all been proven wrong anyway.

fart simpson
Jul 2, 2005

DEATH TO AMERICA
:xickos:

maybe the rational, utility maximizing economic actor model isnt really wrong, its just that the base economic actor is the individual company rather than the individual human?

DJJIB-DJDCT
Feb 1, 2024

fart simpson posted:

maybe the rational, utility maximizing economic actor model isnt really wrong, its just that the base economic actor is the individual company rather than the individual human?

Corporations are people, it checks out

hubris.height
Jan 6, 2005

Pork Pro

Capital Vol 1 posted:

One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will serve to illustrate this point. A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifestation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the weight of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the
weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are both the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight. Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone.

Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value.

feel like this section was related to the discussion on this page with regards to value as an irreductable trait of a commodity, and hell, it worked to help me understand it

dk2m
May 6, 2009
Today is my day off and I’m bored so I guess I’ll just keep posting? The utility question is great though. Please correct if anything I’m saying here is wrong.

To roughly sketch it out, by the time we get to Vol 3, a few big problems emerge that are the impetus that lead to neoclassical economics.

To take a giant step back, Marx is following in the footsteps of Smith and Ricardo, who are obviously both capitalists. They are all trying to answer the same thing: what is “value” and how is it exchanged in capitalism? Smith and Ricardo propose the ideas that it’s actually labor that generates this value. Ricardo, trying to theorize why rents go up, creates a value theory that is based on “differential land rents”.

Paraphrasing roughly, because this example is truly outdated - he thought that there were a few types of land which could be cultivated. Good land, middle land, bad land. Good land cultivates crops well, and therefore has less labor input needed. This means that the prices of crops are cheap. But, as the population increases, that means the worse land has to be cultivated. Because it’s harder to cultivate this, it requires more labor, so the crop will have a higher price.

Summarized, as the population increases (the margins go up), it’s actually the worst land that sets the price (hence the differential part of this theory).

This idea sort of work. You can sort of see why early economists were excited by this idea, because it did imply that when prices were low, wages would be low since you wouldn’t need to pay for the baked in productivity, and profits would be high. This didn’t make much sense though when you start trying to mix and match high capital/low labor costs industries with its inverse. Why would such a situation even emerge?

Marx solved this with his invariant value, which is labor input of time. Still, he runs into this same problem to a certain degree as well. Why would it be profitable to run a company that employed lots of labor vs. a company that ran little labor?

There are ways that he answers this question, but I’m just going to jump ahead.

Marginal theory is hyperfixated on this problem. It stemmed from the difficulty and complicated explanations for why an economy at the total level could sustain reasonable rates of profit given that individual firms might be operating at extreme differences between their cost/profit ratio.

What they stated instead, which is the break between “classical” to “neoclassical”, is that labor inputs just complicate the problem. Instead, forget about all of that - let’s just look at the individual differentials between supply and demand. If it costs - whether thats labor, fixed input, raw materials, the sum of it all, whatever - $1 to create a good, but you only get back $.90 when you sell it, it’s a bad decision.

Conversely, the opposite is true.

So, taking inspiration from Ricardo by using differential (or marginal) costs/prices, they instead focused simply on prices. This completely sidesteps the questions of value or labor, and instead you can just add every marginal cost to see if you get the right price back.

Utility now also becomes marginal. That’s because, as an individual consumer, you can say that if the 15th coat you buy gives you less happiness than the 14th, then you don’t do it. It becomes an arithmetically easy way to calculate longer term profit rates of a company because you can bake in advancements of productivity (costs would go down, so it makes it easier, in theory, to make a decision on what that means for prices). However, the big problem runs into is again, at a total level - wages can fall, meaning productivity falls, meaning production falls. If this happens everywhere all at once, prices would fall and “all together” - this is somewhat analogous to a depression, but depressions are crisis relating to overflowing debt and speculation, not so much a total collapse of wages or labor inputs or price. The theory breaks down because we actually never see it in practice. Eventually Keynes steps in to try and solve this, but that’s for another time.

The question of utility, use-value and value are still pretty open to me. What Marx gives us unique insight is that margins might be useful if we’re looking at 2 individual competitors “facing each other” in a market place. But aggregated, we know that capitalism has emergencies constantly. These emergencies are due to many factors, which Vol 3 lays out - one of them is the general tendency for profits to fall, and the other is fictitious capital/debt. We live in an age where we are inflating debt to unsustainable levels to constantly bail out increasingly unprofitable cost structures inherent in Western economies - primarily due to monopoly practices driving down the cost of labor to become financialized gains. Marx didn’t see this coming, as he actually thought that as capitalism runs into these emergencies, something new will take it’s place. Instead, we are in a stage where financial trickery and debt is inflating a hugely cost prohibitive economy for labor, leading to companies finding new ways to overcome this - offshoring, automation of labor, “spreadsheet economy”, all of that.

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dk2m
May 6, 2009

hubris.height posted:

feel like this section was related to the discussion on this page with regards to value as an irreductable trait of a commodity, and hell, it worked to help me understand it

This one is great.

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