Electric Owl posted:

Sure, but since NNick says that you can produce 2 Juicero in the time it'd take to produce 1 iPhone then wouldn't a true price that reflected the exchange value be $350 for the Juicero and $700 for the iPhone? Not $700 equally? I understand how in a system where money already exists you could just as well express this value in dollars but this specific example seems divorced from an objective determination of the commodity's value, no?

quote:

The capitalist knows that all commodities, however scurvy they may look, or however badly they may smell, are in faith and in truth money, inwardly circumcised Jews, and what is more, a wonderful means whereby out of money to make more money.

Electric Owl posted:

Sure, but since NNick says that you can produce 2 Juicero in the time it'd take to produce 1 iPhone then wouldn't a true price that reflected the exchange value be $350 for the Juicero and $700 for the iPhone? Not $700 equally?

Peel posted:

Harvey discusses that & similar statements starting around 0:26:40. Apparently there's a debate between the position that he was just being antisemitic like most of his contemporaries or being ironic & suggesting anti-semitic sentiment is properly directed at capitalists. I think the suggested exoneration is a bit tenuous but I don't know the relevant texts and context in detail.

Marx had Jewish heritage, but his father had converted to Lutheranism before the birth to avoid anti-semitic legislation, and was quite secular (or so wiki tells me).

quote:

Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

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

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

quote:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Aeolius posted:

Also, people tend to read the infamous "opiate" remark as something much more aggressively contemptuous of religion. But it's not so much dismissive namecalling as it is an attempt to characterize its conditions and social role:

Stale Saltines posted:

This is exactly what the New Atheists always miss. You can shout scientific facts at religious people until you're blue in the face and it won't matter because the social function religion provides is very real.

Electric Owl posted:

Where surplus is generated in the form of currency out of the negative space of what consumers would have been willing to pay for a good and at what price the producer would have been willing to produce it for. So for example, if you would've been willing to pay $10 for a shirt but it was offered on the market for $5, then the economy effectively generates a surplus of $5. This concept is fundamental in the mainstream academic support of Free Trade. The idea being that the lower the costs you can offer consumers, the more economic surplus you generate, and that since Free Trade enables costs to be at their lowest, that everybody therefore wins.

quote:

Let us take the process of circulation in a form under which it presents itself as a simple and direct exchange of commodities. This is always the case when two owners of commodities buy from each other, and on the settling day the amounts mutually owing are equal and cancel each other. The money in this case is money of account and serves to express the value of the commodities by their prices, but is not, itself, in the shape of hard cash, confronted with them. So far as regards use-values, it is clear that both parties may gain some advantage. Both part with goods that, as use-values, are of no service to them, and receive others that they can make use of. And there may also be a further gain. A, who sells wine and buys corn, possibly produces more wine, with given labour-time, than farmer B could, and B on the other hand, more corn than wine-grower A could. A, therefore, may get, for the same exchange-value, more corn, and B more wine, than each would respectively get without any exchange by producing his own corn and wine. With reference, therefore, to use-value, there is good ground for saying that “exchange is a transaction by which both sides gain.” [1] It is otherwise with exchange-value. “A man who has plenty of wine and no corn treats with a man who has plenty of corn and no wine; an exchange takes place between them of corn to the value of 50, for wine of the same value.This act produces no increase of exchange-value either for the one or the other; for each of them already possessed, before the exchange, a value equal to that which he acquired by means of that operation.” [2] The result is not altered by introducing money, as a medium of circulation, between the commodities, and making the sale and the purchase two distinct acts. [3] The value of a commodity is expressed in its price before it goes into circulation, and is therefore a precedent condition of circulation, not its result.

Hence, we see that behind all attempts to represent the circulation of commodities as a source of surplus-value, there lurks a quid pro quo, a mixing up of use-value and exchange-value. For instance, Condillac says: “It is not true that on an exchange of commodities we give value for value. On the contrary, each of the two contracting parties in every case, gives a less for a greater value. ... If we really exchanged equal values, neither party could make a profit. And yet, they both gain, or ought to gain. Why? The value of a thing consists solely in its relation to our wants. What is more to the one is less to the other, and vice versâ. ... It is not to be assumed that we offer for sale articles required for our own consumption. ... We wish to part with a useless thing, in order to get one that we need; we want to give less for more. ... It was natural to think that, in an exchange, value was given for value, whenever each of the articles exchanged was of equal value with the same quantity of gold. ... But there is another point to be considered in our calculation. The question is, whether we both exchange something superfluous for something necessary.” [8] We see in this passage, how Condillac not only confuses use-value with exchange-value, but in a really childish manner assumes, that in a society, in which the production of commodities is well developed, each producer produces his own means of subsistence, and throws into circulation only the excess over his own requirements. [9] Still, Condillac’s argument is frequently used by modern economists, more especially when the point is to show, that the exchange of commodities in its developed form, commerce, is productive of surplus-value. For instance, “Commerce ... adds value to products, for the same products in the hands of consumers, are worth more than in the hands of producers, and it may strictly be considered an act of production.” [10] But commodities are not paid for twice over, once on account of their use-value, and again on account of their value. And though the use-value of a commodity is more serviceable to the buyer than to the seller, its money-form is more serviceable to the seller. Would he otherwise sell it? We might therefore just as well say that the buyer performs "strictly an act of production,” by converting stockings, for example, into money.

...

A may be clever enough to get the advantage of B or C without their being able to retaliate. A sells wine worth £40 to B, and obtains from him in exchange corn to the value of £50. A has converted his £40 into £50, has made more money out of less, and has converted his commodities into capital. Let us examine this a little more closely. Before the exchange we had £40 worth of wine in the hands of A, and £50 worth of corn in those of B, a total value of £90. After the exchange we have still the same total value of £90. The value in circulation has not increased by one iota, it is only distributed differently between A and B. What is a loss of value to B is surplus-value to A; what is “minus” to one is “plus” to the other. The same change would have taken place, if A, without the formality of an exchange, had directly stolen the £10 from B. The sum of the values in circulation can clearly not be augmented by any change in their distribution, any more than the quantity of the precious metals in a country by a Jew selling a Queen Anne’s farthing for a guinea. The capitalist class, as a whole, in any country, cannot over-reach themselves

quote:

Two conditions must nevertheless be fulfilled. First, the cotton and spindle must concur in the production of a use-value; they must in the present case become yarn. Value is independent of the particular use-value by which it is borne, but it must be embodied in a use-value of some kind. Secondly, the time occupied in the labour of production must not exceed the time really necessary under the given social conditions of the case. Therefore, if no more than 1 lb. of cotton be requisite to spin 1 lb. of yarn, care must be taken that no more than this weight of cotton is consumed in the production of 1 lb. of yarn; and similarly with regard to the spindle. Though the capitalist have a hobby, and use a gold instead of a steel spindle, yet the only labour that counts for anything in the value of the yarn is that which would be required to produce a steel spindle, because no more is necessary under the given social conditions.

Electric Owl posted:

dk2m posted:

However, this doesn't seem to hold for secondary markets (used cars where things like subjectivity seem to be a prime price determinator).

Electric Owl posted:

dk2m posted:

2) Ruzihm's idea of secondary markets - I brought up the used car market because it's a really fascinating area. Let's take the phenomenon of the "Classic" car. These cars are old, they do not have modern safety equipment, nor are they road-worthy as a modern car is. Yet they can command prices excess of over 30,000+ even in bad condition. Why is this? These prices seem arbitrary and seem relative not to the the process of manufacturing it, but to the price of other cars within the market. An 1965 Mustang was not a very well built car in the first place - it isn't a luxury good like a Ferrari. It was and is a "blue-collar" good, originally priced less than the modern adjusted for inflation value they command. I'm still not sure if you can categorize what the "use value" of something like a classic car even is because it ends up taking some sort of Bentham-esque concept of utility - I am "happy" to send that much, even though I realize the classic car itself is inferior in objective ways to modern cars. Perhaps there is some distinction here between "essential" goods like food/water/shelter and "accessory" goods like a classic car.

Electric Owl posted:

rudatron posted:

Your question as stated is badly formed: arguments for free trade aren't based of the supply-demand curve, which attempts to argue that prices converge to an optimal value, but on comparative advantage + specialization. Free trade itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor is comparative advantage, it's the distribution of ownership and the proceeds of that surplus that's the problem.

Peel posted:

Yeah. I wasn't able to get started when I wanted so I'm running late, but the post will be up tonight.

Chapter 11 posted:

This law clearly contradicts all experience based on appearance. Everyone knows that a cotton spinner, who, reckoning the percentage on the whole of his applied capital, employs much constant and little variable capital, does not, on account of this, pocket less profit or surplus-value than a baker, who relatively sets in motion much variable and little constant capital. For the solution of this apparent contradiction, many intermediate terms are as yet wanted,

Peel posted:

Piketty is a social-fascist CIA psyop, the title of his masquerading 'book' should be spelled with three Ks.

Electric Owl posted:

There appears to be some cognitive dissonance in academia since "double-entry", a core principle in the GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles), requires accountants to always ensure that Assets= Liability + Equity.

Bryer posted:

In Marx’s theory, this ‘inkling’, that [capital] gets its surplus only from labour, is embedded within the collective mentality of capitalists as a class, in the collective mentality of ‘total social capital’, signatured today in the universal use of double bookkeeping (DEB) and cost-based accrual accounting (Bryer, 1993, 1999a, 1999b, 2000a, 2006b). Predictably, Marx used DEB to deepen his understanding of ‘total social capital’, the aggregate logic of its circuits of capital, and its control of individual capitalists and their workers. ...

In June 1861, at the beginning of his most productive three years during which he wrote the second draft of Capital and the Theories of Surplus Value in the Economic Manuscript of 1861-1863, Marx asks Engels,

“If it could be done very briefly, without making undue demands on you, I should like to have a sample of Italian book-keeping (with explanations). It would help throw light on Dr Quesnay’s Tableau economique” (Marx and Engels, 1985b, p.381).

From his study of ‘Italian book-keeping’, that is, DEB, Marx would learn how it automatically accounts for flows of capital by simultaneously recording the effect of every transaction as both a source (a credit) and a use (a debit) of capital (Bryer, 1993a). He would also learn that capitalists used DEB to produce integrated departmental profit and loss accounts that calculated profitability as the increment to capital at the level of the individual department and at the level of the firm. This would certainly help him understand that it was necessary to distinguish between ‘capital’ and ‘revenue’ at the level of the individual firm or sectors of production (as Adam Smith did), and at the level of society (which Smith did not). Part 3 argues this was critical to Marx’s understanding of ‘total social capital’ and therefore to his solution of the transformation problem in Volume 3, because it allowed him to reconstruct François Quesnay’s Tableau and to reveal Adam Smith’s “nonsensicality of subsuming the gross product of a society simply under revenue (which may be consumed annually)”. Smith’s accounting was nonsense, Marx discovered, because “if this were so, a society would have to start each year de novo, without capital” (Marx and Engels, 1985b, p.485)!

Ruzihm posted:

Chapter 11 is kind of dense and I feel like I might have overlooked something. Did Marx already explain this and is just being coy here or will he explain this later? I'm guessing it has to do with how rates of exploitation can differ.

KomradeX posted:

I did want to ask about Piketty and his Capital. I haven't had a chance to read it (god knows I haven't taken a stab at reading Kapital since high school) but if heard that his book pretty much reaffirms a lot of what Marx writes in Kapital accept he refuses to accept Marx's solution and instead advocates for an even more unrealistic global wealth tax. How true is this comparison?

Electric Owl posted:

There is simply no comparing Piketty to Marx. Marx uses rigorous dialectical and historical analysis to develop a well-reasoned and radical understanding of capitalist economy as it has occured, while Piketty and other "neo"-classicists come up with increasingly arabesque and arcane maths that consistently fail to pass the reality-check litmus test and, with stunning regularity, favor the status quo and dominance of the ruling class. There is no reconciling the works of either of them.

Vermain posted:

The positive reviews are principally because the book says what everyone already knows (that the rich are a parasitic form of baggage on society) but proposes a solution (political reforms) that doesn't require a massive upheaval of presently existing systems.