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By Eamonor
#14803565
I feel like one of the main problems we keep on running into with these debates is that I don't think (in a similar vein to the argument someone made near the beginning of the thread). That you can classify Capitalism as a single political and belief system that is followed in the same way throughout history.
The Marxists in this thread seem to be saying, though correct me if I am wrong, that Capitalism is responsible for everything from Feudalism and Serfdom, to Imperialism and the Industrial revolution.
The problem with this world view of seeming to view every not explicitly Communist system of government as directly the result of "Capitalism". Is that it gives me the impression that the Marxists view human nature itself as Capitalist. And if you see almost every horror in the world as the responsibility of Capitalism then you logically have to view every good thing in the world as the responsibility of Capitalism as well.
#14803578
Capitalism is a specific mode of production. It is not feudalism.

The development of capitalism was, in fact, good. However, things in the world change the things that capitalism changed exasperated the contradictions that existed within capitalism itself. In attempting to reconcile these issues there are more problems that develop.

Marxism is nothing more than the radical notion that things in the world can and do change. We study how it changes is all.

The focus of this thread, thus far, has been the attempt to demonstrate that there are issues within capitalism (just as there are in any system). From here, presumably, we can diagnose the problems and see how they change and then come up with an analysis. This is really all Marxism is.

This far, we have not reached a place where the proponent of capitalism can admit that his preferred system is not perfect.
By Decky
#14803605
That you can classify Capitalism as a single political and belief system that is followed in the same way throughout history.
The Marxists in this thread seem to be saying, though correct me if I am wrong, that Capitalism is responsible for everything from Feudalism and Serfdom, to Imperialism and the Industrial revolution.


You are totally wrong.

Capitalism is the system that replaced Feudalism. How could capitalism be responsible for the system that preceded it? :eh:

You are inventing stories about Marxism and fighting your imagined "Marxist" position instead of critiquing anything a Marxist has ever said.

Same as 90% of what right wingers do when talking about "Marxism."
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By Rugoz
#14803641
The Immortal Goon wrote:The development of capitalism was, in fact, good. However, things in the world change the things that capitalism changed exasperated the contradictions that existed within capitalism itself. In attempting to reconcile these issues there are more problems that develop.


What are the contradictions within capitalism?
#14803698
In the most basic sense, the most apparent one from my perspective is that creating enough—even an excess—is not an acceptable amount to make to stay viable.

This was something that Thomas Harrington proposed initially. He went through the mechanics of how a worker at a shoe factory needed to make, say, fifty shoes in order to afford one pair. After he shoed himself and his family, there were too many shoes to know what to do with. The same thing occurred with the money made from selling the shoes where it became abstract and needed to be made into foreign investment in order to manifest, but continued to abstract itself over and over again. The profits and the physical creating, in Harrington's model, were perpetuating abstractions that had to be forced to manifest—often brutally—stemming from a "problem," in that everybody had enough shoes.

But, though Marx was aware of Harrington, he streamlined this and got to the heart of it a little bit better.

In determining how this same issues existed in feudalism, Marx concluded:

Marx wrote:The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same from the standpoint of its main conditions — due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.

So much is evident with respect to labour rent, the simplest and most primitive form of rent: Rent is here the primeval form of surplus-labour and coincides with it. But this identity of surplus-value with unpaid labour of others need not be analysed here because it still exists in its visible, palpable form, since the labour of the direct producer for himself is still separated in space and time from his labour for the landlord and the latter appears directly in the brutal form of enforced labour for a third person. In the same way the "attribute" possessed by the soil to produce rent is here reduced to a tangibly open secret, for the disposition to furnish rent here also includes human labour-power bound to the soil, and the property relation which compels the owner of labour-power to drive it on and activate it beyond such measure as is required to satisfy his own indispensable needs. Rent consists directly in the appropriation of this surplus expenditure of labour-power by the landlord; for the direct producer pays him no additional rent. Here, where surplus-value and rent are not only identical but where surplus-value has the tangible form of surplus-labour, the natural conditions or limits of rent, being those of surplus-value in general, are plainly clear. The direct producer must 1) possess enough labour-power, and 2) the natural conditions of his labour, above all the soil cultivated by him, must be productive enough, in a word, the natural productivity of his labour must be big enough to give him the possibility of retaining some surplus-labour over and above that required for the satisfaction of his own indispensable needs. It is not this possibility which creates the rent, but rather compulsion which turns this possibility into reality. But the possibility itself is conditioned by subjective and objective natural circumstances. And here too lies nothing at all mysterious. Should labour-power be minute, and the natural conditions of labour scanty, then the surplus-labour is small, but in such a case so are the wants of the producers on the one hand and the relative number of exploiters of surplus-labour on the other, and finally so is the surplus-product, whereby this barely productive surplus-labour is realised for those few exploiting landowners.


This is all to say, that the issue with production, and how we produce things, creates the society in which we live.

But you weren't exactly looking for that.

Within capitalism in particular, you are looking at a mode of production that is both uncentralized, in that an individual can theoretically choose to do what he or she wishes with a company (for instance) but increasingly centralized in that in order to compete, more and more forces need to be kept tightly in control in an increasingly centralized way. The need to innovate, to create, to use certain freedoms absent in feudalism are nullified by the economic expansion and need to continue growing. Google famously adopted for itself the motto, "Don't be evil." Assuming we can say that they were a couple of guys in a garage, this has changed to a multi-national conglomerate where their headquarters are located in tax havens (in Ireland, actually, where the state through its own set of contradictions is forced to defend its right not to tax Google against its own financial interests); that uses a variety of front companies from all over the world (Alphabet) that creates further companies to feed a centralized need; to the point that a certain almost totalitarian culture under the guise of freedom (stay at work all day and we'll add a ping-pong table) becomes increasingly obvious and apparent.

Here centralization and freedom come to an increasing point of conflict.

Speaking of technology, the workforce must become increasingly mechanized if it is to stay competitive. So Ford invented the assembly line; the assembly line was replaced by robots; the workers that bought the cars can not afford the cars. Other markets open up in order to sell the cars to the workers that cannot afford. The workers, now out of work, need to find other jobs. Having been specialized in, say, fender assembly, they become less valuable to Google (or wherever) as their workers (let's say in 1997) are specialized.

As Google begins to expand, it no longer wants specialized workers in the same way that Ford does not. Now there are phone banks and guides to use on the phones that make up the majority of Google employees (I am using this as a basic example, not as an iron truth) and so unspecialized labour becomes increasingly valuable for these jobs. The more skill the worker has, in short, the less valuable he or she is as businesses become increasingly specialized while at the same time demanding less specialization.

Expanding out upon this, there is a violent viability within the market as to what is being produced and not produced. Most famously, this is why controls over what can and should be grown have been put into place. If blueberries sell well, it is to the benefit of the farmer to get rid of his wheat and grow blueberries. Then the market gluts, fluctuates, and collapses. This basic principle applies to a lot—As the economy booms, labor costs rise and profit margins are changed, thus causing a crash. Labor gets cheaper, industry recovers, and the cycle begins anew.

Labour itself brought in to do this work changes. Migration is a big issue. The capitalists need cheap labour, so they go abroad or silently encourage new labour to come into a market as it collapses collective value. There is then a struggle among labour, a deal signed, and in each case the migrant labour becomes more valuable. To exclude them means the illegal labour becomes more valuable; to expel them means the market they are from becomes more enticing to move to; to brutalize them means they will do the work for cheaper.

This exists on a global scale, all of these things. And all of them, and certainly more, are contradictions that have no particular solution within the confines of the capitalist system.

...If that makes sense. I'm late for work and wanted to get this out there.
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By Rugoz
#14805299
The Immortal Goon wrote:Within capitalism in particular, you are looking at a mode of production that is both uncentralized, in that an individual can theoretically choose to do what he or she wishes with a company (for instance) but increasingly centralized in that in order to compete, more and more forces need to be kept tightly in control in an increasingly centralized way. The need to innovate, to create, to use certain freedoms absent in feudalism are nullified by the economic expansion and need to continue growing. Google famously adopted for itself the motto, "Don't be evil." Assuming we can say that they were a couple of guys in a garage, this has changed to a multi-national conglomerate where their headquarters are located in tax havens (in Ireland, actually, where the state through its own set of contradictions is forced to defend its right not to tax Google against its own financial interests); that uses a variety of front companies from all over the world (Alphabet) that creates further companies to feed a centralized need; to the point that a certain almost totalitarian culture under the guise of freedom (stay at work all day and we'll add a ping-pong table) becomes increasingly obvious and apparent.

Here centralization and freedom come to an increasing point of conflict.


Not sure what you're hinting at. Are you saying that market concentration under capitalism inevitably increases? This is not the case empirically. How is the need to innovate nullified by economic expansion? Explain.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Speaking of technology, the workforce must become increasingly mechanized if it is to stay competitive. So Ford invented the assembly line; the assembly line was replaced by robots; the workers that bought the cars can not afford the cars. Other markets open up in order to sell the cars to the workers that cannot afford. The workers, now out of work, need to find other jobs. Having been specialized in, say, fender assembly, they become less valuable to Google (or wherever) as their workers (let's say in 1997) are specialized.


Productivity gains increase real consumption. Whether more or less cars are demanded depends on the price class of the car and the distributional effects of the productivity gains.

The Immortal Goon wrote:As Google begins to expand, it no longer wants specialized workers in the same way that Ford does not. Now there are phone banks and guides to use on the phones that make up the majority of Google employees (I am using this as a basic example, not as an iron truth) and so unspecialized labour becomes increasingly valuable for these jobs. The more skill the worker has, in short, the less valuable he or she is as businesses become increasingly specialized while at the same time demanding less specialization.


You equate skill with specialization. Fair enough. The idea that skill becomes less valuable is contrary to empirical evidence though, the college wage premium has increased significantly over the past decades. It was not always like that, for example skilled artisans were replaced by unskilled factory workers during the industrial revolution. If specialization is something else to you, explain how it is measured.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Expanding out upon this, there is a violent viability within the market as to what is being produced and not produced. Most famously, this is why controls over what can and should be grown have been put into place. If blueberries sell well, it is to the benefit of the farmer to get rid of his wheat and grow blueberries. Then the market gluts, fluctuates, and collapses. This basic principle applies to a lot—As the economy booms, labor costs rise and profit margins are changed, thus causing a crash. Labor gets cheaper, industry recovers, and the cycle begins anew.


I won't go into the business cycle here (I find your description inaccurate) but I don't see it as a contradiction within capitalism. After all capitalism has survived uncountable boom-bust cycles.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Labour itself brought in to do this work changes. Migration is a big issue. The capitalists need cheap labour, so they go abroad or silently encourage new labour to come into a market as it collapses collective value. There is then a struggle among labour, a deal signed, and in each case the migrant labour becomes more valuable. To exclude them means the illegal labour becomes more valuable; to expel them means the market they are from becomes more enticing to move to; to brutalize them means they will do the work for cheaper.


Immigration is no different from population growth. It depresses wages somewhat, but the effect is small, at least at current low levels of growth. Capitalism has existed in phases of zero population growth and phases of growth much higher than today. Again, where's the contradiction?
#14805514
I am afraid that I tried to touch on both the theoretical foundation of a contradiction, and find real examples, and succeeded at neither. As mentioned, I was on my way to work in my defence.

In dialectics, tension is probably a better word than contradiction, so far as English is concerned.

The premise rests upon the idea of dialectics itself, that is to say that everything is made of forces that are both sustaining and opposing themselves. The example I always use is that of a star: the gravity it creates is constantly pushing into it, and the fusion it creates is constantly pushing out. This is the contradiction for a star--that it wants to explode out, while also crushing in. Eventually one side will win out and the star will super nova or collapse in on itself.

Regardless, this is the same kind of tension (or contradiction) that Marx applied to history.

The examples I gave were to be similar examples.

The forces in capitalism for an entity to both simplify and complicate; to have both skilled and unskilled workers; to centralize and not centralize; to have a stable proletariat and an unstable proletariat at disposal.

I've oft said that Marxism is a form of analysis, and that's why people have trouble with it. And I think that's true. I've found there's a fundamental disconnect in a lot of places in attempting to explain it.

And here it was entirelly my fault in trying to be too specific which implied that Marx from on high had made a prediction. He did not, not like this anyway. It should be about we look at these problems and understand them within a historic context.

So you are completely right and valid to point out that, as a set of predictive absolutes, those aren't good examples.

As a type of tension created in various formats of capitalism, I don't think they're bad.

If it helps, is capitalism (or any system) absolutely perfect?

Presuming the answer is no, then one should not only identify the problems, but the cause of the problems within the system itself. That is, in essence, what we are doing.

"Ah," You may rightly point out, "Then why don't Marxists do that with the Soviet Union and the system it had?"

The reason there are a billion and two Marxist parties, however, is exactly because we do that as a compulsion. The Socialist Workers Revolution Party hates the Workers Socialist Revolutionary Party because the latter didn't put enough emphasis on the contradiction of tire production in the Soviet System.

I hope that serves to clarify instead of obscure. In the spirit of that, I'll refrain from leaving even more examples...
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By Wellsy
#14805690
This video might be complimentary to understanding what is meant by contradiction, i'd recommend the prior videos to better understand this one in isolation. Here's a brief summary of his view.

Particular around 1:40ish onwards uses the term contradiction.
Society exists in contradiction and what contradiction refers to here is the different pushes and pulls that are present in society that are resulting from all these different processes.

The processes being summarized as: nature, politics, economy, culture.
Things seen as encompassing all that in the world acts simultaneously in relation to one another and that when one considers any single thing, one can see the relationship between the thing and these different processes and its own impact upon them. He uses the same sort of figure to describe Marx as a product of nature, politics, economics and culture of his time but also as a figure, like anyone else who actively shapes and impacts those things. He gives a more concrete example that is good at illustrating how even when considering a 'primary' cause, that primary thing isn't independent of what might be considered as 'secondary' causes and that they underpin the capacity of the primary cause to have an impact on the point of interest/event/outcome. What you come back with is a really messy and complex view, which is arguably closer to reality than the A to B to C linear view.

To better understand it though, one would likely first have to familiarize ones self with an elaborate and messy sense of causality.
One where causality isn't if A -> B but and is more complex even than A <-> B because it's that everything is acting on everything at all times. That in reality things aren't truly isolated from one another and only in our abstractions where we bracket things off can they be as such. Things are both causes and effects and that there are tensions between these many causes and effects as they're constantly acting upon and being acted upon.

The A -> B type of causality may conceive of things as passive and thus only when something acts upon the other does the passive thing do something, the forces aren't seen as ever present, even though it often takes active ignoring of them and only upon their 'intrusion' are such forces sometimes acknowledged.
Equilibrium means the absence of any state of conflict, of any contradictions whatsoever, i.e. of forces which pull in different, contradictory directions. And where is this seen? You will never see such a state, even in the shop, even in the example of the scales. Even here equilibrium is only a passing result, an ephemeral effect, which is achieved at precisely that moment because two opposing forces are directed at each end of the lever: one presses upward, and the other presses downward.

In the Russian language, equilibrium means: 'A state of immobility, of rest, in which a body is under the influence of equal and opposing forces.' But according to the logic of Machism, the presence of opposing forces exerting pressure at one point (or on one body) is already a bad state of affairs. It resembles the state which is designated in Hegelian language as contradiction, as 'a body's state of discomfort', in which two opposing forces exert pressure, either squeezing the body from two opposite sides or tearing it in half.

Such an understanding of equilibrium is therefore unacceptable for the Machists. How could it possibly be that equilibrium turns out to be only the passing and quickly disappearing result of contradiction, the result of the action of opposites applied at one point, i.e. the very state which every living organism tries to escape as soon as possible, and by no means the state which it supposedly is striving to achieve.

Here then arises the concept of equilibrium which the Machists want to counterpose to contradiction, which is the presence of two opposing forces. It is a state in which two opposing forces have ceased to exist and therefore no longer squeeze or tear apart the ideal body (or the equally ideal point of their application). The forces have ceased to exist and have disappeared, but the state which they have established at a given point still remains. Equilibrium is a state of this kind. A state characterised by the absence of any opposing forces whatsoever, be they internal or external, physical or psychic.

In this form, equilibrium is the ideal. It is the ideal model of the cosmos and the psychics, the fundamental philosophical category of Machism, and the starting point of Machist arguments about the cosmos, about history, and about thinking. The aspiration to escape once and for all from all contradictions whatsoever from whatever kind of opposing forces, is the striving for equilibrium.


This if A -> B causality is straight forward enough with objects considered basic objects perhaps though some may still ignore the tension between opposing forces that cancel one another out. But it's less simple for the more complex phenomenon that don't so clearly have such singular causes as there are many causes simultaneously. Because nothing is really independent from any other thing, to change one thing is to change other things.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch02-s05.html
The concept of universal connection. Nothing in the world stands by itself. Every object is a link in an endless chain and is thus connected with all the other links. And this chain of the universe has never been broken; it unites all objects and processes in a single whole and thus has a universal character. We cannot move so much as our little finger without "disturbing" the whole universe. The life of the universe, its history lies in an infinite web of connections.

Whereas the interconnection of things is absolute, their independence is relative. In the sphere of non-organic nature there exist mechanical, physical and chemical connections, which presuppose interaction either through various fields or by means of direct contact. In a crystal, which is an ensemble of atoms, no individual atom can move in complete independence of the others. Its slightest shift has an effect on every other atom. The oscillations of particles in a solid body are, and can only be, collective. In living nature there exist more complex connections — the biological, which are expressed in various relations between and within species and also in their relations with the environment.

My understanding is that whilst things have changed, it may not be viewed as a significant change to disrupt certain things, but things can slowly build up and change in radical fashion. That if one thing were to be disrupted severely, other things suddenly become disrupted. It can also work in the other way where the existence and creation of somethings are reliant upon , things one could consider as the conditions of existence. Without certain things, the possibility of another thing would be impossible and in this way one can begin to see the interdependence between things, no single thing could exist in the manner that it does without the whole.
It's not clear to me but my impression is that there are certain relations that are quite pivotal to seeing how the change of one thing changes the other and aren't independent. So for example capitalism's immense productive capacities which should intuitively mean prosperity for all, actually results in the opposite where it increases poverty.
https://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/what_is_marxism.php
Paradoxically, the amount of surplus value is also the source of capitalism's greatest weakness. Because only part of their product is returned to them as wages, the workers cannot buy a large portion of the consumables that they produce. Under pressure from the constant growth of the total product, the capitalists periodically fail to find new markets to take up the slack. This leads to crises of "overproduction", capitalism's classic contradiction, in which people are forced to live on too little because they produce too much.

Through this manner of thought, one can begin to see that what might for others be entirely separate are intimately linked to one another.
#14805824
deepthinker wrote:Marx had some serious mistakes in his theories and it was shown even before attemtps of realisaion of them.


Yes but mistakes can be fixed. Capitalism too has problems (poverty, inequality, hunger), but do people reject it? No. In fact, Socialism's mistakes can be more easily fixed while Capitalism's mistakes cannot.
By Senter
#14806190
Rugoz wrote:What are the contradictions within capitalism?

I will mention two for now.

1) capitalism is "sold" to us as a system that relies brilliantly on competition to provide the best product at the lowest price. Competition is said to be indispensable in the beneficial functioning of capitalism. And yet as soon as any new business opens its doors it immediately sets to work to eliminate competitors and competition.

2) Capitalism seeks to maximize profit and one way to accomplish that is to reduce costs of production as much as possible. This includes an effort to obtain the cheapest labor. Capitalist will only pay the lowest price it can to get and keep the labor it needs. And yet capitalism depends on its workers being able to buy the products that labor produces. And right now we have a problem with demand being inadequate to consume all that businesses can produce because people's real incomes have been flat for 40 years while capitalist have been raking it in.
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By Rugoz
#14807867
Senter wrote:I will mention two for now.

1) capitalism is "sold" to us as a system that relies brilliantly on competition to provide the best product at the lowest price. Competition is said to be indispensable in the beneficial functioning of capitalism. And yet as soon as any new business opens its doors it immediately sets to work to eliminate competitors and competition.

2) Capitalism seeks to maximize profit and one way to accomplish that is to reduce costs of production as much as possible. This includes an effort to obtain the cheapest labor. Capitalist will only pay the lowest price it can to get and keep the labor it needs. And yet capitalism depends on its workers being able to buy the products that labor produces. And right now we have a problem with demand being inadequate to consume all that businesses can produce because people's real incomes have been flat for 40 years while capitalist have been raking it in.


1) I assume you are referring to the process of creative destruction. Schumpeter believed big monopolistic corporations would ultimately dominate the economy and socialism was therefore inevitable. Well, it hasn't happened and there's no theoretical foundation for it either. In fact at this point it is pretty much established that competition and innovation form an inverted U-relationship.

2) The gross saving rate of the US economy, meaning the share of income (labor + capital income) that is being saved and invested instead of consumed, has been shrinking for decades. It's now at 17.5%. Meaning 82.5% of total income is being consumed. The lack of aggregate demand (consumption + investment) and associated deflation is a short-run phenomena (at least in the US it has been, due to reasonable macroeconomic policy).

The fundamental problem with Marxism, as far as I can tell, is the subsistence theory of wages, which is utter nonsense. To be fair, other classical economists believed it too and in the first part of the 19th century it wasn't unreasonable to believe it. Marx was very much a product of his time and that's ok. The problem is the ridiculous political cult that has formed around his thought.
#14807986
Rugoz wrote:The fundamental problem with Marxism, as far as I can tell, is the subsistence theory of wages, which is utter nonsense.


You are not the first to point this out, even among Marxists this gets argued about.

And Marx and Engels in their writings seem to both ways about this as he always adds a qualification to such statements:

Now what does political economy call a fair day's wages and a fair day's work? Simply the rate of wages and the length and intensity of a day's work which are determined by competition of employer and employed in the open market. And what are they, when thus determined?

Engels wrote:A fair day's wages, under normal conditions, is the sum required to procure to the labourer the means of existence necessary, according to the standard of life of his station and country' to keep himself in working order and to propagate his race. The actual rate of wages, with the fluctuations of trade, may be sometimes above, sometimes below this rate; but, under fair conditions, that rate ought to be the average of all oscillations.


Marx wrote:The worker need not necessarily gain when the capitalist does, but he necessarily loses when the latter loses. Thus, the worker does not gain if the capitalist keeps the market price above the natural price by virtue of some manufacturing or trading secret, or by virtue of monopoly or the favorable situation of his land.

Furthermore, the prices of labour are much more constant than the prices of provisions. Often they stand in inverse proportion. In a dear year wages fall on account of the decrease in demand, but rise on account of the increase in the prices of provisions – and thus balance. In any case, a number of workers are left without bread. In cheap years wages rise on account of the rise in demand, but decrease on account of the fall in the prices of provisions – and thus balance.

Another respect in which the worker is at a disadvantage:

The labour prices of the various kinds of workers show much wider differences than the profits in the various branches in which capital is applied. In labour all the natural, spiritual, and social variety of individual activity is manifested and is variously rewarded, whilst dead capital always keeps the same pace and is indifferent to real individual activity.

...Political economy considers labour in the abstract as a thing; labour is a commodity. If the price is high, then the commodity is in great demand; if the price is low, then the commodity is in great supply: the price of labour as a commodity must fall lower and lower. (Buret, op. cit.) This is made inevitable partly by the competition between capitalist and worker, partly by the competition amongst the workers...But even by the principles of political economy it is no commodity, for it is not the “free result of a free transaction.” [op. cit.] The present economic regime


Marx wrote:Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages.

A house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain, or but a very insignificant one; and however high it may shoot up in the course of civilization, if the neighboring palace rises in equal or even in greater measure, the occupant of the relatively little house will always find himself more uncomfortable, more dissatisfied, more cramped within his four walls.

An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.


These careful qualifications are important because Marx isn't working strictly from the position of Ricardo or Malthus. Typical for his time, he is going beyond the field of economics and applying economics to everything.

In My own experience, it was Connolly that explained Marx best in this particular regard:

Connolly wrote:wages are not the only factor in the cost of production, and an increase iii wages can be and generally is compensated for at the expense of the other items in the capitalist's account. He either cheapens the raw material, speeds up and makes more productive the machinery, or introduces new labour saving devices. This brings me to what I consider the most astonishing mistake of all in the reasoning of my critics. It is the assumption underlying their argument that the worker is exploited as a consumer. It is one merit of Marx to have effectually demonstrated that exploitation takes place in the workshop and affects the workman as a producer, not as a consumer. If the argument of DeLeon and my other critics is right, then the cheapening of commodities is a boon to the working class, and we were all wrong when we preached, as we have done for years, that low prices would mean low wages.

...when Marx said the worker could not get more than the value of his labour he did not base his statement, upon the increase of prices he has just denied he did not base it upon the truth of a statement he had just proven to be an error nor, upon the occurrence of a phenomenon he has just demonstrated did not occur. The reason why the worker cannot get more than the value of his labour I have just explained to you, and to allow you to judge which explanation is that of Marx, I will quote to you the resolutions which Marx gave at the end of his lecture as the summing up of his arguments.

Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.

Secondly. The general tendency of capitalist production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages.

Now to my mind, these words are so plain' so unequivocal that nothing short of carelessness or perversity can explain such a misconstruing of them as my critics have treated us to.


This probably loses something in the way I've edited it as it's Connolly arguing with other Marxists about this topic. But to my mind it's clear:

Unlike Malthus or Ricardo, Marx is looking at wages through an extremely long lens. Wages, production, the place that the economy holds in the world, all affect a social situation which exists because of the physical reality of the market. Unlike Malthus or Ricardo, this wider world has substance that must be taken into account.

While the general incentive is for lower wages, and in a long term this will become a reality (witness now compared to the prime working years of the Boomers), these other factors affect the mechanics of what a loss of wages looks likes and means in the shorter term. It can, in fact, mean an increase in wages and lifestyle. However, since (again) broader society is affected by the economics, the satisfaction that these things bring is relative instead of absolute. And, of course, the long term trend, sometimes over generations, continues.
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By Rugoz
#14808330
Engels wrote:A fair day's wages, under normal conditions, is the sum required to procure to the labourer the means of existence necessary, according to the standard of life of his station and country' to keep himself in working order and to propagate his race. The actual rate of wages, with the fluctuations of trade, may be sometimes above, sometimes below this rate; but, under fair conditions, that rate ought to be the average of all oscillations.


The subsistence theory of wages claims that the capitalist will pay the workers just as much as necessary to keep them healthy enough to work and to reproduce. It assumes workers use their entire income for their own survival and the survival of their offspring. This is Malthusianism. In reality population growth hasn't kept up with capital accumulation and productivity growth and consequently wages have increased far far above subsistence level (1).

Now to Engels' "according to the standard of life of his nation". It presumes that some outside force is preventing the capitalist from reducing wages to subsistence. This could be the government setting a minimum wage and providing a minimal level of social assistance, thereby increasing the reservation wage of the workers (the wage below which workers are not willing to work). Clearly in such a scenario all wages would have to be at the minimum wage level, since the capitalist has the power to push them far below the minimum, namely towards subsistence. Again, nowhere near reality.

Marx wrote:Let us suppose the most favorable case: if productive capital grows, the demand for labour grows. It therefore increases the price of labour-power, wages.


If labor is assumed to be a commodity as Marx does (a reasonable approximation when looking at the great scheme of things), then obviously wages will grow in response to capital growth. (Edit: corrected)

Marx wrote:An appreciable rise in wages presupposes a rapid growth of productive capital. Rapid growth of productive capital calls forth just as rapid a growth of wealth, of luxury, of social needs and social pleasures. Therefore, although the pleasures of the labourer have increased, the social gratification which they afford has fallen in comparison with the increased pleasures of the capitalist, which are inaccessible to the worker, in comparison with the stage of development of society in general. Our wants and pleasures have their origin in society; we therefore measure them in relation to society; we do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification. Since they are of a social nature, they are of a relative nature.


What Marx assumes here is that capitalists gain more from capital accumulation respectively productivity growth (2) than the workers. In reality the income shares of labor and capital have stayed remarkably constant. In fact stable factor shares were long seen as a "stylized fact" of economic growth. Now in recent decades the labor share has dropped somewhat, but one could write a book about that so I stop here for the moment.

(1) There are economic growth models which try to endogenize population growth. They try to explain the drop in fertility rate with the increased cost of education due to skill-biased technology change for example. Now I personally consider those models to be nonsense, however even in those models the family incomes raise far above of what is necessary to pay for subsistence + education.
(2) Note the distinction between capital accumulation and productivity growth is important. The former is a relatively short term process than converges towards a stable rate of return on capital.
User avatar
By ingliz
#14808336
the capitalist has the power to push them far below the minimum, namely towards subsistence.

The capitalist has the power and uses it.

the government setting a minimum wage

In the UK, the minimum hourly wage is not a living wage.

nowhere near reality.

Zero-hours contracts?

Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 20, Time-Wages wrote:In previous chapters we saw the destructive consequences of over-work; here we find the sources of the sufferings that result to the labourer from his insufficient employment. If the hour’s wage is fixed in such a way that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s or a week’s wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the labourer, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the hour-wage, or the unit of measurement of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio of the daily value of labour-power to the working-day of a given number of hours, it naturally loses all meaning as soon as the working-day ceases to contain a definite number of hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid labour is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the labour a certain quantity of surplus-labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the moment, make the most enormous overwork alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work


:)

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