mycomancy posted:

Has BillsPhoenix finally hosed back off to Reddit or D&D or whatever lib hole he slimed out of? What a bunch of tedious bullshit that dude spewed, all y'all are saints for tolerating that guy and his "effort" to "educate" himself.

Orange Devil posted:

Hey. Hey you. Go read some Marx.

BillsPhoenix posted:

Not calling you out, just wanting to note I'm not the only poster here that doesn't find that question crystal clear.

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Outside of the Austrian school, everybody understands that market policy has to be determined by the state. So these mathy guys go: "well, for a optimal market, the state can organize conditions to create an equal distribution of profits, leading into zero net profit in the whole market..." and then they go holy poo poo.

Can you guess what happened there?

gradenko_2000 posted:

Al! posted:

they always love to illustrate how evil china is by showing almost spotlessly clean, well lit and organized factory floors. but look at how samey the workstations look!!!! everyones in identical ppe!!!

gradenko_2000 posted:

I appreciate this

Capital Vol 1 posted:

However then productive power may vary, the same labour,
exercised during equal periods of time, always yields equal amounts of value. But it will yield, during equal periods of time, different quantities of values in use; more, if the productive power
rise, fewer, if it fall. The same change in productive power, which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and, in consequence, the quantity of use values produced by that labour, will diminish the
total value of this increased quantity of use values, provided such change shorten the total labour time necessary for their production; and vice versâ

Raskolnikov38 posted:

its the exchange-value marx is talking about there. if it takes a whole working day to make a coat and then productivity rises so that a coat takes half a day, the amount of labor contained in each coat falls along with its exchange-value in proportion. on the other hand your material wealth in use-values has doubled even if the exchange-value of each coat has fallen by half

BillsPhoenix posted:

Hubris height, you're getting a lot of dumbass replies.

By Definition: 1 hour of labor = 1 hour of labor.
1 hour work making a coat = 1 hour work making a coca cola.
This applies to all labor, so 1 hour of Joe Biden working as president = 1 hour working to make a coat. Literally the same value.
1 hour of any labor = 1 hour of any other type of labor.

From there it's math - 1 hour of labor divided by # of products made.
1 hour / 1 coat = 1 (baseline productivity use value)
1 hour / 2 coats = .5 (double productivity, half use value)
1 hour / .5 coats = 2 (half productivity, double use value)


An over simplified look at capitalism is roughly opposite. 1 can of coca cola = 1 can of coca cola.

This is useful for capitalism vs Marxism comparison, but capitalism is not just flipping the math, it's 1 product = 1 product, instead of 1 hour = 1 hour.


Ready for my probe professor.

Orange Devil posted:

And also if you think about it from like, a grand strategy game player's perspective, your society has a specific, finite amount of labour power to spend. So spending it on any one thing brings with it the opportunity cost of not being able to spend it on anything else. If 10% of your labour force is producing coats, they're not buildings houses and schools, or producing medicine, etc.

Which is why while improvements in productive output per labour unit might degrade the exchange-value of any one item of said commodity, it increases the overall wealth of the society as you now either have more of said commodity or can create the same number of commodities using less labour, meaning you free up labour to do something else.

Ofcourse in capitalism somehow that increased overall wealth isn't quite enjoyed by all members of said society equally. Very curious. Wonder how that happens, maybe Karl M. has something to say about that later on.

fart simpson posted:

maybe you can think of it kinda like this, b/c imo all of this makes more intuitive sense at a higher level like macroeconomics. im going to oversimplify but you can get the idea:

the total amount of "value" that a society can produce is relatively fixed; it increases by increasing the size of your work force. now, thinking of that, imagine theres some new technique that allows people to make twice as many coats in the same amount of time and all the coat factories use the new technique. if you still have the same number of people employed in coatmaking, and theyre still putting in 8 hour days making coats, then the total amount of value produced by the coat industry has not changed, even though you have twice as many coats entering the market. what it means is that each coat contains half the amount of labor as they did previously, and so the value of any one coat is half as much as before

Capital Vol 1 posted:

One of the measures that we apply to commodities as material substances, as use values, will serve to illustrate this point. A sugar-loaf being a body, is heavy, and therefore has weight: but we can neither see nor touch this weight. We then take various pieces of iron, whose weight has been determined beforehand. The iron, as iron, is no more the form of manifestation of weight, than is the sugar-loaf. Nevertheless, in order to express the sugar-loaf as so much weight, we put it into a weight-relation with the iron. In this relation, the iron officiates as a body representing nothing but weight. A certain quantity of iron therefore serves as the measure of the weight of the sugar, and represents, in relation to the sugar-loaf, weight embodied, the form of manifestation of weight. This part is played by the iron only within this relation, into which the sugar or any other body, whose weight has to be determined, enters with the iron. Were they not both heavy, they could not enter into this relation, and the one could therefore not serve as the expression of the
weight of the other. When we throw both into the scales, we see in reality, that as weight they are both the same, and that, therefore, when taken in proper proportions, they have the same weight. Just as the substance iron, as a measure of weight, represents in relation to the sugar-loaf weight alone, so, in our expression of value, the material object, coat, in relation to the linen, represents value alone.

Here, however, the analogy ceases. The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat, in the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value.

Son of Sorrow posted:

What if the coat was made by a chud, huh? What's Marx got to say to that?

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Show some respect! You're talking to the theorist behind the anti-coat and un-condensing gas!

dead gay comedy forums posted:

really nice summary, thanks for sharing!

Ferrinus posted:

a while ago i wrote a kind of informal for-dummies rundown of the law of value and how it leads to capitalist profits. it appeared in a short-lived blog that mostly discussed communist or communist-friendly organizing initiatives in advance of the dsa's 2021 convention. i'm gonna repost the first half of my article here, and maybe the second half about how profit actually works later on

DJJIB-DJDCT posted:

Buck Wildman posted:

I'm reading

Chapter 8, Capital posted:

From this we may judge of the absurdity of J. B. Say, who pretends to account for surplus-value (Interest, Profit, Rent), by the “services productifs” which the means of production, soil, instruments, and raw material, render in the labour-process by means of their use-values. Mr. Wm. Roscher who seldom loses an occasion of registering, in black and white, ingenious apologetic fancies, records the following specimen: - “J. B. Say (Traité, t. 1, ch. 4) very truly remarks: the value produced by an oil mill, after deduction of all costs, is something new, something quite different from the labour by which the oil mill itself was erected.” (l.c., p. 82, note.) Very true, Mr. Professor! the oil produced by the oil mill is indeed something very different from the labour expended in constructing the mill! By value, Mr. Roscher understands such stuff as “oil,” because oil has value, notwithstanding that “Nature” produces petroleum, though relatively “in small quantities,” a fact to which he seems to refer in his further observation: “It (Nature) produces scarcely any exchange-value.” Mr. Roscher’s “Nature” and the exchange-value it produces are rather like the foolish virgin who admitted indeed that she had had a child, but “it was such a little one.” This “savant sérieux” in continuation remarks: “Ricardo’s school is in the habit of including capital as accumulated labour under the head of labour. This is unskilful work, because, indeed, the owner of capital, after all, does something more than the merely creating and preserving of the same: namely, the abstention from the enjoyment of it, for which he demands, e.g., interest.” (l.c.) How very “skilful” is this “anatomico-physiological method” of Political Economy, which, “indeed,” converts a mere desire “after all” into a source of value

Al! posted:

i put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Just to be clear, you mean chapter 3 of part 1? If so, the major point of interest is that money enters the universe of commodities, which allows to talk about their circulation. If you have seen C-M-C around in Marxist discussion, it's in reference to that.

What is important to realize here is how money is the consequence (and not the premise) of labor-value relations first, in which allows all other commodities to have their labor value in a common social measure through it, which is price. Marx then establishes why gold becomes money and describes why it characterizes a special relation, then it talks about how money works in the circulation of commodities.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

No work out your brain. Working through complex sentence structure like this will make everything else a breeze.

You are Steven Seagal in Hard to Kill. You've been in a coma. Train yourself up. Get stronger.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

Marx’s writing style will eventually click with you and your reading pace will pick up dramatically

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]

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:

mawarannahr posted:

At the beginning there was only Hegel. Marx cut his balls off. They fell into the ocean and became Lenin and Stalin. The rest is history.

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

In antiquity, temples were the storehouses of money, but not stacked as coins. The precious metals were made into statues, some simple and mass produced, some as ornate showpieces. This is how value was stored as a hoard. The Parthenon was like this. The great statue of Athena was designed to be broken down again.

When war broke out, coins were needed to satisfy the new labor demands, such as to pay rowers for the fleet. They melted the gold statues and minted coin. Without the hoard, there would be no way to satisfy this need without reducing the commodities in circulation or increasing the velocity of money through financial engineering.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:

I am beholden to the burger god.