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

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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Mandel Brotset: Jan 1, 2024

BillsPhoenix posted:

No one can even answer the first game theory question, ain't no way we can do diffeq econometric models with incomplete information modeling.

Anyhow, I buy the idea that Marx hosed up, one he hosed up, and he tried to force the mistake through, rather than admit fault.

What happens if instead of coats, the product is a machine that makes coats.

how much do you make

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:08

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# ? May 24, 2024 19:38

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

BillsPhoenix posted:

What happens if instead of coats, the product is a machine that makes coats.

what if marx wrote a chapter on Machinery and Modern Industry

what if he'd considered Department I goods instead of just Department II

has marx even HEARD of labor-saving technology?

this guy should have taken a month off from writing manifestos to read a little about a thing called capital

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:18

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

tristeham posted:

loving kill him

don't need to say twice

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:21

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

hey here's my response to the game theory questions

who loving cares lol, your equations do not respond to reality or how people actually behave

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:23

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

mfer simply goes "neoclassical school has barely to do with modern western economic thinking" and said that had econometrics, I am in lmaos here

For those who don't know, the neoclassical school is the paradigmatic core of mainstream economics, through the two major disciplines of macroeconomics and microeconomics. It's literally the theory that informs people who work in the federal reserve, the IMF, world bank, eurobank, investment firms, brokerages, all the large private international banking, etc etc etc. It's inescapable to learn: if you go to one of the Marxist schools in China, Cuba, Vietnam or elsewhere, you are learning neoclassical economics because Big Karl set the example when he wrote Capital and put in the subtitle "A Critique of Political Economy": it is a critique of the dominant thinking of the subject at the time

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:31

Rodney The Yam II: Mar 3, 2007

Bill why are you making Nash Equilibrium out to be a purity test of our worthiness to discourse with you? Why don't you tell us what it has to do with anything we're talking about?

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:36

Homeless Friend: Jul 16, 2007

i dont know about this game theory. but
i am formally trained in gamer theory

# ? Mar 8, 2024 22:45

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Homeless Friend posted:

i dont know about this game theory. but
i am formally trained in gamer theory

a dangerous theory

# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:00

386-SX 25Mhz VGA: Jan 14, 2003; (C) American Megatrends Inc.,

to derive the socially optimal evolution of policy conditions, first construct the current-valued Hamiltonian entirely from horseshit and apply variational optimization to demonstrate that universal exploding slave collars are the only answer

# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:09

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

If we want to talk about critiques of Marx, we're not gonna get much meat from Bill's standpoint, but one of the more interesting ones I'm slowly engaging with is Colin Drumm's dissertation, which sort of takes Marx and MMT and a bunch of history of seignorage and tries to strip out the most valuable bits of plumbing:

https://twitter.com/drumm_colin/status/1468779685916012546

I won't say I'm convinced of the critique of Marx (which occupies chapter 1) but I am trying to be open-minded about the point he's making, and I do plan to read the whole thing. I'm mostly intrigued because he's the first (sympathetic) critic of Marx I've encountered who actually adopts a starting point adequate to the task. Something I've been saying for years is that to really refute ol KM, rather than looking for issues with his general reductio and argumentation, as people have been trying and failing to do for a century and a half, you'd need to be going after the first principles: the analysis of the commodity form or something similarly fundamental. And sure enough, Drumm is lashing all the way back to Aristotle's doctrine of commensuration.

While I'm still wrapping my head around it, I'd currently characterize him as basically arguing that liquidity and the bid-ask spread are missing ingredients in Marx's theory of money and markets, and those ingredients possess both a logical and a historical precedence that mean they can't be dismissed as mere transaction costs or a byproduct of capitalism, since they're anterior to capitalism. And this situates an irrationality at the very core of money itself, where it kind of has two (or rather a range of) prices. He seems to be saying that rather than a mere amendment, this detail necessitates a more radical theoretical departure that slots the state/dynasty into a more fundamental spot.

As I said, not convinced yet, and I have some initial reactions to some of what he's forwarding, but I'm going to give the whole thing an airing before I respond, because the author's footing is novel enough (to me, at least) that it's certainly earned that much.

From what I've gleaned poking around his TL, his attitude toward Marxian economics is roughly that at the end of the day its biggest problem is that it's still an economics; that Marx did better at apprehending things than 99% of folks who tried, but that just makes it even more frustrating when he falls into certain over-tidy theoretical webs.

Edit: also someone made a recording of the whole thing and adds:

quote:

Modern Monetary Theory comes off the worst as Drumm shows it has tautological underpinnings and a selective view of history which cannot explain the Middle Ages.

looking forward to that bit, too

Aeolius has issued a correction as of 23:33 on Mar 8, 2024

# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:16

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Ferrinus posted:

i'm about to do some political education with friends and i got the task of writing up and delivering a summary of Principles of Communism. if anyone's interested, here's what i got

really nice summary, thanks for sharing!

# ? Mar 8, 2024 23:54

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Btw, again, everybody who wants to post their notes, write-ups, summaries, outlines or whatever, please do. If you worried about being basic stuff, personally, it's extremely helpful and jolts back topics that, with new perspectives and takes from here, forms new connections that I couldn't figure way back.

Also, something that might be apparently basic can be actually quite an advanced topic that often doesn't happen, like with financial capitalism. Discussions that go beyond volume 1 of Capital can reach many questions that are open still today, and who knows, we might stumble across something very interesting which a world-class theoretician can take on. Might even be a goon, who knows (lmao)

# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:03

DJJIB-DJDCT: Feb 1, 2024

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Btw, again, everybody who wants to post their notes, write-ups, summaries, outlines or whatever, please do. If you worried about being basic stuff, personally, it's extremely helpful and jolts back topics that, with new perspectives and takes from here, forms new connections that I couldn't figure way back.

Also, something that might be apparently basic can be actually quite an advanced topic that often doesn't happen, like with financial capitalism. Discussions that go beyond volume 1 of Capital can reach many questions that are open still today, and who knows, we might stumble across something very interesting which a world-class theoretician can take on. Might even be a goon, who knows (lmao)

I'm working on a paper for a conference where I hope to use some of Wickham's work to apply materialist (he doesn't use "Marxist" explicitly in his work) analysis to the Late Antique economy.

Have you read any of Wickham's work, and if so, do you have an opinion of how he threads the needle of applying his understanding to the antique and medieval economies without using Marxist vocabulary? I know Banaji generally has good things to say about Wickham, but believes he weakens his understanding of the transition from slavery to feudalism by shying away from simply using Marx's framing.

I think Hobsbawm was probably the last historian who could be openly and unapologetically Marxist, and since then, as Marx was driven from the economy and Communism defeated with the fall of the USSR, we see a certain kind of gun shyness among respectable historians writing for the major university presses.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 00:07

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

i was always sympathetic to MMT because the basic insight seemed (to me) to be that the labor supply rather than the currency supply of a given state was decisive and that it could be and often was the case that the government wasn't spending enough money into being to validate the labor being done rather than creating too much. but secondhand it sounds like most MMT likers are trying to use it as a proof that you don't need marxism and can just do keynesianism harder instead, which is not at all the conclusion i took when hearing about it on the citations needed podcast approximately seven hundred years ago

# ? Mar 9, 2024 02:10

How!: Oct 29, 2009

I would like to thank this thread. I work with a young Mormon man with a very good heart, and the knowledge here has been instrumental in opening his eyes. It�s honestly heartening to talk to the younger ppl sometimes.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 02:56

Bald Stalin: Jul 11, 2004; Our posts

Was at the pub last night and a schizophrenic was wandering around getting into arguments with everyone about MKUltra and when I said I was very familiar with it he wanted to argue about that too. Reminded me to swing back to this thread and check out the latest.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 03:01

Mr. Lobe: Feb 23, 2007; ... Dry bones...

Bald Stalin posted:

Was at the pub last night and a schizophrenic was wandering around getting into arguments with everyone about MKUltra and when I said I was very familiar with it he wanted to argue about that too. Reminded me to swing back to this thread and check out the latest.

So schizophrenic he's gatekeeping MKUltra

It is an ill end some posters come to

# ? Mar 9, 2024 04:08

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

Aeolius posted:

If we want to talk about critiques of Marx, we're not gonna get much meat from Bill's standpoint, but one of the more interesting ones I'm slowly engaging with is Colin Drumm's dissertation, which sort of takes Marx and MMT and a bunch of history of seignorage and tries to strip out the most valuable bits of plumbing:

https://twitter.com/drumm_colin/status/1468779685916012546

IMO, the only way a satisfying critique of Marx is going to be delivered is when the capitalist political economy (all of them be it neoclassical to social democracy) is clearly on the downfall and the socialist political economy is dominant. This is because at this moment basically everyone is in Aristotle's position where they can perhaps see a glimpse of what socialism would be but the current dominance of commodity production prevents everyone from fully grasping it. In other words, the theoretician who would be able to surpass Marx will arise from circumstances similar to that of Marx where they are analyzing the socialist political economy just as Marx analyzed the capitalist political economy.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 04:20

Halser: Aug 24, 2016

Are there any notable thinkers in China? I imagine they'd have more fertile ground for this kind of development.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 05:22

Danann: Aug 4, 2013

Cheng Enfu's China's Economic Dialectic is good from what I hear but it's only available in dead tree format.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 05:33

DJJIB-DJDCT: Feb 1, 2024

Laozi and Mencius

# ? Mar 9, 2024 13:45

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Ferrinus posted:

i'm about to do some political education with friends and i got the task of writing up and delivering a summary of Principles of Communism. if anyone's interested, here's what i got (i think it's clocked in at shorter than the original text, if not by as much as i'd like). in particular i like how engels defines competition

this was excellent, thank you

Ferrinus posted:

i was always sympathetic to MMT because the basic insight seemed (to me) to be that the labor supply rather than the currency supply of a given state was decisive and that it could be and often was the case that the government wasn't spending enough money into being to validate the labor being done rather than creating too much. but secondhand it sounds like most MMT likers are trying to use it as a proof that you don't need marxism and can just do keynesianism harder instead, which is not at all the conclusion i took when hearing about it on the citations needed podcast approximately seven hundred years ago

at bottom, MMT is pertains to the idea that you don't need to ask "how will we pay for it?" when talking about enacting policy, because a government can simply print however much money it wants, to mobilize however much labor it needs, to do the things it wants to do (and setting aside for the moment as to whether this money-printing ability is a USA-specific special power)

moreover, we already know that this is how things work, because this is what the USA already does: it spares no expense when "paying for" the things it wants to do, it just creates these political roadblocks whenever it runs into something that it does NOT want to do

at a certain level, MMT seems almost tautological, or a form of trying to smuggle-in a progressive policy position under the guise of a "politically neutral" analysis of how the USA can totally afford to do universal healthcare or the green new deal or whatever

I would say that it's failing, if anything, is that it doesn't really address the question of "why would the USA want to enact universal healthcare, in the first place?" - yes, the USA could finance it, if it wanted to, but even if you set aside the "how will we pay for it?" angle, anyone who opposes UHC is simply going to pivot to an entirely different reason, in good faith or otherwise

# ? Mar 9, 2024 14:41

ram dass in hell: Dec 29, 2019

Aeolius posted:

every discussion of game theory has to have an obligatory description of the prisoner's dilemma

i think it points to what we might call a prisoner's dilemma dilemma

so true

# ? Mar 9, 2024 14:54

ram dass in hell: Dec 29, 2019

tristeham posted:

loving kill him

# ? Mar 9, 2024 14:59

ram dass in hell: Dec 29, 2019

Homeless Friend posted:

i dont know about this game theory. but
i am formally trained in gamer theory

~~Nash equilibrium~~
N equilibrium

# ? Mar 9, 2024 15:01

hubris.height: Jan 6, 2005; Pork Pro

dead gay comedy forums posted:

really nice summary, thanks for sharing!

# ? Mar 9, 2024 15:38

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

a while ago i wrote a kind of informal for-dummies rundown of the law of value and how it leads to capitalist profits. it appeared in a short-lived blog that mostly discussed communist or communist-friendly organizing initiatives in advance of the dsa's 2021 convention. i'm gonna repost the first half of my article here, and maybe the second half about how profit actually works later on

a few years ago, i posted:

At time of writing, an ounce of gold costs $1,863.25. Bottled water costs 70 cents. If you had 2,661 bottles of water, you could trade them for 1 ounce of gold�if you were good at haggling.

But why would you ever do that? You might wear gold as decoration, or shape gold to fill a cavity, or thread gold through a microchip. Water, meanwhile, keeps you alive. You can go maybe three days without it. Why is it that practically-useless gold is worth so much more than life-sustaining water? How can we even measure one by the other?

Use-Value and Exchange-Value

The answer lies in the distinction between use-value and exchange-value. Every commodity�every useful thing made to be traded away�has both, but the two are totally unrelated.

Use-value is a commodity�s ability to satisfy some need or desire. A gallon of water maintains your homeostasis, but also puts out fires or cleans things off. A sandwich satiates you, a game entertains you, a coat warms you. This changes with context; you don�t need a coat on a summer day, and you might care more about a coat�s looks than its thermodynamics.

Use-values are qualitative, not quantitative, and they�re largely incommensurable. Some object or service satisfies you or doesn�t, and makes no difference to your other needs. Both a sandwich and a steak can sate your hunger, and you could measure how many calories each provides, but no number of sandwiches substitutes for a glass of water, or a breath of air, or pair of shoes, or a good book.

Nevertheless, everything mentioned has some exchange-value, some number of other things that someone is willing to swap it for. Gold and water fulfill totally different needs, but you can trade a mass of water for a speck of gold. Twelve or thirteen sandwiches could yield one a video game. You wouldn�t trade any number of coats for a breath of air�not until climate change gets really bad, anyway.

Where do these exchange-values come from? Gold and water have practically nothing in common, but there�s some factor that lets us compare them mathematically, or compare either to a toothbrush, or compare that toothbrush to a car. Unlike use-values, exchange-values are quantitative�they�re measuring some scaling, linear parameter that all commodities share. Maybe not perfectly�people bargain�but there�s something telling us that one car is worth more than one toothbrush.

The Labor Theory of Value

That something is value�the socially necessary labor time required for production. This definition originates in the writings of liberal economists like Smith and Ricardo; Marx just takes it to its logical conclusion.

Basically, a thing�s �value� is how hard it is to make or find. It�s trickier to make a phone than a boot, so it�d be unfair to offer someone boots for their phone. If they�re barefoot in the snow, they might take the deal, but they�ll still know it�s a bad deal because boots are more common than phones. But what does �socially necessary� mean?

Socially Necessary Labor

First, �socially necessary� assumes a worker of average productivity. Of course, not all labor is equal. You might work harder than I do or be better trained. Switching a surgeon and electrician will cause problems in both the hospital and the breaker room. However, there is such a thing as an average surgeon or an average electrician, and we can use either as our standard where appropriate. It might take me a week to weave a basket and you just a day, but our buyer doesn�t care; they just need something to carry stuff in.

Second, �socially necessary� varies with context. It�s quicker to fell a tree with a chainsaw than with an axe. It�s quicker to find a tree in the Rockies than in the Sahara. A change in the conditions of production means a change in the value of what�s produced, like it or not. Once chainsaws get popular, wood loses value, and sticking with an axe earns you no sympathies; you�ll find that everyone�s lumber trades for less, and that, unlike people with chainsaws, you haven�t got any more to offer.

Third, socially is a crucial part of �socially necessary�. Value arises from society�s aggregate ability to find or make something, not any individual�s luck. If you trip over a diamond in your backyard, you did a couple seconds� labor. Compare that to the total time all humanity has spent searching, panning, and mining for diamonds, divided by the number of diamonds actually found. The socially necessary labor time in one diamond is enormous! You�re suddenly rich precisely because the value of any diamond is based on the human average, not your experience.

Finally, a commodity needs to be necessary, socially. If no one wants a mud pie, a mud pie you spent hours on has no value. If there�s a glut of baskets across society, weaving another basket wastes everyone�s time.

The Law of Value

So, why is gold more valuable than water? Only because it�s harder to find gold than water. Some things have no value because they don�t take labor to procure�air, for instance.

To Marx, the value of a commodity is the center of gravity around which exchange-value fluctuates. Things won�t necessarily be traded exactly at their values, but, generally, how hard something is to get determines how much of it�s available and how dearly people pay for it.

Price is just something�s exchange-value measured in whatever commodity counts as money. This is often gold, since gold is valuable (hard to find), imperishable, and malleable. Nowadays, money is more abstract, but the principle�s the same; price immediately measures how much one owner wants for one commodity, but flows from how time-consuming that commodity is to make or find.

Value becomes exchange-value which becomes price� and use-value sits on the sidelines. A commodity has to have a use-value to have a value, sure, but that�s the only connection. Value�s a quantity, use-value a quality. Something might have enormous value but trivial use-value, or tiny value but life-defining use-value.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 18:11

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

I'm finding a bunch of nits to pick on this Drumm chapter that I missed when I was giving it my first looking over, but I really should wait until I see all the other parts before I strap on the traditional bandoliers.

I guess if patience were easy, it wouldn't be a virtue.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 20:11

Rodney The Yam II: Mar 3, 2007

Ferrinus posted:

a while ago i wrote a kind of informal for-dummies rundown of the law of value and how it leads to capitalist profits. it appeared in a short-lived blog that mostly discussed communist or communist-friendly organizing initiatives in advance of the dsa's 2021 convention. i'm gonna repost the first half of my article here, and maybe the second half about how profit actually works later on

This is nicely worded and very accessible thanks! I'd love to read the second half when you post it

# ? Mar 9, 2024 22:56

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

Rodney The Yam II posted:

This is nicely worded and very accessible thanks! I'd love to read the second half when you post it

this is all the encouragement i needed. part 2:

i, at some point, posted:

Trade and Alienation

When you trade a commodity away, you�re alienating�giving up�its use-value. Simultaneously, you�re realizing its exchange value. If you start with yarn that took an hour to make, then spend four hours knitting a hat, you�ve now got the means to keep your ears warm, but also five total hours of materialized labor. You could wear the hat yourself, but you�ll never get paid for it. You could trade the hat for something also worth five hours, but you�d never get to wear it. Maybe you swap two hats for one ten-hour basket, or maybe you sell hats for $5 each. Assuming $1 represents one hour, it all adds up: $1 of yarn plus 4 hours� time makes a $5 commodity.

This is the free market ideal: trading commodity for commodity, swapping use-values around while ensuring that exchange-values match. Weave two hats, wear one, sell the other for $5, buy a $5 book � now both you and the printer have warm ears and fresh reading material. Everybody wins! And, the whole way through, value�s preserved: a $5 commodity became 5 actual dollars, which became another $5 commodity.

But, mysteriously, some people start with money, buy commodities, then sell commodities for more money than before. A capitalist might buy $2 worth of yarn, pay $6 to hire you for the day, have you weave two hats, and sell those hats for $10. Somehow, they bought commodities worth $8, then sold some commodities for $10. What happened? Where did the $2 extra come from? Were you underpaid? To answer that, we need to figure out what, exactly, the capitalist bought from you.

Labor and Labor-Power

The commodity that makes capitalism go is labor-power, the human capacity to work. This is your health, your stamina, your life-force; the muscle, brain, and nerve that gets worn down by work and recharged by rest. Shoes and cars and so on come out of production, but social reproduction regenerates your labor-power from day to day. This involves things like food, rest, and shelter, but also self-expression, socialization, and care work.

The value of a day�s labor-power is, of course, the hours of socially necessary labor required to (re)produce it. We can add up the value of three meals, half a gallon of water, one thirtieth of a shirt that wears out after a month, one three-sixty-fifth of a house that needs repairs after a year, and so on. This is the �basket of goods� that keeps a worker alive and fit to work for a day.

As usual, the value of a day�s labor-power is context-dependent. A highly productive society might easily make food, housing, and the rest of the basket. However, the living standards of that society might be high, such that the basket is bigger than it used to be. Either way, all this combines to produce some definite number of hours required to regenerate one worker for one day.

The use-value of labor-power is simply doing labor�and labor creates value. When you consume labor-power, you get work, just like you get nutrition when you consume an apple. That work, itself, generates new value. It doesn�t have to; you might spend the day goofing off or screwing up, just like you might drop an apple into mud before you even take a bite. But labor-power can be consumed to create value; in fact, it can create more value than it had to start with. That�s the basis of human progress; if it took more than a day to produce a day�s necessities, you couldn�t possibly survive, and if it took exactly a day to produce a day�s necessities, you�d be stuck in a loop.

The distinction between labor and labor-power is very important. You can�t sell someone labor any more than you can sell someone the taste of an apple. But you can sell someone your labor-power, just like you can sell someone a physical apple. It�s then up to them what to do with it.

Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham

So, suppose that it takes six hours to make the stuff that keeps you healthy for a day. That means a day�s labor-power is worth $6. That means that when a capitalist hires you for $6, they�re paying you the full value of your commodity, just as if they paid you $5 for one of your hats. You could demand $8 for your labor-power, but it�d be like asking $7 for your hat; the buyer would just look elsewhere, knowing that what they want comes cheaper.

Selling your hat yields its $5 exchange-value, but your buyer gets the use-value of wearing the hat. Selling your labor-power gets you $6, but your buyer gets the value your labor creates. You�ve been alienated from your labor. Why are you selling labor-power, not hats? You�ve got nothing else to sell; you�ve got no yarn to start with, and need those $6 today if you want to stay alive.

So, you work an eight-hour day and produce eight hours of value, exceeding the six-hour value of the labor-power you sold. A capitalist buys $2 of yarn, combines it with $6 of your labor-power, and gets $10 of hats. They consume your labor, so they capture the surplus it produces.

Were you underpaid? No, you were paid the full value of the labor-power. Were you cheated? No, you saw the contract ahead of time. Were you coerced? No, you could have found some other buyer, or not traded at all. You and the capitalist dealt as legal equals, exchanging commodity for commodity for mutual advantage. Nevertheless, the capitalist�s profit came out of your exploitation. Surplus comes exclusively from the difference between the value and use-value of labor-power, and since only the capitalist gets that surplus, you�re left right where you started. Until and unless we seize the means of production for ourselves, we�ll be stuck in that loop, selling off our lives one day at a time.

# ? Mar 9, 2024 23:31

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

hell yea. ty ferrinus

# ? Mar 10, 2024 00:55

FirstnameLastname: Jul 10, 2022

Ferrinus posted:

this is all the encouragement i needed. part 2:

u have yet to think of the anti-hat? how quaint.

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:05

Tarranon: Oct 10, 2007; Diggity Dog

Ferrinus posted:

this is all the encouragement i needed. part 2:

seriously, thanks. when you get a sec or if anyone wants to hop in, could you go a bit more into 'But labor-power can be consumed to create value; in fact, it can create more value than it had to start with.' would examples of this be labor-power towards say research that lowers socially necessary labor time?

or take step back and get a bit closer to what's throwing me, the statement sounds like it's describing something akin to profit, but something about that feels wrong because based on my understanding of this and your previous post, such a thing doesn't really exist outside of the captured surplus you describe in a capitalist system

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:08

Skaffen-Amtiskaw: Jun 24, 2023

Somehow missed this thread, but having stumbled across Paul Cockshott's channel on YT putting me in the mood, am going to diligently churn through it as best I can.

As someone mentioned MMT on this page, a question. How would you address family members who subscribe to the "taxes are what fund gov't budgets" way of thinking? I have a feeling, given most people on the planet are going to be seeing an election this year, that I'm going to have to field more questions about how our crumbling infrastructure is due to lack of money, and that's all because of the massive salaries of council staff and other civil servants and gold plated benefit scroungers. Also, productivity needs to keep going up magically via AI or whatecer and blah blah blah.

I'm curious what the simplest way to rebuke Daily Mail talking points is when the "there's no money left!" trump card gets played.

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:13

ram dass in hell: Dec 29, 2019

dead gay comedy forums posted:

hell yea. ty ferrinus

ferrinus, that poo poo kicks rear end I'm gonna use a lot of it in proselytizing

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:24

Son of Thunderbeast: Sep 21, 2002

dead gay comedy forums posted:

hell yea. ty ferrinus

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:45

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

Tarranon posted:

seriously, thanks. when you get a sec or if anyone wants to hop in, could you go a bit more into 'But labor-power can be consumed to create value; in fact, it can create more value than it had to start with.' would examples of this be labor-power towards say research that lowers socially necessary labor time?

or take step back and get a bit closer to what's throwing me, the statement sounds like it's describing something akin to profit, but something about that feels wrong because based on my understanding of this and your previous post, such a thing doesn't really exist outside of the captured surplus you describe in a capitalist system

it actually IS the source of profit and my favorite insight from vol1, although i feel like i rushed through it a bit too much in an effort to cut wordcount. it actually has nothing to do with technological advancement or labor-saving devices that lower the value of commodities created with them, just the basic gameplay loop of, like, being alive

if you're a hunter-gatherer and need to spend 8 hours sleeping/washing/eating etc, and have another 16 hours each day to try to catch or forage up enough food to stay alive the next day, how many of those 16 hours does it take you? if it takes 17 hours, you can't possibly survive. if it takes 16 exactly, you're caught on a hellish treadmill and living paycheck to paycheck. but if it takes only 15 hours of work to assemble the food and shelter required to survive a day, then something amazing is happening: every spending 23 combined hours on work and consumption generates 24 hours of labor-power. if we're not in any kind of advanced, class-based mode of production yet, we're just describing the general phenomena of human beings creating a social surplus, such that they can stockpile resources for luxury, or reproduction, or expansion, or whatever. if labor-power couldn't replace itself AND leave a little extra it'd basically be impossible to have a civilization

now, one important note here is that the amount of stuff required just for daily regeneration of labor-power is politically negotiable and changes both with the local standard of living and how long a timescale you're operating on -- if you want to be able to regenerate your labor-power sustainably for the next thirty years, your "bare minimum" is very different than if you just need it one more time, ever, immediately tomorrow. but unless you're in really dire material circumstances you can generally work for less than a day and end up with enough use-values to survive a whole 'nother day, and the difference between those things is what capitalists capture as profit

# ? Mar 10, 2024 01:49

Tarranon: Oct 10, 2007; Diggity Dog

that helps a lot thanks :cheers:

# ? Mar 10, 2024 02:06

Rodney The Yam II: Mar 3, 2007

dead gay comedy forums posted:

hell yea. ty ferrinus

This.

I was confused about labour-power but i felt like i couldn't bring it up before doing some more reading on my own. You've really helped make it easy to grasp

# ? Mar 10, 2024 02:16

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# ? May 24, 2024 19:38

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

there's a short(er) essay by marx called Wage Labor and Capital that i read before capital proper that really helped prime me to grasp the labor vs. labor-power distinction. it's really, really important that capitalists buy and sell the latter, not the former, and some of the people marx takes shots chiefly err in confusing the two

# ? Mar 10, 2024 02:23

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