Hate Your Boss: Marxism, Capitalism, Socialism, Anarchy and the Left

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OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

If I were to make a list, I think I would go with.

1. Productive power must be able to be divorced from ownership of land area. e.g there must be a difference between a field and a factory, if you cannot build a factory (something that allows you to use capital to create more productive capability where it did not previously exist) then I don't think you can have capitalism because your options for growth are more limited to controlling more land, of which there is a finite amount and which historically has been difficult to efficiently administrate over wide areas prior to the invention of the things that let you also build factories. Productive capacity and the power it confers is more zero-sum in that case, as it is harder to build than it is to take a share of it from someone else.

2. There must be a practical monopoly of force to guarantee the right of ownership of capital. e.g you can't have capitalism without a state, because the state (or something that functions as the state, being a monopoly of force that can empower or disempower people across a sufficiently large geographic area) is what provides the legal basis for ownership. An owner of a factory cannot own things unless he can call the cops to enforce ownership, or his own private security force perhaps but generally those also operate with the blessing of the state in one form or another. Basically there must be some extremely powerful system, ultimately backed by force, that affords the capitalist his power.

Basically if people can own things, and owning things can allow you to own more things at a sufficiently rapid rate, then you have the conditions for ownership of productive capacity to become the dominant political force in the world quite quickly.

# ? Sep 10, 2021 23:27

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 14:39

DrSunshine: Mar 23, 2009; Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!

That makes a lot of sense, yeah. I was contemplating more like a third addition to your list:

3) There must be a stable ecology where unlimited taking of resources from the environment can be presumed and factored into future growth (interest) calculations. The capitalist system assumes that the investor is able to leverage the future earnings of a business against present assets, to obtain the investment or loan capital to invest in productive capital. The premium on the time value of money is the interest rate. Therefore, if risk and uncertainty is high (for example, if the risk of extreme weather events, war, and so on is high), and take-able resources are finite and decreasing, the calculations become such that presently existing capital is worth more than the expected value of future returns, thereby undermining the credit-investment-profit loop necessary for capitalism to continue.

That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more?

# ? Sep 11, 2021 14:12

PerniciousKnid: Sep 13, 2006

What's the difference between capitalism and older societal structures like ancient Egypt? Aside from things like, the Egyptian elites were not just metaphorically but literally deified.

# ? Sep 11, 2021 15:23

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

From a theoretic perspective a distinct feature of capitalism is commodity fetishism. That is the fact that objects are primarily defined by their market value, as opposed to their use value or labour value/production cost.
There are some others, too.

From an activist perspective, the main distinction of capitalism is that the factory-form allows cooperation between workers on a scale that wasn't possible between serfs or slaves.

I have been recommended this old soviet textbook by some goons but still haven't gotten around to reading it. It has a chapter on pre-capitalist production and how they were different:
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/index.htm

# ? Sep 11, 2021 16:11

ronya: Nov 8, 2010; I'm the normal one.

You hate ridden fucks will regret your words when you eventually grow up.

Peace.

DrSunshine posted:

That makes a lot of sense, yeah. I was contemplating more like a third addition to your list:

3) There must be a stable ecology where unlimited taking of resources from the environment can be presumed and factored into future growth (interest) calculations. The capitalist system assumes that the investor is able to leverage the future earnings of a business against present assets, to obtain the investment or loan capital to invest in productive capital. The premium on the time value of money is the interest rate. Therefore, if risk and uncertainty is high (for example, if the risk of extreme weather events, war, and so on is high), and take-able resources are finite and decreasing, the calculations become such that presently existing capital is worth more than the expected value of future returns, thereby undermining the credit-investment-profit loop necessary for capitalism to continue.

That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more?

emphasis on time structure of investment in productive capital is a very austrian take; if you poke around in those corners you'll find more

usually when we speak of a market society however, we don't mean specifically the money market, but markets in general, especially commodity markets - 'in buying food we worry about taste and cost, not marriage alliances or the need not to alienate our grocer lest he not stand with us in the next feud', to quote CR Shalizi's paraphrase of Gellner. The social revolution is in the devaluation of non-market social relations, like reciprocity or allegiances. Polanyi, Gellner, James C. Scott, etc.

conversely, production on expected future remuneration itself long predates modernism. Nanni bought shoddy copper from Ea-nasir on credit.

ronya fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Sep 11, 2021

# ? Sep 11, 2021 16:34

Pentecoastal Elites: Feb 27, 2007

DrSunshine posted:

That's my hypothesis at any rate, and I was wondering if any writers had explored this concept more?

I haven't read it myself but IIRC something similar to this is explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.

PerniciousKnid posted:

What's the difference between capitalism and older societal structures like ancient Egypt? Aside from things like, the Egyptian elites were not just metaphorically but literally deified.

One of the biggest differences is that in a feudal system your labor was socially determined. You do what you to because of who you are in relation to the nobility. Born to serf parents? Barring getting into the clergy or marrying above your station, you were going to be a serf. You farmed a plot of land and the local nobility got whatever excess you produced beyond what you needed to keep yourself alive.

Under capitalism, though, your labor is determined by the market. After the advent of liberalism you're no longer socially bound to a structure of nobility, you're an independent actor with rights that can enter into contracts with whomever. Unfortunately, if you don't have anything to sell aside from your labor your life isn't going to look much different (in broad strokes) from the serf, but your fate isn't nearly as determined. Capitalism does actually pull a great deal of people up out of the mean conditions of serfdom as it incentivizes new technologies and logistics structures and specific market relationships -- the problem, though, is the wheels fall off when you run out of resources to exploit.

# ? Sep 11, 2021 17:05

V. Illych L.: Apr 11, 2008; ASK ME ABOUT LUMBER

ronya posted:

emphasis on time structure of investment in productive capital is a very austrian take; if you poke around in those corners you'll find more

usually when we speak of a market society however, we don't mean specifically the money market, but markets in general, especially commodity markets - 'in buying food we worry about taste and cost, not marriage alliances or the need not to alienate our grocer lest he not stand with us in the next feud', to quote CR Shalizi's paraphrase of Gellner. The social revolution is in the devaluation of non-market social relations, like reciprocity or allegiances. Polanyi, Gellner, James C. Scott, etc.

conversely, production on expected future remuneration itself long predates modernism. Nanni bought shoddy copper from Ea-nasir on credit.

ea-nasir!!!!! :argh:

# ? Sep 12, 2021 13:16

Failed Imagineer: Sep 22, 2018

V. Illych L. posted:

ea-nasir!!!!!

# ? Sep 12, 2021 14:17

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

DrSunshine posted:

I'm interested in learning about the necessary material preconditions for capitalism's existence. Have any writers identified what environmental states must exist in order for capitalism to exist, or written extensively about the relationship between capitalism and the underlying physical world?

digging up this post I made in another thread from a long time ago:

gradenko_2000 posted:

I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

The first point the book makes is that "capitalism" is a very specific economic system that isn't just "people trading stuff". The act of buying a good cheaply and selling it for a higher price later on, or somewhere else, is just commerce, but it isn't capitalism. The feudal system of serfs having to work for a lord, or even the Enlightenment-era absolutist system of taxation to a centralized bureaucracy are both examples of appropriation of value, but neither of those are capitalism.

Under a strict definition, capitalism was an economic system that began sometime in the 16th to 17th century, and began specifically in England.

The central thesis of the book lays out a case against the popular narrative that the emergence of capitalism is a deterministic conclusion of a society that manages to hoard enough "primitive accumulation" (as Marxists might put it), followed by or in conjunction with the establishment of market behavior. By such standards, the development of capitalism would be inevitable, and is bound to happen as soon as a country / region / state becomes rich enough and decides to sever the fetters of feudalism.

Rather, capitalism developed in England, first and only, because of a specific confluence of factors. In no particular order:

1. The Enclosure movement, or the conversion of common land into private property, and the accompanying ideological rationale that justified it (as driven by liberal thinkers such as John Locke), followed by the enforcement of such rights by The State.

2. The dispossession of land from serfs. This would eventually lead towards the formation of a proletariat. That is, the absence of a similar movement in, say, France or Germany, meant that the peasants in those countries still owned the means of production, and did not have to resort to having to sell their labor-power (and nothing else).

3. The development of land rents based on some contemporary measure of "market value", as opposed to fixed rents as practiced in feudal societies.

Under feudalism, the overlord of a feudal land-holding would extract productivity from serfs via a combination of military and economic coercion, but as long as the serfs could meet that demand (and granting that sometimes they didn't), there was not much of a need to produce more than that, and the serfs still actually owned the same land that they worked. Under absolutism, the extraction was done via taxation, and the extractors were part of a centralized bureaucracy, but the same dynamics largely applied.

However, under English "agrarian capitalism":

A person could now own land (i.e. become a landlord in the capitalist sense), and then rent out the land to tenants. The amount of rent could vary, and therefore there was an incentive for the landlord to adjust their rent rate to whatever could bring them the most profit, lest they be bought-out by richer landlords.

The tenant could hire workers to work the land, and any difference between the value of the harvest, and rent they had to pay, was profit, and so there was an incentive to reduce costs-of-production and labor costs, improve yields and outputs, and so on.

The workers did not own any land, and had to sell their labor-power to earn a wage.

Since the product of the land (i.e. food) was what would be used to pay off the cost of the lease taken out by the tenant, and since there was now a market in leases, then the price of the food would itself be subject to market forces. And this would reverberate down to everything else.

The end result was that the landlords and the tenants were now incentivized to engage in profit-maximization behavior, while workers had to work to survive. The value extraction had shifted from being performed by the political/economic merger of the feudal lord, to being performed by the purely economic imperatives. The author harps on this phrase a lot, and it's important, because it highlights that once the system "got going", everyone was "trapped" in it.

The book later goes on to contrast this to how other countries, such as the Dutch Republic or France, did not develop capitalism, because they lacked the same conditions in one or two critical ways. Capitalism eventually spread to these other countries as capitalist-logic started applying to Britain's commercial and later imperialist ventures, but capitalism was spread TO them, rather than it developing outside of England in its own right, and never quite in the same form, or with the same effects.

It's a good book, and I'd highly recommend it, in particular because it shows what recent scholarship can do to challenge and iterate on orthodox Marxism.

# ? Sep 13, 2021 01:21

radmonger: Jun 6, 2011

gradenko_2000 posted:

the landlord to adjust their rent rate to whatever could bring them the most profit, lest they be bought-out by richer landlords.

That part doesn�t really make sense; is there a part of the argument skipped?

Any landlord already has an incentive to raise rents, because more money. There is no equivalent of company shareholders who will force management to accept a hostile takeover because it will end up as more profitable. So what is the actual change supposed to be here?

# ? Sep 13, 2021 11:28

Aeolius: Jul 16, 2003; Simon Templeman Fanclub

Ruzihm posted:

Even in the early 20th century, Marxists recognized that an individual person will not necessarily fall into exactly one class. The importance is the distinction between class interests - those of labor and those of capital. And an individual person's actions are driven by these interests as they are objectified by the capitalist mode of production.

In the following quote, Rosa Luxemburg describes how the activity of worker-owners must be primarily driven by the interests of capital, despite that they by all accounts are workers (emphasis mine):

I believe offhand that even Marx said as much but I can't think of a citation to back that up, so I will avoid making a claim on that

I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind:

quote:

The essence of the political economy of capital is the exploitation of labour, the maximization of surplus-value for capital. But whereas capital defines wealth in terms of the maximization of surplus labour, for workers "wealth is disposable time and nothing more." The Ten Hours Bill, like more than a century of subsequent working-class struggle internationally, demonstrates that workers strive to limit the time in which they are subject to the dictates of capital, to win time for their own free self-development. For workers, "free time, disposable time, is wealth itself, partly for the enjoyment of the product, partly for the free activity which - unlike labour - is not dominated by the pressure of an extraneous purpose."23

From this principle flows the basic dynamic of a socialist economy, its tendency to develop the forces of production not in order to produce surplus value, but in order to reduce the amount of necessary social labour performed by its members. A society of freely associated producers would thus organize production with the following principle to the fore:

quote:
The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created for all of them.24

This principle, embodied in workers� struggles to shorten the working day, had for Marx already found its corresponding form of production: the co-operative factory. The co-operatives, he suggested, "have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modem science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters." Not that Marx was starry-eyed about co-operative production within capitalism. On the contrary, he recognized that, because they operated in the atomized framework of commodity exchange, they would inevitably reproduce the "defects of the existing system" by forcing workers to become "their own capitalist" and to subject themselves to competitive pressures to exploit their own labour.25 However, notwithstanding this severe deficiency, co-operative production prefigured a society based upon "associated labour"; indeed, the very deficiencies of co-operative workplaces within capitalism underlined the need for workers to overthrow the rule of capital. The limits imposed by capitalism on workers� co-operatives highlight the fact that "to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted," changes which can be realized only "by the transfer of the organized forces of society, viz. the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves."26 And, as I have noted above, reuniting workers with the means of production involves much more than instituting workers� control at the level of the firm; it also requires establishing democratic control of the whole process of economic regulation of society.

The "making ... labourers into their own capitalist" line appears fully in "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production," in Capital III, which frames cooperatives as something more advanced than the factory system from which they sprouted, but nevertheless still a transitional form.

# ? Sep 24, 2021 05:17

Ruzihm: Aug 11, 2010; Group up and push mid, proletariat!

Aeolius posted:

I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind:

The "making ... labourers into their own capitalist" line appears fully in "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production," in Capital III, which frames cooperatives as something more advanced than the factory system from which they sprouted, but nevertheless still a transitional form.

thanks chum

# ? Sep 24, 2021 23:49

Ruzihm: Aug 11, 2010; Group up and push mid, proletariat!

Aeolius posted:

I got you; dug through some old posts to find an excerpt from David McNally's Against the Market that immediately came to mind:

The "making ... labourers into their own capitalist" line appears fully in "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production," in Capital III, which frames cooperatives as something more advanced than the factory system from which they sprouted, but nevertheless still a transitional form.

Just happened to run into this video that touches on the topic. I think we covered it well here but I think the video is worth a share anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMdgD1qnbQw

# ? Nov 9, 2021 04:07

Barrel Cactaur: Oct 6, 2021

I just thought of the phrase autoerotic exploitation and now I can't stop laughing at the libertarians.

# ? Dec 22, 2021 18:18

eSporks: Jun 10, 2011

Wrong thread

# ? Dec 22, 2021 19:12

droll: Jan 9, 2020; by Azathoth

Does anyone have some good writeups they can link thst might break down the Ukraine situation using Marxist analysis but maybe a bit simpler for newbie dummies like me?

# ? Feb 24, 2022 09:36

Harold Fjord: Jan 3, 2004

The Wealthy are fighting about who gets to exploit particular persons and materials.

# ? Feb 24, 2022 16:53

Nebrilos: Oct 9, 2012

It seems unfair to me that when the wealthy fight amongst each other, it is the commoners who bleed and die. Someone should do something.

# ? Feb 25, 2022 03:30

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

Harold Fjord posted:

The Wealthy are fighting about who gets to exploit particular persons and materials.

which wealthy? putin is a super billionaire but the president of ukraine seems to be "owner of a used car lot" upper middle class. It seems like an invasion, not two equally matched foes being used as pawns under capitalism.

# ? Feb 25, 2022 13:25

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

which wealthy? putin is a super billionaire but the president of ukraine seems to be "owner of a used car lot" upper middle class. It seems like an invasion, not two equally matched foes being used as pawns under capitalism.

I think the "other wealthy" here juxtaposed against Russia is the West

# ? Feb 25, 2022 14:37

Harold Fjord: Jan 3, 2004

Small time capitalists underpaying their car salesmen are still capitalists. But yes I was generally referring to broader global capitalists vs Russian capitalists and who gets to profit from the extraction of minerals. Either way it's not gonna be the Ukrainians who do the extracting that profit

# ? Feb 25, 2022 14:58

02-6611-0142-1: Sep 30, 2004

I wonder what value the sanctions on Russia will have. I assume they will make life even more miserable for the Russian working class, and not have much effect on the richest. The elections are so rigged that there's no way to democratically remove Putin, militaries seem to always veer really far right these days so I assume there's no chance of a military coup, modern military technology is so overwhelming now that a "people's uprising" probably isn't possible anymore, etc.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 09:56

Failed Imagineer: Sep 22, 2018

There's no chance of a military coup motivated by a leftist ideology, but there's a reasonably high chance of a military coup now that their whole economy has been set on fire and thrown in the toilet

# ? Mar 2, 2022 10:17

Owlofcreamcheese: May 22, 2005; Can't post for 9 years!; Buglord

02-6611-0142-1 posted:

I wonder what value the sanctions on Russia will have. I assume they will make life even more miserable for the Russian working class, and not have much effect on the richest. The elections are so rigged that there's no way to democratically remove Putin, militaries seem to always veer really far right these days so I assume there's no chance of a military coup, modern military technology is so overwhelming now that a "people's uprising" probably isn't possible anymore, etc.

�Sanctions have no effect on rich people� always feels like it�s partially rich people propaganda

# ? Mar 2, 2022 12:24

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Exploration is ill-advised.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

�Sanctions have no effect on rich people� always feels like it�s partially rich people propaganda

It's really not. The sanctions that countries are willing to do have no effect on rich people. Under capitalism, the only real crime is loving with rich people.

Like I said; if you wanna seize the property of Russian oligarchs, half of London's skyline would be nationalised.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 14:50

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# ? Apr 29, 2024 14:39

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Would that it were so.

# ? Mar 2, 2022 17:06

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Hate Your Boss: Marxism, Capitalism, Socialism, Anarchy and the Left

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