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Karl Marx is dead; ergo, Marxism is dead. Seems pretty simple....?
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Oct 31, 2014 16:23
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It should be noted that the "financialization hypothesis" for the 2008 crisis is a disputed one in heterodox economic circles. Andrew Kliman and the temporal single system interpretation (TSSI) camp view the fall in the rate of capital accumulation as a consequence of the long-term fall in the rate of profit since the post-WWII days. You can read his response to the financialization hypothesis here (Word document).
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Nov 4, 2014 18:20
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Typo posted:The poor in the third world has benefited more from globalization compared to Socialist revolutions. As Marx noted (and as was mentioned before in the thread), the development of productive forces via capitalism is a good thing. The destruction of traditional feudal structures and the increase in industrial capacity as a consequence of capitalist development are both great things. One can easily imagine an alternate version of the Soviet Union that was truly democratic socialist, and which would have had a vastly different - perhaps worse - course of development (due to the slow legislative nature of democracies, infighting amongst different groups leading to political paralysis, etc.). My objections to capitalism are primarily based on the unsustainability of its core components of development (waged labour, continual consumption, profit). If we lived in some weird universe where profitability continually increased, everyone could be guaranteed a job, and resources were (effectively) unlimited, I'd have no problem with letting capitalism continue on its merry way. However, the increasing valorization of labour (via automation), the decreasing overall rate of profit (per Kliman and the TSSI camp), and the limited capacity of the Earth throw the idea of capitalism as a program of continued world development into serious question.
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Nov 4, 2014 18:36
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tbp posted:If an ideology can't resist losing it's philosophical bearings in attempted practice when faced with foreign or outside pressure, isn't it pretty much a wash? I challenge you to find me a political ideology that hasn't altered its core beliefs in some way to compensate for new threats or ideas that have developed.
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Nov 4, 2014 18:41
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Typo posted:Energy usage per capita in the first world are falling because efficiency increases, and people want more services as oppose to energy intensive physical good. Once you go past a certain level of economic development both per capita and overall energy usage (logically, as population starts stabilizing/declining) I'll quote a friend of mine with regards to this: quote:But there is a limit [to growth]. 3-4% year to year economic growth without bound means a doubling every ~20 years. Either energy production will have to increase without bound as well, or it will vanish to 0% of the total economic activity, in the limit. In the first case, we're right back at a problem of pure physics. I discard the second case because of its facial implausibility (activites that require an energy input will shrink to NOTHING in comparison with total activity???) and because if it somehow happened, energy production would be vulnerable to a monopoly attack. Typo posted:If your problem is with automation then go ahead and implement a minimum income to deal with unemployment. The idea of a minimum income rests entirely on profitability increasing sufficiently to allow taxation that would both provide the minimum income necessary (though to what degree? this is always a sticking point with minimum income ideas) while not dynamiting the ability for companies to continually grow. Again, per Kliman, this ability is in serious doubt. To summarize Kliman's argument in Failure of Capitalist Production (it's a reasonably large book, so this summary doesn't really do it justice): rising (long-term) rates of profitability depend on the destruction or devaluation of capital assets on a large scale so as to make investment viable. Previously, the relatively uncontrolled nature of crises (economic troughs in business cycle theory), where governments were more content to sit back and do little, meant that the destruction/devaluation of capital assets (and the relative desperation of workers, who would accept any wages) would allow the rate of return on investments to increase again to the point where profitability was increasing. The implementation of Keynesian policies post-WWII, and the lack of any major large-scale (World War-esque) conflicts has meant that this mass devaluation no longer occurs, and profitability thus continues to slip. This is the cause of the focus on financial instruments (such as sub-prime mortgages) and consumer debt: these help to boost profitability sufficiently to post growth in the short term. The problem, as revealed in 2008, is that these measures are only short term, and cannot fully restore profitability. I would recommend reading Kliman's work, as well as that of other TSSI scholars, as they are fairly in-depth and use solid statistical analysis in order to back up their claims. Vermain fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 19:09
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Typo posted:And like I said, despite steady increase in GDP per capita, energy per capita usage has dropped, the prediction above simply hasn't proven to be true in the real world today. The quote above regards the possibility of energy efficiency increasing forever to keep pace with the 3-4% (compound) growth that is necessary for continual capitalist development. Again, my argument is that the proposition that capitalism can continue to serve as an engine of world growth indefinitely is flawed. It does not accord with physical reality, or with the reality of capitalism's internal contradictions (falling rate of profit). Typo posted:Automation increases profit margins, that's why those people are out of work in the first place, if your problem is with automation replacing employment, then it's safe to assume it's because companies which fire those people are going to make more money because otherwise they won't fire them. To quote Kliman directly: quote:To avoid jargon, I’ll explain Marx’s theory in a somewhat atypical way. Capitalist companies adopt labor-saving [valorizing] technologies that boost productivity. Because the productivity increases lower the cost of producing the companies’ products, the products’ prices also tend to fall, partly because competition between companies drives down the prices and partly because they find it advantageous to cut their prices in order to sell more stuff when their costs of production fall. But the price cutting tends to lower the companies’ average rate of profit. Typo posted:Western Europe recovered to its pre-war level of economic development sometime in the 1950s. Which statistics are you using for this? The TSSI camp asserts that the "standard" method used to calculate increasing profitability (that is, performed in a physicalist manner) is incorrect. Again, I'll let Kliman explain this: quote:If we use the term rate of profit to mean what almost everyone––businesses, investors, Marx––means by it, namely the rate of return on investment, there was no sustained recovery of the rate of profit of U.S. corporations after the recessions of the mid-1970s and early 1980s. If we measure profit as the portion of corporations’ net output that their employees don’t receive, the rate of profit continued to trend downward quite sharply. The data needed to compute the rate of return on investment in other countries aren’t available, but there was a very widespread decline in U.S. multinational corporations’ rate of return on their foreign investment at the same time, which suggests that the global rate of profit probably fell as well. McNally’s claim that the rate of profit rose is based entirely on computations performed by a physicalist economist, Simon Mohun. The problem is that what Mohun and other physicalists mean by rate of profit isn’t a rate of profit in the normal sense––it’s profit as a percentage of what it would cost companies today to replace all of their capital assets––and no one has ever successfully explained why it matters or to what it matters. This isn't to say that economies never bounced back temporarily, but that the long-term trendline of the rate of profit has been a downward slope since the end of WWII. Vermain fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 19:58
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Typo posted:And I'm pointing out, again, that the assumption that 3-4% compound energy usage growth forever has -already- being proven wrong, and the paper (http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/) which brought this into every D&D discussion extrapolated energy usage based on the most unique and most intense increase in energy usage in human history: the 3-4 waves of industrialization since the 1700s. But once industrialization has completed energy usage starts to fall, the premise of this argument is essentially assuming that Capitalism will be permanent undergoing the equivalent of the industrial revolution every generation. This is why his extrapolation is already wrong as of today. This does not answer the central thesis proposed. Capitalist growth is assumed to be infinite in that it is an exponential rate of growth (generally given as 3-4% for "healthy" growth), compounding upon each previous instance of growth. The problem with the energy efficiency argument is that energy efficiency has hard, scientific limits (specifically, Planck's law and the Borda-Carnot equation). If energy usage (per capita) grows at a slower exponential rate than economic activity, then it will vanish as a fraction of it. This is an absurdity: the production and use of energy can't vanish as a fraction of the economy. Typo posted:The point isn't that they "bounced back" the point is that they bounced back and kept going, how does that square with destroying capital stocks to artificially make capital more profitable being the only way to resolve the issue? I would not exactly count a lot of Western Europe as having "bounced back," given how devastating the 2008 crisis has been for numerous countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece). What statistics are you using for "bounced back", and how long did this return last for? Kliman's research speaks of the trend line of profitability, which, as he demonstrates with United States data, has been on the decline since the post-WWII period. (I don't have the book on hand, but I believe the data goes from around 1940-2009). Typo posted:Just look at the GDP per capita of West Germany Could you please explain what you mean by this statement? Typo posted:Except in reality Central banks hates deflation and will print more money to make sure prices don't fall, hell this is one of the exact reasons why the federal reserve tries to keep a 2-4% inflation rate. What exactly do you mean by this, as well? Prices fall repeatedly and often for goods in which more efficient methods of production are found. Ball-point pens used to be well out of reach of the average person, and you can now buy packages of them for less than a day's wages. Are you denying that this takes place, or that it has an overall effect on profitability?
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Nov 5, 2014 20:07
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Friendly Tumour posted:I think we live in a great ideological vacuum, and I for one am waiting for that new ideal that will inspire a new century of war with trepidation. Liberalism has certainly reached the end of its road. What's going to come? Who knows, but I suspect the Occupy movement will be seen as its beginning. Bad news: you're already eating out of the trash can.
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Nov 5, 2014 22:42
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Friendly Tumour posted:Well I guess, but I'm not sure it's all that necessary. Ultimately all you have to do is to inspire people to work together. I mean, is Naomi Klein a Marxist? She offers a pretty convincing argument about the future of the current liberal free-market capitalism. How do you inspire people to work together? Can you think of potential barriers that may arise? If so, why do they arise?
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Nov 5, 2014 23:02
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Relevantly: Haiti was forced at cannon-point by France to pay "reparations" post-Revolution equaling (inflation-adjusted, 2009) US$12.7 billion. One imagines that this would prove rather crippling to even medium-sized industrialized countries, to say nothing of a primarily agrarian country that was one of the biggest pariah states of its time as a consequence of what it theoretically entailed to any world powers that still relied on slavery.
Vermain fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 05:25
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Ardennes posted:Capitalists pick "winners and losers" through investment through many many reasons, some of this reasoning is faulty. However, I don't know if a state can really manage certain industries well by virtue of its size, like "artisan" food stuffs and other luxury items. There's a few proposals for this in a more socialist economy, such as with grant committees (akin to Cockshott and Cottrell's "planning juries") that could provide necessary capital to promote entrepreneurship. Public capital granting has the incentive of not necessarily requiring profit as its sole motivator of continued investment, as the committee is not composed of shareholders expecting a return. Customer/community satisfaction, as an example, could play an important role in deciding whether or not to continue providing the necessary capital. It's similar to how certain public industries (such as health care in Canada) measure performance. What way you want to go with it depends a lot on how much planning you're looking to have in the economy. There's a certain point where it becomes impractical for a central committee to attempt to monopolize production universally. My general feeling towards the matter is that the broad "necessities of life" (food production, house construction, etc.) should be placed under public control, while non-necessary luxury goods can be left in private hands, with varying methods of providing sufficient capital (such as the one proposed above). This assumes, of course, a robust enough system of checks and balances to mitigate influence buying and collusion. I'm in favor of a general sortition model for this sort of thing, though the idea of random selection (especially when combined with the already novel concept of a society based around public capital ownership) isn't a heavily explored one. Or, to put it another way: there's drat little scholarship on the subject, much to my chagrin. (Unless I've missed something? If you know of any, holla at your boy, Vermain.) MaterialConceptual posted:1) I tend to agree with Boner Slam on the point that central planning comes up against the problem of enterprises withholding information. Cockshott and Cottrell don't seem to have any good arguments against this point other than to argue for firm redundancy in order to create competition that will allow for the construction of a baseline against which to measure firm performance. Couldn't heuristic modeling get you pretty close to finding "optimal" firm performance, which incoming results could then be compared against? That is: given factors of X, an output of Y should be expected (within a certain margin of error). If the output is lower than expectations, it can be investigated as to why, and improved; and if the output is higher than expectations (due to a particular innovation or technique), it can be investigated and its improvements can be used in other, similar industries. In any case, frequent auditing and observation will be needed, combined with above-mentioned systems to attempt to reduce collusion (such as frequent auditor rotations/randomized selection).
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Nov 10, 2014 15:57
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Ardennes posted:Public grant committee could help to some extent, but as you alluded to, I could see a situation where they wouldn't necessarily be sufficient. For example, a committee could very likely deep six funding for artisan gluten-free cupcakes. It's, unfortunately, difficult to determine the efficacy without any real case studies on hand. The best that can be said is that the theoretical model (involving a randomly selected sample of citizens who live where a particular business will operate) should be able to reasonably express the desires of the population in a given area. I believe that smaller niche products can still succeed in this kind of environment, given a good enough presentation and a sufficiently representative sample size. They might well reduce inefficiency: a representative committee can gauge whether there's much interest in a particular area with regards to a certain kind of commodity in a more direct and democratic fashion than a "businessman with a hunch" can. Small businesses failing, after all, are not at all rare, at least in the United States. Actual causes of the failure can certainly vary, but my suspicion is that "lack of interest" (and, thus, profit) is a key factor. The counter argument to this, of course, is that it might end up being worse, as average citizens are not well-versed enough in financial matters to know if a business plan is viable or not. This, again, is an area I want to look into (alongside legal juries, which are the closest sort of things we have to this concept), so if y'all have any good reads about general financial literacy (e.g., how long it takes for someone to understand the basics of finance, whether effectiveness at judging business proposals increases with experience, etc.), I'd enjoy taking a peek.
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Nov 10, 2014 17:03
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Soviet Space Dog posted:I'm not sure how this is much different than market research as it is currently undertaken, and how state subsidized/enforced market research as a subsidy to small/medium businesses either too incompetent or under resourced to do it themselves would be "socialist" It's following along the likes of Cockshott and Cottrell's "planning juries." The idea here is still that the means of production are publicly controlled (that is, all capital is nationalized). The purpose of the planning committee is to evaluate proposals for smaller/medium businesses, and to then either provide or not provide capital. The committee itself is a representative random sample that's meant to capture the population of an area in which a business will operate. It's meant to better capture what local desires are with regards to the allocation of capital if you're looking for a more decentralized socialism. You could still do something similar with a centralized planning system (via the aforementioned market research/sampling method), but it runs a higher risk of a principal-agent problem, unless the desires of those sampled are somehow legally binding (e.g. 82% of people want X product, so we constitutionally must produce it). ronya posted:The argument from improved corporate governance needs to be spelled out more clearly, I think Some good points. I don't think it's impossible for groups to come to a singular yes/no consensus when presented with multiple dimensions: legal juries do something similar with court trials, looking at a large quantity of information and then committing to a single decision. You're probably right that there's an efficiency loss, but it's a question of, "How much?" for me, and how that then compares with the potential outcomes (needs/wants better met, a stronger involvement in the direction of a community, etc.). It's certainly more efficient for judges to simply go through cases and deliver verdicts, but this may lead to undesirable outcomes (along these lines) despite that efficiency gain. Vermain fucked around with this message at 00:54 on Nov 11, 2014 |
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Nov 11, 2014 00:43
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ronya posted:but the question is not "is it impossible to come to a decision, any decision", which even Arrow's theorem doesn't prohibit - it is "do the decisions thereby generated plausibly resemble what one might label as the general will of the voting group?" I believe so, yes. Is your concern primarily along the lines that (going off of your governance comment) certain more strongly-expressed interests (pensions, etc.) will corrupt the voting such that people will vote against the "general will", or that certain flaws in the process of a voting system (IIA, for example) will distort whatever the "general will" should be? To be plain, there isn't a method of group decision making out there that can completely and accurately capture the full will of the group (in the sense that certain people will be more persuasive, others will be less willing to make their voice heard under group pressure or due to disinterest, and so on). Do you think that the proposed method would be deleterious to entrepreneurship over a traditional private investment model?
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Nov 11, 2014 06:49
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rudatron posted:(And again, IIA has some serious philosophical problems with it: repeated experiments have shown that human behavior about fairness does not conform to IIA). Do you happen to have the main set of experiments (or meta-analyses, etc.) with regards to that? I'm always interested in learning more about decision making principles.
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Nov 11, 2014 23:22
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Boner Slam posted:[...] Thanks and appreciations to you and everyone else who responded. These threads are always extremely helpful for expanding my knowledge and providing new areas of investigation.
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Nov 12, 2014 17:40
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Obdicut posted:In other news, the Bob Avakian assholes are doing a ton of literature hand-outs here on campus in the wake of Ferguson and Garner. That's Chairman Bob Avakian to you!
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Dec 4, 2014 17:40
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