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Friendly Tumour posted:Same as Russians are responsible for Stalin. Why did those fools elect him? Those fools, curse them Actually Stalin is good 
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Nov 6, 2014 03:21
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icantfindaname posted:Leftist infighting is still hilarious, so I think you should keep it up 
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Nov 6, 2014 03:34
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Race Hate Kramer posted:If you are seriously failing to see the economic and political differences between third world nations with no power and Europe you are absolutely dense. rudatron posted:Do not respond to IWC. He will not argue in good faith. Ever.  icantfindaname posted:That actually seems like the same thing to me. Those places have bad government as a result of imperialism. But the solution isn't necessarily socialism.  sure, but whereas imperialism here refers specifically to the highest stage of capitalism, your set of alternatives is pretty slim. Would you prefer feudalism? A classical slave society? Perhaps primitive communalism?icantfindaname posted:Communists: noted defenders of cultural heritage Quick note on cultural autonomy et al: Roland Boer posted:[Tito's] Yugoslavia is one of the best examples of what has been called ‘affirmative action’ in relation to ethnicities, cultures and religions. Given the range of peoples and regions in Yugoslavia, the constitution was explicitly designed as an affirmative action constitution. The Socialist Federal republic of Yugoslavia comprised six republics and two autonomous provinces that were part of the socialist republic of Serbia. Given the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia, the constitution and the framework of the laws sought to ensure that smaller groups were not discriminated against by larger ones. The measures included very strong anti-discrimination laws, with heavy penalties for vilification in terms of ethnicity, language, and religion. Further, in provinces and regions, local people were encouraged to take up government positions, and local languages, cultures, social formations and education were fostered. At a federal level, all republics and autonomous regions, no matter what the size, had equal representation in the federal government. This entailed toning down the dominance of the larger parts, so they didn’t lord it over the others. The Cultural Revolution was directed against reactionaries, "capitalist roaders," and corruption and authoritarianism within the party and society. See, e.g., Dongping Han's The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Han posted:Because a corrupt institution would not be able to exercise leadership in an effective manner, ultimately [the increasing corruption of individual party leaders] would lead to its death. ... The Cultural Revolution was Mao's last resort after the previous campaigns failed to do the job effectively. It differed from all the previous political campaigns because for the first time in the CCP's history it circumvented the local party bosses and stressed the principle of letting the masses empower themselves and educate themselves. So, start with a radically horizontal, radically pro-free speech, pro-dissent and pro-democracy movement of internal critique, reorganization, and modernization. Then, with that context firmly in mind, note the following passage in the Wikipedia article you shared: "Although being undertaken by some of the Revolution's enthusiastic followers, the destruction of historical relics was never formally sanctioned by the Communist Party, whose official policy was instead to protect such items. Indeed, on May 14, 1967, the CCP central committee issued a document entitled Several suggestions for the protection of cultural relics and books during the Cultural Revolution.[103]" Yeah, the USSR got pretty reactionary vis-a-vis religion. Communists have learned from such mistakes. You won't find communists today supporting Stalin-era homophobia, either. (Of course, I doubt I'll be able to convince you of this, since only capitalist nations have the luxury of blaming "bad policy," whereas all undesirable outcomes in a socialist state are because of socialism.) Aeolius fucked around with this message at 09:34 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 09:21
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Friendly Tumour posted:I don't think Marx's call to "kill the rich" has much of a future in a century where everyone and anyone can act as a capitalist. Nothing like anticommunists holding forth on what Marx "probably wrote"
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Nov 6, 2014 20:32
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wateroverfire posted:Also because they have put up the capital to fund the venture and are ultimately bearing the risk of its failure. 
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Nov 6, 2014 21:46
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asdf32 posted:We're sort of at an impass here. Can we go back to a few basics? -No, God does. It's actually spelled "bapital," because it derives from the sacrament of baptism -They self select and then determine the weakest to cull by sniffing each other's scent glands. -I do. -Sure, if you hit 'em just right. P.S. In the years you've spent going around in circles asking and then stumbling over the same basic questions, you could have read some actual books for yourself. But you wouldn't do that because whether human or bot, no part of your inquisitive demeanor actually corresponds to a real desire to learn. My most charitable reading is that you're just looking for poor or imprecise turns of phrase by expositors on a web forum, which you then nitpick endlessly in the hopes of spotting some loophole or inconsistency. Here, *don't* read this; it contains the secrets to disproving Marxism. We must keep it from you at all costs. icantfindaname posted:This has progressed beyond obnoxious to the range of pathologically dishonest.
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Nov 7, 2014 00:44
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Friendly Tumour posted:Guys, marxists, look... I'm sure you believe strongly in the whole marxist conception of value and that capitalists contribute nothing of value to economy, but you're not going to convince non-marxists of that. We can see that the world doesn't really work according to your principles. The value of anything isn't defined by the amount of labour put into it, but how much somebody (anybody) is willing to pay for it. Capitalists don't exploit workers, but provide work to do in the first place. Gonna give you the benefit of the doubt because I'm unfamiliar with you: It's not that "capitalists contribute nothing of value to the economy." It's close to that, but not quite. The disconnect here lies in the word "value." Most contemporary economic discourse treats the word as pertaining to personal utility — a subjective system of valuation and preference-ranking. When Marxists use it, it means the amount of socially-necessary abstract labor time embodied in a commodity — an objective system of labor accounting. If this distinction is tripping you up, and I can see that it is, your best bet is to take the training-wheels approach (no shame in it!) and drop "value." Instead, refer to the first kind as "utility" and the second as "SNLT" or something thereabouts. It makes it easy to spot where equivocation may be occurring.  Important note!! In Marxist political economy, value rarely ever equates to price! It's not designed to, either; instead, the differences between price and value are a key part of the dynamism of the system.Anyway, to say capital creates no new value is effectively true by construction, to a Marxist, but don't get it twisted: we aren't treating it as an interesting statement. It's just a facet of the accounting system, which allows one to key into things like flows of labor time between firms or industries, the tendential fall of the rate of profit, etc. Friendly Tumour posted:Is there anything else you could offer the world? I mean, assuming you for a minute accept that these thesis' of Marxism are simply incorrect, for just a moment? I spent most of my life quite content to dismiss it all as a self-evidently silly crock, so it's not hard for me to grasp where you're coming from. The game-changer, for me, was when I actually read Capital for myself, puzzled over it, interrogated it, debated it. It's a big dive, and I'm not saying you need to right now, but it's worth the investment — not just as a seminal and still-relevant (and little understood, to boot) treatise, but also as literature (it's a frequent feature on Great Books lists, and far from just dry theory, it's littered with interesting references, quotes from Shakespeare and Greek poets, and good old Acidic Marx throwing shade on his opponents) and as a document that arguably marked the birth of the modern social sciences. You can get a shorter intro from Marx's famous speech, Value, Price and Profit, which was sort of a preview of Capital. See also that glossary document I linked in my last post. Now, if you want me to assume for a moment that all of this is wrong, I certainly can. Poof. Now machines can produce, maintain, and improve other commodity-producing machines ad infinitum without the input of human labor. Hooray! But, uh, now what? Was there a question or a problem to go with this assumption, or did you just want me to enjoy a reverie for a moment? Friendly Tumour posted:I mean, this is how markets work. It's not a thesis, it's a fact. You sell for how much somebody wants to pay, or you wait untill somebody is willing to pay what you want for whatever you're selling. Yes and no. Financial markets work that way, what with market-clearing prices and such. Actual goods are mostly administered prices. But even if they weren't, recall the point above that price != value except in special cases. wateroverfire posted:Alternately, Marxism uses a peculiar definition of value different from the lay definitions, and it's as useless for understanding the world as the rest of the system. How would you even know?  "I haven't read this Darwin fella but I have read the Bible and let me tell you something about that Darwin..." Aeolius fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 02:50
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Friendly Tumour posted:What. I said you can't say what anything is worth without knowing what somebody wants to pay you for it. What is it so difficult to understand about this? If nobody want to pay for your lovely rear end mechanical press, then it isn't worth poo poo. The end! No Marxist would dispute this. Friendly Tumour posted:You know what? I don't want to continue this talk anymore. I asked if Marxism can offer anything to the world except exhausting discussions on the semantics of value, so I guess the answer is "no". Why is it so fundamentally upsetting to people that a science should want to carefully define its terms? 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.) Don't give up! It's really pretty cool. icantfindaname posted:If you have a captive market sure you can. If the dude is stuck on a desert island and can only buy your product you can charge whatever you want and whatever he can pay that's not a competitive market you loving nitwit
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Nov 7, 2014 03:10
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icantfindaname posted:It absolutely is. How is it not? I'm not preventing anyone else from coming to sell printing presses on this island. That's literally the definition of a competitive market. A competitive market is a market with competition, are you sleep-posting right now or something icantfindaname posted:price ('value') I've never seen someone so aggressive in their ignorance; it's like you're actually proud that even the most basic concepts are not sinking in. That's some commitment you have to imperialism, I guess. bella ciao~
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Nov 7, 2014 03:18
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hahaha i just want to post at you one more time to laugh at your backpedaling about competition if the sum of your argument is "a thing's price is equal to its price" then maybe you'd be more comfortable with Mises, assuming you find time in your busy schedule of preening over Not Knowing Things to read a loving book
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Nov 7, 2014 03:27
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Effectronica posted:I get what you're trying to say, I'm saying that it's nonsense. Eh, give it up. He is right. He has owned us hard with the observation that market price is not the same thing as embodied socially necessary labor time, a thing Marx most certainly never thought of or even also took great care to point out himself. And SNLT definitely could not have an analytical role outside of price determination, because reasons. This is truly a chilling day. Effectronica posted:I mean, listen to yourself for a moment. dare you challenge the void to gaze into itself...?
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Nov 7, 2014 03:44
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icantfindaname posted:Lol look at those goalposts move but pray tell me, in your own words, where you thought they were relative to where they are now. maybe i can trick you into actually fielding productive discourse this way.
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Nov 7, 2014 03:49
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Obdicut posted:This thread didn't spend considerable time defending both Leninism and Maoism. In fairness, I'm probably one of like two or three people around these parts who'll defend planned economies. I don't expect I'll convince many others, given the visceral reactions that sprout from being raised by the Cold War generation. It is what it is, though; it's a position to which I've only recently become open, myself. That said, I'd be happy to enter into a dialogue about it with anyone who's demonstrated they're not allergic to "laying down common terms" or other basic intellectual honesty stuff.
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Nov 7, 2014 04:23
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Effectronica posted:How do you deal with the problem of requisite variety? What, how do you keep a plurality of economic structures? You could accomplish it similarly to how we do right now, with local firms and dispensaries and such. There are lots of ways to skin a cat, as it were. Communism is viewed as this singular sort of thing, but the best way to illustrate the problem with that is the simple fact that most actually existing communist states criticized each other extensively. It's just like how there's enormous variation between existing capitalist states; rarely does one represent another's (or even its own!) "ideal" vision of capitalism. But I apologize, I feel as though I'm missing the crux of the question. Can you elaborate on the problem?
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Nov 7, 2014 05:07
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Effectronica posted:The problem is that a controlled physical system, in order to be stable, must have as many independent variables as dependent variables. Capitalism, using financial markets as a control system, fails to provide the requisite variety of states, and so is unstable. How is a planned economy going to overcome the problem of managing a system without producing crashes or major shortages or similar problems of stability. I'm not sure what fits the criterion of "independent" and "dependent" variables in this. It seems pretty abstract. It's not clear to me how this would map, say, to my own understanding of the way capitalist systems are unstable. Would we call exchange values dependent variables, with purchasing power as independent, and therefore [crisis of overproduction]? If so, then that's just the standard realization problem growing out of the circuit of capital. If you turn M-C-M' into M-C-M (i.e., the state does not pursue surplus value), then you circumvent the problem entirely. That's how the Soviet Union never experienced a business cycle. But again, that assumes I'm interpreting you correctly.
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Nov 7, 2014 05:24
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Effectronica posted:I'm talking more about allocating resources, labor, and capital. The independent variables are basically the economic, statistical, and sociological data that are collected to determine the effects of economic policy, and the dependent variables are the actual things that the planners tweak in order to allocate things. Ok, so like the Hayekian "information problem"? Gotcha. That has more to do with feedback mechanisms than realization. Effectronica posted:To put it more concretely, how can such a system determine optimal levels of TV production without having issues with shortages or wastage, and then extending this across the whole economy and considering how this interacts with other industries? Alright, I'm up to speed, now. The question of shortage and wastage, again, wouldn't be tremendously different than right now. As to why: For starters, as I stated upthread, most currently existing prices are actually administered prices. If prices are not all determined by an auctioneer process, then the calculations involved become extremely tractable: input costs plus a markup, for example. Further, price signals actually have almost nothing to do with managing the above issues. The majority of prices are extremely inelastic to changes in demand, and price signals exert a vanishingly small effect on production. A point Nicholas Kaldor spent much of his storied career making is that, empirically, quantity signals are far and away more important for both prices and output, and inventories are their quintessential tool. Dwindling inventories both point to a greater need for production and supply the requisite funds for growth. Bloating inventories are both a fiscal drag and a sign that demand is low. I mean, this makes sense logically, too; if we talk about scarcity being communicated via price signals, then we're assuming that a rise in the cost of good A might be, e.g., due to a rise in the cost of component good B, and it in turn due to a rise in component good C, and so on. But where the rubber meets the road, this propagation had to start somewhere. At such a point, either bids for a primary commodity outpaced production (a quantity signal), or an administrator observed a growing scarcity in the industry (also quantity!), and bumped the price accordingly. There's no underlying price shift to explain it, and there's no necessary precise way to parlay that quantity shift into a price shift, save for any further adjustments if competitors surprise you. However, even the latter is likely, and firms tend to play it conservative so as to get it right on the first try, since survey data indicates that most sales are repeat sales, and rapidly shifting prices tend to alienate buyers. Next thing to note is, economic planners aren't just sitting in a room guessing madly at production quotas without any feedback. Feedback mechanisms are at least as important to the health of a planned economy as to an unplanned one. The above-mentioned quantity signals, inventories, etc., are some of the most important mechanisms — they're the ones that are responsible for those parts of the market that "just work." There's no need to make daily decisions about how many shovels and shoelaces to make, since the central planners will focus on more of the big-picture problems, while resources could be allocated downward to ever more local councils and firms. We, of course, also have, in the internet, the mother of all quantity signal systems in place. Nothing at all says that a factor in production need be anything more complex than "a lot of people writing to say they're interested in more kinds of [X]." Anyway, the first and most critical order of business in any socialist state is to ensure production of food, clothing, shelter, and other essential needs are met. The sooner this occurs, the sooner necessary hours of labor can begin to scale back. As people have more time, they are also freed up to pursue more and more ambitious productive activity in a manner of their own choosing. This is basically the thing Marx was saying about how labor won't be alienated but rather will no longer be distinguished from leisure under communism. Sort of like the open source movement. This is just barely scraping the top of the tip of the iceberg on this topic, but I'll leave it there for now. Plus, again, the fact that the USSR was chugging along and growing steadily during every major depression or recession of the 20th century also suggests that stability is not necessarily a problem. --- For the record (for other discussions going on in here): Marx never claimed capital performs no socially useful functions! In order for capitalism to be a significant step up from feudalism, it is fait accompli that capital does indeed make itself useful. The problem lies — as it always does, given a certain dogged refusal to use words the same way as the analyst one critiques (which is a pretty hilariously unscientific way to go about criticizing but w/e) — in the use of "value." The point is not that capital doesn't do anything; it's that it doesn't generate in and of itself the preconditional substance of its own existence: socially necessary human labor. This is not a controversial point, unless you either a) equivocate or b) achieve the aforementioned state of self-reproducing machinery. In the case of b), machines could be producing use-values without producing values, but these would not strictly speaking be commodities, and the law of value would be hard pressed to assert itself at all. It'd definitely qualify as a major tension between the means of production and the relations of production, and would without a shadow of a doubt lead to huge pressure to proceed to some state of communism (or, if that word makes you uncomfortable, "some trans-capitalist state"). Aeolius fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 06:34
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icantfindaname posted:It can't 'transfer value', the value didn't exist before it was created. There is no value in burning $100 bills. Value is a function of the utility of market actors, it's created by increasing utility. Value isn't inherent to labor, breaking rocks produces no value Hang on, let me use my decoder ring to spot the equivocation: icantfindaname posted:It can't 'transfer socially necessary labor', the subjective value didn't exist before it was created. There is no subjective value in burning $100 bills. subjective value is a function of the utility of market actors, it's created by increasing utility. subjective value isn't inherent to labor, breaking rocks produces no subjective value Is that about what you meant to say? Notice how "labor time is dumb, you don't make utility from mud pies" doesn't actually critique anything? Does this give you some idea why we seem to be so hung up on definitions? No? It's because we're discussing two completely different things. Every time you switch between them mid-argument, you cease to make a valid, or even intelligible, point. Think of the words like homonyms. "You don't support the right to bear arms? Did you even think of how many people would die from the grievous injuries you'd be inflicting, removing their appendages en masse? Oh, what's this? Moving the goalposts? Well, I don't even want to hear what kinda dumb word games you're trying to play now; I support the right to arms and that's that. Checkmate, hippie!  "
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Nov 7, 2014 06:55
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icantfindaname posted:So basically, even if the distribution of capital directly affects how much value is created, you're going to define 'value' in such a way that the distribution of capital doesn't actually play any part in the amount of value produced? No. icantfindaname posted:Repeat after me: There is no difference between utility and socially necessary labor time You appear to have just made a point I'm pretty sure you (correctly) argued against, before. Please play again.
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Nov 7, 2014 06:58
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icantfindaname posted:Maybe I should "invest" in buying you all copies of intermediate level Microecon textbooks. I think that'd be a socially useful amount of labor on my part I assure you the problem is entirely with your own comprehension. I've already showed you the way to solve the problem once and for all: by eschewing "value" in this conversation in favor of what each usage signifies. Your refusal suggests that you're just playing around. But I'm pretty fed up with irony, so I'm just gonna carry on treating you like an ignoramus. icantfindaname posted:Your definition of value is bad and useless, like I've said over and over again. That's a point you can actually debate, and I and others here would even engage you civilly and honestly on it! All you have to do is level one (1) criticism of it without becoming confused and lapsing into equivocation. You're batting 0 for, what, 200 posts today? But nothing's stopping you from turning it around...
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Nov 7, 2014 07:08
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Ok. How does it do that?
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Nov 7, 2014 07:12
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Let me make sure I'm reading you correctly: The use of the word "value" to mean "socially necessary labor time" is bad and useless because it suggests that value [subjective utility?] is only created through labor, and rhetorically elevating labor above capital. Is that the claim?
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Nov 7, 2014 07:17
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icantfindaname posted:Yup. At the very least, there's absolutely no reason to use that instead of the standard neoclassical definition Ok. I can answer that. Marx explicitly states, in Capital volume 1, chapter 1, that labor is not the sole source of "use-values" — that is, something subjectively useful but with a material basis (a good or service, rather than an amusing thought). I.e., Nature is also a source of subjectively valuable goods, yes? Nobody creates gold. Nobody had orchards at the time the first apples were picked and eaten. Etc. So, the idea that anyone is saying subjective utility only comes from labor suggests a misunderstanding (or, it must also be suggested, poor communication on the part of Marxists). As to why it's a useful thing to keep tabs on: It goes back to the analysis of the commodity. An object being a use-value is only one part of a commodity's dual character; the other part of it is that it is produced specifically to be sold, and therefore possesses some degree of embodied labor. So, to be a commodity, a thing has both a qualitative dimension (its subjective value in use) and a quantitative dimension (the objective quantities of labor involved in its production). So, utility is already baked into the theory, albeit not in a sense that tries to be both quality and quantity. 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). Here's a detail that should please you: Marx also gives examples of things with no socially necessary labor embodied at all that nevertheless still have prices (which further cements how not-the-same-thing they are). Things like uncultivated land, for example. They have prices, but by way of conventions and systems other than the "law of value" he's expounding. Indeed, every scientific theory has to clarify its domain specificity, and Marxian value theory was only meant to describe the laws of motion of capitalist production. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you want to put a stake through Marx's heart once and for all, the thing to attack is his analysis of the commodity form. I've not seen anybody try, and his entire value theory rests upon it. Hope that's helpful. I gotta go get some shuteye now, anyway. More later, if you like. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 07:55
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Friendly Tumour posted:it's like a möbius strip made of poo I worry that it's more like this, just with "Marx." Effectronica posted:Okay, and we know from the five-year-plans that central planning can largely meet the needs of an industrializing economy, but we also know that the Gosplan system struggled to deal with the nascent consumer economy of the later USSR. Effectronica posted:The problem doesn't come in from the lack of feedback systems but the limited ability to sort the information from the feedback systems. In isolation, building too few TVs or too many TVs is easily correctable, but knock-on effects can create a situation where too many TVs triggers too few PCs and phones, which creates a series of ripples as it cycles down into equilibrium, which in turn creates an economic crisis as hundreds to thousands of goods are thrown out of whack. Effectronica posted:This is a distinct form of instability from the capitalist business cycle, of course, and it's solvable through post-scarcity, but true post-scarcity would require ridiculous levels of spaceborne infrastructure and energy production. By contrast, necessary labor producing the means of subsistence in our economy is inextricably interwoven with our luxury sector, such that the needs of the multitudes are not met if the wants of the bourgeoisie are not also met — and often even if they are, given the prioritization of luxury. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 15:58
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Effectronica posted:A company that overproduces eats a loss, and contracts. One that underproduces expands. The side effects of these expansions and contractions are generally negative things like unemployment, increasing vulnerability to companies to credit contractions, and so on, and eliminating or marginalizing them is good. On a broad scale, large-scale overproduction, say of housing, damages the housing industry as a whole and triggers a recession, while large-scale underproduction triggers a boom, with these becoming depressions and bubbles if they're particularly large. In the USSR, firm-level accounting included profit and loss much in the same way as ours does. That information was not lost; it just didn't "call the tune" and thereby structure production. It was a secondary indicator of success or failure, after the primary indicator of meeting or exceeding quota. And they were able to use that information to temper decisions without also having to endure unemployment or recessions. (Mind, the role profit and loss played in the USSR also changed over time.) Effectronica posted:I'm saying that the business cycle is almost entirely caused by these errors and mismatches in capitalist economies. I'm confused. Didn't you say that these mismatches are "a distinct form of instability from the capitalist business cycle"? That said, you're pointing out a possible source of shocks, which is fine. But shocks occur every day without recession. Conditions need to be in place to turn a shock into a crisis, and those conditions, I'd argue, stem fundamentally from profitability.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:04
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Effectronica posted:And the central contradiction of capitalism doesn't really explain the business cycle without massively modifying it. It certainly helps explain why certain events trigger gigantic depressions, but the idea that every five years profit-extraction reaches the point where the economy begins to collapse but just catches itself before actually doing so is more than a little ridiculous. That's not the argument, though, or at least not mine. Declining profitability is an underlying, tendential cause of instability and shocks, as well as an influence on other proximal causes such as the procyclical movements in financial capital, growing debt burdens, etc. It's not the immediate cause of crisis, though. Not every shock, even those that the financial sector renders more general, is a full-scale disruption of the mode of production along the lines of the 1929 or 1973 or 2008.
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Nov 7, 2014 17:44
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JeffersonClay posted:Untrue. Yeah, I thought of Solow's growth model later, too. I was really tired at that point, what can I say? But 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:  Not to mention, positive returns won't keep a business afloat if banks are expecting interest in excess of what they wind up making.
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Nov 7, 2014 22:35
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JeffersonClay posted: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. Bingo. JeffersonClay posted: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 Missed this, but have an answer from a different discussion on a different topic in a different thread: Aeolius posted:The idea that ideology pervades not only the social role of science but also its content and method has been a part of the discussion for some decades (see, e.g., Kuhn or Feyerabend). You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the philosophy of science who buys idea that science is a single linear tradition of accumulation of facts, or that pure Baconian inductive science (which remains to this day a common lay portrayal) is even possible. Though I would also submit this very thread as an example of why just discussing this stuff any ol' where isn't an option. People have very strong opinions about it, often without so much as even a glance at any of the texts themselves, as they've been assured by every authority in their field that it was all Disproven Long Ago. Of those open-minded people among them who try to engage with it, many are put off by what amounts to an entire alien vocabulary, and the process of translation often breeds further misunderstanding. Now confound it further with the fact that some downright vicious debates exist even within Marxist economics. It's all pretty messy. Plus, don't forget our sterling history of academic freedom.
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Nov 8, 2014 01:41
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MaterialConceptual posted:Aeolius, it has been a while since I last talked to you Yeah, sup duder? I still peep your blog every now and again btw. You should update more.I left out the quotes to keep it from becoming stupidly long, hope that's not a hassle. 1) Every tool at the disposal of a capitalist economy could, depending on how it's structured, be similarly available to a socialist one. Case in point, see what I was saying before about the USSR maintaining firms and even keeping an account of profit, if not operationalizing it in the same way. Basically, every problem with either information or calculation that I've seen raised is such that, taken to its logical conclusion, it either a) presupposes a type of planning specifically designed not to pass its muster (i.e., no or limited feedback mechanisms), or b) the critique applies equally well to a capitalist economy. As I recall, you're also familiar with Cockshott & Cottrell's argument from the Church-Turing thesis that anything mathematically tractable to distributed human computers would be similarly computable to central, universal computers. I think this argument is useful less because it's advisable to have a single supercomputer puzzling out everything down to the last firm, but rather because it indicates that the load can be shifted at all, period. It makes a vast array of administrative arrangements feasible, including ones highly similar to our own, save with an echelon or two designed to replace firm competition with firm coordination. 2) No standard of utility is needed, period, because utility is not quantitative in any intersubjectively meaningful sense. The only way goods are commensurable objectively (and I don't mean that as in "my opinion is right" but rather in the sense that we're working off real, directly and concretely measurable figures that don't change significantly without a change in the prevailing technology) is what proportion of the total social labor is required to produce a given thing at a given point in time. Assuming utility is even stable, intransitive, etc., it's arguably of minimal importance to the determination of prices, anyway. For one thing, utility comparisons presuppose the existence of prices against which to make said comparisons. Plus, gads of survey and case study data (and even econometric studies, for those who don't trust price setters' word on how they set prices) frame pricing practices as independent of demand (see my post discussing quantity signals in response to Effectronica). The financial sector is the domain in which prices are the most demand dependent, and that would cease to exist. In Human Action, Mises posits money as the single standard of (and indeed, a logical prerequisite for) calculation. Though it wouldn't still function the same way as under capitalism (e.g., couldn't become capital), you'd still need to retain some sort of value note as a means of circulation and unit of account. 3) This argument supposes that the state is actually struggling against workers for appropriation, as in the state is one big capitalist living high on the hog on workers' backs. Some argue that this has historically manifested in terms of a tension between, say, growth of military apparatus and worker consumption, as in the late USSR especially. For one thing this strikes as a highly contingent outcome, built out of pretty specific global conditions. It's not as though armaments were going into some giant vault so bureaucrats could swim through them like Scrooge McDuck. In the long run it seems self-defeating. If we view the state as tantamount to a coordinator/managerial "class," as Albert and Hahnel do, we've already marshalled the workers into unity more or less by construction. Plus, the state does not have the advantage of being diffuse, as with the capitalist class. It's much easier to mobilize against a singular, figureheaded entity than a plurality of uncoordinated, faceless ones, and it's much easier to point out state tyranny and corruption than economic exploitation. Hell, even libertarians can do that. So I think we're set on that front. 3 [other]) The USSR had some real problems with this in its later years, but that had to do with changes to its model of technological innovation following Stalin's death. This article is long, but it makes a strong case that a shift away from subsidized industry and towards more market-oriented incentive systems under Khrushchev (while still retaining the planned quotas otherwise) actually left the USSR with the "worst of both worlds." They could slide on previous advances for a while, but over decades this problem grew ever more onerous. 4) Empirically bunk by the absence of business cycles alone, to say nothing about the difference in rates of economic growth and quality of life improvement. I'm extremely suspicious of economics that claims democratization decreases optimality — optimal in terms of what and for whom? It's absolutely less optimal if you're judging from the vantage point of the bourgeoisie, but who cares? That class position ought not exist. Slavery was pretty "optimal" to the owners, I'd imagine. Even if we accept that somehow the raw growth outcomes are identical, then there remains to be made a good argument for using it for the enrichment of some at the expense of most, instead of actually assuring greater positive liberty and freedom from privation for all. (Meliorists invariably show up here to argue that social democracy can achieve the same outcomes. Shoo, shoo! *waves broom with grit and menace*) 5) Allocative efficiency is, in this case, a political question. Schemata and programs will come and go over the years, no doubt. I don't think we can guess too hard at this, except to say that it will always be a work in progress, much in the same way that local storefronts are constantly changing before our eyes right now. As to social prestige: who knows? It may happen, or it may not. Cultures manage to find all manner of things to be lovely about, but it sounds less structurally harmful than the other sort of hoarding, at least. 6) Are you sure "not fetishistic enough" is an argument against planning? Anyway, the growth of luxury goods comes hand-in-hand with the reduction of necessary labor as the fundamental needs of society are met. If that frustrates, say, status seeking by way of conspicuous consumption, then "oh loving well," I guess. 7) I don't think it's ever been structured that way, and I'm not sure why it ever would be. This problem assumes that "entry" would require competition with said "one firm," as opposed to starting a new venture within it. 8) To the worker, the arrangement under socialism will still bear the characteristic C-M-C structure as under capitalism, though. The material incentive to work is retained for the "lower stage" of communism. There are, of course, differences: the absence of the alienation of market capitalism, better pay and benefits, more leisure, guaranteed work, some guaranteed standard of living even without work, etc. But there's still fundamentally a material incentive to keep working. 9) Ehhh. This presupposes that "career options" aren't heavily restricted (both in terms of options and acquisition) right now. And anyway, it's not as though jobs are handed out by sortition in actually existing industrialized socialist states. People changed jobs in the USSR all the time, and vocational retraining was free, as was education through the university level. The "gains" you mention were, for many, a tremendous step down — such as those dispossessed of their ancestral farmlands during "primitive accumulation." In the broad view we can indeed reflect that capitalism represented a huge step up from the prior feudal order, but it now represents something reactionary and repressive. The "free individuality" you mention is intrinsically tied to Enlightment notions that tend to situate human freedom as some ahistorical, metaphysical absolute, to draw a stark line between reason and the passions, etc. We've moved beyond this, by and large, by recognizing that the mind is inherently embodied, that thought is mostly unconscious, that mental life is socially conditioned, that social life is underpinned by a material basis, etc. A coherent concept of freedom can't just rest at "live and let live," because our lives are inextricably connected; freedom must be "in gear," interacting with the world causally to realize intentions, but cognizant of context and physical and social limit (while, indeed, seeking to minimize both when possible). (Incidentally, this blogger makes an interesting related point: "liberalism, developing as a bourgeois revolutionary tradition against absolutist monarchism, has since then been completely unable to criticize anything outside of the anti-monarchist framework." Thus, communist leaders are "viewed as monarchs, despite their social structure deviating significantly from any known monarchist society." I had never considered it like that, but it seems so obvious in retrospect.) 10) lol, who said this one? 11) Preposterous. If anything, I'd argue it's precisely the other way around: a nation enduring the devastating conditions of total war needs the effectiveness of a planned economy in the long run. Any country that needs a national enemy in order to succeed is almost certainly fascist. 12) Planning gets a bad rap on the environment because many of our examples of planned economies also happened to be pursuing industrialization, which has been pretty much an environmental nightmare in any system. But a socialist state — especially a developed one, since, recall, this is supposed to be post-capitalist — could certainly prioritize environmental preservation over raw output. Plus, it's much more feasible for a socialist planning to incorporate in prices those factors that would merely pass as externalities under capitalism. As that Ball paper linked above notes: "Contrary to conventional thinking, socialist planning is potentially a very flexible system, precisely because what happens in the economy is the result of conscious decision-making, rather than spontaneous market forces." 13) How closely synchronized are we talking, here? Is there no redundancy, or what? This seems odd on a pretty basic level. I mean, if society is progressing such that a given technology even has the chance to "ossify," then this suggests technology elsewhere is improving. Why can it improve in one part of an economy, but not another? Can't the labor saved by the first innovation lead to an allocation better suited to developing the second? The point is supposed to be, after all, to reduce the necessary work hours — not to keep the entire labor force going balls to the wall forever. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Nov 9, 2014 |
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Nov 9, 2014 13:11
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Let me just get this out of the way up front.Boner Slam posted:you are being dishonest. This ain't gonna fly. If you want to accuse me of intellectual dishonesty or outright dogmatism, how about seeing how I actually respond to your arguments before launching into it? If you'll be so kind as to keep those tics to yourself from here on, we can proceed amicably, MISTER Boner. Boner Slam posted:So while there is no a-priori reason to rule out any form of central planning, when you claim that there are no results showing the inherent difficulties of such an undertaking My point was specifically the first half of this. My claim is not that socialism has no inherent problems. On the contrary, I believe socialism has internal contradictions just like capitalism. In particular, the conflict between the individual and collective interests would overtake class conflict (though it's worth noting that the former arguably already exists in subsidiary form under capitalism). There is no inherent Magic Market Pixie Dust quality to coordination/information in capitalism such that something analogous couldn't be made available elsewhere. You even agreed with this several times in your response, but then you disagree insofar as you appear to attribute a stronger claim to me than (I believe) I've made. Once more with feeling: A capitalist system has endogenous motors and thus tends to fall into place a certain way; a socialist system does not have those mechanisms by default, but can incorporate similar structures (or, as I believe history shows, better ones). It's hard work, building a better world. If it were easy, we'd be there already. Boner Slam posted:In fact it may be possible that at some points things will become more understood and therefore planneable. But it is not entirely a subject of computation, feedbacks and cybernetics. These things offer certain mechanical necessities to an eventual solution, however very much not the solution. ... Any way, any solution presented must - on many levels- proof its superiority to existing mechanisms. I think it's a little unfair to take stock of things competitive markets haven't solved (but somehow carry on with regardless), and then insist that a more humane system would need to solve them before becoming feasible. Especially we've got solid proof that socialism solves the contradictions of capitalism handily. What we're left with are a different set of internal contradictions inherent to socialism, but I (and as you indicate further down, perhaps many more than is commonly acknowledged) would take those in a heartbeat. Boner Slam posted:It seems to me any reasonable researcher would not go ahead and plaster some blanket statement about what works best in every situation. However this is exactly the agenda of many people on the extremes of both sides of theory. Sure, but there's a very good reason for this: we have to use a system. The people who argue for capitalism have the distinct advantage that whatever problems are identified can be simply endured for no other reason than that's what we've got. They don't even have to "win" a debate; just fight to an obtuse/pedantic standstill (as with several participants in this thread) or otherwise bide for time. Plus, many are content to merely dismiss inherent problems as "stupid/ill-informed/incorrect policy," without any implication for the mode of production itself. My position is fundamentally disadvantaged because the view from without tends to exert a homogenizing effect, such that different planned economies seem to blend together and differences are obscured. Thus, it's an uphill battle to convince anyone that identified problems could be located in the political sphere rather than in the relations of production themselves, as they themselves would do in my place. (All the while, of course, rebuffing what people believe to be "inherent problems.") As Michael Parenti argues, critical heterodox perspectives tend to be worth more than their orthodox counterparts, since you know the former will be tested, subject to the most withering scrutiny imaginable. Much of the latter, on the other hand, may just as well pass without note. Boner Slam posted:Because there's also this: Every day we have more info on this stuff - on what goes and what doesn't go. Many things are inherit to current institutions, some things are even general. I expect that in a couple of years we will be much better at managing policy than we are now, and that this will continue. What makes you more confident of this than every economist who's made the same remark in the last half century plus? Why is This Time Different, and why should I read such a claim as more than Bernanke's ironically timed speech on the Great Moderation? Boner Slam posted:But anyone claiming to have the singular solution right now is pretty much a charlatan in my eyes. My personal feel is that the economic framework will eventually be very.. differentiated. But that's me. I actually agree, and I've claimed nothing so grand as to have a whole blueprint for The America of Next Year. I think any such plan will have to be deeply, deeply collaborative and attentive to local information, and must draw heavily upon existing institutional structures to start with. My only issue lies with my front-and-center claims: capitalism is hosed, something better is indicated, and despite some pretty severe Western propaganda, I don't think it's clear at all that the socialist alternatives ended because they were a priori untenable, but rather because of contingent historical circumstances from which we can learn (including, though it hasn't been mentioned yet in this particular discussion, intervention from a hostile Western imperial core). Aspects of actually existing socialist states stand out as unequivocal successes, and these we should preserve and build upon, rather than throwing out the baby with the bathwater because the outcome wasn't perfect. Statecraft is messy business no matter how you slice it, and if you let the perfect become the enemy of the good, you've failed before you've started. (I'm looking at you, Trotskyists!) Boner Slam posted:And while that may be intuitive, you will quickly realize that these directly measureable values are not enough. What you are saying in effect is that you can not and will not take individual preferences into account. Not quite. If you pare it down, the real claim here is that capitalist economies don't nearly take individual preferences into account as well as advertised, and a socialist state has the power to do so at least as well if not considerably better. But it must be understood that this is entirely separate from the question of how prices are set in either sort of economy. Which brings us to: Boner Slam posted:What makes you think that prices are independent from demand? Or rather, which causality do you presupose here? There is about a century of literature in accounting, post-keynesian econ, marxian econ, and other areas, that indicate that most commodity prices, as I note every so often, are administered cost-plus (i.e., markup) prices. The response of prices to crisis conditions (such as price gouging under a shortage) is unnecessary via coordination over the very quantity signals that breed those price shifts. If you'd like, I can toss you some references. Boner Slam posted:This is highly hypothetical and if you define business cycles as dynamics in output wrt to production potential then you are pretty much just wrong in any system here. Noted. Note also that we've already established upthread that "inserting a definition by which your opponent's claim is wrong and then declaring victory" is kind of a slimy tactic. Boner Slam posted:However this is the ground issue here: You are not able to answer the specifics of allocation and by that even distribution. Ok. So like, try this on for size. Say you have a grocer near your neighborhood. Slightly further, a mall at which you can find any conceivable consumer good. You've got farms a short drive away in the other direction. You've got industrial buildings a slightly further drive away. You might argue that these various units achieve allocation that, while not perfect, is "good enough," yes? Ok, now, *poof*, imagine that all of those things are nationalized overnight, but otherwise exhibit no immediate change in allocation. Is this suddenly no longer "good enough"? If not, why? I'm not going to answer specifics of allocation because anything between that and a number of other extremes are all feasible, and they've got to be built by the people who are actually living with them, not some armchair-economist rear end in a top hat like me. By challenging me to sit here and guess what will work for people, you're just begging me to fall into the very trap of what everyone assumes central planning is: some maniacs sitting in a room setting pie-in-the-sky goals and then throwing darts at a map to accomplish it sans any real connection to the concrete lives of citizens. Boner Slam posted:So take it like this: Even if I would be 100% sympathetic to your general goals, I could not actively help you as a moral human being. On the one hand you delete part of an economic system which we have a decent, yet incomplete, understanding of and replace it with something which may very well be contrary to the comparably few general, robust results which we do have independent on concrete behaviour or institutions. I understand your objections all too well. Full disclosure: about ten years ago, I'd probably have been pegged as a libertarian. As I've said elsewhere, I'm not some "red diaper cradle-commie," and I haven't come to hold these beliefs without interrogating them. Thing is, those "few general, robust results" bespeak a degree of privilege, as if to say "this works well enough for people *in my experience*." I am not going to presume that you've never had to struggle with unemployment and its attendant existential terror, with homelessness and hunger, with poverty and penury generally, with imperialism and the stagnation and terror of client states. But on that same token, the persistence of all these things — not just as a matter of course but as necessarily tendential of the system — is such an unimaginably huge problem that this dismissal on the grounds of possible allocative speedbumps (which we have no reason to presume are insurmountable) is something that I cannot morally support. Boner Slam posted:If you truly believe that you will solve business cycles, coordination, allocation, poverty and incentives with your system, show it. I'm not "handwaving" anything; indeed, I've been trying to show it, bit by bit, but not by releasing a 9,000 page document with everything that needs to happen for the reasons I've given above. Not saying that something like couldn't be useful, but that it sure as hell ought not come from one person. Instead, it's much more efficient to do the following:
The rest falls ultimately to history — in all its contingent, path-dependent, democratic meandering glory. Boner Slam posted:I know I will not convince you of this but it really wasn't free, in pretty much any sense of the word and assignment was actually what happened in many cases. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Nov 10, 2014 |
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Nov 10, 2014 03:05
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Heey icantfindaname, how's your day going, my dude Are you all square with value theory now, after my reply? You never said. Instead you kinda vanished for a bit. Everything ok, I hope?
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Nov 10, 2014 07:22
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icantfindaname posted:Your post did demonstrate to my satisfaction that Marxian value theory is internally consistent, yes. I still don't see how it's at all useful though, or what exactly it elucidates that the economic orthodoxy doesn't hey, after all the acrimony in this thread, I'll take it. Some key distinctions have been spelled out here — particularly the point I was discussing with JeffersonClay about how the mere difference in value theory leads Keynes and Marx (for instance) to draw two very different conclusions about whether the contradictions of capitalism can be wrangled humanely or must be done away with entirely. If the starting point isn't the problem, then one might also discover what is elucidated by working backwards from two diametrically opposed conclusions. MaterialConceptual posted:Anyhow I'll just respond to those points I have something to say about. Sounds good. I'll keep on doing this quotelessly, too, since it seems to be doing the job: 1) All of these seem to be subsumed under my point, though. For instance: if firms are coordinating, then it's possible to view the economy as a single vertically integrated firm, yes? Would we regard "divisions within a given firm withholding information" (an issue to which I can attest firsthand experience) as a fatal problem right now? If not, why must we assume it would be under socialism? The concrete examples Nove highlights are real hassles, no doubt, but what puts any of them in the same class as persistent unemployment, homelessness, or recurrent crises, to say nothing of imperialist war? That's why I don't see arguments about efficiency, where they even hold water in the first place, to be "an argument against socialism" so much as "a helpful pointer about what to prepare for, as we exit Hell (e.g., it may be a bit nippy outside)." The idea that we ought to expect perfection from socialism is strange, when you get right down to it; socialism is presented as a solution to a handful of very particular, momentous issues while still retaining the complex supply chains and technological growth of a modern society. That's all. And we have evidence it does just that. If there's a problem, here, it's not "socialism or not?"; it's "how can we make socialism even better than our historical examples of it? (But also we really need to do it like ASAP, so let's talk on the road.)" 3) I meant it less like "workers can rise up and overthrow the system" and more "workers can rise up and replace the reactionary elements," without necessarily starting from scratch. We can point to difficulties in management and even entrenchment, but I'm not familiar with cases of exploitation as such. Further, where the goals of state and worker don't align, it's not because they're diametric, as with the struggle over labor time under capitalism; rather, it's more about different views to the exigencies of foreign vs. domestic matters at various scales, much more like the struggles we recognize in our own contemporary politics. That's why I feel "negotiating" isn't really a good term for what happens between state and worker. I'd bill Mondragon as a problematic analogue, given the particular pressures and strictures at work on it. The latter point is probably correct about its integration, since worker/management struggle has a somewhat different material basis. Given the broader market context, there's actually an incentive to "self-exploit," and power struggles have additional fires burning under them — not just competition (as with what we saw between socialist states and the West), but the other issues brought on by capital (falling returns, hard budget constraints, etc.) 5) I'm a few pages in and so far I agree. Really cool history, but kinda odd analysis. Seems to take a nigh-metaphysical view of consumer preferences ("It is tempting to perceive this marginalization of consumption in the Soviet Union as a reflection of particular historical circumstances [BUT]..."), but maybe I'm just not getting the full picture yet. 13) I think I recall you mentioning writing to Cockshott. I tracked down the book in question. Oof.  Oof. Well, I'll find that chapter, anyway.
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Nov 10, 2014 16:01
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JeffersonClay posted: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. 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. Never fear, though — the argument depends on a definition of "value" that some people in this thread take great pains to argue doesn't matter. The world will continue to spin in the indicated fashion. icantfindaname posted:No, that's not his point, his point was that Marx says that the act of trading itself produces no value, no matter who it's done by. You can define value such that this is the case, but the argument is that this is a useless definition of value, regardless of whether it's internally consistent or not I honestly don't know what you'd call that except a bad argument, though. If two different, consistent theories yield radically different conclusions, then studying what distinguishes them is just about the furthest thing from "uninteresting" or "useless," scientifically speaking. And there's nothing more suspicious than this fervently anti-pluralist insistence that there's no reason to study a coherent opposing theory. Friendly Tumour posted:Is there any rational reason why the Marxist conception of value cannot be summed up in less than one million words? None whatsoever. God bless.
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Nov 11, 2014 03:29
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JeffersonClay posted: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. Oh god, you're taking it personally. 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)." 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. 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? To wit: if you want to do away with the POV that says producing use-value without surplus value is unproductive, agitate for socialism. JeffersonClay posted:I realize that's a pretty unfair critisism-- Ayn Rand thought soldiers and police were not parasites. Yeah, she really was pretty terrible.
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Nov 11, 2014 05:31
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Guys I keep telling you. Just stop using the word "value" and refuse to allow pathological, ideological equivocators to drag you back into that mire. It's a Who's-On-First bit that never ends. When they use it in the subjective sense while critiquing in the sense of Capital, don't waste time telling them they have; just use brackets to replace it with the definition they're using in their quote and move on.
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Nov 11, 2014 20:37
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asdf32 posted:You're seconding the notion that the subjective version and the Marxist version have no relationship to each other? Please clarify. jesus, you're only just noticing that "utility" and "socially necessary labor time" aren't the same thing? how many times have we had to say it, now? over how many years? though in fairness you've absolutely exceeded my expectations asdf32 posted:There is an honesty to appreciate in libertarians though isn't there? When they say "Aggression" they mean it and don't retract behind a labyrinth of definitions with conveniently shifting applicability to the real world. aaaaand nope the socially agreed-upon definition of "aggression" presents real problems to quite a lot of libertarian argumentation.
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Nov 12, 2014 02:44
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asdf32 posted:These links are the thing you're trying to protect yourself from. You can try trickier attacks like this once you demonstrate that you can restate the arguments you're criticizing. Any sooner and you'll hurt yourself. Case in point: quote:when pressed, libertarians don't try to pretend that their definitions were never meant to apply to the real world in the first place. Now you just look downright silly. You still don't even grok what a materialist analysis is, let alone the content of this one. asdf32 posted:Explain what we're supposed to take from the marxist definition of exploitation, or value. You know those things as well as anyone. Show me, a total idiot in your opinion, why I'm wrong. I don't think you're a total idiot. I think you're a total ideologue. I think you substitute pitbull-like persistence over misunderstood nitpickery for actual honest engagement with the subject matter. This is not because there's anything in your brain preventing you from grasping these concepts, but because to do so would threaten your bullshit worldview, and I say this as someone who by and large shared your bullshit worldview at one time. If you were actually developmentally delayed or whatever, I'd be on some ableist poo poo to call you out on it. No, I just think you're dense to a degree that can only be the mark of ideology. That's all. And anyway, examples have already been given regarding the different sorts of hypotheses that stem from this framework — within the last five pages of this very thread, even. I've also shared several links that explain the value theory in far fewer words than Capital. And I've specifically given you some very detailed explanations in previous threads. I'm not gonna read to you, too; go do it yourself. As with a capitalist, I don't continue to invest where I don't see returns. You've never rewarded my effort with comprehension, so why waste the time on you? Aeolius fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 04:44
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But the funny thing is, it's exactly the opposite. Marx developed his value theory to a large degree while puzzling over real business accounts Engels had sent him to study. The whole analysis is, as MaterialConceptual pointed out, basically taking the view of a capitalist. It should be no wonder why Marxist value theory winds up being compatible with Post-Keynesianism's heavily empirical price theory and historical-time modeling methods like SFCA. What they share in common (along with most academic management accountants) is a perspective of scientific realism, in contrast to the positivism that's dominated neoclassical econ since basically the outset, which chiefly concerns itself with prediction. That is to say, Friedman's ("F-twist") canonical statement of the positivist method explicitly abjures realism of assumptions, so long as point A and point B of the transformation correlate like they should and thereby function as predictors (until, of course, they don't). That's not to say that you won't find any realism in mainstream economics, and I certainly applaud scholars like Uskali Mäki for encouraging economists to think more seriously about these matters. Still, given the methods and philosophical underpinnings of the schools in question (and categories like "average labor time per unit" vs. "utils"), it's deliciously ironic to suggest this one has no relation to the real world. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 08:11 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 08:04
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Best Friends posted:http://www.scriptureoncreation.org/science-question-answer/macro-vs-microevolution/ poo poo, he'sr ight we lose, x 10000000000finity in our faces :enormous bong rip" MaterialConceptual posted:We would then be tied to an economic position that gets most of its validation from actually having been implemented...by Stalin and friends in one of the most reviled periods of human history. At least Cockshott and Cottrell can point to the roots of their argument in the Khrushchev reformist era, which most historians agree was not the worst time ever, but it seems that a defense of Stalin's economic arguments will inevitably have to involve a defense of Stalin to some degree, which really is a non-starter. Even if we were to equivocate by pointing out the horrors carried on the American side in the name of "modernization" it would never get anywhere. I dunno if it's unsalvageable per se. It's not a subject that many are willing to discard their priors on, certainly. But a lot of highly detailed scholarship has come from the opening of the Soviet archives (from non-left historians, even), casting new light on most issues. E.g., Davies, Wheatcroft, and Tauger have made tight cases that the famine of the early 30's was not at all some deliberate Holodomor — a charge that even anti-communists like Ellman admit still lacks a smoking gun and, as Tottle shows, actually originated as Nazi propaganda. J Arch Getty (yet another lib) et al. have been demystifying the purges and penal system. "Everybody's favorite Grover" Furr has been publishing exculpatory critical historiographies taking apart standbys like Khrushchev's secret speech, etc. Biographies — such as Kotkin's mammoth trilogy, part I of which just came out last week — are showcasing ever more nuance and historical contingency than the bog standard "Hitlerian sociopath" account. It's actually possible to mount a non-batshit defense of Stalin, these days, though I imagine few still would. However, any such undertaking that then tries to excuse executions, any sort of forced labor arrangement, etc., would promptly and justifiably lose its credibility. That said, I don't see a defense of Stalin as at all necessary; the question is one of economic policy, irrespective of the take on incarceration or the death penalty, for instance. Would a new round of New Deal policies call for another internment of Japanese Americans? ronya posted:I'm not sure about that. Take mark-up pricing, which post-Keynesians make a big deal out of - contemporary New Keynesian models regularly feature markups too, emerging from monopolistic competition models. Ah, good, sup ronya. Maybe you can clarify some things. 1) Any reason they tend to base those markups on marginal cost instead of the empirically indicated full-cost accounting? 2) What other forms of competition are modeled? 3) Why the continued reliance on equilibrium and logical time, rather than a fully path dependent, historical concept of time? As a fan of Robinson, I assume you'd be particularly keyed into that problem. These all qualify as distinct questions of realism of assumptions, no? But realism is not just some position you arrive at by having one or two more realistic assumptions than the other guy; the entire orientation is fundamentally different. It's why realists tend to be, e.g., suspicious of the reliance on microfoundations, which curtail our ability to grasp emergent phenomena, the variously relational aspects of reality, etc. A realist position argues, among other things, that the generative mechanisms of reality (including social reality) are fundamentally knowable, while a positivist sees little use for such question. The point is not that these assumptions are less realistic, but rather that they aren't even necessarily working towards grasping the real mechanisms in question, since the point is just to plug in policy A and observe effect A on an instrumentalist basis. ronya posted:e: we've touched on these issues many times in other threads already, so let me emphasize the main point, which is that this approach to Marx is not especially attentive to Marx. By "this," you mean the whole bit you've been discussing about the analytical set? Because, sure, why not. You'd have to be really stodgy and kind of dull to object to working off a different set of stylized facts, etc. What is far less dull is expecting that people will then be accountable to the results these generate, especially in comparison to other interpretations. And I don't believe I've resurrected an interpretation dispute...? I have no problem with those, either, but there's a time and a place for them. ronya posted:e#2: I omitted this initially because one would think it's too obvious, but Marxism as you have defined it (in its analytical, post-Keynesian flavour) is not especially realistic. Defining two classes of representative households rather than one is certainly applaudable but it does not earn an award for adherence to reality, I am afraid. (I thought I wouldn't fall into the "analytical" camp, since I reject equilibrium theory? But no matter.) Case in point to the above note on realism. If you create each class with a view toward embodying one of the processes identifiable within the circulation of capital — such as the fundamental opposition of the circuits of capital vs. simple commodity exchange — then this is very much a materialist realist innovation. Your implication, taken to its extreme, is that a class for every profession (or even every household, depending) would be more in tune with realism. Not so, if the system's mechanisms go without a concrete abstraction. (A summary of the point can be found here.) Aeolius fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Nov 12, 2014 |
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Nov 12, 2014 11:30
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Sup gang. Sorry I couldn't get back to yinz sooner.asdf32 posted:So the general question of "how do marx's definitions relate to the real world" is where you want to make your stand? It's the question where giving the answer has insufficient "returns"? How can we not consider it telling if the marxism debate drives to a halt here. It's not that the question; it's my past experience of trying to explain things to you. Maybe you missed that in my post. Maybe you caught it but you're spinning it to look like I'm deflecting. Either way, you're basically making my point. And considering how many definitions within the value theory relate to something either directly measurable or algebraically calculable from measurable phenomena, to answer you here would necessitate retreading a lot of ground that I know for sure I've covered. Your question amounts to "so what was that Marx guy saying, anyway?" You seem to want me to breathe this information into you. It's impossible. You've got to be willing to put in the effort to read and comprehend what others write. Against my better judgment, I started to write you out a summary of Marxist concepts and what they imply for reality on the ground. I stopped when I noticed a few things. For one, some people are already taking stabs at that. For another, I actually already gave you — that is, you specifically — a short document doing exactly that in this very thread (and now twice). Granted, mine was shaping up to be even shorter, but this one is still reasonably compact. So start with that. And if you have any questions about a specific point therein, or would like to criticize some aspect of the theory (AFTER you restate it correctly), I would be glad to answer. God help me, I actually would. --- JeffersonClay posted: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? Ok. Yes, you are correct in ferreting out the appearance of the word "parasite," but to ignore the way he's using it is preposterous. It's as sensible as taking his references to "our friend, Moneybags" to mean he liked the game Monopoly. But I see others have beaten me to this point. Still, I'm gonna drive this poo poo home: You're effectively arguing that Karl Marx, who spent his whole life agitating to make all work "public sector," and inspired countless others to do the same, was viscerally opposed to public sector work. That feeling tugging at the back of your mind, that is "cognitive dissonance." It's a warning siren worth heeding. JeffersonClay posted:These institutions are highly valuable for capitalists, though! Every one of these positions can improve profitability! Yeah, it's a wonder liberals ever need to make this argument to justify the existence of public services. JeffersonClay posted: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. Right. They want to privately appropriate public wealth. And, it is agreed, we all know capital would never permit something individually or socially hazardous to persist just because it could turn a quick buck (minus, let's say, marketing). JeffersonClay posted: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. I doubt it exists in the mind of your average joe human, and thus if your methodological orientation is eliminative individualism you might be led to doubt it exists, period. But it most certainly does exist to an entity that has no interest in use-values — i.e., it's structural, dude. The average joe human also doesn't usually operate as a functionary of the needs of an emergent social operation of self-valorization. Such a capitalist firm may do any number of things, but whether it produces penny whistles or pepper spray, its "needs" as pertain to a particular productive techniques or materials are all contingent, while the need for returns is necessary in the same way that food is necessary for us; a company losing all its capital withers away as though starving. That's the logic of capital, the infamous "grow or die," that you're trying to deny. This raises an important question: Why would we WANT to put such an alien perspective, completely divorced from the wants and needs of actual humans, in the driver's seat of the world? It's like electing a shoggoth to the presidency. (Also, your two sentences appear completely unrelated. Maybe I'm missing something.) --- Boner Slam posted:The right way to do it is to say "I have this problem here, and I don't think an equilibrium model could explain this or it would be appropriate. With my non-equilibrium approach, here's what I get differently". And that's interesting. Oh, sure, I don't disagree. I didn't mean any of those questions as "gotchas," for what it's worth; they were just things that I recall had been niggling me about NK models. The TSS stuff towards which I gravitate is a non-equilibrium approach, which sets it against the bulk of mainstream work, but also Sraffian and even quite a lot of past Marxist stuff. Even still, I think it's got its back to the wind right now. Boner Slam posted:Let me remind you that the original research program for general equilibrium and its assumptions is to look at how general and minimal assumptions we would need to have an equilibrium. Something else that's always kind of felt funny: If we're structuring our assumptions such that we will make sure equilibrium happens, then doesn't this presuppose that "making sure equilibrium happens" is a structuring principle of economic actors? But I thought the whole point is that equilibrium is supposed to be something that "just happens." Minor nitpick: I think you and I are using "positivistic" differently. I meant it more in the sense of the position in the philosophy of social sciences, not in the way that contrasts with "normative." But your meaning was clear, either way. Boner Slam posted:It might be frustrating, but economics today is exactly not the one true philosophy of the one true model. Yeah, the New-Keynesian paradigm is leading - but only really in certain macro questions. And that's even a mixture of what you are proposing. Not everything in NK DSGE model is really founded, it's just that they are Very good at predicting in situations where their foundations are not challenged, such as before and after the financial crisis. It's leading, but this lead also self-reinforces via superstar/network effects and the like. Sort of like how everyone learns Java because everyone uses Java because everyone learns Java, etc., while to this day I've never met what I'd consider a serious partisan of Java, and I've met people passionate about Haskell. Also, thanks for the paper. I'd seen others arguing that it's basically impossible to say whether DSGE or ABM are getting better results. I'll give it a peep when I have the chance. --- ronya posted:1) since you raise the point, I'm sure you're aware that full cost pricing is consistent with a realist and marginalist perspective, e.g., by simply asserting that firms are mistaken on why they do what they do (i.e., that they use simpler heuristics instead of fully optimal intertemporal behaviour - this is a common explanation for consumer behaviour - and instead adjust heuristics from time to time, as arranged by a mysterious entity that one might call the Calvo fairy). You mean incorrect in the survey answers, or incorrect in the actual method and practice of pricing decisions? In either case (though less equivocally so in the latter), this is an "as if" argument, which is basically the standard approach of positivism in the Friedmanian tradition, so I don't see how it could be realist. It's a case of correlation and simplicity trumping the actual mechanisms underpinning the relations. I've got other problems with it, too. For one thing, it kind of flies against the underlying individualist methodology if one starts with "the economy is actors using means to achieve ends according to their preferences" and then immediately assumes that an actor can't even accurately understand its own preferred ends and/or the means by which it pursues them. Which is not to say businesses don't reevaluate their heuristics from time to time, which I acknowledge both empirically and as a matter of common sense. I think I get what you're saying with the Calvo fairy thing: MC floats along its curve, so it sidesteps the behavioral question about when, why, and how the adjustments are made. Right? (Though we do have some ideas about those questions.) Blinder didn't seem too hot on constant MC as explanatory, going by how many firms surveyed billed marginal costs "Totally Unimportant," the large gap between MC and price change, the numbers suggesting constant or increasing returns to scale are the overwhelming majority, etc. That last point still bugs me, because I know it's well known by now, so it makes one wonder: "Why start off with an upward-sloping marginal cost curve and then build a whole literature of price rigidity around explaining why it doesn't apply to ~88% of cases?" ronya posted:incomplete exchange-rate pass through ... utterly contradicts post-Keynesian stylization of full cost pricing. I've not read anything on this relationship. Any recommendations? ronya posted:3) Well - the theoretical problem with historical time is special pleading. The empirical problem with historical time is overfitting. One problem is fine; having both problems is fatal. I don't see how it's special pleading at all, though. It can absolutely be applied as a consistent standard. ronya posted:4?) Bewley's famous survey Blinder and Bewley in the same post, nice. I've actually got both right at my desk. ronya posted:I'm not sure what you are basing a rigid realism vs positivism distinction on. I guess the shortest answer I can possibly give (apart from where I mentioned a distinction or two in a recent post) is that scientific realism, especially within the social sciences, prioritizes identification of concrete causal mechanisms (which persist whether actualized or not) with an eye to explanation, while a positivist would prioritize prediction by whatever means. There's a tendency to view explanation and prediction as symmetrical, but that only holds when closed experiments are possible, and closure is impossible in the social sciences. A stark example of this asymmetry might be a field of study that is highly explanatory without ever reliably making a single prediction — generative grammar comes to mind. So when we have a case where everybody knows a theory is bunk — e.g., the money multiplier's total non-correspondence to the actual mechanisms by which financial institutions operate — and one guy insists on defending its continued use on predictive grounds, that's a positivist argument. And it follows that its single-minded pursuit of correspondence between guess and test brings us no closer to an actual explanation of the events in question. I regard that as a serious problem. ronya posted:I feel that there appears to be little interest to commit to particular definitions and more to confabulate a narrative that can be used to fight political battles. That might be a feature rather than a bug for someone committed to the anti-analytical perspective, of course. What's vague at this point? Can't speak for everyone, but I've yet to change a single definition I've used in this thread or the last. Ditto, as we've seen, with the folks on the other side of the table. The problem isn't moving goalposts; it's rampant equivocation, inconsistently using one or the other definition in an argument. --- Sakarja posted:Actually, it's extremely important that latter-day Marxists undertake the hereditary Sisyphean task of defending the LTV against the critiques of Conrad Schmidt and Böhm-Bawerk. If D&D has taught me anything about Marxism, it is that nothing could be more important to the success of the imminent Revolution than defending the LTV along with the good name of Joseph Stalin and the economic performance of the USSR. Nice solidarity. Plenty enough hate floating around without an anarchist deciding to punch left. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 19:39 on Nov 14, 2014 |
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Nov 14, 2014 08:56
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Boner Slam posted:I find everything which is formulated to a concrete research question interesting. The usual way to proceed would be for me to ask you for a handbook article or a review article on temporary single systems, that is please post your fav lit I'll check it out thx This is probably a good starting point. It's far from a complete model of the economy, but it's an explicitly non-equilibrium TSS Marxist foundation, illustrative of a number of the source material's central claims. Boner Slam posted:However the nice thing is that the pref axioms etc are not based on the existence of the equilibrium, rather on the topological properties we need for individual choice determination. It's absolutely correct that they're created without any explicit presupposition of equilibrium. But at a meta-analytical level, it's also undeniable that these have passed through what amounts to a procedural sieve that "selects" for the emergence of equilibrium. This, I'd argue, owes to messy institutional, interpersonal and ideological factors in real life, including (but not limited to) the extensively documented publication bias against negative results. There's all manner of strange and perverse aspects to the development — such as it is — of science. Boner Slam posted:Hm this paper compares DSGE with DSGE, it just shows that incorporating financial markets and stuff and dynamically chosing the "best" model in a hypothetical forecasting situation based on real data, that the standard DSGEs are very good. But then again as you can guess in the standard situations DSGEs fare well if properly calibrated. This paper however also shows that the obvious issue in the crsis, ie not that SmetWouters was just bad, it broke apart. It's not a comparision paper of DSGE vs. X. I take issue only the final sentence. As kind of a continuation of my last remarks, the history of science tends to screw with the idea of science as a linear/rational/ideal process of accumulating facts and discarding what doesn't work. Theories, once struck, do not melt easily, and all who adhere to a given theory do so because they believe in its efficacy. This thread is a case in point on both counts, when you get right down to it. To my mind, Marxism has persisted against discriminatory tides of money from the ruling class because it's fundamentally right. In the eyes of many, I'm some crank who just can't let go of an antique theory, likely because of some personality flaw. Such cases are by no means exclusive to economics, or even the social sciences on the whole. Consider mathematics. It developed in jerks and starts (via a collection of jerks and upstarts), and 20th century debates on foundations got downright vicious. Its very development was often illogical, featuring false proofs and slips and errors, poorly understood concepts, etc., that persisted because, hey, still worked well enough. Criteria for deciding between theories are seldom if ever unequivocal, depending heavily on priors. As someone summarizing someone else summarizing Laruelle put it, "in spite of the competing claims to truth on display in the battlefield for ideas, it is nonetheless clear that many forms of thinking seem to function." Complicating matters further, abandoning a non-working system generally calls for something else to replace it. Only in the most extreme cases of nonfunctionality are people likely to just figure an alternative out as they go. If the alternatives are not well known, then they're that much less likely to subvert the dominant mode of thinking — which incentivizes anti-pluralistic behavior among adherents to the dominant mode. All in all, anything that makes the undertaking of science look tidy is suspicious. Aeolius fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Nov 15, 2014 |
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Nov 15, 2014 05:12
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