dead gay comedy forums posted:

this is a good moment to refresh about this:

that argument is sorta praxeologist (the concrete airplane thing), I've seen it before around that type of thinking. It satisfies a certain rationalist mindset by cargo culting a bit of materialism, I guess? But it betrays the poster's ignorance about value theory immediately. Money per unit of mass is one of the instances of the water/diamond paradox, but transforming that into an argument of efficiency requires first defining what said efficiency is about, because the only way that concept as posted above can be understood in proper value theory is to make it (efficiency) a measurement from a physical quantitative

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I wonder if you could formulate some sort of Marxist quantitative unit of technology that relates input mass, the caloric value of human labor and then some sort of use value in like equivalent-labor calories against mc^2

dead gay comedy forums posted:

re: caloric value of human labor, it's important to remember that the result of generation of use-value can become invaluable because of meaning/significance. Like, it's important to understand that Marx elaborates exchange-value and use-value in relation to capitalism and capital. This is to say that we can measure the process of creation of a work of art or great labor of science in purely physical terms, but if we were to reproduce the same conditions as much as possible, we would still have wildly different outcomes. Subjectivity comes into play here.

That's part of why there is always going to be a social factor of what constitutes value

Zodium posted:

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

reading rec? never heard of this. I'm just bullshitting in here but if someone actually ran this down in some form I'd be extremely interested to read about it

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

reading rec? never heard of this. I'm just bullshitting in here but if someone actually ran this down in some form I'd be extremely interested to read about it

Aeolius posted:

You're in luck, here's a whole old thread I bookmarked that's super interesting.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3482774

Zodium posted:

Aeolius posted:

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I wonder if you could formulate some sort of Marxist quantitative unit of technology that relates input mass, the caloric value of human labor and then some sort of use value in like equivalent-labor calories against mc^2

Ferrinus posted:

dollars per unit mass is actually a great way to illustrate the value created by labor specifically. like hmm a block of steel is worth so and so much, but a watch made of a portion of that steel weighs less but costs more! what could have happened...

dead gay comedy forums posted:

yuuuup

like, a gram of iphone is more than a gram of suv because…

fart simpson posted:

what would you expect to get out of caloric value of human labor over just labor time? people broadly need a similar amount of calories per day to stay alive and healthy and it doesnt really change all that much for adults, like way less than 1 order of magnitude even if youre talking about being sedentary vs manual labor. example: the usda recommends adult men on average to eat 2500 calories per day, or 3000 calories per day if you do heavy vigorous daily exercise

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I want to keep my units in energy so you could have a lower (some infinitesimal of human input like button pushing or thought-directing) and upper (mc^2) bounds so you could say something like my process coverts X% of raw material inputs into work at a rate of whatever to one calorie of human input, from which I could decide how technologically efficient or advanced or whatever it is

I have no real reason for this beyond me thinking its kind of cool

dead gay comedy forums posted:

got you fam

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

yeah, for this particular metric I'm only evaluating at the point of implementation, so your human labor-energy input would be the calories expended in using the tool or process vs. not doing that. If I wanted to evaluate my nailgun vs my hammer the comparison between them would be the degree to which they expend human energy over just standing around doing nothing during evaluation. If I burn 100kcal/hr sitting on my rear end, but 1600 with a sledgehammer and 800 if I used a jackhammer I can isolate the tool-labor-energy of the work.

this obviously doesn't incorporate the Marxist understanding of labor in relation to the actual human worker, but it might also be useful to use it as a jumping-off point for a wholistic or even ecological understanding of a technological society, if you could quantify the entire productive chain in this way, to make evaluations where, say, a technological apparatus might be extremely labor-energy efficient at the point of the work but not for the system as a whole. The labor-calories saved from an extremely useful hammer might not be worth it if it necessitates a new or different labor-intensive step in the productive chain, even if the material inputs are the same.
I think you could also create higher-level metrics like projected labor-energy per laborer, where processes that might be more labor calorie efficient at the point of work could result in more caloric expenditure to the worker because it's unsafe or non ergonomic or something.

I think what I'm trying to get at is a way to understand technological efficiency that is better divorced the commodity form and less so from the actual physical labor and raw materials

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

Raw ingredients that make a human versus said materials arranged as a human.

mawarannahr posted:

energy fetishism

mycomancy posted:

See, I think time is both more a practical and more accurate unit of labor, as time seems to be the "limiting reagent" in production.

The Voice of Labor posted:

I get the desire for quantification but energy's indifferent to whether it's used for good, for bad or simply wasted. the unit and the metric picked for quantification should be ones that further the values you're trying to promote. in the way that a petrodollar and gold before promoted colonialism, colonialist values, the commie unit of productive forces should promote equality and advancement

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

I wonder if you could develop some kind of horsepower-like standardized unit of labor time and do a straight conversion. One workerlaborhour is equivalent to however many joules or whatever

But yeah, I think you're (and fart simpson are) right in the thing that anyone would care about would be "does it reduce time" as a measure of technology over "is it physically costly", in relation to the worker. Who cares if pushing the button only takes a fiftieth of a calorie if I have to do it for eight hours a day.

I agree but I will note that I'm a dumb guy and haven't been able to get there yet. I think in the most general sense the answer would have to be in a projection up to a system where you have axes for the good stuff you want and the optimal point for the technological metric would sit at (or demark a range or whatever) of the highest grade of ecological health -- like the actual physical health of the biosphere, but also the workers therein, the maximalization of the work energy/time they can expend on non-productive purposes, etc etc. You could build a kind of non-demonic profit curve.

Dongicus posted:

has anyone seen this https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3438093 ?

fart simpson posted:

you’re talking about central planning with constraints. if you had central planning software or something you could add in energy or fossil fuel constraints or whatever alongside labor time and resources or whatever

Halser posted:

Being bald is praxis

Halser posted:

Being bald is praxis

Halser posted:

Being bald is praxis

mark immune posted:

it’s not a bald spot
it’s a solar panel
for a Marxism machine

Aeolius posted:

You're in luck, here's a whole old thread I bookmarked that's super interesting.

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3482774

I think there's something in this that connects very well to Marx's "sensuous human activity" as razor, and to dialectical materialism's primary emphasis on temporality, motion and becoming. That said, phil. of mind is broadly outside my wheelhouse.

Son of Thunderbeast posted:

Commodity fetishism came up in a conversation last night and i wanted to double check my understanding/the example i gave. I brought up the brain geniouses who protest companies going "woke" by filming themselves destroying the company's products that they already paid for and own (shoes, keurig, etc), as though destroying the commodity itself had any effect outside of the plain fact that they were destroying their own personal property.

I contrasted this with e.g. destroying a shipment of shoes before they get to the store, or even before they leave the factory, or somehow preventing the materials from being assembled in the first place, all of which would have an actual material effect on the target of their ire.

quote:

A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it is capable of satisfying human wants, or from the point that those properties are the product of human labour.

quote:

But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas

quote:

A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labour. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities.

quote:

Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it.[28] Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.

quote:

The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight and action of the producers. To them, their own social action takes the form of the action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them.

quote:

The determination of the magnitude of value by labour time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative values of commodities. Its discovery, while removing all appearance of mere accidentality from the determination of the magnitude of the values of products, yet in no way alters the mode in which that determination takes place [...]

[...] It is, however, just this ultimate money form of the world of commodities that actually conceals, instead of disclosing, the social character of private labour, and the social relations between the individual producers. When I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen, because it is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots compare those articles with linen, or, what is the same thing, with gold or silver, as the universal equivalent, they express the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society in the same absurd form.

Mandel Brotset posted:

what’s the thread about? need to get plat, can’t even see the title

dead gay comedy forums posted:

-- CAPITAL, VOL 1
-- PART ONE: COMMODITIES AND MONEY
-- CHAPTER ONE: COMMODITIES
-- SECTION 4 -- THE FETISHISM OF COMMODITIES AND THE SECRET THEREOF