[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)

Pf. Hikikomoriarty: Feb 15, 2003; RO YNSHO; Slippery Tilde

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.

agreed

imo this is the key to Jevons paradox, all actually occuring economic activity must be thermodynamically favored, else it would not occur

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Pf. Hikikomoriarty: Feb 15, 2003; RO YNSHO; Slippery Tilde

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Which also ties to how the labor theory of value is a massive intellectual enterprise that we honestly just finished the basic levels for

which ties with this: the cool far-out-there Marxist conceptualists (whose work is more akin to sci-fi than theorycraft) propose that the definite solution to the material value question is energy, as it is an universal and absolute physical quantitative. It's definitely possible to calculate all energy costs in input/output for economic activity and thus have pricing and whatnot, so currency can be anchored in direct allotments of it. The neat thing about that is that allows (iirc) the best appreciation of use-value for anything into a practical reference that can also be exchange-value, so nothing is actually "useless", it just requires labor to be made into something else

free energy really

and this is why fossil fuels make our current absurd economic system possible

and we are hitting interesting times as they get depleted

# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 03:17

Pf. Hikikomoriarty: Feb 15, 2003; RO YNSHO; Slippery Tilde

Pentecoastal Elites posted:

The tendency of profit to fall is due to the inevitability of profit ultimately trending towards zero because of capital accumulation. "Profit" isn't a thing created ex nihilo due to industry, it is a quantification of wealth transfer: any behavior that generates profit moves wealth (from whatever source) to whatever entity collects the profit. As capital continues to accumulate, the only profit growth happens further up the chain and more and more exclusively in the domains of near, and then actual, monopolistic enterprises, and then finally within that strata until all capital has been accumulated in a kind of systemic heat death and all profit is zero. It is probably materially impossible to get to that terminal point before revolution or some other system collapse state, but the profit trend is the visible part of this process actually being carried out.

The shuffling around of wealth can happen in a million different ways that represent localized high profit periods and activities, but the tendency of profits to ultimately collapse is due to, and a reflection of, the tendency of capital to ultimately accumulate. It is, specifically, the profit motive that determines all actions within capitalism.

this is a major point to keep in mind with the trpf

in the short term you can always have some improvement that increases profits

but today's profits are tomorrows investments and those investments require returns, tending to drive the rate of profit down

# ¿ May 14, 2024 17:41

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