BillsPhoenix posted:

Ok so... I'm not really sure there's consensus on the inflating an items price.

I think one hand we have - its impossible, from a use/exchange value standpoint. You literally can't add value by making up a higher price.

But we have numbers involved, and Marx does use these arguments to critique capitalism.

In capitalism, you can, and we commonly see, sellers mark up a price just because. An extreme example is Lockheed adding $100m to jet prices.

Can I say that when Lockheed marks up the price 100, no new value is created, no additional surplus labor is exploited, the $100 is a paper theft by Lockheed from the buyer?

BillsPhoenix posted:

Past few years in the US, many different food manufacturers have artificially increased their pricing because they're greedy. There's implicit collision and evidence of explicit collusion to allow this.

And they're raking in more money. I'm avoiding the terms profit and value here intentionally.

But it's happening, for real.

What would Marx call this?

Orange Devil posted:

Yeah for all the hubbub about refugees and Muslims and brown people coming to Replace Us, or whatever, the actual mass influx of labour used to crush the domestic working class in Western Europe came and continues to come from Eastern Europe through Schengen and the EU. In that sense Brexit made a lot more sense as a response than giving Frontex carte blanche to turn the Med into a graveyard.

It's still a stupid response because it doesn't do anything about the root cause, which is that capital is flat out refusing to pay wages sufficient to replicate your lifestyle, so if you are Western European and not part of the elite your material position vis-a-vis your parents is going to decline, and you can already predict that your children will have it worse still. And the cause of that ofcourse is loving fundamental to capitalism as a system, so the only solution is revolution.


Edit:
You gotta see the EU's attempt to bring in Ukraine in this light as well. If anything the racism of the electorate puts a break on capital's designs to import foreign labour. This is partially remedied by all kinds of benefits for foreign "highly skilled" workers. Like in NL for example they receive a special income tax exemption on the first 30% of their income, which means companies hiring these types of workers can get away with paying their foreign workers less (cus their net wages end up higher anyway) and thus love importing them. And because they are high skilled and being paid decently, even the explicitly racist parties don't mind the import of this labour, even if they are Indian or whatever. It also means Dutch workers get paid those same wages for the same jobs but end up with less money in their pockets (yet competing with their foreign colleagues for the same housing, good luck). After the elections a few months ago it looked like this was about to be abolished, but the ASML CEO cried in some newspapers a couple weeks ago and now this is being reversed plus ASML is getting about 2.5 billion in subsidies. Current proposals are to pay for that 2.5 billion by increasing taxes on home owners or lowering the amount at which the wealth tax kicks in. Ie. all of the cost will fall squarely on the Dutch middle class, to subsidize both ASML directly, and subsidize companies like ASML to drive high skilled wages down.


It's also very convenient that Ukrainian refugees were immediately allowed to work once they got here, as opposed to all other refugees. Once Ukraine dries up as a source and Russia puts it out of the EU's reach, it's going to be very interesting to see where capital will turn to next. If the liberals in Turkey win I wouldn't be surprised if suddenly Turkey's accession to the EU talks start up again. Though that's going to create so much backlash because of how much hatred has been built up towards Muslims and brown people these last decades.

Ferrinus posted:

but to reiterate, a lot of loving around does go into setting prices, and does amount to a de facto theft from one party by the other (and this can happen in both directions). the important thing is that this happens on top of regular capitalist profits, which, as marx shows, exist even if we assume strictly fair exchange between all participants

quote:

17. Note by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in the Russian edition. — In his letter of November 28, 1878, to N. F. Danielson (Nikolai-on) Marx proposed that this sentence be corrected to read as follows: “And, as a matter of fact, the value of each single yard is but the materialised form of a part of the social labour expended on the whole number of yards.” An analogous correction was made in a copy of the second German edition of the first volume of “Capital” belonging to Marx; however, not in his handwriting.

quote:

And as a matter of fact, the value also of each single yard is but the materialised form of the same definite and socially fixed quantity of homogeneous human labour. [17]

tristeham posted:

i know someone who makes bags for hermes. she makes barely above the minimum wage.

hubris.height posted:

I'm curious on the difference noted by this footnote. i read the before and after and I don't really see why it requires a note at all. Is this a matter of some controversy and if so,what over?

tristeham posted:

i know someone who makes bags for hermes. she makes barely above the minimum wage.

BillsPhoenix posted:

If you told a random American that price gouging wasn't possible...

That's what I'm trying to resolve here. I understand there is no possibility of manipulating value. But price fixing is very possible...

hubris.height posted:

I'm curious on the difference noted by this footnote. i read the before and after and I don't really see why it requires a note at all. Is this a matter of some controversy and if so,what over?

BillsPhoenix posted:

Or... Marx used use value and exchange value to point out increasing or decreasing a price has no impact on the value of a commodity.

Ferrinus posted:

the machine seller can't just charge $750 because he's "greedy". if greed was actually what made capitalism go, he could charge $800 or $1000 or whatever instead, right? one of my favorite jokes goes like this: a man is wandering an open air market, and finds a stall with a single seller and a sign that reads "ballpoint pens: $10,000". the man asks, why are you selling your pens for that much? the merchant responds, this way, i only have to sell one!

in fact if a machine retails for $750 (even if it specifically retails on the big markets that capitalists trade with each other in, not the petty markets in which workers buy individual apples or baskets), and its constituent raw materials cost $300, then turning the materials into a finished machine must require $450 of value-generating labor, i.e. 1.5x as much effort as mining and hauling and refining those materials in the first place. so if a capitalist just started with a team of laborers and the unbroken earth, it might take his laborers three months to find and mine and smelt all the iron they need as well as chop down all the timber and so on, and then four and a half months to hammer and shape and forge and saw that stuff into a finished machine ready for sale. since the capitalist instead already has a market to draw on, he could just buy three months' worth of stuff from that market, then have his workers go at it for four and a half months to transform those $300 materials into a $750 machine ready for sale

the trick is that (within the world of your example), those workers only need $200 worth of food, clothes, and lodgings to live and work for 4.5 months. no one's going to hire them for more than $44.4.../mo because that's the prevailing wage. so they just end up doing a bunch of labor for their boss, gratis, because what else are they going to do? starve?

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

If you read. the loving. book. you will find that Marx eliminates that nonsense in order to examine how capitalism functions at the essential level. Supply and demand are always equal in Capital, because flux in Supply/Demand were invoked as explanations for why prices are this or that.

So Marx says, fine, what if Supply and Demand are equal? Does value cease to exist? No? Where does it come from, then?

Outright corruption, as in your example, does not enter into the basic analysis because it doesn't help to explain anything.

genericnick posted:

Idk, is this what primary contradictions are about? Because this whole thing is clearly one of those "the house always wins" topics. It's true that immigration absolves capitalists of the need to pay replacement level wages, but it's also true that the backlash against immigration makes it easier to compress wages for immigrants in particular, which in the end compresses all wages and also builds a repression apparatus that will always be turned against the working class in total.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Mandel Brotset posted:

Cuttlefush posted:

I wouldn't say it like that, but the answers to what I think you're asking are yes. volume 1 does discuss this and how things get averaged. it's all over, but chapter 6, 13, 19 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch13.htm, and https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm) most directly apply i think.

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

This isn't really a marxist theory question, but I don't know where else to ask so. What do people think about "all power to the soviets"? As in, the worker-soldier-peasant councils? As a result of the Civil War their self-organizing nature kind of got hollowed out and the USSR went on to lean more heavily into a top-down state beauracracy under the vanguard party.

Was that a good idea? Wouldn't it have been ideal to go back to real soviet power after the defeat of the Whites? Or would that have made the state too unstable?

The Alchemist posted:

After the defeat of the whites, came the loving nazies. After defeat of the nazies, came United States of America and cold war. Before Cold War could have been won, reactionary elements had already grabbed the power.
I think Stalin just died at the worst possible moment, and had he lived longer and had he himself carried on decentralizing the power to soviets e.g. councils, then yeah it may have been better

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

I think there was a period in the 20s-early 30s where it could have easily been done. I am asking whether that would have been a good idea or not, and whether that's a good form of government in general or not.

The Alchemist posted:

Its not good when there are external threats, but its good for peace and prosperity times

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

The problems it's supposed to solve are worker alienation from government and excessive beurocratism. There is a reason Lenin once called the soviets "the purest form of democracy ever to exist".

I am asking the people of this thread, which are usually familiar with scholarship and stuff, if this is something that's been studied/discussed.

AFancyQuestionMark posted:

The problems it's supposed to solve are worker alienation from government and excessive beurocratism. There is a reason Lenin once called the soviets "the purest form of democracy ever to exist".

I am asking the people of this thread, which are usually familiar with scholarship and stuff, if this is something that's been studied/discussed.

Mandel Brotset posted:

yah one of the cool things about marx is he managed to prove “the economy” is a real, material thing with thermodynamic properties like socially necessary labor time and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. like air molecules in a room, once I realized capitalism was an analogous object, a lot of the variations in pay or price suddenly made a lot more sense. like of course there are local variations, that’s the whole basis of statistical properties.

Brain Candy posted:

If you look at say Cuba, they are incredibly democratic in practice

I don't think you can underestimate the effect of a brutal civil war egged on by the west plus a nazi invasion of the west (also cultured by the west), the surprising thing was that the Soviet society didn't collapse immediately. usually that's what happens when a society suddenly loses 13% of the population. and don't forget the selection bias here, everyone who would be willing to do hard and boring leadership in the army was possibly going to be faced with times where they could die to save other people. who do think was left after all this?

large parts of the organically grown leadership was in graves. those people are still important in a democratic system, you want and desire people wiling to do organizational work as a specialized task, just like any other scut work. and the organizational experience the next generation was getting was the army which they previously tried and failed to make democratic and effective. so there could have been better outcomes, but the conditions were not at all favorable

BillsPhoenix posted:

And that's it. This all works logically, can scale down to a single person (Robinson Curisoe) or scale up up to a whole economy.

No form of value is unaccounted for.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

The bureaucratic quagmire was also a consequence of the immediate realities of the Revolution, the Intervention and Civil War (and the general revolutionary conflicts). The Bolsheviks were handling existential risks that didn't afford the possibility for a thorough demolition and reconstruction of the tsarist state: much of the greater Soviet government was a takeover of that existing structure and prosecuting officials and nobles that were reactionary or historically adversarial to the popular interest, while offering the possibility to the immediately less problematic people to nominally join the party or just doing civil service.

In places where the soviets managed to hold out and establish local government, they were the spearhead of the land conflicts by going out and fighting aristocrats and kulaks well over the Civil War, for example. So far from what I have read and came across, there's very little notion in our general view from the present of the difficulties of direct executive capacity the revolutionary government actually had: the impression given in most of the reading is that once Lenin sits in the chair, it is like a strategy game event and the buttons are available to do whatever he wanted. The reality of the circumstances was that the Soviet government had to battle from its major centers of Petrograd and Moscow into the countryside to link up with places that formed soviets while building new and properly soviet structures into the bureaucracy. SOVNARKOM was a monumental success in that regard, given the adversities faced, as it created a central executive authority that was able to do incredible feats of public administration, military organization and coordination, revolutionary construction and of the new political reality from the moment it popped up, but that was sustained by War Communism and that had a clear political threshold of tolerance. The new political structures would require a comprehensive build-up of the CPSU, to form a new roster for the political administration and move out the remainder of the tsarist state - it seems to me that Lenin was very likely to succeed in that task, but he got shot and then had the strokes...

BillsPhoenix posted:

Raw materials have an exchange value equal to the value generating labor used to extract and get the raw materials to a marketplace.

The labor consists of both paid to the worker and surplus value exploited from the worker.

Better?

BillsPhoenix posted:

Back to marx.

I think we've at a bit of alignment on sources of value finally?

Use value - we've covered this a lot, does an item have a use. No $ assigned, it either has a use or doesn't.

Labor value - value generating labor. Surplus labor is the value not paid to the worker and exploited by the capitalist benefactor. No other form of labor value exists. This can be assigned $ both for surplus and what the worker receives.

Exchange value. Items that have a use value have an exchange value that equals the labor value (as defined above) and raw material value.

And that's it. This all works logically, can scale down to a single person (Robinson Curisoe) or scale up up to a whole economy.

No form of value is unaccounted for.

Tempora Mutantur posted:

no. exchange value is inherently arbitrary. when one half of the exchange can opt to murder/threaten the other half, directly or indirectly, the value ceases to have any useful metric beyond navigating the systems of arbitrary exchange values (i.e. markets) maintained by the practitioner more willing and able to exert violence to enforce their arbitrarily set exchange values.

this is why the only sane way to run a society is focusing on the (also arbitrary) use value i.e. making sure people have what they need, full stop. exchange value can be used as markers for items beyond necessities, but again, purely arbitrary in its value, not something that can be meaningfully modeled outside of its usage within the system that sets said arbitrary exchange values.

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

What do you guys think of Henry George and his ideas?