(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
|
billsphoenix deserved to be reminded to keep it light, stick to anti coats and poo poo, don't get too serious. it's all fun and games when you do the thing that the text literally says you can't do, but don't get cocky!
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 21:01
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 18:42 |
|
|
I can't post here, I don't have authority.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 22:15
|
|
|
you just did and who am I to contest the will of the masses
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 22:18
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:he actually did several pages ago, it's this: I've avoided replying to Ferrinus until now, because they seem to understand Marxism. This is an excellent post about falling profits. I agree with the concept. But the revolutionary ground work in regards to use value, exchange value, ltv Marx created... doesn't align.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 22:59
|
|
|
Actually it does
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:02
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:I've avoided replying to Ferrinus until now, because they seem to understand Marxism. marx did not create the labour theory of value arguably aristotle did
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:02
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:I've avoided replying to Ferrinus until now, because they seem to understand Marxism. can you elaborate as to where the misalignment is?
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:03
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:I've avoided replying to Ferrinus until now, because they seem to understand Marxism. and why is that so?
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:03
|
|
|
So machine mk. 1 costs $750 to purchase. But we need to backtrack that machine to earlier chapters. Does the machine itself have a use value? Yes, it creates coats  .Does the machine have exchange value? Yes, in this example it's $750. How did we get to this value? A machine maker used raw materials and labor to create the machine. Let's say $300 in materials and $200 in labor is needed to create the machine. The seller is greedy, so the charge $750. Did the seller create $250 in value here? Unless I'm wildly off - no, they didn't. A $500 machine was created, if they get someone to pay them an extra $250, the payer has lost $250 in value. Or... Marx used use value and exchange value to point out increasing or decreasing a price has no impact on the value of a commodity.
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:09
|
|
|
ugh i'm never in the right frame of mind nor confident enough whenever one of these starts but oh well i'll take a crack at it. the $250 is the realized surplus value of the machine. the $500 of labor and materials serves as the departure point for the sale of the commodity, various forces can compel the capitalist to sell above, below, or at cost such as monopoly power, laws of competition, or market conditions. so i guess your last line would be an accurate summation unless i'm misunderstanding it
|
|
#
?
Apr 4, 2024 23:36
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:
no, the capitalist used $450 in labor to create the machine and is pocketing $250 of it instead of giving it to labor
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 00:15
|
|
|
Doesn't Marx explicitly, and very early on state that the individual price of a specific thing doesn't mean squat, and he's always talking about the market of those things as a whole. So, if one specific capitalist held a gun to a dudes head and made him pay twice as much for a product, that doesn't make all of Marx's theory crumble to the earth in ruin because that person magically found the way to create "value" at the barrel of a gun. Now, if every capitalist did this and those machines in aggregate sell for 750 dollars each that's just their 'exchange value' due to 'market forces'. Kaedric has issued a correction as of 00:42 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 00:39
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:So machine mk. 1 costs $750 to purchase. But we need to backtrack that machine to earlier chapters. the machine seller can't just charge $750 because he's "greedy". if greed was actually what made capitalism go, he could charge $800 or $1000 or whatever instead, right? one of my favorite jokes goes like this: a man is wandering an open air market, and finds a stall with a single seller and a sign that reads "ballpoint pens: $10,000". the man asks, why are you selling your pens for that much? the merchant responds, this way, i only have to sell one! in fact if a machine retails for $750 (even if it specifically retails on the big markets that capitalists trade with each other in, not the petty markets in which workers buy individual apples or baskets), and its constituent raw materials cost $300, then turning the materials into a finished machine must require $450 of value-generating labor, i.e. 1.5x as much effort as mining and hauling and refining those materials in the first place. so if a capitalist just started with a team of laborers and the unbroken earth, it might take his laborers three months to find and mine and smelt all the iron they need as well as chop down all the timber and so on, and then four and a half months to hammer and shape and forge and saw that stuff into a finished machine ready for sale. since the capitalist instead already has a market to draw on, he could just buy three months' worth of stuff from that market, then have his workers go at it for four and a half months to transform those $300 materials into a $750 machine ready for sale the trick is that (within the world of your example), those workers only need $200 worth of food, clothes, and lodgings to live and work for 4.5 months. no one's going to hire them for more than $44.4.../mo because that's the prevailing wage. so they just end up doing a bunch of labor for their boss, gratis, because what else are they going to do? starve? Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 01:12 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 01:08
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:ugh i'm never in the right frame of mind nor confident enough whenever one of these starts but oh well i'll take a crack at it. It's about the social average value power unless otherwise stated yeah. Capital I, Page 29 posted:Some people might think that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production. The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power. The total labour power of society, which is embodied in the sum total of the values of all commodities produced by that society, counts here as one homogeneous mass of human labour power, composed though it be of innumerable individual units. Each of these units is the same as any other, so far as it has the character of the average labour power of society, and takes effect as such; that is, so far as it requires for producing a commodity, no more time than is needed on an average, no more than is socially necessary. The labour time socially necessary is that required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth. The hand-loom weavers, as a matter of fact, continued to require the same time as before; but for all that, the product of one hour of their labour represented after the change only half an hour’s social labour, and consequently fell to one-half its former value.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 03:00
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:Or... Marx used use value and exchange value to point out increasing or decreasing a price has no impact on the value of a commodity. this doesn't sound 100% accurate to me but it does seem to be the only thing I've ever seen you post itt that wasn't completely dumb as hell
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 06:26
|
|
|
I'm trying to work through some things and I hope the following makes sense: I'm aware of the concept of the amount of value required for someone to reproduce their labor. I can follow along with the idea that capitalist exploitation derives from a worker generating value for their employer, over and above the value that they need to reproduce their labor. They work eight hours in a factory producing widgets, generating x value. They had already generated enough value to reproduce their labor by hour five, but they work for another three on top of that - the capitalist takes all eight hours worth of value, and gives five back to the worker, and keeps the three to themselves. That's where the capitalist's profit comes from. The worker can't demand the full eight, because the capitalist owns the capital, and without the capital to work on, the worker's labor doesn't produce anything. I think that's all generally correct. What I'd like to talk about is: is it correct to say that the value required for a worker to reproduce their labor, is variable from worker to worker? like, it costs so-and-so amount of money for a worker to feed themselves for a day, to cover the fractional cost of their monthly rent, to cover the depreciation of their clothing, to cover the cost of their commute to the workplace and back, and so on. That amount isn't the same across any two workers, right? I mean, we can average it out, sure, but someone who lives closer to the workplace, someone who has two kids over none, someone who splits the rent with two roommates, someone who lives in a two-income household, and so on, means there's variance? I'm not saying it necessarily matters, big picture, that the answer to that question is "yes", I'm just trying to check if it is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 09:50
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I'm trying to work through some things and I hope the following makes sense: Yes, sure. In Capital everything is always fluctuating around the socially common way of production and the typical worker. And anyway, you can't really get exact numbers here, since what a worker is paid needs to be enough to reproduce the worker, including costs of education etc. But not what it did cost, but what it would cost now. But then you obviously can't reproduce a worker in this very moment, no matter what you do with child labor laws. So in practice there's a lot of fuzziness, I think. Particular if you move from large aggregates to narrower slices.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 10:04
|
|
|
The cost of labour reproduction is comprehensive in that it also needs to include the cost of producing new laborers, ie. having and raising kids. So a lifehack in capitalism is to not have kids and enjoy spending the money that saves you on leisure. Capital can respond to this by lowering pay, but then that immiserates specifically those with kids, disincentivizing everyone else from having kids even more (having to give up that leisure money was already a disincentive) and in a couple decades create a labour shortage as the population ages. The solution is to either pay more (most effectively through taxes and then directed government spending at helping only those with children. Remember the government is owned by the bourgeoisie as their tool so they can do this), or to import labour from abroad. From the workers perspective at superficial analysis choosing the second costs them the first and thus the foreign workers are a threat. Anyway, for some reason the Western European population is aging, having very few kids and while their liberal governments have found lots of ways to let in Eastern European and other foreign labour this is perceived as a threat of them being replaced by the indigenous working class and they are voting for whoever convinces them they are the biggest xenophobes who will keep the foreigners out, or even exit the EU. All very curious.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 11:14
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:... i think it matters in terms of understanding how to differentiate between marxist egalitarian values ("from each according to their ability, to each according to their need") and bourgeois equality ("one toothbrush per slum"), and subsequently where liberal/socdem/anarchist "criticism" of communism as coming to force everybody into the exact same life with the exact same (minimal) stuff is actually a projection from liberal ideology itself EDIT: to clarify, specifically that the natural distinction between workers needs to be utterly smudged and leveled out by bourgeois forces for the sake of extractive efficiency, and thus they end up being the ones who need their version of equality to drop all human standards of living to a universal barest minimum
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 11:32
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:Unless I'm wildly off - no, they didn't. A $500 machine was created, if they get someone to pay them an extra $250, the payer has lost $250 in value. For the hundredth time you refuse to do the basic reading. A $500 machine was not created. A $750 machine was created. The machine maker paid $500 to make it, because the workers were shorted $250 in wages. That is surplus value. But wait, why do the workers allow themselves to be shorted? What determines their wage? To find out more, read Capital!
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 12:24
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:What I'd like to talk about is: is it correct to say that the value required for a worker to reproduce their labor, is variable from worker to worker? I wouldn't say it like that, but the answers to what I think you're asking are yes. volume 1 does discuss this and how things get averaged. it's all over, but chapter 6, 13, 19 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm, and https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm) most directly apply i think.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 13:15
|
|
|
Orange Devil posted:The cost of labour reproduction is comprehensive in that it also needs to include the cost of producing new laborers, ie. having and raising kids. It's the perfect wedge issue, since being a Good Person requires you're all for mass immigration. Sure it drives down wages and is being done cynically for economic gain, but why do you hate diversity? This is why people tried to ruin Angela Nagle's life. She wrote an article explaining the leftist position against mass immigration until unions were stronger. It's loving ridiculous. In Canada it's loving insane. The middle class can't replicate, so replacements are being brought in by the millions, quite openly. There's nothing against those people being from China and India as opposed to the last wave of Germans and Italians, and before that the dregs of Eastern Europe, before them the Scots and Irish (and Scots-Irish). Sincerely, it makes no difference. It's that this is being done as a matter of policy to crush Canadian labour and keep the economy going past the point where people born here can't buy houses or have kids. Our stupid loving false consciousness society has turned this into "The Great Replacement" in racial terms when it is clearly a dimension of class war. If they could do this with more lowlanders and Ulstermen, they would. They needed a reserve army of labour and they found one, they weren't consciously trying to diversify society of whatever. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 13:32 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 13:27
|
|
|
I've always wondered what happens when the liberals run out of cheap immigrant labour or can't convince anyone to move here. I guess it goes back to the inflection point of either hyper-exploitation or something (eventually) less lovely. Like perhaps an international worker's union?!
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 13:43
|
|
|
Rodney The Yam II posted:I've always wondered what happens when the liberals run out of cheap immigrant labour or can't convince anyone to move here. I guess it goes back to the inflection point of either hyper-exploitation or something (eventually) less lovely. Like perhaps an international worker's union?! The real answer would be they cooperate with neocons, the foreign policy arm of neoliberal ideology, to create cheap immigrant labour by colour revolution/coup/war. What kind of position would Europe be in if Libya and Syria hadn't been knocked over for them, followed by Ukraine?
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 14:01
|
|
|
DJJIB-DJDCT posted:The real answer would be they cooperate with neocons, the foreign policy arm of neoliberal ideology, to create cheap immigrant labour by colour revolution/coup/war. Nah, Libyan and Syrian labor isn't really meaningful for the EU. At least compared to the crushing austerity in the 2010s.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 14:19
|
|
|
DJJIB-DJDCT posted:Our stupid loving false consciousness society has turned this into "The Great Replacement" in racial terms when it is clearly a dimension of class war. If they could do this with more lowlanders and Ulstermen, they would. They needed a reserve army of labour and they found one, they weren't consciously trying to diversify society of whatever. Yeah, racism is useful to capital as a way to divide the working class and prevent class consciousness and solidarity, but capital is not racist in the sense that it doesn't give one flying gently caress about the ethnicity or colour of the labourer it exploits, as long as it has enough bodies to fill those positions. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 15:27 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 15:20
|
|
|
I'd even suggest that racism would develop against whatever group provided the way to undercut labour. Canadians were virulently racist against Germans and Italians in the 60's and 70's at the peak of their immigration. In the antebellum south, lynching of free blacks in southern cities was explicitly economic, and Germans and Irish were threatened with lynching when they were subsequently imported to undercut labour instead. Their greatest reaction was against slaves, which southern planters wanted to use to take over urban labour. Since their labour cost was zero, obviously it caused people to pop the gently caress off. However, a surprisingly thing happened. I don't know if it's because the hand of the ruling class was so much more obvious than when using immigrants and free black labour, but resistance to the introduction of slaves into southern industry turned into a sort of class consciousness, with poor whites in southern cities demanding abolition. This was the single biggest issue in the southern states throughout the 1850's, they seemed to be on the verge of social revolution. In some southern cities, poor whites and free blacks started protesting together, which caused apoplexy in the ruling class and led to the passage of all sorts of laws forbidding fraternization and miscegenation. There's nothing particular about Chinese and Indian people that wouldn't be applied to the Dutch, if the Canadian government decided to import the Dutch middle class instead. DJJIB-DJDCT has issued a correction as of 15:30 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 15:26
|
|
|
genericnick posted:Nah, Libyan and Syrian labor isn't really meaningful for the EU. At least compared to the crushing austerity in the 2010s. Yeah for all the hubbub about refugees and Muslims and brown people coming to Replace Us, or whatever, the actual mass influx of labour used to crush the domestic working class in Western Europe came and continues to come from Eastern Europe through Schengen and the EU. In that sense Brexit made a lot more sense as a response than giving Frontex carte blanche to turn the Med into a graveyard. It's still a stupid response because it doesn't do anything about the root cause, which is that capital is flat out refusing to pay wages sufficient to replicate your lifestyle, so if you are Western European and not part of the elite your material position vis-a-vis your parents is going to decline, and you can already predict that your children will have it worse still. And the cause of that ofcourse is loving fundamental to capitalism as a system, so the only solution is revolution. Edit: You gotta see the EU's attempt to bring in Ukraine in this light as well. If anything the racism of the electorate puts a break on capital's designs to import foreign labour. This is partially remedied by all kinds of benefits for foreign "highly skilled" workers. Like in NL for example they receive a special income tax exemption on the first 30% of their income, which means companies hiring these types of workers can get away with paying their foreign workers less (cus their net wages end up higher anyway) and thus love importing them. And because they are high skilled and being paid decently, even the explicitly racist parties don't mind the import of this labour, even if they are Indian or whatever. It also means Dutch workers get paid those same wages for the same jobs but end up with less money in their pockets (yet competing with their foreign colleagues for the same housing, good luck). After the elections a few months ago it looked like this was about to be abolished, but the ASML CEO cried in some newspapers a couple weeks ago and now this is being reversed plus ASML is getting about 2.5 billion in subsidies. Current proposals are to pay for that 2.5 billion by increasing taxes on home owners or lowering the amount at which the wealth tax kicks in. Ie. all of the cost will fall squarely on the Dutch middle class, to subsidize both ASML directly, and subsidize companies like ASML to drive high skilled wages down. It's also very convenient that Ukrainian refugees were immediately allowed to work once they got here, as opposed to all other refugees. Once Ukraine dries up as a source and Russia puts it out of the EU's reach, it's going to be very interesting to see where capital will turn to next. If the liberals in Turkey win I wouldn't be surprised if suddenly Turkey's accession to the EU talks start up again. Though that's going to create so much backlash because of how much hatred has been built up towards Muslims and brown people these last decades. Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 15:41 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 15:27
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I'm not saying it necessarily matters, big picture, that the answer to that question is "yes", I'm just trying to check if it is. you're correct, although there's a subtle distinction to be made here the value of labor-power on the market, which is a socially-arrived-at average that doesn't care if you personally have kids to feed or a bum leg, varies from person to person based on things like age, gender, and training. it's cheaper to buy the time of a kid than of an adult and it's cheaper to buy the time of a porter than of a surgeon. certain kinds of labor-power require more time and education to cook up and therefore sell for more, although, of course, the general tendency of capitalist development is to flatten all labor-power to having the same value by deskilling all work to the point that everyone does it identically without requiring any training on top of this, your labor-power might be easier or more difficult to regenerate because you're sick or have to take care of your grandma or something. unfortunately this doesn't impact its value at all, in the same way that a basket i weave slowly and inefficiently is no more valuable than a basket made with a repeatable industrial process of some kind. because workers as a whole generally need some kind of slack with which to absorb injuries, raise the next generation, etc. there's a place for the working class to exert leverage and drive the price of labor-power up, but, because all that stuff is kind of random and invisible, it also represents a cost that the ruling class can cut. so how much welfare you get is determined by the state of class struggle and not just the level of technical development
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 16:12
|
|
|
relatedly, if you're writing op-eds about The Leftist Case For Opposing Immigration you're either a mark or a fed and have no business being in the public eye
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 16:13
|
|
|
nvm
tristeham has issued a correction as of 19:09 on Apr 5, 2024 |
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:06
|
|
|
Ok so... I'm not really sure there's consensus on the inflating an items price. I think one hand we have - its impossible, from a use/exchange value standpoint. You literally can't add value by making up a higher price. But we have numbers involved, and Marx does use these arguments to critique capitalism. In capitalism, you can, and we commonly see, sellers mark up a price just because. An extreme example is Lockheed adding $100m to jet prices. Can I say that when Lockheed marks up the price 100, no new value is created, no additional surplus labor is exploited, the $100 is a paper theft by Lockheed from the buyer?
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:13
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:the machine seller can't just charge $750 because he's "greedy". if greed was actually what made capitalism go, he could charge $800 or $1000 or whatever instead, right?
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:21
|
|
|
i think the confusion is because ferrinus is taking more of a volume 1 approach and my post originally had some stuff from volume 3 in it that i ultimately decided to cut out. so the capitalist (without monopoly power anyway) can't simply mark up the price whenever they feel like it, because then someone else will undercut them and take their customers. the value over the $500 in labor in materials instead must reflect the average rate of profit in the particular sphere the capitalist is operating in. to connect to ferrinus' point, the $750 is thus the true value of the machine at that point in time in prevailing market conditions and the sphere's average rate of profit with the capitalist pocketing the extra $250 in value the workers have created.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:28
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:In capitalism, you can, and we commonly see, sellers mark up a price just because. An extreme example is Lockheed adding $100m to jet prices. If you read. the loving. book. you will find that Marx eliminates that nonsense in order to examine how capitalism functions at the essential level. Supply and demand are always equal in Capital, because flux in Supply/Demand were invoked as explanations for why prices are this or that. So Marx says, fine, what if Supply and Demand are equal? Does value cease to exist? No? Where does it come from, then? Outright corruption, as in your example, does not enter into the basic analysis because it doesn't help to explain anything.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:34
|
|
|
Past few years in the US, many different food manufacturers have artificially increased their pricing because they're greedy. There's implicit collision and evidence of explicit collusion to allow this. And they're raking in more money. I'm avoiding the terms profit and value here intentionally. But it's happening, for real. What would Marx call this?
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:37
|
|
|
BillsPhoenix posted:Past few years in the US, many different food manufacturers have artificially increased their pricing because they're greedy. There's implicit collision and evidence of explicit collusion to allow this. nothing because he is dead
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:38
|
|
|
It's like trying to explain to someone how a car works, and you're talking about the motor, the driveshaft, and the wheels, but he keeps honking the horn and shouting, "WHAT ABOUT THIS? DOES THIS MAKE IT GO?"
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:42
|
|
|
If you told a random American that price gouging wasn't possible... That's what I'm trying to resolve here. I understand there is no possibility of manipulating value. But price fixing is very possible...
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 19:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 18:42 |
|
|
It sure is.
|
|
#
?
Apr 5, 2024 20:02
|
|