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NNick posted:Value: I think it is safe to say the socially necessary labor time to produce a iPhone and Juicero is different. We can say it costs 20 hours for an iPhone and 10 for a Juicero. In other words, 1 iPhone=2 Juicero. It could also be 2 iPhone=1 Juicero. From what I understand, and I could be wrong, you can't express exchange value in terms of a price. I mean you technically could if you had a True price that reflected the objective value of the goods, but that's not the case in your example (or capitalism generally for that matter). Exchange value is meant to reflect the tradeoff between socially necessary labour-time between different commodities. Which you mention in the lead up to that, but I just wanted to clarify that for you because that's a potentially deadly mistake to make since it assumes a subjective determination of value. Anyways, am I alone in thinking that this book is really sort of psychedelic? The idea that "things" aren't, like, just "things" bro, they're social hieroglyphics that signify underlying labour is a trip to think about. When I walk into supermarkets I can't help but imagine all the factory worker's absent stares, vats, and sheet metal gizmos behind every thing anymore. Also, the idea that the preconditions of the nature of commodities just sort of naturally unfold into developments of money and stuff seems like it says something about free will that Marx doesn't comment on. Just a bunch of "woah" moments for me so far. almost there has issued a correction as of 05:45 on Apr 30, 2017 |
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Apr 30, 2017 05:25
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Aeolius posted:Small note: Price is exchange value, just expressed in terms of money instead of another commodity. 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?
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Apr 30, 2017 17:04
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Okay, as a recently graduated economics student who has been steeped in neo-classical economics, Marx is doing a lot to totally negate those four years of my life. And don't get me wrong, I'm glad of it. When he talks about the tautology of market equilibrium I realized the extent of the swindle. I've spent four years getting a degree in a bourgeois techno-rhetoric completely divorced from reality. I'm willing to accept that. That being said, I still can't help but constantly contrast what I was taught against what Marx is saying. Particularly in the case of surplus-value. What I was taught was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_surplus  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. Just to be clear, I don't hold this view. Many however do. So I think it would be beneficial for us to discuss what a Marxist's response to this argument would be since it is so discursively vital to working-class struggle. So ya, I was just wondering if any goons here could provide an argument before I decided to piss in the pool and offer my own interpretations. almost there has issued a correction as of 20:11 on May 8, 2017 |
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May 8, 2017 20:06
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 ^I think a sufficient marxist critique of "economic surplus" would really be this simple ( I added "consumer deficit" and "producer deficit" on the graph just in case you don't want to play spot the difference). The labels "surplus" and "deficit" are inherently deceptive and not at all what's being depicted on that graph. They are just as readily replaced by "consumer gain/loss", and "producer gain/loss". At which point it becomes self-evident the argument is based on a tautology (i.e. every buyer has a seller, and every seller a buyer), because either party's gain will inevitably be the other party's loss at the point of sale. In other words, any "surplus" the consumer makes is by definition offset by an equal producer's "deficit" and vice versa. No actual surplus is generated. 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. In other words, say you pay $30,000 cash for a loom; this would ensure two entries in a company's ledger, one $30,000 gain in "fixed" asset value, in this case a loom, and a simultaneous $30,000 loss in "current" asset value, in this case cash. This is just one example but any purchase made must be recorded as a double entry (a gain explained by a loss) and must always satisfy the equation Assets=Liability+Equity. This is why it's called a BALANCE sheet. Profits don't even come into the ledger until the income statement, where you subtract your net revenue from your cost of goods sold (which include the cost of materials as well as the direct cost of labour). This, to me, seems like a tacit acknowledgement of the inability for exchange to generate surplus value and, simultaneously, an acknowledgement of the appropriation of labour-value. Since, Cost of Goods Sold being measured as a combination of material costs (in which no value can be considered "surplus" since the money paid for these materials is recorded as an equal gain in the acquired asset value) and labour, only labour's productive power can be said to account for the differential between revenue and cost (i.e. surplus value/profit). The fact that such an obviously absurd and self-satisfying "model" as the economic surplus one is peddled at a mainstream academic level is indicative of total intellectual bankruptcy if u ask me. almost there has issued a correction as of 07:10 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 05:21
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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. I'm not denying that there are a lot of moving parts to the Free Trade argument, but just that this particular aspect of it corresponds to where we are in Kapital and is thus arguable at this point along the reading. The vulgar economists proposed "economic surplus" as an alternative to the Marxian theory of surplus value and so I just thought it would be good to deconstruct that flimsy model considered "mainstream" economics. But you're right, I think its important to make the distinction between the benefits of Free Trade generally and Free Trade under a capitalist paradigm. When economist vulgaris brings up Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the Market they tend to leave out his advocacy for the labour theory of value ("Labour...is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities") and his warning of impending inequality under capitalist Free Trade ("All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind"), which is a selection bias worthy of serious examination. almost there has issued a correction as of 18:44 on May 11, 2017 |
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May 11, 2017 18:34
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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? 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. almost there has issued a correction as of 06:33 on May 17, 2017 |
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May 17, 2017 06:03
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Baby Babbeh posted:The parts that are just documenting the problem and arguing that exists are well researched and good. With as deep in denial as some people are about how hosed things have become, just that much is a worthwhile endeavor. But his solution of "maybe if we just ask the locust swarm our system has created to eat less we can avoid a famine" is pretty weaksauce and can safely be ignored. What solution do you mean? EDIT: Oh, are we still talking about Piketty in the Kapital thread? I guess every day we fall further from communism's light. almost there has issued a correction as of 15:23 on May 20, 2017 |
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May 20, 2017 15:20
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I recommend anybody to read this article written by David Harvey for Jacobin that goes into some detail discussing the more poetic interpretations of Kapital: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/03/david-harvey-marxs-inferno-review-capital-grundrisse/ Before reading this article I wondered what could have driven Marx to write a treatise that challenged and interrogated the power structures of capital. Surely something radical like Kapital would be difficult to write and make him lose the grace of, and become a perennial target for, the bourgeoisie who, Marx surely knew, would do everything in their power to discredit and belittle him and his ideas. And, to no small degree, we see the nefarious results of his sacrifice to this day in the wholesale dismissal of Marx's work by the intellectually bankrupt economic departments of elite universities and the general stigma of his name. So what could have driven a man to such a Christ-like sacrifice of his own material for the sake of the greater good? and what sort of sights would a man have to experience before he was ready to offer himself to that alter of love? In Chapter 10: The Working Day we get a glimpse into the pits of huddled agony that must have first driven Marx to make that sacrifice. Marx wrote during a time of rapid industrialization and was not alone in associating the furnaces of factory production with the chambers of Hell. William Blake wrote a poem I recommend you check out called "The Tyger" about the new landscape in London under the new industrial paradigm that does everything but explicitly state his loss of faith in God because of it. In Kapital we see why this might be the case. We're given accounts of children as young as 8 working in sweltering hot factories littered with irritants and toxic debris who are denied to lunch away from the machine they are fettered to. Capitalists who will pay and peddle any falsehood necessary to ensure that child isn't treated humanely, and a system more than willing to oblige him. In Marx's words: quote:"All methods for raising the social productivity of labour . . . distort the worker into a fragment of a man, they degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, they destroy the actual content of his labour by turning it into torment; they alienate . . . from him the intellectual potentialities of the labour process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power; they deform the conditions under which he works, subject him during the labour process to a despotism more hateful for its meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time and drag his wife and child beneath the wheels of the juggernaut of capital." This, I believe, is the emotional core for Marx's mission in writing Kapital. And sure, one could argue that London today doesn't look anything like the London of 1850. But you don't need to look further than China or India to see that that reality hasn't been eliminated, it's just been relocated because it's dangerous. Visible Hell makes rebels out of us all. almost there has issued a correction as of 21:52 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 21:47
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ironic, ain't it? 
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May 24, 2017 15:42
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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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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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What do you guys think (not you asdf) are solutions to the problem with currency's privileging of exchange-value over use-value? I've considered time coupons, but the more I think about it the less I'm certain a socialist society would actually benefit by giving workers their surplus-value back to them in toto (which as I understand it, would be the effect of a time currency system). A society where surplus-value is spent exclusively on consumer goods would be wasteful (C-M-C circuit), an institution would thus still be needed to appropriate a portion of the value of the worker's labor to accumulate and grow the means of production (socialized in this scenario), extend and improve social programs, and eventually achieve autarky. I've also encountered techno-utopian type set ups where currency would be eliminated and sophisticated computer systems would make the necessary logistical adjustments to the manifold divisions of labor in place of the market system. With the advent of smart phones, I can imagine an app that directs workers to open job-sites where the means of production are socialized or some such thing. But then the downside here is that workers wouldn't have much of an incentive to work and so I can imagine that society spontaneously developing some sort of tacitly enforced sense of "social responsibility" or legal-mandate in order to coerce workers into working. Thoughts?
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Jul 31, 2017 16:35
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This thread would maybe do better if the OP just went into an indepth "goon representation" of the first volume or the abridged version ? Like i was super engaged at first but, like, doing all three volumes after one another seems to me like an exercise in impractically painful masochism. An OP that broke down the core analytics of Marx's materialist dialectic ( a topic rarely breached afaik in discussion of the first volume) as well as supplementing the reading material with tons more examples of contemporary Marxism might give the impression that the thing is less dead than focusing exclusively on reading that is effectively a Victorian era treaty on the latent effects of industrialization? i mean that in as unsnarky way as possible (as far as rhetorical questions will allow me, ofc). Like a customer survey? i dunno. I just benefitted alot from this thread and would like to it come back bigger and gayer than ever before
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Oct 16, 2017 20:00
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Peel posted:I don't, even having read two volumes of this and plenty of side material, think I could do a good analysis of Marx's dialectics and honestly I've never found a description of what Marxist 'dialectical' thinking is supposed to be that didn't seem either relatively trivial or metaphysical speculation. I don't know why anybody thinks dialectical thinking is some sort of philosophical swindle (probably Chomsky). It's like you said, Hegelian. And Hegel, being the OG he was, developed a method where everything is considered symptomatic of absolute ideals. So like, when Marx analyzes historical record and comes to his conclusions regarding the progression of the material conditions underlying certain historical epochs, he's simply attempting to devise a general theory whereby historical progress becomes explainable as symptomatic of certain predictable and opposing (in this case economic) prepositions (labour theory of value vs capital accumulation leading to an ever weakening position of the working classes for example). The reason I mention the dialectic is because I think its his most enduring contribution to academia. Literally no Marxist thought can call itself Marxist and exist outside of the dialectical method. Really, in a big way, we're living in a world that has failed to make that intellectual leap German Idealists had already made during the Victorian era. Peel posted:Doing a summary of each volume is a good idea, maybe aimed at the I Will Never Read A Book crowd, but (being totally honest) it would take a lot of time and effort which I dunno if I want to spend on this right now. Comrade! You work too hard. I'd be glad to help out writing whatever portions you'd think would make a good OP. I have a lot of free time since I told my employer to screw 
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Oct 17, 2017 17:30
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Peel posted:I don't think it was a swindle in Marx's hands, in that I don't think he was being insincere, but I think it is a swindle conscious or not in the hands of some marxists, some particularly dogmatic types who just use the idea as a cudgel, and the occasional non-dogmatist who seems like they're just trying to preserve the idea even as they empty it of content because they think it should be important. The former are the ones who treat it as some kind of superpower, possibly applicable to the whole universe including the domains of natural science, and suppressed by bourgeois society because they fear its inevitable revolutionary conclusions Tbh the dialectical method wasn't really clear to me until I read Zizek's "The Sublime Object of Ideology" which I recommend for anyone interested in the course contemporary Marxism is taking (focused more on the economy of desire and the social apparatus involved in repressing and elevating certain desires rather than a focus on modes of production). But in it he lays down a sort of easy to intuit way. He first starts his examination of dialectics off quoting Lacan saying "It was none other than Karl Marx who invented the notion of symptom." And then examining in what relation commodities (Marx's interest) and dreams (Lacan's interest) intersect and how is it that dialectics as a method seems applicable to so many things beyond Marx's narrow interests of economy. So, the basic premise is therefore that there are latent tensions always in existence of the body of the Thing [capitalism / dreams] because the rules to the Thing that necessarily define it (i.e. it's text) can also be understood to determine it. That is, so long as we're in the realm of business-as-usual as it pertains to the Thing (and not in its pre-conscious radical "anything can happen" state) there are necessarily regularities one can point to and describe certain inevitabilities of the system's functioning (i.e. symptoms) simply as a result of those regularities functioning according to its own rules. From that perspective one can see at what point certain contradictions to the system's whole functioning are already "built-in" at the moment of its conception. For example, it was Marx's idea that bourgeois people are necessarily aware of the latent contradictions in their system, even if only at first. In the case of Marx's discourse on primitive accumulation for example, the first movers simply had to be aware of their intent to separate working people from their means of production. And then what follows is a form of psycho-social repression whereby the latent tensions of the system become obfuscated under so much absolutely necessary (according to Zizek) ideology meant to insure that the "suture points" of the system remain unacknowledged, because their existence inherently threatens the legitimacy of the system itself. It presents as a neatly closed-loop so long as nobody really takes the time to look at it in a way that "lays its contradictions bare", so to speak (in this case the contradiction would be that the colony of workers one gets having "freed" them from their own means of production means that you create a class of absolute dependents that will become inevitably replaced by machinery ((b/c of the pursuit of surplus value)) and given an ever depressing wage ((in real-terms)) that inevitably will erode their bargaining leverage with their employer and will directly threaten their livelihood as a class of dependents and create the space for a locus of social unrest; all of which is a natural conclusion based on the understanding of how latent and opposing desires, within the structural framework of the system, lead to certain predictable results and antagonisms). I don't know if that cleared anything up so the best I think I can do is recommend that Zizek book lol quote:A summary of volume 1 by topic could go: I like it. Though I think instead of "commodities" you'd be better off looking at the fetishism of commodities specifically. If only because fetishism is more universal and ripe with problems than the (in this case, commodity) form it takes.
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Oct 29, 2017 18:07
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Hilario Baldness posted:Are his books easier to follow than his speaking manner? He goes off on a lot of tangents in his lectures. Ironically, I'm a person that goes off on a LOT of tangents. A lot easier. He's pretty much famous for his writing first, and his insane public persona second. Though, if you don't have a basic education and know some of the jargon normally associated with academic philosophy I can imagine you'd be at a loss trying to get through any of his books. That aside though, he takes a lot of opportunities to relate his ideas to stuff in pop culture (as is vogue nowadays) and has an interesting writing style that sort of perpetually leads you down a certain road only to turn around and mock you for believing all that shite he was spinning which, personally, I find super hilarious.
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Nov 3, 2017 03:03
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