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dead gay comedy forums)
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dead gay comedy forums posted:this is a good moment to refresh about this: I wonder if you could formulate some sort of Marxist quantitative unit of technology that relates input mass, the caloric value of human labor and then some sort of use value in like equivalent-labor calories against mc^2
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 17:44 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 13:06 |
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re: caloric value of human labor, it's important to remember that the result of generation of use-value can become invaluable because of meaning/significance. Like, it's important to understand that Marx elaborates exchange-value and use-value in relation to capitalism and capital. This is to say that we can measure the process of creation of a work of art or great labor of science in purely physical terms, but if we were to reproduce the same conditions as much as possible, we would still have wildly different outcomes. Subjectivity comes into play here. That's part of why there is always going to be a social factor of what constitutes value
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 18:01 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I wonder if you could formulate some sort of Marxist quantitative unit of technology that relates input mass, the caloric value of human labor and then some sort of use value in like equivalent-labor calories against mc^2
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 18:38 |
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dollars per unit mass is actually a great way to illustrate the value created by labor specifically. like hmm a block of steel is worth so and so much, but a watch made of a portion of that steel weighs less but costs more! what could have happened...
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 19:51 |
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dead gay comedy forums posted:re: caloric value of human labor, it's important to remember that the result of generation of use-value can become invaluable because of meaning/significance. Like, it's important to understand that Marx elaborates exchange-value and use-value in relation to capitalism and capital. This is to say that we can measure the process of creation of a work of art or great labor of science in purely physical terms, but if we were to reproduce the same conditions as much as possible, we would still have wildly different outcomes. Subjectivity comes into play here. sure, maybe my use of "use value" there was incorrect. Intermediate productive labor-energy efficiency metric is more towards what I'm getting at: If you could produce two sorts of, say, handsaw and measure the degree to which they saved labor-calories in terms of use efficiency, then project that backwards into labor expenditure to produce the device. The degree to which it reduces labor input at the point of measurement (using the saw to cut wood) versus labor input to produce the saw in toto could give you a value to compare against other intermediate productive inputs. This might be too reductive of labor-power, which includes but isn't strictly caloric expenditure. This wouldn't be applicable to some end products of production, or would be applicable but not something anyone would care about, but would be interesting to examine in terms of tools and implements within the mixture of labor and raw material. An implement of higher "technological" value would be something that would reduce labor-power down the chain for the same output. reading rec? never heard of this. I'm just bullshitting in here but if someone actually ran this down in some form I'd be extremely interested to read about it
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 19:58 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:reading rec? never heard of this. I'm just bullshitting in here but if someone actually ran this down in some form I'd be extremely interested to read about it You're in luck, here's a whole old thread I bookmarked that's super interesting. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3482774 I think there's something in this that connects very well to Marx's "sensuous human activity" as razor, and to dialectical materialism's primary emphasis on temporality, motion and becoming. That said, phil. of mind is broadly outside my wheelhouse. Aeolius has issued a correction as of 20:26 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 20:18 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:reading rec? never heard of this. I'm just bullshitting in here but if someone actually ran this down in some form I'd be extremely interested to read about it I would love it if you read it, but it's a bit of a tongue in cheek recommendation. I'm always telling people to read this because the ecological approach to behavior allows for very rich description and modeling of what Marx calls use-value, and would slot very well into the niche () you're describing. much like marxism allows us to treat the economy as a physical system with thermodynamic properties we can observe and model, ecological psychology allows us to treat behavior as a physical system with thermodynamic properties we can observe and model. edit: Aeolius posted:You're in luck, here's a whole old thread I bookmarked that's super interesting. this thread is what you should probably actually read. surgicalontologist's op is something to aspire to. Zodium has issued a correction as of 21:05 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 20:18 |
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Thanks for the input on my query. It’s handy to have this place to call upon for such instances. I’m also thinking of that oil based comic relating the energy slaves concept to material wealth we all enjoy in the fossil fuel party we call industrial civilisation. Steve Keen I think often uses a barrel of crude as a way of gauging the true price for our profligate energy use in seeing it as how much it would cost at minimum wage.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:10 |
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sick, thank you both. thankfully IA's got the book (and as an epub!)
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:21 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I wonder if you could formulate some sort of Marxist quantitative unit of technology that relates input mass, the caloric value of human labor and then some sort of use value in like equivalent-labor calories against mc^2 what would you expect to get out of caloric value of human labor over just labor time? people broadly need a similar amount of calories per day to stay alive and healthy and it doesnt really change all that much for adults, like way less than 1 order of magnitude even if youre talking about being sedentary vs manual labor. example: the usda recommends adult men on average to eat 2500 calories per day, or 3000 calories per day if you do heavy vigorous daily exercise fart simpson has issued a correction as of 22:27 on Apr 27, 2024 |
# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:24 |
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Has anyone ever read The Economic Superorganism by Carey W. King? I seem to recall a lot of productive value and energy being calculated in it as relating to what makes our global economy today. It’s always fascinating to see the inflection from where some bottleneck translates to capital deciding to skim off the top more as profitability sinks due to input increases.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:27 |
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Ferrinus posted:dollars per unit mass is actually a great way to illustrate the value created by labor specifically. like hmm a block of steel is worth so and so much, but a watch made of a portion of that steel weighs less but costs more! what could have happened... yuuuup like, a gram of iphone is more than a gram of suv because…
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:34 |
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dead gay comedy forums posted:yuuuup Raw ingredients that make a human versus said materials arranged as a human.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:44 |
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fart simpson posted:what would you expect to get out of caloric value of human labor over just labor time? people broadly need a similar amount of calories per day to stay alive and healthy and it doesnt really change all that much for adults, like way less than 1 order of magnitude even if youre talking about being sedentary vs manual labor. example: the usda recommends adult men on average to eat 2500 calories per day, or 3000 calories per day if you do heavy vigorous daily exercise I want to keep my units in energy so you could have a lower (some infinitesimal of human input like button pushing or thought-directing) and upper (mc^2) bounds so you could say something like my process coverts X% of raw material inputs into work at a rate of whatever to one calorie of human input, from which I could decide how technologically efficient or advanced or whatever it is I have no real reason for this beyond me thinking its kind of cool
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:45 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I want to keep my units in energy so you could have a lower (some infinitesimal of human input like button pushing or thought-directing) and upper (mc^2) bounds so you could say something like my process coverts X% of raw material inputs into work at a rate of whatever to one calorie of human input, from which I could decide how technologically efficient or advanced or whatever it is ok, but my point is that the vast majority of human caloric intake is in sustaining your body and health at a baseline, and relatively little is actually expended on top of that, at work
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 22:48 |
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yeah, for this particular metric I'm only evaluating at the point of implementation, so your human labor-energy input would be the calories expended in using the tool or process vs. not doing that. If I wanted to evaluate my nailgun vs my hammer the comparison between them would be the degree to which they expend human energy over just standing around doing nothing during evaluation. If I burn 100kcal/hr sitting on my rear end, but 1600 with a sledgehammer and 800 if I used a jackhammer I can isolate the tool-labor-energy of the work. this obviously doesn't incorporate the Marxist understanding of labor in relation to the actual human worker, but it might also be useful to use it as a jumping-off point for a wholistic or even ecological understanding of a technological society, if you could quantify the entire productive chain in this way, to make evaluations where, say, a technological apparatus might be extremely labor-energy efficient at the point of the work but not for the system as a whole. The labor-calories saved from an extremely useful hammer might not be worth it if it necessitates a new or different labor-intensive step in the productive chain, even if the material inputs are the same. I think you could also create higher-level metrics like projected labor-energy per laborer, where processes that might be more labor calorie efficient at the point of work could result in more caloric expenditure to the worker because it's unsafe or non ergonomic or something. I think what I'm trying to get at is a way to understand technological efficiency that is better divorced the commodity form and less so from the actual physical labor and raw materials
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 23:14 |
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i always think about rakes vs. leaf blowers, their differences in production, material input, how they’re expected to be used, how they shape the environments they’re used on and how they shape the various commercial entities that rely on them it’s a very depressing mental exercise!
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 23:26 |
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dead gay comedy forums posted:got you fam Quoting this for later, I really should know more about the history of my own country.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 23:50 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:yeah, for this particular metric I'm only evaluating at the point of implementation, so your human labor-energy input would be the calories expended in using the tool or process vs. not doing that. If I wanted to evaluate my nailgun vs my hammer the comparison between them would be the degree to which they expend human energy over just standing around doing nothing during evaluation. If I burn 100kcal/hr sitting on my rear end, but 1600 with a sledgehammer and 800 if I used a jackhammer I can isolate the tool-labor-energy of the work. See, I think time is both more a practical and more accurate unit of labor, as time seems to be the "limiting reagent" in production.
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# ? Apr 27, 2024 23:51 |
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Raw ingredients that make a human versus said materials arranged as a human.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:06 |
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I get the desire for quantification but energy's indifferent to whether it's used for good, for bad or simply wasted. the unit and the metric picked for quantification should be ones that further the values you're trying to promote. in the way that a petrodollar and gold before promoted colonialism, colonialist values, the commie unit of productive forces should promote equality and advancement
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:17 |
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energy fetishism
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:20 |
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mawarannahr posted:energy fetishism cold fusions just a couple decades off, man!
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:32 |
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scold fusion is here right now though
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:38 |
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Commodity fetishism came up in a conversation last night and i wanted to double check my understanding/the example i gave. I brought up the brain geniouses who protest companies going "woke" by filming themselves destroying the company's products that they already paid for and own (shoes, keurig, etc), as though destroying the commodity itself had any effect outside of the plain fact that they were destroying their own personal property. I contrasted this with e.g. destroying a shipment of shoes before they get to the store, or even before they leave the factory, or somehow preventing the materials from being assembled in the first place, all of which would have an actual material effect on the target of their ire.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 00:44 |
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I think there's a mismatch there regarding the underlying concept and the thoughts (or lack thereof) going on in the minds of the reactionary culture warriors. Ultimately commodity fetishism is meant to divorce the thing from the processes of labor and relations involved in creating and selling the thing, so using an example where the commodity is being brought back into relation with the company that made it might be a bit counterproductive to explaining the concept. The chuds are usually saying something like "look what you did nike" or whatever, which is pretty different from focusing their hatred on the object itself as if it were a little god with it's own power to compel their actions. I have had three standard drinks tonight but I think I'm right.
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 03:21 |
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mycomancy posted:See, I think time is both more a practical and more accurate unit of labor, as time seems to be the "limiting reagent" in production. I wonder if you could develop some kind of horsepower-like standardized unit of labor time and do a straight conversion. One workerlaborhour is equivalent to however many joules or whatever But yeah, I think you're (and fart simpson are) right in the thing that anyone would care about would be "does it reduce time" as a measure of technology over "is it physically costly", in relation to the worker. Who cares if pushing the button only takes a fiftieth of a calorie if I have to do it for eight hours a day. The Voice of Labor posted:I get the desire for quantification but energy's indifferent to whether it's used for good, for bad or simply wasted. the unit and the metric picked for quantification should be ones that further the values you're trying to promote. in the way that a petrodollar and gold before promoted colonialism, colonialist values, the commie unit of productive forces should promote equality and advancement I agree but I will note that I'm a dumb guy and haven't been able to get there yet. I think in the most general sense the answer would have to be in a projection up to a system where you have axes for the good stuff you want and the optimal point for the technological metric would sit at (or demark a range or whatever) of the highest grade of ecological health -- like the actual physical health of the biosphere, but also the workers therein, the maximalization of the work energy/time they can expend on non-productive purposes, etc etc. You could build a kind of non-demonic profit curve. Pentecoastal Elites has issued a correction as of 04:14 on Apr 28, 2024 |
# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:12 |
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has anyone seen this https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3438093 ?
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 04:24 |
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I wonder if you could develop some kind of horsepower-like standardized unit of labor time and do a straight conversion. One workerlaborhour is equivalent to however many joules or whatever you’re talking about central planning with constraints. if you had central planning software or something you could add in energy or fossil fuel constraints or whatever alongside labor time and resources or whatever
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 05:06 |
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Dongicus posted:has anyone seen this https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3438093 ? Being bald is praxis
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 17:20 |
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fart simpson posted:you’re talking about central planning with constraints. if you had central planning software or something you could add in energy or fossil fuel constraints or whatever alongside labor time and resources or whatever yeah I should read up on cybersyn and the soviet systems, I'm sure they found interesting stuff along these lines
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# ? Apr 28, 2024 18:33 |
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Halser posted:Being bald is praxis Lenin would agree
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 00:00 |
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Halser posted:Being bald is praxis I like to think so
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 02:12 |
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Halser posted:Being bald is praxis it’s not a bald spot it’s a solar panel for a Marxism machine
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 02:20 |
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mark immune posted:it’s not a bald spot Need a laser eye Lenin smilie for this post
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 04:14 |
I came across a fascinating paper that uses Marx's literal coat as a focus for the material realities of the English working class he was writing about in Capital. Stallybrass, Peter. 2013. “Marx’s Coat.” In Border Fetishisms, edited by Patricia Spyer, 183–207. Routledge. [...] [...]
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 14:48 |
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Aeolius posted:You're in luck, here's a whole old thread I bookmarked that's super interesting. what’s the thread about? need to get plat, can’t even see the title
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 17:18 |
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Son of Thunderbeast posted:Commodity fetishism came up in a conversation last night and i wanted to double check my understanding/the example i gave. I brought up the brain geniouses who protest companies going "woke" by filming themselves destroying the company's products that they already paid for and own (shoes, keurig, etc), as though destroying the commodity itself had any effect outside of the plain fact that they were destroying their own personal property. it's related, yeah. It's the notion that we, because of capitalism and alienation, are unable to perceive that the thing that we are buying as a consequence of a complex chain of human activities throughout different spaces and shared history. You know what, let's throw a bit of the book -- CAPITAL, VOL 1 -- PART ONE: COMMODITIES AND MONEY -- CHAPTER ONE: COMMODITIES -- SECTION 4 -- THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF This section gets thrown around for later in a good bunch of political economy courses because professors say it can be too much. Marx is using his German philosophical formation here for a full takeoff. quote:A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour. Big Karl here is simply saying that a hammer is good as a hammer, a chair is good as a chair, etc. Human labor attending human necessities is a very straightforward relationship. BUT quote:But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas The moment that thing (Marx uses a wooden table here) gets commodified (i.e. put to sale in a store), it suddenly acquires a lot of strange properties that are not based on its materials or labor: it presents as itself but also more. quote:A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. The strange properties that Marx talks about are how a thing that I buy in a store appears to me as if saying: "I have this price because I am of this brand, I am good/nutritious/wholesome/beautiful/practical/[insert any adjective here] and you thus you should buy me." But I don't get to perceive how it was made, how the things it is made were made, etc unless I put conscious effort into it, then it shuts up and becomes weird in its banality, because we are not used to that perception. quote:Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic. Here is how it happens: by having a general idea of effort required to make things, transmitted by cultural and societal awareness, we then can as-if "inscribe" a notion of value by our very act of gauging that effort. This is the "social hieroglyphic", a form of putting that perception of labor and effort into language in order for us to compare different things and exchange them. quote:The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them. A very large producer of oranges acts not based on satisfying the demand for oranges; they are looking the Chicago Agricultural Futures index, the bundle price around the globe, what other exchanges are charging on orange options, etc. By this action, they try to adjust production accordingly: they are "responding to the market". Pay attention here -- the orange producer never tries to produce for an abundance that satisfies demand far and wide. They are responding to this magical property that a cask of oranges has in the agricultural options index: market price. They do not determine themselves in production: the magical hieroglyph rules them. quote:The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place [...] Put this here to understand that Marx knew what he was doing about the linen, lmao. It is exchange-value, through the act of estimation and attribution (the social hieroglyphic) that creates this phenomenon that Marx called commodity fetishism, granting them strange properties which of course they do not have as a material fact. Worse, the material fact becomes hidden or disguised by that process. There are social and cultural reasons why gold and silver became money-commodities, but paper-money is absolutely nothing lesser in comparison to gold because we give the paper a property of being just as useful - especially much later than Marx's time, when Nixon blows up Bretton Woods: that event proves a lot of what he argues there. Marx then goes to explain further how that happens by using religious thought and how it is fundamentally a consequence of social relations that must arise by the economic relations (how in other modes of production such obfuscation didn't happen, etc)
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 19:47 |
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Mandel Brotset posted:what’s the thread about? need to get plat, can’t even see the title I'm just starting to dig in and am having to backtrack quite a bit to grasp things, but in short its about an alternative to a computational model of intelligent behavior (your brain holds an internal model of the world that it projects on the external world in order to do stuff like comprehend visual input and coordinate movement) and instead posits that intelligent behavior is an emergent phenomenon that arises between agent and environment, that the world-interior-model doesn't exist as it is commonly/popularly understood, and provides a solution to the brains in a jar problem because the external world is one half of the sauce agents of complex behavior arise from that's definitely not a complete understanding of even what's going on in the thread, much less the book its about, but that's what I've gleaned so far. its got my poo poo fizzing and sparking
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 20:31 |
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# ? May 11, 2024 13:06 |
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dead gay comedy forums posted:
this is a great writeup. it's also a great example of dialectical thinking - marx is constantly pointing out that while a certain relationship appears to exist, in fact the exact opposite relationship actually or simultaneously exists. living, thinking humans create inert, mindless objects, and yet the inert, mindless objects somehow acquire exactly the agency and vitality that we end up lacking
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# ? Apr 29, 2024 20:47 |