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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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Under capitalism, each firm producing for exchange competes for market share. That is the root cause of exploitation. The organization of the firm merely determines how the surplus value is managed and distributed. It doesn't matter if the workers are slaves, they own some stocks in the company, or they work in a co-op. The firm is incentivized to exploit the workers in order to compete in the market, regardless of if they manage themselves, are managed by a single owner, or are managed indirectly by a board of directors. Aeolius's example is fine to illustrate where zero surplus value is technically possible, but it is a bit misleading when used to illustrate how capitalism actually exists. This carpenter is not acting rationally. The carpenter (and all of his competition) would be competing not only for income now, but for an expectation of income in the future. So, each one would be incentivized to reinvest into more advanced capital, so that they could produce more cheaply (or produce a better product, entering into a market of different use values) in the future. As such, the carpenter would extract from himself a surplus value that would accumulate into a more advanced -- and therefore a larger accumulation of -- capital.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:29
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Peel posted:I don't think that's quite right, I think it's more fundamental than that. Competition obliges competing capitalists to exploit their workers, but the exploitation itself just originates from v vs v+s, workers being paid at the value needed to reproduce their labour-power, but producing more value than that. This happens even under monopoly conditions. Peel posted:In Aeolius' example there's no 'surplus value' produced and hence no exploitation because the worker, receiving the full proceeds, is compensated at the full value of his labour. Peel posted:At some point in volume 1 I think Marx refers to workers receiving the full value of their labour and still setting some aside to improve their means of production, and this not being surplus value in the capitalist sense. The crucial distinction there is that it is under their own control. Peel posted:But the categories are starting to get warped. The model in Capital is a model of the capitalist firm, a society of independent producers or worker co-operatives is not what it's designed to describe, I'm not convinced that a worker co-operative that is producing for exchange is anything but a capitalist firm, albeit one in which the exploitation is agreeably distributed among its worker-owners.
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Jul 27, 2017 19:08
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Electric Owl posted:What do you guys think (not you asdf) are solutions to the problem with currency's privileging of exchange-value over use-value? If we're talking about the critique of the gotha program, Marx was pretty clear that even the lower phase of communism is still a communist society; i.e., that the use of labor vouchers is in part of an effort to eschew production for exchange entirely. The use of labor vouchers allows for a rationing of scarce produce as well as an incentive for productive labor. Compensation would not rely on how much products are sold, but merely on the intensity & duration of your labor and if your labor is sufficiently useful (no labor vouchers for making mud pies). But what is being rationed here? Here's what Marx says labor vouchers should ration: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm posted:Let us take, first of all, the words "proceeds of labor" in the sense of the product of labor; then the co-operative proceeds of labor are the total social product. First, means of production must first be maintained. Second, technology & productivity must advance. Third, accidents & disasters must be insured. Fourth, any additional administration maintenance must be performed. Fifth, common welfare must be kept. SIxth, society must care for those who can not care for themselves. Finally, what products that remain is what should be rationed off based upon the distribution of labor vouchers. In our world today where we regularly see food gluts & so much empty housing, I think we could certainly consider food & housing guaranteed to all under the 5th pre-ration distribution. So what remains? Products that are not yet sufficiently produced enough to meet everyone's needs. And I think it's reasonable to ration luxurious things like vanilla beans or saffron based on labor vouchers.
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Jul 31, 2017 17:10
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Peel posted:Annoyingly I couldn't find it, I evidently didn't think enough of it to highlight it at the time. If it seems contrary to the rest of Marx chances are I've communicated/remembered/understood it wrong. Dang  if I happen to re-read and stumble upon it I'll post it!Peel posted:About market competitive co-ops in general, after thinking I think it's right to say they in theory replicate capitalist relations to a significant extent. There's two things Marx repeatedly invokes in Capital: first, that capitalists are compelled to harshen exploitation, advance production etc. by competitive pressures, and second that 'capitalist' is a role, not a person. Capitalists insofar as they are following the role of a capitalist, of being the conscious personified form of capital, will follow the dictates of capitals self-expansion, and so on. There's a sense of capital as an alien parasite taking over human self-determination. So this being a role not a person, it can be taken out of a separate capitalist and shared across the workers. Indeed, the firms would find incentive to lower their prices as time goes on. So you would see these worker-owners negotiating with each other over how the pay cuts should be distributed & capital liquidation should be handled. Eventually, as a firm loses more and more capital & wages to competition, worker-owners would find that they have no more incentive to work there than elsewhere, and even later all prospective ones would agree. At this point, the firm would be completely liquidated & the workers would have to work elsewhere or consume significantly less , risking a propagation of a crisis. To add to this, there would still be economic incentives for all of the worker-owners to work together to keep those who are unemployed from them access to capital (in order to protect their profit/wages). Would this result in a class struggle between those unemployed and those who work-own businesses? Maybe! I'm not knowledgeable on exactly what distinguishes a class. I think a transition could certainly happen during a particularly threatening crisis, as soon-to-be-unemployed and the unemployed unite in dismantling capital, to the dismay of those who would have rather worked with it in place. I think such an organization would qualify as a dictatorship of the proletariat~ But we should be cautious in assuming that the firms would remain cooperatives until communism. I think it would grow harder to justify, depending on the rate of profit. That is, as capital accumulates, the surplus value of a single firm could grow high enough to secure ownership for only a portion of the worker-owners against the will of all of its competitors. And then the remaining workers could find themselves with no control of their surplus value, to the benefit of a shrinking remainder of the company, assuming the costs of securing it do not increase too much. Again this all depends on the amount of accumulation & the rate of profit being high enough to sustain it all. This is a pessimistic counterpoint of how it's a transitional stage: Could it transition back into hierarchical business capitalism. As you said, such a society would be one that once "brought capital to heel" but consider that may have been done under favorable conditions, such capital whose accumulation has been temporarily & forcefully undone. Once that accumulation happens again, it may just reassert itself. Ruzihm has issued a correction as of 13:26 on Aug 1, 2017 |
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Aug 1, 2017 06:43
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Aeolius posted:Embedded here is the primary challenge to building socialism. Because the state belongs to the bourgeoisie, and because the bourgeoisie also works actively to reproduce itself — as much through the state as through cultural institutions — it strikes as unrealistic to posit that we could get from the current state of affairs to Full Co-op Economy without basically already having established a DoP. Though from the discussion thus far it seems that y'all are pretty much already intuiting this. 
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Aug 1, 2017 14:30
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Are there any critiques of UBI that analyze it from a marxist perspective? My first inkling is that it's just a relabeling of variable capital--at least a portion of welfare is variable capital that is spent on preparing the next generation of workers, anyway. But what are some of its effects in marxist terms? Depending on how the ubi is funded, I could see if welfare costs go down as those who need significantly more help can't afford their needs without significantly more money than the average welfare concession. Those people die and the average cost of helping the unemployed goes down, resulting in lower costs of reproducing that society & therefore higher profits. Does it increase profit/accelerate the accumulation of capital by increasing the rate of turnover because the welfare is given out as money instead of needs?
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Aug 3, 2017 19:46
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Jeb! Repetition posted:If we fixed capitals gains tax you might be able to look at UBI as the most universal and general possible form of Marxist wages. You mean like the closest to his model of wages? Yeah I can see how that would be the case. Sidenote: someone linked to "Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises" by Anwar Shaikh on the /r/marxism_101 subreddit and the reviews seem neat. Has anyone here read it? https://global.oup.com/academic/product/capitalism-9780199390632?cc=us&lang=en&
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Aug 3, 2017 20:42
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Top City Homo posted:this is a very good "debate" of an austrian economic priest getting corncobbed about the ltv
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Aug 16, 2017 19:46
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Vermain posted:I think the final piece of the socialist puzzle really is the transition from competition-driven production to collaboration-driven production, where goods and services are produced based upon democratically decided social need and resources allocated accordingly. I recall Orwell mentioning in his writings that organized, collaborative production that eschewed (or, at least, stamped down) the profit motive had already showed its startlingly effective face in the form of Nazi Germany's wartime economy. The challenge for socialists is to replicate that sort of organized economic success in the interests of peace and democratic justice, rather than war and totalitarian control. This is basically the explanation for why communism can't exist as just one sector of a global economy - for it to be stable, market participation & private property enforcement must be made completely redundant to those with the capacity to make it otherwise.
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Aug 25, 2017 19:43
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Peel posted:I expected this would happen eventually - while I work on the next post, can I get a roll call of how many people besides me are still following along with this? im lagging behind and thank you so much for doing this!!!
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Sep 5, 2017 16:50
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Nov 7, 2017 17:27
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If anyone wants some homework, please debunk Bohm-Bawerk's critique of Marx that is explained in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS53kAVv31A. I'm having some trouble with it personally.
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Nov 10, 2017 08:46
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Aeolius posted:he's clearly on firmer footing than most of the folks he'd likely consider on "his side." In short, this guy is a puzzle. Yeah that was what surprised me. usually the austrain economists/  s are way less competent. Thanks for your critique, it explained a lot.
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Nov 11, 2017 05:21
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Is there a link to an explanation of how to calculate the amount of labor you are entitled to in a system of labor vouchers like in the Critique of the Gotha Program? I thought I'd read it somewhere but I can't find it & I'm starting to think I just pulled my own understanding out of my rear end. For some reason I'd thought it was measured by summing up how many products of the same kind you made were made in total & how many hours in total were spent on it, and you get a portion of those hours according to your portion of the products made. Edit: not counting the deductions for common fund & insurance etc. Ruzihm has issued a correction as of 19:33 on Nov 20, 2017 |
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Nov 20, 2017 19:14
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:redpill me on marx's capital fam  if you want a super high level thing you can watch this series of videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGT-hygPqUM Ruzihm has issued a correction as of 08:22 on Dec 20, 2017 |
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Dec 20, 2017 08:20
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 14:35 |
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Aeolius posted:Which finally gives us: By the way do you have any sources for this? Your explanations make sense but I can't trust myself to critique it accurately. Also, where can I find more continuing analysis like this?
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Dec 27, 2017 23:21
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