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communism bitch posted:Marx's predicted final implosion of capital rests essentially on the system exhausting all available fuel (in the form of available workers and consumers) and reaching a point where it cannot grow any more. All automation actually does is push back the hand on the doomsday clock a little bit, by freeing up more cheap labour for capital to expand again - sometimes into new and different areas of production. All automation actually does is push back the hand on the doomsday clock a little bit, by freeing up more cheap labour for capital to expand again - sometimes into new and different areas of production. I don't think Marx places the inflection point at some point of advanced accumulation where it can't grow anymore. Certainly you can make hypothetical arguments like that by taking the contradictions to their conclusions (the tendency of the rate of profit to decay is actually one of Marx's more controversial assertions), but I don't think Marx assumed that those doomsday scenarios would even necessarily be realized before the system broke down. Take this quote from Changes of Magnitude in the Price of Labour Power chapter: Kapital Chp.17 posted:The value of labour-power is determined by the value of a given quantity of necessaries. It is the This prediction is one of the most astonishingly prescient in the whole text. If you're not already familiar with the productivity decoupling check this out: http://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ Basically since wages have been stagnant since 1973 and now that they've had 44 years to diverge from one another we now see the working-class reacting to that growing disparity in the political sphere, with Trump and Corbyn neatly representing the polarity of popular positions. I think all this talk we now hear of a Universal Basic Income (which is not feasible without socializing a fair number of industries) is to deal with this situation as the divide (between productivity and wages) only worsens and the antagonism between the working and owning class only grows more intense. As always, Marx seems eternally obsessed with the idea that contradictions will rub up against each other until a spark shoots out and happens to find some kindling. Anywhooooo, Does anybody here recommend any particular feminist critiques of this book? I've heard that The Dialectics of Sex is pretty good. almost there has issued a correction as of 17:36 on Jul 2, 2017 |
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Jul 2, 2017 17:10
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So I've been watching this thread and figured I should finally ask something pretty important. I can't read Capital. Well, I theoretically could but it would take me forever. I have very poor eyesight. Reading posts on forums like this is nothing to reading huge books. Now, LibriVox is a thing thankfully and someone has actually uploaded the first Volume of Das Kapital there. But only the first volume. I Googled looking for some more but it apparently doesn't exist. One post I read said the subsequent books have a lot of figures or something in them so an audiobook wouldn't work? So...yeah, kind of at an impasse. I'm glad I found Professor Harvey's videos thanks to this thread but while I am very interested in Marxist theory, I dunno what I should do to learn more.
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Jul 3, 2017 09:26
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I'm surprised to hear there's no complete set of Capital audiobooks but a quick look and I haven't found one for the second and third volumes either. In the absence of Capital itself, do any of our actual marxists know about any other good lecture/video series (Harvey has a third series on his website but I haven't listened to it yet), or good non-capital books with audio versions? There's a lot of expositions and elaborations of Marx around but the ones I know of don't have audio versions, even the short Ben Fine book. If there isn't this feels like a bit of a glaring hole in socialist infrastructure. Unless 2 and 3 are very unlike volume 1 I wouldn't have thought them so diagrammatic as to be worthless without print. Final Volume 1 post up later tonight.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:35
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There's a neat channel full of marxist videos at http://www.youtube.com/user/brendanmcooney although it isn't organized by source material. Even from staunch orthodox marxists I've only heard of small quibbles over some vocab.
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Jul 3, 2017 19:51
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Who really needs to read Capital when Andy Ancap can explain Capitalism in YouTube format?!
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Jul 3, 2017 23:13
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Dreddout posted:Who really needs to read Capital when Andy Ancap can explain Capitalism in YouTube format?! I genuinely think telling people to go read stuff is one of the biggest weaknesses of the left.
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Jul 3, 2017 23:23
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Jeb! Repetition posted:I genuinely think telling people to go read stuff is one of the biggest weaknesses of the left. ok
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Jul 4, 2017 01:38
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hi I heard quantum field theory might be our best explination for reality could you please explain all of it to me right now, in a not boring way, no math, and no I will not read
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Jul 4, 2017 01:39
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I have no actual desire to understand something myself and apply it in my own life I just want some soundbites to yell at conservatives on chat forums pls, tia
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Jul 4, 2017 01:42
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Modest Mao posted:hi I heard quantum field theory might be our best explination for reality could you please explain all of it to me right now, in a not boring way, no math, and no I will not read If quantum field theory was politically controversial then yeah, being able to explain it to a layman would be useful. Modest Mao posted:I have no actual desire to understand something myself and apply it in my own life I just want some soundbites to yell at conservatives on chat forums pls, tia If you just want to apply it to your own life why would you tell other people to read it?
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Jul 4, 2017 01:55
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I can make a marxism 101 post in a bit but in general books are written because it takes a lot of words to explain something, so most people wills say "I can explain it in all its nuance over the course of several hours, answering all the questions you have, or you can just read the words I would have said anyway on your own time on this big stack of papers called 'a book' which will leave my own biases and misunderstandings out of the equation"
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Jul 4, 2017 02:49
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Jeb! Repetition posted:I genuinely think telling people to go read stuff is one of the biggest weaknesses of the left. if they ask about capital vol 1 just give em one of these 
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Jul 4, 2017 02:58
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Ruzihm posted:if they ask about capital vol 1 just give em one of these I saw a good version of this where instead of capitalists it was boomers and instead of workers it was millenials.
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Jul 4, 2017 03:14
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1-13: Conclusion "The formulation Marx sets out in volume 1 of Capital is in fact a beginning point for a much broader analysis." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qUHGiLXgPg That was the first volume of Capital. Marx described the system of capitalist production, the system by which a capitalist can take money, turn it into means of production and labour power, turn that into other commodities, and end up with more money. This is described in an ideal way in two senses. In the one sense it is liberally ideal - everything, at least in theory, obeys the liberal principles of property, freedom, rational self-interest and so on. In the other sense it takes place under idealised assumptions that capital has enough markets to sell in, no circulation problems, and so on. Despite this ideality the analysis reveals a tendency toward exploitation, domination and misery embedded in capitalism as capitalism, not as corrupted by anything else. This story is surrounded on the one end by a heavily theoretical discussion of the nature of commodities and money and on the other by a heavily historical discussion of the brutal origins of this system that then clothes itself in the full armour of liberalism. I think it's interesting to compare the analysis with mainstream or 'bourgeois' economics, which we've done a couple of times in this thread. More generally than particular points of surplus and exchange, both are stylised, simplified representations of reality that purport to give a description of the basic workings of society, but (much) mainstream economics buttresses established power and flatters its pretensions while Capital critiques it and undermines them. One function of such analyses at the basic level we've met so far is to create or give confidence to a kind of 'common sense' of how the world works. That this works at the basic level is important because that's the level most mass-producible. That advanced mainstream economics is far more sceptical of free markets (though not so much capitalism more broadly) than its 101-level bromides would suggest is immaterial when those 101-level bromides are what are mass-produced into the heads of business students and libertarian bores around the world. Bourgeois economics - and I say this as someone interested in what mainstream economics has to say - gives confidence to the common sense of capitalists and their upper stratum allies that their life is just and the world is fine. 'Libertarian' moral theorising and Austrian-school metaphysics do the same, just in a more blatantly ridiculous and so less functionally useful way. They do this independently of their scientific value. Marxist analysis, by contrast, gives confidence to the common sense that the world of capitalism is quite blatantly full of exploitation, oppression and misery. So there's no surprise in the common anecdotes of working class people tackling Capital quite straightforwardly while wealthy scions struggle. In general terms (individuals always vary), for one group it puts analytic meat on established common-sensical bones, but for the other it's describing a strange otherworld quite unlike the one they know. I wanted to talk about the LTV here but I'm out of time, so maybe sometime this week if I can think of something intelligent to say. Next week is the introductions week for volume 2 (and some of 3), which will start to remove the limits and caveats of the analysis in volume 1, and should be interesting reading in a post-2008 world. The video this week is a general overview of volume 1 with some interesting discussion of the general structure of the capitalist system, potential blockage points, and various theories of crisis relevant to each. Peel has issued a correction as of 03:39 on Jul 4, 2017 |
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Jul 4, 2017 03:35
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Speaking of accessible videos I guess I'll finish those Kapitalism 101 things before V2 gets going.
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Jul 4, 2017 03:37
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Hi Jeb!, Here's a not quite book length post: Modern society worldwide organized itself in a very specific way, replacing all pervious forms of economic life. People, as free and equal individuals, enter the market place and spend their money on goods that they want. In general, these goods are mass produced in a market that has at least a few competing firms, firms which are owned by individuals who invested capital into the firm, using labor from people who voluntarily enter into a working contract with that specific firm. The people who own the firm get their income as a return on the capital they invested, and the people working get their income in return for their work. In this system, as a rule, the wealth of society seems to grow year over year, though the growth in wealth is not distributed equally. If this modern system is built on equality and fulfilling wants why does it seem to generate so much growth and why are there biases in deciding who receives the new wealth? Objects changing hands cannot be the source of new wealth. If I have an old car and I trade it for your motorcycle, while we might both be happier, nothing has changed in the grand scheme of the economy, no new wealth was generated. Likewise if I exchange 500 bucks for your motorcycle, or my microwave, or anything else. [Modern economics would argue exactly the opposite, of course, and that's where some of the political contentiousness comes from.] So where does new wealth come from, and how do we reproduce the wealth we consume (food we eat, gas we burn, etc)? If we can admit that new economic wealth must be created in constant production of new goods and not from the rearranging of existing goods, we should look into what exactly a good is and how it's made. Goods are made, generally, with two inputs. Human labor, and capital. There are things which exist, like land and water, might have a price but not seem to be made this way, but let's focus on what is made this way. We measure growth in dollars, and we measure an object's value in dollars. Why does a car cost more than a pencil? Two reasons, the capital (raw materials, factory, designs, etc) needed to make the car are more valuable to begin with, and it takes more human labor to make it. But we can see there's a cycle here, why were the raw materials of a car (a ton of metal) more valuable than a pencil (an ounce of wood)? Because these raw materials took more human time and energy to create. In a sense, the value of things is proportional to how much time and energy people spent making it. In fact, empirically this is well supported. [Modern economics has no empirical basis for value, things are their price ultimately because of the immeasurable whims of individuals, any relation to labor time is not a necessary result of the assumptions.]) Of course the person buying the good has no idea how long people worked to make it, and likely neither does the seller. In general a lazy craftsman who takes years to make a wooden cabinet, and a master craftsman who does it in a few weeks, can only sell them for the same price on the market. Likewise, a craftsman who insists on hand sanding cannot charge more than a craftsman with power tools, the customer can't see the difference. But while even powertools take time, those trying to maximize what they sell will do well to use them, so they can charge less but sell more and earn more per unit time overall. So price is proportional to the time the average worker must take to do some task. I'm going to call this Socially Necessary Labor Time. When you do sell something you take a guess at a price, even with good data. Do you price the same as a competitor, lower, or higher? Prices do have some variation but they float around this Socially Necessary Labor Time. So in the previous paragraph I said that the inputs into making something, the design, the raw materials, the machinery employed, etc can all trace their value back to the work that was done to make them, and the depreciation of these things makes its way into the price of the product. If it cost $1,000,000 to buy a design that will be made into a run 10,000 items, it adds ~$100 to the price of each item. What about labor? Well, in one sense it's the same thing. The price of labor is equal to the food, the housing, the healthcare, the TV set it takes to 'produce' a worker. But since the price of the product of that labor is a measure of how much work was done to make it, we cannot use such simple math to see how labor effects the price of a product. In a working day a person might be paid a wage that can buy 6 hours of work on the market, but work an 8 hour day. In other words, labor is paid for the value labor consumes and not the value labor creates. So, while labor gets paid enough to 'reproduce itself', those employing labor end up with extra value. That's the simple answer to the question: "why do equals interacting on the market place create new wealth and why isn't the new wealth distributed equally?" I hope that helps, and if you want to understand all that better, read some more! Competition, crises, stock markets, etc all can be explained in this model quite well. In fact, I do want to touch on how many every day experiences fall out of this framework: - Firms care much more about negotiating salaries than the prices of new machinery. - Laborers feel like a different class than lawyers or advertisers even though they both work for a living. Just like a consumer might not care if the wood was hand sanded or power tooled, they don't care about how it was advertised or if patents were filed. Certain kinds of labor are necessary in capitalism but do not create new 'wealth'. - Competitive firms replace labor with technology since prices are 'socially necessary labor time', and charging for more labor than was actually done allows them to get extra profit. But when all firms in an industry switch over to the technology the advantage vanishes and may even reverse, as less labor time is spent making the product. - Business owners and those invested in businesses are not concerned by unemployment, might even engage in illegally undercutting wages, overbooking hours, other dastardly stuff. But most would not scam a company selling them machinery, or support the industry supplying their machinery being put into hard times, with the same zealousness. Hope I remembered all that well enough, sorry for posting so much stuff not related to studying the book in the thread 
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Jul 4, 2017 03:47
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Found a link to this abridgement of Capital from the left communism subreddit. Seems pretty good. Could be useful for people trying to catch up before we start vol 2. https://www.marxists.org/archive/ruhle/1939/capital.htm
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Jul 5, 2017 16:42
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2-01: Introduction "My plan is, as with volume 1, to get you to read this book." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl5umxeDWDI Now with more dramatic intro music. Volume 2 is less famous than 1 and 3, less polemical and literary, less structured, less easy a read. But it's also shorter, the bridge to volume 3, and rich with ideas of its own useful to understand the mechanics of capital. It's incomplete, but even when unfinished can be taken as a starting point of thought to develop your own ideas. It will also make you cooler, being more obscure. Volume 1 of Capital is about production, specifically production of surplus value, and its changes over time. Volume 2 is about a different perspective on capitalism, the transformations and flows of commodities and value. It doesn't deal so much with technical change over time, but instead things like market conditions, working class consumption and acceleration in time come into the fore as surplus value faces obstacles to its realisation. This course of lectures, which we'll be following in our reading, cuts the dry vol 2 material with some vol 3 material to show how the categories developed in vol 2 (such as money and commodity capital) are used in practice. Given the contemporary dominance of finance capital, I'm looking forward to this most of all. Timestamps: 0:02:40: Start of lecture 0:10:30: How Volume 2 differs from Volume 1, overconsumption & compression of time and space 0:28:25: The 'apolitical' Volume 2 & the relation of political economy and history 0:41:39: Capital and the Grundrisse, production vs. distribution vs. consumption, the objectives & self-imposed limitations of Capital 1:25:06: Q&A, the limitations of Capital
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Jul 10, 2017 23:15
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At the end of my copy of vol 1 (Penguin ebook) there's some unpublished material, 'Results of the Immediate Process of Production', and a few fragments. Much of it is almost unreadable and of unclear significance, but if you have it I thought the numbered sections in II ('the formal subsumption of labour under capital' to 'mystification of capital, etc.') were relatively brisk and worth reading. They cover the 'formal' vs. 'real' subsumption of labour under capital and attempt to define a distinction between 'productive' and 'unproductive' labour. The formal subsumption of labour under capital is when an established system of production is taken over by capitalist relations without much changing in how the work is actually carried out. The peasant continues to farm in the same way, but on private land for wages rather than on his land Monday and the lord's land Tuesday. At this level the increase in surplus value is mostly absolute as hours are extended beyond the previous level. The real subsumption of labour under capital is when capitalism transforms production with increasing mechanisation, capital concentration and so on. This was the concern of Marx in the gigantic chapter on machinery. As this subsumption continues labour becomes less independent and is confronted by the means of production and the labour process as an immense, alien, alienating thing. This is a chief source of the mystified appearance of capital as independent and the source of production. One of my concerns as a socialist is I'm not at all sure this alienation is solvable. It's easy to assume in this context that we just remove capitalism and make things 'democratic', but it's far from obvious that any 'democratic' system can actually make systems on the scale needed to compose modern society not alien. So I think of alienation as a problem to be mitigated rather than solved (the only solution would be primitivism). As for productive labour: Productive and Unproductive Labour posted:Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus-value, labour is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it or he creates surplus-value directly, i.e. the only productive labour is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorisation of capital. People like service workers and soldiers are not for Marx productive, but because all are wage labourers they can be confused for productive workers, and the opposite effect can also happen, with productive workers being reduced to people who merely exchange their 'services' for money. And the same sort of labour can be productive or unproductive: quote:For instance, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. The extra material also has a fragment on trade unions with a good quote: quote:[The trade unions] wish to prevent the price of labour from falling below its value. They are aware, of course, that if there is a change in the relations of supply and demand, this results in a change in the market price. But on the one hand this change is a very different thing from the one-sided claim of the buyer, in this case the capitalists, that such a change has taken place. And on the other hand, there is 'a great distinction between the level of wages as determined by supply and demand, i.e. by the level produced by the fair operation of exchange that exists when buyer and seller negotiate on equal terms, and the level of wages which the seller, the labourer, must put up with when the capitalist negotiates with each man singly, and dictates a reduction by exploiting the chance need of individual workers (which exists independently of the general relations of supply and demand). Tomorrow's post will probably be up pretty late.
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Jul 16, 2017 14:11
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Capitalism can never self destruct. How could it. The liberal preoccuption with self destruction says more about liberals than it does about capitalism. There's a big long list of things liberals predict self destruction of and that's telling. Capitalism will trundle along as it always has, because it appropriates and commodifies everything around it, it becomes whatever you want it to be. Free markets, investment of capital, ownership of shares, and the profit motive are basic, what capitalism really brings to the world is the accompanying drive to commodify everything it sees. And that only seems to be increasing now, even in the most liberal quarters of anywhere with free markets. Everyones getting in on taking something untouched, repackaging it, and selling it to the person next to them. That can only change if first world people want to relate to their immediate world differently, and I don't think they do. Everything around you wants to either buy the product or be the product. Capitalism lives in that space. It's not just a way in which value is assigned, it's an entire ethos, an entire worldview. Want it to change? See the world differently, and articulate it. Marx got the economic points right, as well as the zeal and the polemic, but he missed the human element, and rightly so, because people don't actually want to be human. They want to buy and be bought. Want that to change? Articulate how it can, in the complex modern social sphere. Articulate how man can emanicipate himself each day, living alongside technology, working as the specialized skill automaton that he is 8 hours a day. What changes? What was profane and is now sacred? Capitalism wreaks profanity wherever it goes, but I think it also did away with the distinction between sacred and profane, and now we're somewhere else. What can we hold in reverence now? Something real. Each other? Community? Nebulous. No one gives a poo poo about abstractions. Give the people something real. Capitalism promises dreams and then delivers. How do you top that?
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Jul 17, 2017 13:38
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Peel posted:The real subsumption of labour under capital is when capitalism transforms production with increasing mechanisation, capital concentration and so on. This was the concern of Marx in the gigantic chapter on machinery. As this subsumption continues labour becomes less independent and is confronted by the means of production and the labour process as an immense, alien, alienating thing. This is a chief source of the mystified appearance of capital as independent and the source of production. If you're pointing to the alienation as the problem I think you're missing the entire point of Kapital. Alienation itself isn't a problem, in fact its necessary for trade. How could anybody trade anything without first alienating themselves from the good's use-value? If instead you're referring instead to the "alienating" effect of capital, such as the class struggle embodied in the machinery the worker confronts, then I really fail to see how anarchro-primitivism necessarily provides a solution to this. What are you, a Luddite? The way I see it, Capitalism is here to stay. We're already well on the way to slapping a floor (UBI) on this elevator headed into the Sun. There is simply no way to reconcile the naturally spontaneous system of organization in capitalism with the disruptive and interventionist approach necessary in a new system that does away with Capitalism's driving organizational principle, the pursuit of surplus-value. Without that principle it becomes necessary to transition into a centrally organized economy where information asymmetry (problems of demand and supply are handled explicitly, rather than naturally) along with the familiar cadre of tired problems concerning centralized power come into play, 'honest' vanguard or not. I used to think so-called Market Socialism (in the Anarchist, not the Soviet or Chinese, sense) could be a solution that reconciled the necessity for spontaneous labor organization with the growing necessity for a society where (at least some of) the means of production are held in common. But, of course, this is also extremely problematic because the socially-owned firm is still under pressure by the coercive laws of competition under a capitalist paradigm to accumulate capital and exploit their workers (in order to make goods imbued with the "socially-necessary" labor-time characteristic), so you'd just end up with a system where the collective worker is naturally, tho no less ironically, remade into its own collective capitalist. Which, sure, means better social programs or whatnot (some socializing might be necessary to pay for a UBI) but fundamentally fails to nullify the destructive contradictions in capitalism at large. I think this is the essence of Marx's critique of Proudhon's conception of property. Its clear that without a universalized socialist paradigm that property will fail to ever become fully divorced from the bourgeois property relation, and yet this sort of full blown gay space socialism isn't possible without a major rearrangement of the world's ideological horizon. Which, destructively, only grows more persuasive and possible the closer the Earth gets to the Sun. almost there has issued a correction as of 16:36 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 16:33
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2-02: Chapters 1-3 "At the end of the day we are interested in industrial capital, but we're interested in the circulation of industrial capital as it incorporates all of the things we see about this circulation process through these separate windows." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0OZP55EfMs If you enjoyed the parts of Volume 1 where Marx goes on and on about pedantic permutations of simple concepts, these are the chapters for you. Capitalist production is cyclical. Machines don't run once and then stop, shops don't open once and then close, consumers don't buy once and then starve. Capital must transform between money, commodity and productive capital, each of which has different properties and each of which presents possibilities for disrupting the cycle if its transformation is blocked. Marx examines this cycle from the perspective of each type of capital as a starting point, locating points of differentiation and blockage, and connections to the wider economy of other circuits. These introductory chapters more desert than oasis, but introduce concepts that will be important going forward: the three types of capital, the dependence of each part of the circuit on various social and physical conditions, the importance of turnover time and money reserve, etc. There's not just the necessity of money to exist in the needed quantities and in the right places, or buyers for commodities that need selling, but the physical preconditions of production. Timestamps: 0:02:27 - start of lecture 0:22:30 - Chapter 1 (The Circuit of Money Capital) 1:08:10 - Chapter 2 (The Circuit of Productive Capital) 1:29:42 - Chapter 3 (The Circuit of Commodity Capital) Since I didn't post it before, here's a link to the free english translation of Volume 2 on marxists.org. Peel has issued a correction as of 17:55 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 18, 2017 02:40
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Electric Owl posted:If you're pointing to the alienation as the problem I think you're missing the entire point of Kapital. Alienation itself isn't a problem, in fact its necessary for trade. How could anybody trade anything without first alienating themselves from the good's use-value? If instead you're referring instead to the "alienating" effect of capital, such as the class struggle embodied in the machinery the worker confronts, then I really fail to see how anarchro-primitivism necessarily provides a solution to this. What are you, a Luddite? It's not the problem, but alienation from the labour process is surely a problem for Marx in capital. But it's the latter form of alienation that I'm referring to. My concern is that any large-scale organisation of production is going to confront its human members as something alien to themselves and oppressive to them, because it is large enough that they are effectively powerless before it even if it is controlled democratically, and they cannot identify themselves properly with something so large and mostly remote from their experience. Primitivism would hypothetically solve this in the sense that it would destroy social structures so large that people can't fully grasp and identify themselves with them even if they aren't structured around class oppression. But that destruction is obviously unacceptable since it would kill the great majority of humans alive and lose us all the goods large-scale organisation can provide. So alienation becomes something to be mitigated through whatever means, rather than something to actually be eliminated. quote:The way I see it, Capitalism is here to stay. We're already well on the way to slapping a floor (UBI) on this elevator headed into the Sun. There is simply no way to reconcile the naturally spontaneous system of organization in capitalism with the disruptive and interventionist approach necessary in a new system that does away with Capitalism's driving organizational principle, the pursuit of surplus-value. Without that principle it becomes necessary to transition into a centrally organized economy where information asymmetry (problems of demand and supply are handled explicitly, rather than naturally) along with the familiar cadre of tired problems concerning centralized power come into play, 'honest' vanguard or not. It's surely far premature to declare capitalism is here to stay or will even survive the next century. Even granting for the sake of argument there's no way to achieve the useful elements of (some) markets without their destructive elements, a new social formation could just abandon them. A number of things that will possibly or definitely affect the system are already known - automation, climate change, nuclear war - and there will doubtless be many more things we aren't aware of yet. We don't know how capitalism will respond to these changes (reading Capital might help).
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Jul 22, 2017 01:13
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https://twitter.com/autonomio/status/888302438343741440
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Jul 23, 2017 02:04
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Tautologicus posted:Want it to change? See the world differently, and articulate it. Marx got the economic points right, as well as the zeal and the polemic, but he missed the human element, and rightly so, because people don't actually want to be human. They want to buy and be bought. Another way to put this is that Marxism is based on specific and ridgid assumptions about human nature. Does the capitalist mode of production necessarily lead to exploitation or alienation in a general sense and does a socialist legal structure necessarily eliminate it (peel smartly questions this). Or will capitalists necessarily play their role in systemic destruction or will they see it and avoid it? Or can they be kept in check by external means. The answer to these things are only necessarily yes if human nature is exactly what Marx thought it was. With just slightly different assumptions any variety of different outcomes are possible.
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Jul 23, 2017 20:50
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asdf32 posted:Another way to put this is that Marxism is based on specific and ridgid assumptions about human nature. Does the capitalist mode of production necessarily lead to exploitation or alienation in a general sense and does a socialist legal structure necessarily eliminate it (peel smartly questions this). Or will capitalists necessarily play their role in systemic destruction or will they see it and avoid it? Or can they be kept in check by external means. The answer to these things are only necessarily yes if human nature is exactly what Marx thought it was. With just slightly different assumptions any variety of different outcomes are possible. Articulate Marx's assumptions about human nature and then explain how they're flawed.
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Jul 24, 2017 01:21
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Also, please articulate how his conception of the capitalist class system is NOT exploitative.
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Jul 24, 2017 22:56
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2-03: Chapters 4-6 "This language of continuity, fluidity, coexistence, succession is as it were punctuated by this other language of interruption, with the potentiality of course of that interruption becoming 'a disruption'." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLJH-jnKORI Chapter 4 stitches the three circuits of capital together. Obviously, each is just a different perspective on the same thing and each takes place simultaneously, with production of new commodities happening even as previously produced commodities are sold. There's a lot of different observations here: - Capital (self-valorising value) can only be understood 'as a movement, and not as a static thing'. - If the circulation is interrupted then a money reserve is needed to smooth things out. This is one of the factors that leads to money capitalists becoming the dominant form of capitalists. - Not everything that enters the circuit as commodity or money need have itself originated from capitalist production. - Capitalists supply more value than they demand, creating an imbalance and a question of how the surplus can be realised. Chapter 5 introduces time analysis: the concepts of production and circulation time and the subdivisions of each. This is a short chapter of straightforward conceptual material. Chapter 6 looks at the costs of the circulation process and outlines the various costs involved in administering production, getting commodities to and from the market, and buying and selling them there. Most of these are cordoned off as 'not productive' and so needing to be paid out of the surplus value rather than adding to value. I have to say I'm not really convinced by the separation. The LTV is supposed to be a theory of what things exchange for against one another, underlying supply/demand fluctuations. Why would some of the costs required to get from M to M' factor into the 'value' but not others? What's the analytic significance of the productive/unproductive distinction? It's all the same to the capitalist. But the point is also made in this chapter that capitalism is limited by time and space, and there's advantages to collapsing these in expanding your market and reducing transport costs. Timestamps: 0:02:55 - Chapter 4 1:01:24 - production vs. circulation, productive vs. unproductive labour 1:06:20 - Chapter 5 1:20:44 - Chapter 6 Peel has issued a correction as of 17:53 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 03:20
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Peel posted:The LTV is supposed to be a theory of what things exchange for against one another, underlying supply/demand fluctuations. It's more "to describe the laws of motion of a capitalist economy." I feel like even the phrase "LTV" might be inherently misleading. When we discuss it simply as a Theory that Labor creates the underlying Value, this nevertheless kind of fixes one's gaze on price, as if to suggest "ah, so THIS explains THAT" — giving the impression that such is point of the exercise, via some linear or perhaps even monocausal relation. Marx himself doesn't use the phrase; he instead refers to the "law of value" as the basic principle of conservation underpinning commodity exchange. That's where the analysis starts, but not its ultimate aim. The law of value, after all, applies to all commodity exchange, including in pre-capitalist contexts, whereas Capital is trying to get into the workings of, well, capital and, ultimately, the world system it generates. Peel posted:Why would some of the costs required to get from M to M' factor into the 'value' but not others? What's the analytic significance of the productive/unproductive distinction? It's all the same to the capitalist. But the point is also made in this chapter that capitalism is limited by time and space, and there's advantages to collapsing these in expanding your market and reducing transport costs. The significance is this: The analysis is conducted from the perspective of capital. We've got these cyclopean, amorphous structures looming over humanity, whispering unceasingly of their own limitless hunger. If you're not actively helping them grow, you're forced to fight not to be thrust straight into one or another grasping, formless maw. In more straightforward terms, let's say you're a petty-bourgeois craftsperson, perhaps a carpenter. You make "artisanal" commodities that you sell directly; you own your own means of production and you don't employ wage labor. You're therefore producing value for certain, but you are not producing surplus value. If the entire hypothetical economy consisted of people such as yourself in this example, then there could be no capital accumulation, because there is no exploitation via wage labor, no concentration, no centralization. Even if you manage to save via abstention, you'd just be substituting consumption-now for consumption-later, in exactly the manner described by Austrians and other vulgar economists who don't adequately treat capital. It would be C-M-C, or the circuit of simple commodity exchange, all the way down. A lot of puzzlement seems to get expressed on this point. I think part of it is that people mistake a descriptive category for a normative one; if you say a public school teacher is "unproductive" in Marxist terms, people grow indignant, as though you suggested that they are not contributing usefully to society. Of course they are, to the perspective of a human being. But to our aforementioned world-dominating shoggoths, if you're not shoveling surplus directly into their manifold and nebulous orifices, you're wasting your brief, inconsequential little life. Thus, in this example, they might work to privatize the school system — to break the shell and feast upon what lies within. I've also seen people assert that service workers are not productive, but that's more of a Smithian hangup than a Marxist one. For Marx, it's not about a physical object so much as a social relation. If you're giving massages or whatever as a wage-labor gig to make someone else profit, that means you're being employed to create surplus value. If you work as an independent domestic, whose labor is completely consumed within a household without entering into a circuit of capital, that's unproductive. If you work as a domestic for a capitalist enterprise that sends its staff to perform housekeeping activities for clients, then there's a part of the day during which you work for MaidCo for free, and from this MaidCo can accumulate capital. Thus, it is productive. The bit about merchants' capital being an exception to this fits into the law of value's system of accounting. Merchants are some of the "necessary" unproductive labor; they improve systemic efficiency, they temper the circulation that is one of the conditions of the very existence of capital, etc. But at the end of the day, their private consumption will have to come out of the mass of commodities produced, whereas they haven't forwarded any of their own. "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities,' its unit being a single commodity," etc. In short, the creation of surplus value is inextricable from the creation of values, and therefore of use-values. Aeolius has issued a correction as of 16:13 on Jul 25, 2017 |
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Jul 25, 2017 16:10
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Autism Sneaks posted:Articulate Marx's assumptions about human nature and then explain how they're flawed. Marx presents predictions of how humans are going to behave and what social/political outcomes will be based on economic mode of production alone and goes on to posit that a socialist mode of production will create an essentially utopic stateless end-game without class conflict, exploitation or alienation. Hilario Baldness posted:Also, please articulate how his conception of the capitalist class system is NOT exploitative. Well his conception of capitalism is exploitative because it's defined to be that way. Peel posted:2-02: Chapters 4-6 An obvious one: without capital ownership/management being defined as unproductive there is no guarantee capitalists exploit.
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Jul 26, 2017 04:47
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things this post does not do:
maybe work on some/all of those
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Jul 26, 2017 13:54
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Aeolius posted:things this post does not do: I'll assume this reflects your objection to anyone trying to interpret Marx from anything other than a Marxist perspective.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:10
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asdf32 posted:I'll assume this reflects your objection to anyone trying to interpret Marx from anything other than a Marxist perspective. even if this assumption happens to be true, in your case adopting it only feeds your delusion of adequacy in that regard
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Jul 26, 2017 17:29
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asdf32 posted:An obvious one: without capital ownership/management being defined as unproductive there is no guarantee capitalists exploit. This isn't 'obvious', it's wrong. Exploitation arises from the nature of the use-value and exchange-value of labour-power. It makes no difference to this which levels and types of management of the production process are considered as productive. Please refer to the last entry in the first post Q&A before continuing your posting career ITT. edit: first post index is now up-to-date edit 2: Aeolius, I'll try to get to your post this week. I think Marx might be drawing some unnecessary lines he can't justify, but I need to make sure I understand just what he's doing & trying to do. Peel has issued a correction as of 18:14 on Jul 26, 2017 |
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Jul 26, 2017 17:40
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Peel posted:This isn't 'obvious', it's wrong. Exploitation arises from the nature of the use-value and exchange-value of labour-power. It makes no difference to this which levels and types of management of the production process are considered as productive. A dividing line between value producers and everyone else is necessary for the basic concept of exploitation and capitalists placement on the unproductive side of the line is what enables the entire concept capitalist exploitation. If we decided that their role was productive (or ceased to draw categorical lines and took things on a case by case basis) that wouldn't be possible.
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Jul 26, 2017 18:16
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Hey Peel is there a particular hard copy translation that's better than others? Would like to get vol 2 in that form if there's a worthwhile translation. (If not, I'll work with the free online version.)
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Jul 26, 2017 18:37
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asdf32 posted:A dividing line between value producers and everyone else is necessary for the basic concept of exploitation and capitalists placement on the unproductive side of the line is what enables the entire concept capitalist exploitation. If we decided that their role was productive (or ceased to draw categorical lines and took things on a case by case basis) that wouldn't be possible. i'm pretty sure you aren't reading the thread outside of your own posts, because recent posts discuss the fact that teachers are not considered 'productive.' either. your critique if of 'marxism as you understand it' not marx' argument in capital like at best it's earnest but lovely posting that would still be at home in a let's marxism thread or whatever but this thread is more specific; it's cool to start a general marxism thread by making GBS threads on it though, at least that will draw replies and maybe the thread will survive the resulting slapfight
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Jul 26, 2017 18:42
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asdf32 posted:A dividing line between value producers and everyone else is necessary for the basic concept of exploitation and capitalists placement on the unproductive side of the line is what enables the entire concept capitalist exploitation. If we decided that their role was productive (or ceased to draw categorical lines and took things on a case by case basis) that wouldn't be possible. No. Exploitation arises from labour being paid v but producing v + s. This remains true if management is considered a form of productive labour that produces s, or unproductive labour that is paid out of s. Exploitation can proceed perfectly well if everyone involved in the process is a productive worker. In full seriousness: Your understanding of Marx is pretty clearly superficial and vague, so you're not in a position to answer, or even understand, technical questions in this thread. It's fine if you've decided you don't like what you've heard of Marxism and don't want to know more, my superficial and vague understanding of Austrian economics is enough for me to decide I'm not going to read Human Action any time soon, but this isn't the thread for you.
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Jul 26, 2017 19:27
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asdf32 posted:I'll assume this reflects your objection to anyone trying to interpret Marx from anything other than a Marxist perspective. I get that "death of the author" still carries weight in literary analysis, but in science a consistent frame of reference is critically important.
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Jul 26, 2017 19:35
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Peel posted:No. Exploitation arises from labour being paid v but producing v + s. This remains true if management is considered a form of productive labour that produces s, or unproductive labour that is paid out of s. Exploitation can proceed perfectly well if everyone involved in the process is a productive worker. One step at a time here. If everyone involved in production is "productive" (as in Aeolius's carpenter example above) there cannot be S by definition in LTV. Correct? The existence of unproductive labor is what allows there to be an S to begin with.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:21
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