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I read this book about a decade ago and it absolutely galaxy brained me. I had taken about a half dozen econ classes in undergrad while also majoring in hard science and political science and marx made undergrad econ look so, so bad.
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Jun 24, 2017 03:14
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It's also cool to see marx repeat the same thing like 20 times about linen and gold and whatever and people, many in this thread, still don't get it because goddamn modern econ has plagued our minds, each and every one of us.
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Jun 24, 2017 03:20
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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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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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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 07:53 |
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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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