Is Marxism dead?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Is Marxism dead?

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Bob le Moche posted:

The cool thing about Marxism is that it didn't end with Marx, and Marxists economists who witnessed all these things have been having debates and coming up with new theories to attempt to explain those things and understand them better the whole time. In contrast the theoreticians of liberal economics are holding onto to the very same tenets without empirical basis as they were decades ago despite the historical record proving their theories wrong over and over again. Any political economist worth its salt will tell you that while Marxism may not be the perfect economic theory to describe how capitalism works, it's certainly a better fit than anything out there - the more "mainstream" economic theories are typically primarily interested in coming up with justifying narratives for why the current system is good, while marxist economics focus on critique and deconstruction.

Literally everything in this paragraph is ~~wrong~~ informed by your ideology and not materialism. Marxist economists are still trying to shoe-horn Marx's flawed labor theory of value into something that isn't provably false, orthodox economists are the only ones who actually care about empirical evidence and microfoundations for their theories, empirical support for Marxism is impossible because there are no natural experiments, nearly every academic economist would describe Marxism as either substantially flawed or useless, and there is significant debate within mainstream economics about the value of laissez faire capitalism, see: John Keynes, Paul Krugman, and Thomas Piketty.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Nov 4, 2014

# ¿ Nov 4, 2014 03:09

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 05:33

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

Any time a high-capital company buys a natural resource from a less-developed country, they profit more off the deal. However, just profiting isn't enough, you also have to actually spend that money on good poo poo. THe US has really lost its way in doing this, we don't put money back into infrastructure, R&D, and other capital improvements as much as we should, we tie up tons of it in phony financial instruments, military spending, and immediate healthcare.

Are we still exploiting Venezuela's oil wealth now that they've nationalized the oil industry? Because it doesn't really matter to the US economy whether it's been nationalized or not. They sell us oil at the world market price, which determines the profits we make from it. The only difference is that the profits from the extraction itself go to Venezuela instead of a multinational, but that doesn't change the world price of oil, and therefore it doesn't affect the profitability of enterprises which require oil as an input. Oil is oil, and whether it is mined by highly developed Norwegians or dirt poor people in the third world doesn't impact our ability to profit from it.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 01:57

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

There isn't one. The capital-rich company is always going to be able to profit more off the trade than the poor country.

I doubt this is necessarily true because, to go back to the Venezuela example, Venezuela is a member of OPEC which is a highly successful cartel that has shown itself to be capable of both extracting substantial rents from oil production and leveraging its power to cause significant economic harm on western, highly developed and capitalized economies. If any exploitation is occurring in the world oil market, it's OPEC holding the whip, not the G8.

quote:

If a linen mill employs 50 workers, and pays them $20 a day, while making $5 per employee/day in profit, then the workers collectively get $1000 a day and the employer makes $250 a day, but there are fifty times as many employees. In general, the pressure of wages (absent forces external to capitalism forcing better treatment) will tend to seek a minimum of replacement, but even if it doesn't, let's say that in this nice town every ordinary person needs $16 a day to get by. The high-living capitalist spends more than three times as much, $50 a day, whoo hoo.

Why would you assume the pressure on wages would be downward in this hypothetical? It's entirely dependent on the supply of linen mill workers. If there are a massive number of unemployed linen mill workers, then yes, pressure would be down. If there are only 50, there would be upward pressure to $25/day as capitalists competed to expropriate whatever remaining fraction of surplus value they created.

And last, the parenthetical which attempts to divorce capitalism from any forces which might force better treatment is absurd. Complete laissez faire capitalism has never existed, will not ever exist, and is advocated by no one but the craziest libertarians. And even if we define any and all government interference in the market as non-capitalist, labor unions could still exist and exert influence, yes?

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Nov 5, 2014

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 04:30

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

The Marxist critique of capitalism has, I think, the following features:

1. Capitalism is inherently unstable, due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
2. In capitalism the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, which is morally wrong and also works to destabilize Capitalism.
3. The owners of capital don't do valuable work, they only enrich themselves by appropriating the value created by their employes.

Recognizing that this is an incomplete and possibly inaccurate summary, mainstream economics rejects points 1 and 3 outright, and argues about 2 quite a lot. Piketty's book "capital in the 21st century" was an attempt to prove #2 with actual historical data.

Piketty had this exchange when interviewed about his book.

IC: Can you talk a little bit about the effect of Marx on your thinking and how you came to start reading him?

TP: Marx?

IC: Yeah.

TP: I never managed really to read it. I mean I don�t know if you�ve tried to read it. Have you tried?

IC: Some of his essays, but not the economics work.

TP: The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is a short and strong piece. Das Kapital, I think, is very difficult to read and for me it was not very influential.

IC: Because your book, obviously with the title, it seemed like you were tipping your hat to him in some ways.

TP: No not at all, not at all! The big difference is that my book is a book about the history of capital. In the books of Marx there�s no data.

This is among the more charitable views of Marx that exist in mainstream Econ.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 22:07

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Ardennes posted:

The funny thing is for a guy who hasn't read almost any Marx, he spends some time talking about him it in his book. It almost makes you wonder if he is intentionally downplaying it quite a bit considering some of the criticism he was excepted to get. When he is having a conservation about Marx in the book without supposedly knowing anything about it, it is a bit silly.

Also, modern economists are kind of struggling to address some issues at the moment, one of the reasons Piketty wrote his book in the first place. He just has to play a little dance because he can't say the M word.

He talks about Marx in the introduction and conclusion, including a brief summary of Marx's theories, but the 500 pages of content in the middle are Marx-Free. Quotes like this lead me to believe he is not engaging in clever posturing when he suggests he doesn't think too much of Marx, the bolded section is as close to an insult as I think Piketty is ever willing to commit to the page.

Piketty page 9 posted:

Like his predecessors, Marx totally neglected the possibility of durable technological progress and steadily increasing prodictivity, which is a force that can to some extent serve as a counterweight to the process of accumulation and concentration of private capital. He no doubt lacked the statistical data needed to refine his predictions. He probably suffered as well from having decided on his conclusions in 1848, before embarking on the research needed to justify them. Marx evidently wrote in great political fervor, which at times led him to issue hasty pronouncements from which it was difficult to escape. That is why economic theory needs to be rooted in historical sources that are as complete as possible, and in this respect Marx did not exploit all the possibiilites available to him. What is more, he devoted little thought to the question of how a society in which private capital had been totally abolished would be organized politically and economically--a complex issue if ever there was one, as shown by the tragic totalitarian experiments undertaken in states where private capital was abolished.
Despite these limitations Marx's analysis remains relevant in several respects. First, he began with an important question...and tried to answer it with the means at his disposal...Even more important, the principle of infinite accumulation that Marx proposed contains a key insight...if the rates of population and productivity growth are relatively low, then accumulated wealth naturally takes on considerable importance, especially if it grows to extreme proportions and becomes socially destabilizing.

Obdicut posted:

This isn't true, or it's phrased really weirdly. Capitalism is 'unstable' to Marx because he thinks that the proletariat will achieve mass consciousness and overthrow the bourgeoisie, just as the bourgeoisie overthrew feudalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

quote:

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF), also known as the "law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall" (LTRPF), is a hypothesis in economics and political economy, most famously expounded by Karl Marx in Part Three of Das Kapital, Volume 3...
In his 1857 Grundrisse manuscript, Karl Marx called the tendency of the rate of profit to fall "the most important law of political economy" and sought to give a causal explanation for it, in terms of his theory of capital accumulation...Marx regarded the TRPF as proof that capitalist production could not be an everlasting form of production, since, in the end, the profit principle itself would suffer a breakdown

Also Andrew Kliman's newish book was on this topic.

quote:

This isn't true, no. A capitalist can also labor. Where did you get this idea from? Is it just from the very basic, and simple idea that it is possible for an owner of capital to not do work?

I'm not suggesting that Marxists believe a capitalist is not also capable of laboring, should he so choose. I'm suggesting they believe that the act of choosing how to invest their capital in order to maximize returns is not, itself, labor. Mainstream economists would disagree. If you're familiar with the American TV show Shark Tank, mainstream economists would say the "sharks" (investors) are laboring by choosing when to invest, Marxists would not.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Nov 5, 2014

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 23:34

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

If the act of investing capital is, itself, labor, then you cannot make the assumption that surplus value (profit) is produced solely by workers and expropriated by the capitalists. They might have earned it.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2014 23:47

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Ardennes posted:

That one quote shows he is engaging with Marx though, the book is an academic work, most of the turf conflicts are going to happen in the introduction and conclusion.

Btw, the issue wasn't he liked Marx or not as an academic, but if he was influenced by him including if he read him. He goes interview saying he barely read any of Marx then in his book talks about him at enough length to critic him at multiple points, it is rather ridiculous.

Also be honest based on his how he frames Marx, I kind of doubt he is himself free from pre-judgement especially since he supposedly barely read Marx in the first place. I mean if he doesn't look at sources before judging them, why critique Marx for it? Also, no one comes into academia without ideological bias to begin with. Oh and yeah he goes further on about Marx after that quote.

I think the book is a interesting ideological battleground if anything as a liberal tries to explain what is going on in the 21st century by tiptoeing around what more or less has been talked about and he absolutely knows it but can't say it and has to distance himself from it and still has to engage it at the same time.

I'm not trying to suggest that Piketty hates Marx or that Marx has zero influence on mainstream economists. If I had to guess I'd say Piketty thinks Marx was an interesting philosopher but a bad economist. Piketty's a French economics PHD; he got a decent serving of Marx through his academic training at a minimum-- although it was much more likely to be secondary sources than big chunks of Das Kapital (which is totally fine, by the way, you can understand evolution perfectly well without reading a word from the Origin of Species). Also his parents were apparently french communists of some sort so perhaps this is all precocious defiance! My point in bringing this up was to refute the idea that the Marxist critique of capitalism has any significant degree of acceptance in mainstream economics by showing that reaching somewhat similar conclusions to Marx is not the same thing as accepting his views or even being influenced by them.

Obdicut posted:

I feel you're missing a few logical jumps here.

First of all, if you labor to decide what to invest in, that doesn't actually contribute to the productive work at all. Your example would work a lot better if you talked not about investing capital but in making active business decisions, getting deals, etc. The act of investing doesn't actually affect the productive process except to make it possible or not.

It contributes to productive work by deciding which sort of work is done and which isn't, how much of it is done, and who should go about doing it. I don't mean day-to-day management decisions like production quotas or hiring and firing individual workers. I mean decisions about which organizations should have access to capital in order to do things like hire people and make things. Who should be able to use this car-making capital, Ford or GM? Maybe neither because demand for cars is low. Maybe car companies should have less access to capital and shoe companies should have more. By choosing who to invest (and disinvest) in, the capitalist performs productive labor by allocating resources to more productive enterprises. Some committee would have to do the same thing if the means of production were seized by the proletariat, right?

I think we should tax the poo poo out of their profits, but I don't think what capitalists do is necessarily worthless.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 00:41

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

You were talking about how revolutions are a bad thing, and buddy, Latin America and Haiti won their independence through revolutions. I guess it's just "leftist" revolutions that are bad, but given that the Haitian revolutionaries expropriated land to create smallholding farms, they were pretty goddamn left for 1804.

They seized the means of production! (Their own persons)

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 00:53

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

They don't invest in more productive enterprises, but in more profitable ones. The decision of 'how much' work is done is not decided by the investment, it is at most influenced. Likewise, who does it is not decided by the investment. And yes, a committee would have to make decisions about resource allocation, but it doesn't take the seizure of the means of production, just a non-profit enterprise.

In addition, the 'labor' of decision-making in this regard is really hard to judge. Lots of investments fail, some succeed. How do you measure the effectiveness of an investment? Even if it was successful, maybe he could have invested in something else that would have been more profitable or even better. Etc. Finally, the capitalist is really, really unlikely to just go ahead and make this decision, he almost certainly pays a large number of people to come to this decision.

And again, even if we granted fully and totally that the capitalist is doing labor by doing that, it doesn't disturb the basic mechanism at wall. He recoups the value of that labor, nobody else gets the profit from it.

I don't disagree necessarily with anything in the first two paragraphs, other than to note that to Marx a more productive enterprise is necessarily more profitable because the capitalist is getting all the surplus value of the production. But you can see how your point in the first two paagraphs--the capitalist's role in investment has indirect impacts on production that are very difficult to measure-- makes it impossible to determine how much of the surplus value created he is responsible for. Marx asserts the answer is zero, which can't be proven, any more than the capitalist could prove he deserves all the profits. Thus The existence of a differential between a workers wage and the value of the labor he performs is not necessarily evidence of exploitation.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 02:46

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

icantfindaname posted:

You're completely ignoring time and economic efficiency here. Sure, you might get the same end result, but if it takes you 50 years and 100 net abstract units of labor that's clearly less efficient than if it took 1 year and one net unit of labor. The capitalist improves efficiency of the allocation of resources

And Marx recognizes this explicitly:

the communist manifesto posted:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature�s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground � what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 18:51

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

namesake posted:

The ability for an organisation to be unable to recoup its expenses in direct payments back (with an additional profit to entice the owner to continue it) is only a failure under a capitalist system. Under another system products could be sold at production cost indefinitely or even for free if resources were to be transferred via another method.

In a non-capitalist system factories could still produce products that few people liked, that had costs of production which outweighed their benefits to society. This certainly occurs in capitalist systems, but they are not likely to continue for long, as capitalists would be unlikely to continue projects that lose money, or they go bankrupt. An economic system where the decisions about capital allocation are distributed would need a robust system to ensure capital is not misallocated to wasteful projects, and whether these systems would be more successful is an empirical question.

For simplicity's sake I'm ignoring market failures like pollution which could cause a capitalist to profit from something which society did not profit from. The state should use its power to force capitalists to bear the full costs of their production, through regulations and taxes. The state should also subsidize things like education and scientific research which have social benefits which cannot be fully profited from by capitalists.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 22:18

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

namesake posted:

Not entirely true, capitalist enterprises can choose to subsidise unprofitable parts so long as they have taken enough money from another source and see it is in their private interests to do so. Newspapers/new media are an example of this and also handily illustrate why they would do so.

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure whether you mean capitalists will invest in money-losing ventures that they just really like (Spruce Goose) or that they will invest in money-losing media ventures to control public opinion (Fox News, except Fox News is profitable). In either case, they're trading some of their capital stock for the privilege of doing so, which makes it available for projects that actually make sense. I think there's a good case to be made for the government to promote accurate, informative media-- but the solutions can be pretty odious.

quote:

The Cold War shows you can't just set up an alternative system and expect it to be a simple matter of comparing.

It also shows you can't assume an alternative to capitalism will necessarily be more efficient just because it's not capitalism.

quote:

I feel doing this is less simplifying an argument and more an attempt to remove some of the arguments from the anti-capitalist, because there are obvious issues with these points under capitalism.

If government regulations, taxes and subsidies make an economy non-capitalist, there has never been and will never be a capitalist economy. If incremental changes can correct the worst defects of capitalism while retaining many of its strengths, what use is there for Marxism?

# ¿ Nov 6, 2014 23:33

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

namesake posted:

You seemed to interject on a point about market correcting misallocation of capital but in my examples the rich are either backing capital wasting projects or actively bad by dominating public discourse but are immune to economic efficiency arguments against them because somehow the capital ends up somewhere else? The point is that the market is an arbitrator of what succeeds or fails but the rich control what succeeds or fails to a much greater extent than the poor, which is not a method of economic directing that I agree with...that's why Marxism tries to argue for a working class democracy, appealing to the same sentiments which allows republicans to otherthrow monarchies. It's a very specific form of change but still has a lot of question marks about it.

Taken as an aggregate, the market does tend to correct misallocation of capital, but not immidiately, and not in all cases. More to the point, what system would work better? What empirical proof do we have that it would? "Capitalism is so bad, anything else would be better" is a bad argument to begin with, but is particularly bad when there are tested, effective solutions that moderate capitalism without scrapping the whole enterprise.

quote:

Well quite, but the Marxist criticism is that it cannot correct them so that's why revolution is necessary/going to occur at some point and should be an improvement. That's why there is revolutionary socialism rather than just reformist socialism.

Yes, Marxism rejects piecemeal reforms and government interventions. That's why it's stupid. I'm not stifling Marxist critiques of capitalism by defending a capitalist system with those features. Marxism is not some catch-all term for all leftist criticisms of capitalism, as much as Glenn Beck would have it be so.

Effectronica posted:

what Obdicut is saying is effectively true. 99% of the investors in a company do not exert meaningful control over its decisions, and times when they do are noteworthy

This is true of any distributed decision-making system, like social democracy, as well. But many people exerting miniscule amounts of power can aggregate into a measurable force. In a joint-stock company, investors exercise control over the stock price, through their individual decisions to buy or sell, and corporations certainly respond to changes in the price of their stock.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 01:48

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

And the act of buying or selling securities affects the price of those securities. Corporations respond to changes in the price of their securities. Does the phrase "maximize shareholder value" ring a bell?

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 02:03

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

Yes, but that management is performed post-facto, it's not related to the idea of 'investing' money to actually get something going. The shareholders who vote, almost always, respond to financials and financials alone. In fact, most places that don't muck around with arbitrage just use an algorithm.

So what? Shareholders want their capital to be put to the most productive, profitable use so they can earn the highest return. Financials are often how one determines the profitability of a corporation.

Effectronica posted:

Companies have a variety of ways to respond to a fall or rise in stock prices (and thus the price of derivatives and so on), which can't be predicted from the rise or fall of the prices alone. The actual control this represents is pretty limited. We don't say that consumers exert any meaningful control over the operations of a company, despite the fact that they're what generates revenues and thus affect the financial status of the company.

So what? Investors don't control the companies, they control their capital. They try to ensure their capital is put to the most profitable use. That's the work they do. It doesn't matter whether they do this by telling the company what to do, if they own it outright, voting in a stockholder meeting, if they can, or simply selling their shares.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 02:24

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

I have no idea what you're trying to say. I don't think you really understand why we're talking about it.

Capitalists don't need to exercise control over their investments. They can, but they can delegate that, and they almost certainly make any decisions in concert with a bunch of advice and input from people who get paid to advise them.

So what? Managing a group of advisers and deciding which one to listen to isn't work now? Then why is Obama's hair going so gray?

quote:

You're presupposed a bunch of stuff here, including money.

Do you think that in a community where they don't use money, and don't sell things, that stuff has no value whatsoever?

It doesn't matter whether you measure the value of a product in dollars or gold or wheat or handjobs, its value is what someone else is willing to exchange for it. (Well, what someone else is willing to exchange for it establishes the lower bound of its value, at any rate)

quote:

So exactly that. Capitalists don't (have to) control their companies. They generally don't perform any sort of management role. This is literally what we've been talking about, whether capitalists do 'work' or 'labor' or whatever at a company.

You're arguing something slightly different, which is that the investment in various areas channel resources into profitable stuff, which nobody has ever argued against nor ever will.

Channeling resources into profitable stuff is work! Really important work, in fact.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Nov 7, 2014

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 02:33

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Obdicut posted:

They don't have to manage a group of advisers, either. They can, but they don't have to.

Seriously, I own stock. I make money from it. i have exerted zero, zip, nada, no control over the companies whatsoever.

But you have exerted control over your capital, and decided that it would be more productively employed by some corporation that it would sitting idle, or earning interest. When you do this, the effect is minuscule. When warren buffet does this, the effect is not. (Also if you're not investing in a mutual fund I really question your financial strategy)

quote:

You are stating this as though it's an axiom, but it's really not. That is one method of determining the value of objects. There are lots of others, both historically and in present.

If you only want to talk about the value of goods in a market economy, then sure, that's it. But there's more economics than just market economics.

The value of objects is determined by people. A BLT will have a different value in Tehran than Toledo. When people trade, we know that the seller thinks the value, to him, of the item is less than he received in trade, and the buyer thinks that it is worth more, to her, than what she gave in trade. Nobody cares how much labor went into your BLT in Tehran because they're not eating that poo poo.

quote:

It may or may not be productive work, and capitalists don't just channel resources into profitable stuff, obviously. They also channel resources into unprofitable stuff. you surely don't dispute that, right?

As long as they're channeling resources towards stuff that's more profitable than random assignment, they're doing work. If other methods of assigning capital to productive uses are more efficient, we should be able to prove that empirically.

Effectronica posted:

This is a lot of bullshit to get around the fact that bubbles are defined by something being priced higher than its actual value, which is the definition used in like, Krugman or Chang or Quiggin or pretty much any liberal explanation of the housing crisis or the dotcom bubble.

Bubbles are created because of expectations of future value when people buy things they believe will appreciate. They predict that other people will be willing to pay more than they did for the item in the future. When this does not come to pass, the bubble bursts as these people sell off their investments at a loss. It is not evidence of some metaphysical value embodied in the object that was ignored.

Aeolius posted:

Here's an offer: the most consistent, complete, and empirically validated crisis theory in all of economics; explanations for problems like "secular stagnation" and "global divergence" and a great many monetary puzzles. Virtually all the things neoclassicals can't figure out, Marxists got down pat. (Post-Keynesians have a lot of it, too, by virtue of a lot of common ground, though they do good accounting work in general.)

And just like global warming deniers, they can't publish these empirical studies which explain all the mysteries in economics in mainstream peer reviewed journals because

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Nov 7, 2014

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 03:35

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

The orthodoxy still holds that monetary policy is the instrument of first resort and fiscal policy is tertiary. You need to look at how things are actually applied, rather than the fact that the freshwater school is less prominent in journals.

The IMF came out with a report recently admitting its error in supporting austerity in Europe in 2010. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/04/international-mensch-fund/

Also, let's apply that standard to Marxism. You've got to look at how it's been actually applied, man!

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 03:56

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

Yeah, let's apply that and consign Marxism-Leninism to the trash heap with Maoism, but without pretending that those are the only Marxist or socialist approaches. I'm fine with that, not being an adherent to either of those ideologies. Communism works pretty great within companies though!

So when politicians try to implement Marxism and gently caress it up, that's not really Marxism. But when politicians try to implement neo-keynesianism and gently caress it up well that's all we can really look at when evaluating it am i rite?

Obdicut posted:

No, when I buy stock it's not employed by some corporation. The money doesn't go to the corporation. You know that, right?

The corporation gets the money when it issues the stock. Trading for stock someone else has already bought is functionally identical to the original buyer cashing out his equity in the company and the company then selling you the stock at the same price.

quote:

And you can empirically show that, in some areas, assigning capital through another means is more efficient. Our completely hosed health insurance system, for example. It would be a lot better if we had single-payer insurance.

Single payer insurance doesn't have anything to do with who owns the healthcare capital. You know that, right?

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 04:16

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

You just lied about what I said. Do you do that in person, or is it reserved for the internet?

you said

Effectronica posted:

The orthodoxy still holds that monetary policy is the instrument of first resort and fiscal policy is tertiary. You need to look at how things are actually applied, rather than the fact that the freshwater school is less prominent in journals.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 05:01

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

I mean, gently caress, every iteration of capitalism has been complicit in horrific crimes, and yet you wouldn't say that capitalism is inherently evil, would you?

I would be very comfortable saying that unregulated capitalism is inherently evil and the solution lies in government. That's why I'm not a Marxist.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 05:28

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Aeolius posted:

Though it may not be obvious right now, these categories eventually lead to analyses such as his "two department" model of production (i.e., distinguishing production of means of production vs. production of consumer goods), and a crisis theory built out of the law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit — which is something neoclassicals have still not identified a mechanism for, assuming they even bother to recognize the existence of the trend at all (though some certainly do the latter, like Deloitte).

Untrue.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_to_fall

quote:

In the concluding chapter 25 of his General Theory, Keynes nevertheless projected that, ultimately, the total stock of capital accumulated in society could become so large, relative to the demand for it, that its marginal efficiency would fall to "a very low figure." In that case, the income from the use of durable capital assets would fall to the point where it would only cover �their labor costs of production plus an allowance for risk and the costs of skill and supervision". However, Keynes thought that this outcome would be a blessing of capitalist development, and not a bad thing at all. An all-round permanent abundance of capital would entail what he called, famously, the �euthanasia of the rentier�. Rentiers who made no productive contribution themselves, would no longer be able to claim an unearned profit in excess of real costs, just because they owned title to scarce capital. Because capital would no longer be scarce. It was not so much that Keynes "hated" rentiers, but rather that he thought they would ultimately put themselves out of business.

Whether the rate of profit is falling towards zero, or trending asymptotically towards replacement cost + a premium for risk and smart investing makes a big difference. If Keynes is right, you're observing the process by which the profits of capitalists are reduced to their minimum sustainable value, but not reduced to such a point where the whole system catastrophically self-destructs. A fall in the rate of profit could indicate the market working as advertised, squeezing out monopoly and monopsony power.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 21:52

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Aeolius posted:

I still stand by the idea that, even if economists recognize the relationship between rising capital stock and falling total profits, they don't take the right message from it. Case in point, that quote. If Keynes had correctly identified the nature of profit, he'd have recognized the growth of surplus value is bounded in ways the growth of capital is not. Also, in order to keep total profits ("the mass of profits") growing while the rate of profit is falling requires an ever-greater deployment of capital, which strains the rate of profit ever further. Though profit will always be net positive as long as surplus value is realized, it will move asymptotically towards zero.

Thing is, it doesn't even need to get very close to zero to create problems. For instance, poor stability and solvency among businesses is not associated with falling profits per se, but low average profitability:

This is a really excellent illustration of why these arguments about value are actually important. Keynes doesn't recognize those limitations on "surplus value" because he thinks the Marxist conception of value is not useful in examining this economic problem. If value is an emergent property which constantly fluctuates based on economic interactions, there is no limit on its growth, nor is there reason to believe that profits would trend toward zero, rather than a small, sustainable non-zero number.

# ¿ Nov 7, 2014 23:52

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Scarce, in economic parlance, means not (functionally) infinite.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2014 02:08

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Scarcity is a metric. Everything has a degree of relative scarcity, except things that are functionally infinite like seawater at the coast. Scarce things have prices. Non-scarce things are free. Star Trek is a post-scarcity setting because you can replicate anything you want for no cost.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2014 03:26

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Defenses of Marxism which rely upon appeals to the diverse character of the bourgeoisie (not all capitalists...) are inherently self-refuting because they indict the very notion of class analysis. If the bourgeoisie is a diverse group with diverse interests and tendencies, generalizations about their character and predictions of their collective behavior are impossible.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 19:51

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Gantolandon posted:

You absolutely can define a group of people by what they are or do. Cooks, for example. They are a diverse group with diverse interests and tendencies, but you can safely assume that they prepare food.

Yes, and Marx makes no distinction between the actual owners of capital and their henchmen. All of them are expropriating value from actual laborers. None of them produce surplus value--they live off the value created by others. They are defined by what they do-- they're bourgeoisie.

Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Chapter 17 posted:

If the labour-time which the industrial capitalists themselves lose while directly selling commodities to one another � hence, speaking objectively, the circulation time of the commodities � does not add value to these commodities, it is evident that this labour-time does not change its nature in the least by falling to the merchant instead of the industrial capitalist. The conversion of commodities (products) into money, and of money into commodities (means of production) is a necessary function of industrial capital and, therefore, a necessary operation of the capitalist � who is actually but personified capital endowed with a consciousness of its own and a will. But these functions neither create value, nor produce surplus-value. By performing these operations and carrying on the functions of capital in the sphere of circulation after the productive capitalist has ceased to be involved the merchant merely takes the place of the industrial capitalist.

Merchants are parasites like capitalists, check.

quote:

the profit realised by the merchant on a small amount of advanced capital may be no larger, or may even be smaller, than the wages of one of the better-paid skilled wage In fact, he brushes shoulders with many direct commercial agents of the productive capitalist, such as buyers, sellers, travellers, who enjoy the same or a higher income either in the form of wages, or in the form of a share in the profit (percentages, bonuses) made from each sale. In the first case, the merchant pockets the mercantile profit as an independent capitalist; in the other, the salesman, the industrial capitalist's wage-labourer, receives a portion of the profit either in the form of wages, or as a proportional share in the profit of the industrial capitalist, whose direct agent he is, while his employer pockets both the industrial and the commercial profit. But in all these cases, although his income may appear to the circulation agent as an ordinary wage, as payment for work performed, and although, where it does not so appear, the profit may be no larger than the wage of a better-paid labourer, his income is derived solely from the mercantile profit. This follows from his labour not being labour which produces value.

Salesmen are parasites like capitalists, check.

quote:

What about the commercial wage-workers employed by the commercial capitalist, here the merchant?
In one respect, such a commercial employee is a wage-worker like any other ... However, we must make the same distinction between him and the wage-workers directly employed by industrial capital which exists between industrial capital and merchant's capital, and thus between the industrial capitalist and the merchant. Since the merchant, as a mere agent of circulation, produces neither value nor surplus-value (for the additional value which he adds to the commodities through his expenses resolves itself into an addition of previously existing values, although the question here poses itself, how he preserves this value of his constant capital?) it follows that the mercantile workers employed by him in these same functions cannot directly create surplus-value for him.

Henchmen are parasites like capitalists, check.

quote:

commercial operations required constantly for the circulation of industrial capital, in order to sell the product existing as commodity-capital, to reconvert the money so received into means of production, and to keep account of the whole process, multiply accordingly. Calculation of prices, book-keeping, managing funds, correspondence � all belong under this head. The more developed the scale of production, the greater, even if not proportionately greater, the commercial operations of the industrial capital, and consequently the labour and other costs of circulation involved in realising value and surplus-value. This necessitates the employment of commercial wage-workers who make up the actual office staff... It is in the nature of things that labour consisting merely of intermediate operations connected partly with calculating values, partly with realising them, and partly with reconverting the realised money into means of production, is a labour whose magnitude therefore depends on the quantity of the produced values that have to he realised, and does not act as the cause, like directly productive labour, but rather as an effect, of the respective magnitudes and masses of these values. The same applies to the other costs of circulation. To do much measuring, weighing, packing, and transporting, much must be on hand. The amount of packing, transporting, etc., depends on the quantity of commodities which are the objects of this activity, not vice versa.
The commercial worker produces no surplus-value directly

Office workers are parasites like capitalists, check.

To Marx, it matters not whether the Capitalist does these things himself or hires others to do them for him. The activities themselves are without social value. And he's absolutely wrong.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Nov 10, 2014

# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 02:48

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Sergg posted:

In the 2006 poll of the opinions of professional economists, it was revealed that at the time, the majority of economists:

This is a good place to look if you're interested in what mainstream economists think about a variety of issues, and particularly about the issues where mainstream economists disagree.

http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel

Some samples:

Question A: Because of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the U.S. unemployment rate was lower at the end of 2010 than it would have been without the stimulus bill.

82% Agree, 2% Disagree

Question B: Taking into account all of the ARRA�s economic consequences � including the economic costs of raising taxes to pay for the spending, its effects on future spending, and any other likely future effects � the benefits of the stimulus will end up exceeding its costs.

56% Agree, 5% Disagree

When they asked the same questions in 2012, the results were 80% agree, 4% disagree, and 44% agree, 12% disagree. Mainstream economists respond to empirical data! Mainstream economics is not the bastion of laissez-faire capitalism many would lead you to believe.

Gantolandon posted:

Nowhere in those quotes Marx calls wage-employed salesmen or henchmen bourgeoisie, which is just another word for owners of capital. Independent merchants are either capitalists or petite bourgeoisie - people who own capital but don't employ anyone.

And the point, of course, is not what category we assign them to but whether or not their work has value. Traders produce value. Full stop. A value system which cannot recognize the value produced by trade is inherently and inextricably flawed.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 02:54

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Aeolius posted:

A central theme of the system is that value is created in the sphere of production and not exchange. It's argued in a variety of ways, but this feature does not change. To delve into it more distinctly, we reach the question of productive vs. unproductive labor.

I got five pages in before reading this:

(labeled page 51) posted:

The capitalist qua capitalist purchases labour-power with which to create surplus-value. The capitalist (or worker for that matter) qua consumer purchases labour services for the direct use-value they provide. The former labour is productive, the latter unproductive. Included in the latter are all state employees, whose services are purchased with revenue whether the original taxes are paid out of wages or out of the various categories
of surplus-value

As a teacher employed by the state, I think Marx's definition of value is complete bullshit. More to the point, I don't think there's a single Marxist in this thread. I think there might be some socialists confused about what Marx actually advocated. Any of y'all want to get on the "all state employees are parasites" train? It's amazing how closely Marx resembles Ayn Rand when you squint your eyes. I realize that's a pretty unfair critisism-- Ayn Rand thought soldiers and police were not parasites.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 04:02

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

team overhead smash posted:

I'd say even then it doesn't. I would say Marxism largely focuses on Capitalist critique above envisioning some Communist future and I feel that critique of Capitalism is still relevant regardless of the existence (or lack thereof) of alternatives.

Even if we rule out anything other than Capitalism, as long as you feel that a Marxist analysis is a relevant one it can still allow you to analyse Capitalism and how it should be dealt with even if only in terms of what kind of Capitalism you want. Hell, how many articles were there in mainstream Capitalist magazines post financial-crash which essentially said "Marx was right because..." or "Marx is still relevant because..."?

Marxism is actually really bad at differentiating between different types of capitalism because all the definitions assume certain inherent features of capitalism, like that trade cannot create value, or that agents of the state cannot create value. Thus, from a Marxist perspective, there can't be important differences between a capitalist country practicing free trade and one practicing autarky, or between a minimalist state and a state with a massive social welfare scheme, as long as the means of production remain privately owned.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 00:30

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Aeolius posted:

If it's any consolation, you're wrong on every point. "Parasite," you may notice, doesn't appear in the passage you quote, for one thing. As I'd hoped you'd have gotten from the linked material, "productive" is defined in a way historically and materially specific to the capitalist mode of production. It's not "does it meet the needs of society (by doing something useful)"; it's "does it meet the needs of capital (by producing surplus value and thus profit)."

Parasite is a word that Marx uses repeatedly to describe people who do not produce surplus value, but rather live upon the surplus value created by others. Can you show where he makes a distinction between classes of people who do not produce surplus value?

quote:

Many jobs that are "unproductive" in relation to capital are actually necessary for the daily operation of society, such as politicians, teachers, firefighters, police, armed forces, etc. This is not some intrinsically bad thing, but the mark of a society advanced enough to have the surplus to make such roles available. Nor are these roles "parasitic" in any normative, pejorative sense to any point of view save that of capital itself.

These institutions are highly valuable for capitalists, though! Every one of these positions can improve profitability!

quote:

Do you deny that there are people who push for the privatization of the above roles, to change them into for-profit enterprises? Well, why do you suppose that might be?

Because they want to transform some of the broad social benefits of the institution into private profits. This implies they recognize that the value of these institutions is higher than their cost, otherwise they would agitate to abolish them rather than privatize them.

quote:

To wit: if you want to do away with the POV that says producing use-value without surplus value is unproductive, agitate for socialism.

The POV that use-value without surplus value is unproductive does not exist. Neoclassical economics has recognized the existence of market failure and positive externalities for more than a hundred years.

team overhead smash posted:

This also doesn't mean that Marxism doesn't recognise all the other differences which happen which aren't to do with the classification of socially necessary labour time, which is really what you are getting at when you talk about trade and the like.

What does Marxism have to say about free trade, then? What tools does it give us to analyze it other than "it cannot produce surplus value", "it is parasitic to profits", and "it will accelerate class struggle and revolution"? Statement 1 is apparently meaningless outside of a tangled web of Marxist theory, statement 2 is provably false, and statement 3 is nondisprovable.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2014 19:15

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

First, argument from popularity is a logical fallacy. Appeal to authority is not. We might care what most economists think about economics, but what most people think in general isn't very useful.

Second, the examples you offer are not inconsistent with a utility framework. People sell their labor because the wage is worth more to the individual than the alternative (more leisure time and less money). These same people might believe that they are overpaid-- being paid more than they estimate an employer gains in benefit from their labor, or just generally being paid more than the average wage for that work. Or they might feel that their employer gains far more value from their labor than they are being paid, or that they are being paid below the market price for their labor, and thus consider themselves underpaid. The framework assumes that people disagree about the value of things and that when they engage in voluntary exchange their preferences are revealed. They value the item they traded away less than the item they received in return. None of this is incompatible with nuance like:

Employers often have more power than employees and will try to contract labor at the lowest price possible. (Solution: Workplace protections, unions, minimum wages, redistributive taxes)
Market failures like monopoly, monopsony, and externalities can interact with voluntary exchange to produce inefficient outcomes. (Solution: Anti-trust law, regulations, taxes, state investment)
Government can be co-opted by employers to game the system in their favor. (Solution: Good government)
While a choice between work at a low wage and starvation is still a choice, calling it voluntary isn't accurate. (Solution: Minimum wage, welfare, guaranteed minimum income)

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 02:42

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

Both of them are fallacious, you idiot

No, appeal to authority is not a logical fallacy. You're thinking of appeal to false authority. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

quote:

People believe that they deserve more pay for working harder than other people, because they believe (like, actually believe, not your ivory-tower nonsense about what they believe) that you get paid for working, not because the boss feels like it. People believe that a manager is overpaid because he doesn't do poo poo, or seem to do poo poo, not because of your gobble gobble gobble blather. Business owners, if they aren't part of the elite, believe that they pay people according to what they're actually worth. They believe that it's possible to figure this out. You have utterly failed to overcome lingering Marxist and pre-Marxist ideas in the economy, except among the elites who benefit most from a belief system where there's nothing wrong with $200 million golden parachutes, because obviously shareholders believed it was worth it!

Do Marxists believe that people who work harder should be paid more? I was pretty certain that they believed "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". What about people who are naturally stronger or more talented? Do they also deserve more pay? How do you tell the difference between hard work and work enhanced by talent?

Effectronica posted:

The absolute funniest thing is that people are saying redistributive taxes are necessary when they believe value can be created ex nihilo. Decoupling wealth from any actual production process means that wealth redistribution actually is punishing people for being rich, since you can just uplift people out of poverty by creating sufficient wealth to do so.

Who thinks this? One of the more pithy slogans derived from mainstream economics is "there's no such thing as a free lunch". Mainstream economists believe that value can be increased through both production (turning raw materials and labor into products and services that people want) and distribution (transferring the products to the people that value them the most). I add value to a pig by hunting, butchering and smoking it, and then combining it with bread, lettuce and tomatoes. I can add additional value to that pig by allowing the person who wants the BLT the most to eat it. People who hate pork and love pigs might think I've reduced the value of the pig by killing it, and reduced the value of the bread lettuce and tomato by tainting them with pork. All of that can coexist without difficulty in a utilitarian framework.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 03:34

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Effectronica posted:

No, appealing to authority is fallacious in logical reasoning. That's right there on the page. It's also fallacious when you use it to dismiss evidence, which is basically how it functions in these kinds of things- "You know, every economist, apart from a few fringe crackpots, disagrees with you!"

When global warming deniers are dismissed because the overwhelming scientific consensus supports AGW, that's not a logical fallacy. That's not dismissing evidence. That's valuing the opinions of experts, and making a statistical argument to do so.

Effectronica posted:

This isn't about Marxism.

Marxism_is_dead.txt

quote:

Really? So why aren't you arguing against the people saying that value is purely a matter of what people believe? Because in a purely subjective environment, one people have been arguing for for this entire thread, no value is ever added to anything, it is simply something that exists in the mind of the beholder, and therefore you can, in fact must create value out of nothing. Without any way to objectively measure wealth, I can say that US GDP was 17 trillion dollars, or 17 quadrillion dollars, last year, and both statements are equally true so long as I value everything produced in the USA one thousand times as much.

In all the examples I provided, value is purely a matter of what people believe. A price is a relative, local consensus on that value. "Hours of work required to create this product" might be a factor in determining that value, both explicitly and implicitly, but there are many others.

I'm not sure if your critique now encompasses algebra or what.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 05:42

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Rodatose posted:

use value and intrinsic value weren't invented by marx; aristotle, adam smith and david ricardo used them for instance. that's kinda a big thing to mess up on your part

Yes, this is a good point. Mainstream economics traces its history back through the same people who inspired Marx. They abandoned the labor theories of ricardo (and marx) and mutated adam smith's labor theory into utility theory.

quote:

Maximizing utility isn't the same as creating it. It's simply getting the most out of produced things' inherent material qualities; a trick of optimization through social interaction and organization. You don't "grow the pie," you just make sure parts of the pie don't go to waste.

And what is the important distinction? Maximizing utility sure sounds cool... doesn't use many non-renewable resources but makes society better off. You're making capitalism sound pretty rad, don't stop!

Rodatose posted:

How does trade "create" value?

Law of diminishing returns is that one gets less use value out of additional production or consumption of the same thing past a certain point. Trade doesn't create value, it prevents waste of it. If you like the taste of five tacos, but not so much the taste of ten tacos, then you can trade away some of your tacos to a friend for their crisp refreshing mt dew baha blast. The trading doesn't make the tacos any tastier. It does not imbue the tacos with any extra flavor. You would have to change the material composition of the taco through adding more materials (spices) and/or labor (extra prep to change the initial taco state) to change the core tastiness of the tacos

Tastiness is not something that exists outside the human mind. If you give the tacos to a person who really likes tacos or is really hungry instead of somebody who hates tacos then the tacos literally taste better, in physical reality, because the taste sensor and experiencer that is eating those particular tacos thinks they taste better. We could prove this scientifically with brain scans. Human labor responsible for ensuring the tacos went to someone who found the most value in eating the tacos can be reasonably said to have added value to the tacos.

JeffersonClay fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Nov 13, 2014

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 05:57

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

HighClassSwankyTime posted:

You're confusing two things here chump. You're forgetting a substance contains chemicals that activate taste buds. The chemicals are already there: if there's no human to taste a taco, then that taco will still contain the chemicals that may (or may not) activate taste buds. The rest of your "argument" is entirely dependent on circumstances, personal preferences and the like.

Whether or not the chemicals activate taste buds associated with pleasure is an empirical question answered each time someone eats a taco. There's no objectively good taco because tastiness can only be determined by running the object through a taste detector attached to a human brain. You might be able to deduce some general outlines of tastiness from chemical analysis (this taco is too spicy for 95% of people) , but that's just an estimate that will be either confirmed or rejected empirically when the taco gets eaten.

Tastiness, like utility in general, is an emergent property created in a human brain.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 16:02

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

team overhead smash posted:

This is all just stupid confusion over terminology, because we can never have a Marxism discussion which doesn't have confusion over terminology.

In this you complain that marxism doesn't recognise that trade creates value without much explanation of what you mean by value.

In this post Rodatose asks why it would create value because value is based on the labour embodied in the commodity.

In this post you explain that it is because giving a commodity to someone who wants it more increases its utility.

The problem here is you are not using the word value correctly. Marxism cares about utility and factors it in, the thing is "value" happens to be a specific marxist definition for a completely different concept which is not synonymous with utility. Utility, which is what you are referring to is defined specifically as "use-value".

So in answer to your original statement which sparked this off of "A value system which cannot recognize the value produced by trade is inherently and inextricably flawed", the reply is:

"Well then you can't level that criticism at Marxism because it does recognise trade as having 'value' it just uses the specific term 'use-value' to talk about the kind of utility you are referring to."

Value is a really really really core Marxist term which is not synonymous or interchangeable with utility or use-value and the confusion is that you have done just that.

Why is there an arbitrary distinction between "labor used to create a commodity" and "labor used to ensure the commodity is employed with maximum use-value"? Why is value, in the core marxist sense, determined solely by the former?

And let's not be coy, Marx describes "unproductive laborers" as parasites.

quote:

The great mass of so-called 'higher grade' workers�such as state officials, military people, artists, doctors, priests, judges, lawyers, etc.�-some of whom are not only not productive but in essence destructive, but who know how to appropriate to themselves a very great part of the 'material' wealth partly through the sale of their 'immaterial' commodities and partly by forcibly imposing the latter on other people-�found it not at all pleasant to be relegated economically to the same class as clowns and menial servants and to appear merely as people partaking in the consumption, parasites on the actual producers (or rather agents of production).

If the arbitrary distinction between labor used to directly create a commodity and other types of welfare-enhancing labor causes you to start thinking doctors are parasites, that's probably a good indication that the definition is a lovely one.

Effectronica posted:

The argument that you are presenting is fallacious, because if we turn it around to the lumiferous ether, we would be forced to say that relativity was false until the 1910s. The evidence for global warming is what disproves denialism, not the number of people involved. You clearly have a strange definition of what truth is.

An argument from authority is statistical. Experts are usually right. Experts believe X. Therefore X is probably right. It's not necessarily a strong argument, but it's not fallacious either.

quote:

Wrong, on two counts. First of all, prices cannot be measured without an objective value to compute them in. Second of all, an apple doesn't stop being food because you're not hungry, and this sort of inherent value is fairly common. I know you'll insist that prices/utility are the only economically meaningful kind of value, but if mainstream economics says that the uses of objects are meaningless, it's stupid no matter how many people it employs.

Prices are just agreements about the exchange value of commodities. They can be expressed as ratios of commodities to money or to other commodities. 3 chickens/ RPG is a price. No, an apple doesn't stop being food because I'm not hungry. But my lack of hunger makes food in general, and therefore apples in particular, less valuable to me. If I can trade the apple to a hungry person for something I desire more, I have added value to the apple because it will be consumed by someone who will enjoy it more.

# ¿ Nov 13, 2014 22:45

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

Marx on Parasites:

Capital Volume 3 chapter 25
Usury centralizes money wealth where the means of production are dispersed. It does not alter the mode of production, but attaches itself firmly to it like a parasite and makes it wretched. It sucks out its blood, enervates it and compels reproduction to proceed under ever more pitiable conditions. Hence the popular hatred against usurers, which was most pronounced in the ancient world where ownership of means of production by the producer himself was at the same time the basis for political status, the independence of the citizen.

Drafts for The Civil War in France, 1871
The Commune does not do away with the class struggles, through which the working classes strive to the abolition of all classes and, therefore, of all class rule (because it does not represent a peculiar interest. It represents the liberation of 'labor', that is the fundamental and natural condition of individual and social life which only by usurpation, fraud and artificial contrivances can be shifted from the few upon the many), but it affords the rational medium I which that class struggle can run through its different phases in the most rational and human way. It could start violent reactions and as violent revolutions. It begins the emancipation of labor - its great work of the state parasites, by cutting away the springs which sacrifice a immense portion of the national produce to the feeding of the state monster on the one side, by doing, on the other, the real work of administration, local and national, for workingmen's wages. It begins therefore with an immense saving, with economical reform as well as political transformation.

Capital Volume 3 chapter 33
The credit system, which has its focal point in the allegedly national banks and the big money-lenders and usurers that surround them, is one enormous centralisation and gives this class of parasites a fabulous power not only to decimate the industrial capitalists periodically but also to interfere in actual production in the most dangerous manner � and this crew know nothing of production and have nothing at all to do with it.�

And here's a secondary source:
Karl Marx's Social and Political Thought, Volume 6, P 321
Throughout The Civil War, Marx frequently referred to the �state parasites� of the Second Empire and Versailles Government. From a polarized class perspective it might be thought that the entire bourgeois class was parasitic as it appropriated what the proletariat produced. By using a circular class structure, however, Marx identified parasitism only with unproductive degenerate categories. In other words, parasitism did not mean exploitative but productive relations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but rather referred to a lack of involvement in production. Although the Bourgeoisie were despotic, they were not parasitic. Nonetheless by shifting between different combinations of class attributes, Marx was able to explain middle class support for the Commune in terms of middle class opposition to unproductive parasitism..."

Obdicut posted:

Do you get he's talking about Adam Smith's definitions there?

How is his definition any different?

# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 00:39

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

quote:

We are trying to break with the theological formulation of the question. For us, the question of the Jew�s capacity for emancipation becomes the question: What particular social element has to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism? For the present-day Jew�s capacity for emancipation is the relation of Judaism to the emancipation of the modern world. This relation necessarily results from the special position of Judaism in the contemporary enslaved world.

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew � not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development � to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed � has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

quote:

The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.

What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism.

The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.

Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man � and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world � both the world of men and nature � of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man�s work and man�s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.

The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.

It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas M�nzer declares it intolerable

�that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.�

Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.

The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.

quote:

Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism, Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity, but this application could only become general after Christianity as a developed religion had completed theoretically the estrangement of man from himself and from nature.

Only then could Judaism achieve universal dominance and make alienated man and alienated nature into alienable, vendible objects subjected to the slavery of egoistic need and to trading.

Selling [verausserung] is the practical aspect of alienation [Entausserung]. Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something alien, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity � money � on them.

quote:

Once society has succeeded in abolishing the empirical essence of Judaism � huckstering and its preconditions � the Jew will have become impossible, because his consciousness no longer has an object, because the subjective basis of Judaism, practical need, has been humanized, and because the conflict between man�s individual-sensuous existence and his species-existence has been abolished.

The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism.

Yeah Marx has some real awesome ideas about merchants and trade alright. It must have been tough to go through hundreds of pages of manuscript changing "jews" into "bourgeoisie" without find and replace.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 02:01

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# ¿ May 22, 2024 05:33

JeffersonClay: Jun 17, 2003; by R. Guyovich

team overhead smash posted:

To paraphrase Marx, value is the only value-type which you can see with a microscope. You can't find the exchange value or surplus value or use-value of a pair of jeans or what have you by looking at it. You can however see the stitching and sewing that took place and you could then go and look at how long this takes to work out the value embodied in such work. You could even identify the individual component materials involved and the labour that went into them. At no point would the manager have actually sewn together a pair of jeans or fashioned the raw materials or what have you. He does not provide the value embodied in them.

Not to exhaust the jeans analogy, but...

Let's say there exist two companies making jeans. Each company uses an identical production process where each piece of fabric is cut and sewn by hand-- each piece takes the same amount of time to physically construct. Company A makes jeans with a range of standardized sizes. Company B has a tailor measure each customer and send those exact measurements to the factory to produce a pair of jeans with a perfect fit. Did the extra labor of measurement, communication and coordination add to the "value" of the jeans in a Marxist sense? The tailor didn't actually sew anything. The two pairs of jeans would look identical under a microscope, and each pair of jeans took exactly the same amount of time to sew.

In this example, it seems to me the only value you can measure is use-value. We cannot differentiate between the jeans based on their construction. We can only differentiate by noting that jeans from company B actually fit the customers better, and from this deduce that they were probably individually fitted, and therefore are more "valuable" than jeans from company A--but not in a marxist sense. Why make this arbitrary distinction between labor which directly affects materials and labor which directs and informs other labor?

because if the latter type of labor produces value, then Jew jobs like merchant and banker would produce value, and the critique would fall apart

# ¿ Nov 17, 2014 19:50

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