A question for our Marxists - Page 15 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15173520
Wellsy wrote:That it is entirely owned by the worker doesn't necessarily distinguish it as a non-commodity, as workers may own commodities also, whether for consumption or some kind of exchange. And it most certainly is sold competitively because workers do compete for jobs, if someone gets a job, and I don't I lose out on that opportunity to earn that wage for that kind of work.


That labour theory of value cannot explain prices in a pure exchange economy. The production part is essential (needless to say it has severe limitations even then).

Of course other, almost as old theories, can, but I won't mention them because I would be crucified. :lol:

Wellsy wrote:Both wages and the value of labour-power are the object of conflict, but the powers of the combatants are ultimately subordinate to labour market conditions. The value of labour-power influences labour supply while past wages go to determine the value of labour-power.


Why should past wages determine the value of labour-power? In other words, how do they affect the (re)production of labor? That's what needs to be explained.

Wellsy wrote:Interesting you make the point of historically how machines available to be worked couldn't keep up with the number of people to labor


I said the opposite, fertility did not keep up with capital accumulation.

Wellsy wrote:, where it seems that we see how superfluous a lot of labor becomes soon as production is radically improved with machinery. There always being the defense that workers will simply find other jobs, but it is of course a progressive part of capitalism that automation takes over the more mundane of tasks.


You mean labor-saving innovations. But why would they affect wages negatively? Let's assume a capitalist introduces a new machine that produces twice the output for the same labor input (i.e. a process innovation). That capitalist will set the price slighty (to not say marginally :eek:) below the current price to capture the market and maximize his profits. He obviously has no intention to pay his workers more, but there will be other capitalists jealous of his fat profits. They will introduce the new machine as well and again set the price slightly below the current to capture the market and hence profit. That process continues until prices are cut in half and real wages have doubled.

Wellsy wrote:It is just of course a nasty effect that people can be put out of work en masse.


It might, though when demand is exhausted, capitalists will focus on product innovations instead. That's hard to do in some sectors, such as agriculture (an apple is an apple), hence employment in those sectors will shrink.
#15173534
@ckaihatsu
Inflation sparks concerns in financial markets


Is inflation not how the government plans to retire some of its debt?
#15173539
Drlee wrote:
@ckaihatsu

Is inflation not how the government plans to retire some of its debt?



I think this is a (right-wing-propagated) common misconception -- that governments *need* to balance their books as any company or individual may be obliged to do.

Government debt is basically the lender of last resort, if I recall correctly, and it's subject to the same market dynamics as any other financial vehicle, as we're currently seeing -- meaning that if there's no *demand* for it, then what good is it / what worth does it have:



The Fed is haunted by the prospect of a return of the conditions of March 2020, when markets froze, and the events of February 25 this year, when a tremor went through the financial system because 40 percent of a Treasury bond issue was not able to be sold.



https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... l-m18.html



The hazard isn't about all creditors suddenly calling in their debts, as would be the presumed concern for anyone who's deeply in debt -- for governments and corporations the hazard is no longer being able to issue *more* debt. Treasuries are dangerously near 'junk bond' status, meaning that they're perceived to be *so* risky, for defaulting, that no one *wants* that vehicle, even though it's the frickin' *U.S. government*, which is supposed to be the most stable thing there is.
#15173574
@ckaihatsu this that you wrote:

The hazard isn't about all creditors suddenly calling in their debts, as would be the presumed concern for anyone who's deeply in debt -- for governments and corporations the hazard is no longer being able to issue *more* debt. Treasuries are dangerously near 'junk bond' status, meaning that they're perceived to be *so* risky, for defaulting, that no one *wants* that vehicle, even though it's the frickin' *U.S. government*, which is supposed to be the most stable thing there is.


This is the elephant in the room right now. The US government's stability is being questioned. I think this is one of the big indicators of some serious problems down the road for the USA's position in the world.

I think there is a shift in how it is working.

if there is a massive default? You can shut the door on superpower status. If there is no confidence in the stability of the government to issue bonds? It is a big problem, Chris.
#15173576
Tainari88 wrote:
@ckaihatsu this that you wrote:



This is the elephant in the room right now. The US government's stability is being questioned. I think this is one of the big indicators of some serious problems down the road for the USA's position in the world.

I think there is a shift in how it is working.

if there is a massive default? You can shut the door on superpower status. If there is no confidence in the stability of the government to issue bonds? It is a big problem, Chris.



It's a big problem for the bourgeois capitalist financial *Ponzi scheme*, that is.

Please note that these periodic crises (2000, 2008-2009, 2020, and now 2021) are happening on increasingly *quicker* cycles (arguably), so I think it will be difficult to catch one's breath now before the next one is then upon us all over again.

This dynamic isn't limited to just the U.S., though -- it's a *capitalist economics* problem, since China happens to be highly overextended, with little in the way of prospects for returns on all of their overseas outlays. They're certainly ahead in the *geopolitical* arena, though, since the U.S. has squandered so much of its 'political capital' / goodwill with imperialist decimations of countries and millions in the Middle East in the 21st century. It's the post-Vietnam-War all over again, but *this time* with better overall productivity (ongoing exploitation of dirt-cheap Chinese labor), so that the balance sheets balance-out this time around.
#15173588
Tainari88 wrote:
I am sorry but cooking my food I will never let a robot do it. I think food has a certain vibration and only a good cook can do the job. Now cleaning the house? Yes, they can do laundry, make the beds, dust, sweep, mop the floor, scrub the toilet and bathroom floors and tiling and shower disinfection and wash the car, water the plants and polish everything and organize and put away things and toys and so on...make shopping lists, vacuum the curtains, wash the windows. A lot of that is fine. Won't allow cooking and or doing personal stuff. Nope. No way.

No technology for fake personal stuff. :lol: :lol:



Yeah, I draw the line at *sex* robots -- none of that stuff for me. At least not during the week.


= )


Actually, the tech promise here parallels the reasons for the collapse of the Roman Empire -- the existing empire superstructure has gotten so unwieldy, superfluous, and damaging that it's of no use to the average person whatsoever, anywhere in the world. Who needs wage labor when all households could simply retrench and become self-sufficient, and also luxurious, with free / amortized robotic "labor".



In short, the integrated economy of the [Roman] empire, based on slavery, gave way in the west to a new economy of localised, almost self contained rural units based on serfdom. Slavery did not pass away completely.

The use of slave labour persisted until around the year AD 1000 on some of the larger landholdings,99 where landowners, compelled by the decline of the towns to live on their estates, found it a very effective way to pump as much surplus as possible out of the cultivators. But it no longer provided the basis for sustaining a civilisation or an empire. The attempts to do so, with the brief reunification of the eastern and western empires under Justinian in the mid-6th century and the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne almost 250 years later, soon fell apart. The material base was just not strong enough to sustain such a superstructure.


Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 86
#15173643
This is the elephant in the room right now. The US government's stability is being questioned. I think this is one of the big indicators of some serious problems down the road for the USA's position in the world.

I think there is a shift in how it is working.

if there is a massive default? You can shut the door on superpower status. If there is no confidence in the stability of the government to issue bonds? It is a big problem, Chris.


I agree with you but allow me to offer a different take on it.

The given is this. Before WWII the USA was too large and far to well armed (citizens) to be invaded. Today we have a nuclear arsenal and weapons industries that allow the same relative military invulnerability. Indeed just like before WWII we have a large consumer society that can support protectionism and 'America first" plans.

So would the USA be better off if it dropped its attempts to be a geopolitical superpower? What does the US position as superpower mean anyway? We have a powerful military that may in some small way deter overzealous countries like Russia from adventurism. But my belief is that the EU can/has already done that.

The reason for our massive attempt at world domination, at least in my lifetime, was to thwart "communist" expansion. In other words to check Soviet and then Chinese ambitions to expand their systems. We have already won that war entirely. China and Russia are exactly what we wanted them to be from the start....capitalist fellow travelers. There is no longer a communist threat and the very idea that socialism is bad has been put to rest long ago.

So the US got embroiled in the Middle East because.....why did we do it again? Thwart the rise of nukes in the region? Well that failed. Now we are trying to extricate ourselves from there.

OK.

So if the US decided to stop playing on the world stage like the only superpower/policeman and instead decided to withdraw within it own borders then what goes wrong? Chinese capitalism continues to look for markets? We set out to impose capitalism on the word, succeeded and now we are worried about Chinese capitalism? We made it FFS. No. We are worried about Chinese competition in the business of the world. And in many ways we have already lost that war. Indeed it is a war we did not want to win anyway. Does anyone think we should try to compete with Chinese labor resources?

So I say the US will be better off if we turn inward. We can support US businesses, prohibit unfair trade practices that are depressing our industrial growth choose to compete on the world stage only when we can do it fair and square.

So my point is that I think the US should maintain a very robust military defense and limited expeditionary capability but to try to rule the world economically is a losing battle for us. What is China's worst nightmare? That their currency should become the world reserve currency. I can't imagine any country that should want that.
#15173650
Drlee wrote:
prohibit unfair trade practices



...And then we *nuke* 'em -- !

See, there's really no getting around that bourgeois nation-states, like the U.S. and China, for example, are going to inevitably be *competitive* within the context of capitalism, and that there's not really any *supra*-national entity that can transcend international friction and 'referee' fairly over it all.

I'll note that you didn't address the *sweatshop of the world* at all -- why should Chinese laborers continue to do all the gruntwork so that the rest of the world can have civilized things? There's that *class* issue that continues to go unaddressed.
#15173676
@ckaihatsu
...And then we *nuke* 'em -- !


:roll:

S
ee, there's really no getting around that bourgeois nation-states, like the U.S. and China, for example, are going to inevitably be *competitive* within the context of capitalism, and that there's not really any *supra*-national entity that can transcend international friction and 'referee' fairly over it all.


Never has been.

I'll note that you didn't address the *sweatshop of the world* at all -- why should Chinese laborers continue to do all the gruntwork so that the rest of the world can have civilized things? There's that *class* issue that continues to go unaddressed.


It has been addressed. It has been addressed from time immemorial. They do it until they get tired enough of it to take control of their lives; taking up arms if necessary, and free themselves.

But that was not my point. My point was that the correct behavior in the past and for the future is that first world nations like the US should not choose to challenge China's cheap labor. Let them stew in the problems it may ultimately cause. It is their creation. Not my problem.

@ckaihatsu Let me mention something that you may not know. I am a retired soldier. Nations do not contend with one another, soldiers do. It is upon us that the bad shit falls. We have to bleed for someone's political theory. So I oppose any course of action that the US might take that puts us in a military conflict anywhere (particularly China) for either competitive business advantage OR to "free" some guy who is simply not paid enough in someone's not so enlightened opinion.

People who use terms like "slave labor" or "exploited worker" when they mean to address low wages. If those low wages are enforced by government then there is only one thing for it......Pro tip. Whining and hyperbole are not it.
#15173678
Drlee wrote:
[usermention=59984]

@ckaihatsu[/usermention]

:roll:



Yeah, that was merely rhetorical.


Drlee wrote:
Never has been.



Okay, agreed, but remember that you said *this*:


Drlee wrote:
prohibit unfair trade practices that are depressing our industrial growth choose to compete on the world stage only when we can do it fair and square.



So I'll reiterate that to tout '[fair] trade practices' means to appeal to some kind of *supra*-national authority, one that could-and-would presumably *overrule* the 'unfair' nationalist entity, in the interests of international 'fairness'.

But at the same time you're acknowledging that there's *never* been such an international institution, and, by extension, there never *will* be, because nothing *transcends* the international stage (except for *class*, of course).


History, Macro-Micro -- simplified

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Drlee wrote:
It has been addressed. It has been addressed from time immemorial. They do it until they get tired enough of it to take control of their lives; taking up arms if necessary, and free themselves.

But that was not my point. My point was that the correct behavior in the past and for the future is that first world nations like the US should not choose to challenge China's cheap labor. Let them stew in the problems it may ultimately cause. It is their creation. Not my problem.



Do you realize that the U.S. simply *lost-out* to its industrial competition, Japan, and then China, and Korea, in the 1970s onward?

Also, Nixon made a deal with Mao, and that's why the U.S. enjoys hyper-exploited Chinese labor today *instead* of being a truly Third World deindustrialized country.


Drlee wrote:
@ckaihatsu Let me mention something that you may not know. I am a retired soldier. Nations do not contend with one another, soldiers do. It is upon us that the bad shit falls. We have to bleed for someone's political theory. So I oppose any course of action that the US might take that puts us in a military conflict anywhere (particularly China) for either competitive business advantage OR to "free" some guy who is simply not paid enough in someone's not so enlightened opinion.



Okay, noted, and I'm not a Stalinist, so I don't *advocate* militaristic imperialist competitions for this-or-that nation's dominance, on its own nationalist basis.

I pointedly *didn't* support the Hong Kong uprising because it was obviously chauvinist and wasn't about pan-Asian proletarian solidarity, as across to the workers of China.


Drlee wrote:
People who use terms like "slave labor" or "exploited worker" when they mean to address low wages. If those low wages are enforced by government then there is only one thing for it......Pro tip. Whining and hyperbole are not it.



It's not 'whining' or 'hyperbole' to plainly point out that low wages = exploitation, thanks to capitalism.
#15173685

China: from the Great Leap Forward to the market

China’s official image in the 1950s and early 1960s was of a land of smiling peasants and overjoyed workers, joint leader of the Communist world with the USSR, steadily moving towards a socialism of peace and plenty. It was an image carried in thousands of left wing papers across the world.

The US had its own rival image of China. It was of the biggest Red Menace of them all, a land of organised hate, a society in which hundreds of millions toiled mindlessly at the command of those at the top, even closer to the nightmare world of George Orwell’s 1984 than Russia. This image played a powerful role in US propaganda in support of the war in Vietnam. The US claimed that China was intent upon expanding its influence south and destroying freedom. If it succeeded in Vietnam the other countries of south east Asia would be next, falling like ‘dominoes’ until nowhere in the ‘free world’ was safe. Neither image accorded with the realities of life for the fifth or more of the world’s people who lived in China. US propaganda ignored the growing schism between Russia and China from at least the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s Russia had cut off aid and withdrawn thousands of advisers from China, and the two countries were denouncing each other’s policies at international meetings.

Official Chinese propaganda glossed over the class divisions in the country and the extreme hardship in which most of its people lived. On taking control of China’s great cities in 1949 the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army had followed a policy of uniting all classes, including a section of capitalists, behind a programme aimed at economic reconstruction. In the early 1950s this gave way to a programme of industrialisation, loosely modelled on that pursued by Stalin in Russia and likewise aimed at accomplishing what capitalism had done in the West. Many industries had been state-owned under the Kuomintang regime or been confiscated from their former Japanese owners. The state now took over most of the rest, but paid their old owners fixed dividends (so there were still millionaires in ‘Red’ China). The apparatus of state control was staffed, in the main, by members of the educated middle classes, with most of the officials of the Kuomintang period left in place.There was land reform in regions dominated by landlords, but the better-off peasants were left untouched. The condition of the mass of workers remained much as before.

These measures produced considerable economic growth—12 percent a year according to official figures for the years 1954-57. But this did not get anywhere near the official aim of catching the advanced industrial countries, and a section of the Chinese leadership around Mao Zedong began to fear that unless desperate steps were taken China would subside into being one more stagnating Third World country. In 1958, against the opposition of other leaders such as the president Liu Shoqi and Deng Xiaoping, they launched a ‘Great Leap Forward’ aimed at ultra-rapid industrialisation.

Heavy industry was to be made to grow much faster than before by every district setting out to make its own iron and steel. Millions of new industrial workers were to be fed by removing individual plots from the peasants and forcing people into huge ‘People’s Communes’. In 1958 and 1959 it seemed the ‘leap’ was being made successfully. The official industrial growth rate was almost 30 percent a year, and across the world enthusiasts for Chinese Communism hailed the ‘communes’ as the dawn of a new era. In 1960 reality struck home. China did not have the technical equipment to make the communes viable, and merely herding the peasants together could not overcome centuries-old traditions which set one family against another. Grain output dropped catastrophically and many millions died in famines. The new locally-based industries were of a low technical level, extremely inefficient and damaged the overall economy by using up resources. The Great Leap Forward turned into a disaster for which the mass of people paid a terrible price. Willpower alone could not overcome centuries of stagnation and the de-industrialisation caused by imperialism.

The leadership reacted by shunting Mao away from the levers of power and returning to a more measured approach towards industrialisation. But this policy was hardly a great success. Industrial output was lower in 1965 than in 1960. While the labour force grew by 15 million a year, the number of new jobs grew by only half a million, and the 23 million college graduates found it hard to find meaningful employment.291

As the problems accumulated, the group in the leadership around Mao Zedong once more felt that only urgent action could break the impasse. This time they believed they had found an agency to carry it through—the vast numbers of young people whose hopes were frustrated. In 1966 Mao and a coterie of supporters, including his wife Jiang Qing and defence minister Lin Biao, proclaimed the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

China, they said, was being held back by the ‘culture’ of those running the structures of the party and the country. These people had become soft and lazy. Such tendencies had already led Russia ‘down the capitalist road’ of de-Stalinisation, and they could drag China back to its old ‘Confucian’ ways. It was the task of youth to stop this by mass criticism of those obstructing Mao’s policies. The Mao group shut down all education institutions for six months and encouraged 11 million college and high school students to carry the criticism from one region to another on free rail transport.

The ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was in no sense proletarian and in no sense a revolution. The workers were expected to keep working while the students staged mass rallies and travelled the country. Indeed, part of the message of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was that workers should abandon ‘capitalistic’ worries like bonus rates and health and safety issues, since these were ‘economistic’, and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was sufficient motivation for anyone. At the same time the students were instructed not to interfere with the functioning of the military and police apparatus. This was a ‘revolution’ intended to avoid turning the state upside down!

The student ‘Red Guards’ were encouraged to unleash their frustrations not at institutions, but against individuals who were deemed to have shown insufficient revolutionary zeal. At the top this meant targeting those who had disagreed with Mao at the time of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others were forced from office. At the local level it meant scapegoating low level figures of minimal authority who were thought somehow to embody ‘old ways’—schoolteachers, writers, journalists, clerks or actors. The atmosphere of irrational persecution is conveyed vividly in the memoirs of former ‘Red Guard’ Jung Chang, in Wild Swans, in scenes in the film Farewell, My Concubine about an Beijing opera performer and victim of the Cultural Revolution, and in the novel about a group of intellectuals, Stones of the Wall, by Dai Houying.

But the Cultural Revolution was not just an irrational outburst. The frustrations which Mao exploited were real enough. And, because of this, Mao could not keep control of the movement he had initiated. Rival ‘Red Guard’ and ‘Red Rebel’ groups emerged in many towns and many institutions. Some were manipulated by local state and party apparatuses. But others began to attract young workers, to raise questions affecting the lives of the mass of people and, in Shanghai, to get involved in major strikes.

Mao now tried to stop the movement he had initiated only months before, and called upon Lin Biao’s army to restore order in each locality. It was a move which prompted some of the students to turn against the whole social system. A group in Hunan denounced ‘the rule of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie’. Others made criticisms which laid the ground for the ‘democracy wall’ movement of the 1970s.292 Decisive action by the army brought the ‘Red Guard’ movement to an end, aided by the faith the mass of students still had in Mao himself. Those who had begun to express their feelings through the movement, in however distorted a way, now paid a hard price. Millions were forcibly removed from the cities to undertake backbreaking work in remote rural areas—one estimate suggests one in ten of Shanghai’s population were sent out of the city.293

However, the end of mass participation in the Cultural Revolution was not the end of the turmoil in China. In 1970 Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, suddenly fled the country for Russia amid talk of a failed coup, only for his aircraft to crash close to the Soviet border. The early part of the 1970s saw central power concentrated in the hands of Zhou Enlai, who brought back the previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping as his designated heir. Mao’s wife and three collaborators (the ‘Gang of Four’) briefly regained control in 1974, purging Deng again and reverting to the language of the Cultural Revolution. Huge demonstrations to commemorate the death of Zhou Enlai showed how little support they had, and they were overthrown and imprisoned after Mao died in 1976.

Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the Little Red Book of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers hit targets in Vietnam than ever before, Mao greeted US president Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 572-576
#15173863
Wellsy wrote:Maybe you want to choose the example of someone directly renting out their home unmediated by the AirBnB app because AirBnB takes a cut of the work as a kind of digital platform middleman which does little of the actual work. So I would also emphasize that AirBnB is making money for what is pretty much advertising and bring consumers to those with places to stay rather than even outright owning such properties and providing the actual service.


Indeed, I wasn't referring to AirBnB (which is just an intermediary and advertiser, very much like posting an ad in a newspaper was back in the day) - I was referring to the property owner in this case.

Wellsy wrote:But in the more direct case, does one not act as a landlord even if its within the same property which you live?
Oddly enough, heard cases where someone tries this on the property of their landlord's and when found out, their rent goes up XD


You usually need to ask your landlord if subletting is allowed... Landlords often don't like it because they want to be in control on who lives in the property.

Wellsy wrote:And often the ideal of airbnb peeps is actually to have a distinct and separate property just like a landlord, but its of course smaller scale than having a hotel with a series of rooms depending on how big the property is.
And we would have to examine the dynamic in the sort of work the person running the airbnb is doing and the money made. Are they earning so much that they are more like a landlord or are they more breaking even when one considers how much they're busting their ass to maintain the place and provide clean sheets and all that.


Why would it make such a significant difference? Wouldn't a petite bourgeois still be bourgeois despite busting his ass running his business?

Wellsy wrote:The definition focuses on the ability of money to actually change into a great value through the process of first being an investment in certain commodities and back into money.
It focuses on the process in which capital actually realizes a profit and the essence of capitalism where the only investment is done in pursuit of profit, otherwise it's unclear how you constitute the money as capital as otherwise.
Can one imagine a capitalist not driven by such a fundamental pursuit? They would not stand to be a capitalist for long if not.
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/12641/33292_1.pdf?sequence=1


Also artworks are a rather unusual commodity because they are treated like other commodities but they only become as such because of the large scale commodity production of capitalism that they acquire such a price.
[URL]https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/on-labor-as-the-substance-of-value/[url]

In another thread I in fact mention how absurd the markets are on artworks.

Also Marx is distinguished in emphasizing that capital is a social relation and not necessarily a thing although it is experienced through things.

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/a.htm

But to outline this I would go down the route of some philosophy in understanding the problem of ideality which still confuses people even the philsoohpucally minded who tend to reduce materialism and idealism to that which is tangible and that which is subjective and a product of the mind even though many intangible things are very material as defined as existing independent of our consciousness.
And ideality itself is a product of social relations which end up as supresenous but objective qualities belonging to a thing but not universally necessary but because of the social relations.
For example Marx talks about a black man being a black man, but only within particular relations is he a slave.
So to is it the case that many objects we experience as commodities isn't a property of objects but social relations and it is this alienation that mystifies people and produces fetishism.

The best work detailing this is by Evald Ilyenkov: https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm


Why wouldn't acquiring skills through training or getting degrees be a form of capital accumulation in this view, if this is being done to achieve earnings? You can actually approach the decision of whether to get a degree (e.g. a masters) from a financial point of view, and I'm guessing plenty of people do (I did at least, it wasn't the only criterion but it was a major factor in the decision).

Wellsy wrote:See this is a issue I think we'll continue to have as you seem to want to make some things the same or indistinct from one another where as I think class relations are essential elements when considering capitalist production and that it is an issue in some economic theory that it tends to treat individuals in a similar fashion. We may go down the road of why such a methodology is ideological in ultimately conflating capitalist and workers as if they're simply individuals meeting in the market freely while entirely ignoring structural relations which constitute each class.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1g.htm

In fact, class often isn't used in the Marxian sense which leads to an arbitrary process of differentiation by income and so on.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch52.htm#:~:text=The%20owners%20merely%20of%20labour,the%20capitalist%20mode%20of%20production.

And this seems to apply to you're thinking, trying to see individuals as a split between classes but lacking the structural relation that is seen as Essential in Marxism and I would argue is objectively essential and not simply an artbiary selection of Marx but derived from a more concrete synthesized kind of analysis.
Reflecting not class but strata and thus the arbitrary quality of such a concept that doesn't properly understify the particular thing which constitutes the particulars of class.
https://www.sociology.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/cs14.pdf

So what you are perhaps focused on i s strata because not all workers are of the same standing due to income and such. But this doesn't undermine Marx's notion of class at all, it can compliment it but it is distinctly something else.
A case of Abstract universal vs concrete universal.


Not quite, in this case I'm trying to stick to something closer to how Marxians see class rather than simply a bunch of income strata. My point is that the same person can both be a worker and behave like a capitalist depending on the context, owing to how the labor markets have changed in the last few decades. After all, no one stops you from driving an Uber after work or renting a room of your house (or a second dwelling) to have some extra income. Likewise, making your career decisions is more sophisticated than it was in the 19th century and it is also easier and more common to switch employers than it used to be in the mid 20th century.

Class distinctions are just not as strong as they used to be.

Wellsy wrote:And is contract labor somehow essentially different to wage labor generally? That it exists doesn't pose some sort of contradiction to Marx. They still have to sell their labour to survive and as such are part of the working class.
Unless you're wanting to characterize something more like a tradesman who is more petty-bourgeoisie and runs his own company with a few apprentices.
But again, I'm not really seeing much on the face of the concept being an issue.


It is different because contract laborers have more freedom to decide how they work than wage workers do.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed, technological change in production is but a precondition to changing an economic structure. Do not forget that even the bourgeoisie waged war upon the aristoticracy the world over and that things didn't peacefully transition.
So while increased physical production through technological advancement is a precondition, it is insufficient in itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

The idea here being that communists don't seem to put their faith solely in technological development.
Although it is of course controversial how one would identify such a state of affairs.
http://caute.ru/am/text/dogstate.html


Do you think Marx only considered tangible commodities the source of value?
Marx definitely focuses on industrial production a lot but I don't think service industries somehow pose a problem to his examination of value which is based in the material world but isn't confined to physical objects.
I already touched upon the issue of someone who provides labor as a service and not a specific good for trade.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/value.htm


And it is indeed something which Marx praises a great deal about capitalism even while he detests its destruction of humanity, that it revolutionizes the production process, that technological advancement is an ongoinging and dynamic part of capitalism even while he sees it as being a significant part of causing economic crises in the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. The idea being that while the initial capitalist who develops a technology wins out a super-profit against competitors as they produce more efficiently but can sell at the same average price, thus taking value away from sluggish producers, overall machines do not create more value but only use-values.
The plus side is that it clearly reduces the need for as many people to labor in an industry as seen with agriculture, can feed more people with less workers. It is a sign of pushing back necessity in the scarcity of time and labor which is allocated to things.

See this is where we would of course disagree in that I don't think such changes around production are so seamless and easy. If anything one can see how some industries can be a fetter on development such as "green" technologies being suppressed by the old energy industries. There can be a great conflict between the force of production and social relations.

And it conflicts with the idea of acknowledging qualitative change upon reaching a quantitative limit, that things build up and change radically in quality that they become something new. This being the Communist tendency to emphasize conflict and dynamic change as opposed to a static equilibrium and harmony which is temporarily sustained.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positii.htm


Indeed, technological change is a necessary condition but I would also not say it's sufficient for such a change to take place. And yet... It's precisely technology what often introduces the disruption necessary to shake the system and make the leap to one that is more efficient.

As for how Marx saw the production of services, thanks for pointing that out. It's just that most examples mentioned in these discussions apply to the production of physical goods for the most part, and most of the terms used by Marx also lend themselves to think mostly in terms of physical production.

Wellsy wrote:Making wonder if you're switching to an individual level of abstraction where there are corrupt politicians who receive money for favors and things of this nature and not sure speaking of a government broadly making a profit in terms of investing money and making a return.
Because tax revenue if it is to have value comes from the productive parts of society and government often funds and subsidizes things that aren't profitable or aren't best run for a profit, in spite of the neoliberal tendency to privatize everything and run it out of a company under the notion that it's always superior to the bureaucracy of government.
And my impression is that governments try to run services as a minimal cost while a capitalist enterprise tries to achieve a profit, which marks them distinctly.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm

The government's revenue comes from taking a slice from capitalist' profits (and taxing workers from their wages), but it doesn't seem apparent that a government necessarily makes a profit itself in how they usually function.


Yeah, I'm taking a broader meaning of the term here. If you stick to the definition of "profit" a business would use, then you'd of course be right (except for some particular cases such as some state-owned enterprises).

Wellsy wrote:The point of labour-power is if it's a commodity, a wage provided to someone so that they can afford the necessities to exist and continue to go to work. There are all kinds of labor which aren't linked to labour-power for much of human history and to illustrate what is going on one needs to detail the situation in which people labor.
A slave didn't sell their labour-power, they themselves were property and the products of their labor automatically owned by someone else. A serf did not sell their labour-power, they had a clear division of working some set amount for their lord and the rest for themselves. They had their means of production on their land which they worked on and then did unpaid labor for the lord.
Where we can see a surplus, the particular relationship of production in capital is distinct from these two, where there historically is the framing that workers are paid for their labor but Marx argues that there isn't a contradiction in the equality of exchange and that workers are being robbed, rather they are paid in full for their capacity to work.

What I can speculate is that there something which are called 'wages' in a commune and a co-op, but does it replicate the same sort of relation as under the capitalist where they're being paid for their labour-power.
My suspicion is yes as they're receiving a set wage. Your effort to criticize the concept of exploitation here though is how one functions under capitalist production without capital personified within a human capitalist. But Marx's analysis isn't a criticism of any particular capitalist, but an analysis of capitalist production and the relations there of.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/marx-subject.htm

Capitalist's are no more in control of the economy than workers in the sense that they are reactive to it rather than directors of it. The issue is the system of production and this is where Marx is critical of those who pose communes and such even while retaining commodity production and exchange.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf

As such, if there is still the production of goods as commodities, then there is no disruption to the law of value
The focal point is that workers in the co-op while they might have some greater say in the management of the company, are still having to work just as hard, over and above the meeting of their own subsistence as the money or profit, over and above their necessary labor is to be reinvested in the company/co-op.
So while there may not be the personification of a particular person, the capitalist relations still prevail, they are still operating largely the same. And it is in fact the exchange of commodities that Marx is fixed on in explaining the degrdation of humans, not a Ricardian socialist notion that laborers are owed full payment for their labor. This being a point raised against any idea of injustice, Marx considers the gap between labor power and labor performed as just within the organization of capital even while he makes an appeal that capitalism is wrong from the standpoint of human flourishing.

In the case of the commune, things are less apparent because there would need to be a clearer sense of what the production is like. Are they any less exploited in the co-op though, I don't think so and I don't necessarily think the lack of it clearly going to the benefit of the specific capitalist undermines the concept.
And then I also wonder if what you're wanting is an abstract universal where you'll find something that you think contradicts Marx and say got you where his focus is on a particular case which may lead to explanatory power in other cases.
The idea being that Marx tries to find the essential concepts in their particularness which provides an avenue to explaining other things. This is a very metholdogically distinct approach from what is common to modern thinking because it tends to arbitrarily relate a universal concept that shares the feature of individual case, but Hegel shows that this is arbitrary and inadequate, it shows no logical necessity between the individual case and the concept leading to nominalism where people find such concepts unreal and only individual things 'real', even while our language reflects generalizations.


So in a nutshell you don't really disagree with my example? I'm asking because one problem with organizing production under a commune would indeed be that more productive members may be getting (or believe they are getting) less than what they are contributing to it. More generally, it would seem that there would be an incentive not to work "too hard" if living in a commune because there will be a point in which you will not benefit from it.

Wellsy wrote:Yeah, that seems to be what Unions and such did, it was insurance for workers.
Indeed, it can be better to simply make a service accessible rather than having to save up for the rainy day but of course, money is the permission to access things or not and if you can't risk not having money for somethings, people go to great length to try and stave off losing everything.


Indeed, it depends on the case.

Wellsy wrote:Hard for me to keep track but I don't necessarily see the two so combined as one was an example of some communal thing in Ireland and the latter was someones proposal of how to disrupt the law of value in the first stage and the incompatibility being a product of not the same ideas or proposals.
And if you've seen my interaction with Chaitscu you'll see that I have some reservations about their summary and only raise to to bring it into focus if it is something which to pursue.
Also, continuing my earlier emphasis, Marx is not a Ricadian socialist who advocates that workers be compenstated in full for their labor, as much as he advocates a radical change in production itself so as not to be based on commodities. I say this simply to remind that the focal point isn't to advocate full compensation necessarily but to disrupt relations of capitalist production.

But to continue my speculation, it seems the idea for the indirectly social labor link is that people should be compensated on the individual basis of how productive they are in terms of labor time, rather than based on a social average.
What stands out to me is that such differences in pay can occur in the workplace although not tied to productivity, a push against the idea that Marx advocated an equality of wages no matter what ones work was.
But I have to admit that I haven't gone done this path that far myself to see what sort of ideas people are proposing and hold skepticism to some, I rather pursue when I can an understanding of Marx's critique of the political economy as a pre-requsuite to speculating his idea of how the law of value is overcome. But that link is none the less interesting in it's attempt to offer an answer. Disstaisfying I know, but I cannot bullshit past the limits of what I've not dabbled in at least. My strength has mostly been in Marx's methodology than political economy as I've pursued it more along with understanding Psychology with Lev Vygotsky.


I see, although not aiming to fully compensate workers kind of undermines the criticism that the capitalist mode of production fails to... Fully compensate workers.

Wellsy wrote:If I remember the thread correctly, it's not simply just a matter of profit, but many are becoming more like your average worker, they're reaching productive limits for their population and many have to seek out work to help provide for their communities. So the idea of a self-sufficient community among the Amish is losing it's basis. And it is indeed profitable for those that are increasingly becoming similar to a capitalist or land owning class.
I wouldn't call wages profit.

I don't know why you think Marx's analysis doesn't apply to services and you seem to think only in terms fo tangible commodities because of the tendency to use industrial production examples but profit can be clearly made in services within the same framework of necessary labor vs surplus, being paid a wage but working more than the value needed to reproduce the worker's basic needs and so on.
My impression is that Marx's definitions only extend further beyond that of the political economists of his day based in critical analysis, that is posing the limitations of those thinkers. Which still holds relevance, except perhaps where there are changes like a focus on strata based in socioeconomic status as opposed to class. Or a the tendency to consider capital based on physical things instead of noting the social relations particular to capitalism, but this is a point of his critique in revealing it's historical temporarily against the idea that it's simply quantitative development from past production.

There is also the point to actually to consider what Marx's analysis of capital is about and the implications there of so as to avoid thinking it is a theory of everything under capitalism.
Which doesn't mean his work loses relevance but that a work has it's focus.
http://crisiscritique.org/political11/Andrew%20Kliman.pdf
One must first understand to see whether something left out is a critical problem or if it simply isn't within he focus.
To which we bth must admit great ignorance and as such limits on what we can claim is possible or not.
Because while some think of Marx as an economist, I don't really see him in the same intent as economists analysising such dynamics, the very intent of his work is different, and it does seem that Many want to put his work on the level of modern economics with it's particular concerns, which might complement or contradict some things but may not always fit either.
But my own concern I raise with your conflating that someone investing in a degree to enhance their labor power/wages, is the same as investing in a machine to produce and sell stuff is that you assess them as individuals abstracted from social relations of capitalist production.
It ends up treating synonymous things which might have very different structural relations like whether someone is a worker or a small business owner or even a capitalist (as with the use of profit for both wages and profit a capitalist). You would rid essential relations under capitalism as ti present it as a neutral thing without any class content but I think under a dubious means of abstracting.


I agree both are not literally the same thing, but they do share some essential traits (in particular, both include foregoing present consumption to be able to earn more in the future by becoming more productive - that is, the profit motive is relevant to both). One difference is that the capitalist is actually investing in a physical object, which of course has its own consequences (it can be resold, it can be expropriated, etc) and unless production is fully automated it also requires hiring labor to generate a profit (although it should be noted that for human capital, you would need to be hired, work under contract or start your own business to generate a profit too).

Still, I think the similarities are at least as relevant as the difference between them. Both for theoretical and practical reasons.

Wellsy wrote:For your original quote:

I would like to share a piece to emphasize how the ideality of value is objective, material, that is independent of individual consciousness but a product of social relations in the same way that a slave is only marked as a slave within certain relations.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm

It helps think about the objectivity a great deal because often things are treated as synonymous with concepts in ones head opposed to the empirical world around us with no mediation, stuck at best at the level of kant with a prior concepts inherited rather than developed through activity and learned with each new generations acculturation.

But what you're getting at is the concept of value, which is neither synonymous with use-value, or exchange value but is seen as a concept which underpins them as existing together in a commodity.
This is a contentious area as Marxs sense of value is not well understood despite how easily people like our selves talk about socially necessary labor and such.
But a start for why Marx considers value to be derived from labor, this might be a good introduction: https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/on-labor-as-the-substance-of-value/
But things aren't really straight forward to me around the exact relationship between labor and value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch12.htm

There is some sort of debate around the relation between labor, abstract labor and value.
I hope to look into it sometime or at least glance at some summaries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_value-form


Thanks for the response. So what you are saying, basically, is that while Marx makes the distinction between use and exchange values, in reality neither corresponds to the broader notion of "value" and that use values aren't all that important in practice. Am I correct?

ckaihatsu wrote:This is practically *anecdotal* -- like you 'heard', from a little birdie, that some companies are 'constant innovators'.

Also, 'constant innovation' isn't the goal of business -- much innovation is 'bleeding edge', meaning that being so 'cutting-edge' actually *backfires* and causes 'bleeding', such as the hemorrhaging of investment capital in whatever speculative tech venture didn't pan out.

The *point* of business is to make money, and the money to be made is in *finance* these days, and also in government bailout money, so the actual real-world economic activity of making tangible useful products for consumers isn't what it used to be -- hence the current *inflation* in the consumer markets that you've been pointing to, since consumers are increasingly chasing after a lesser number of thin-profit-margin real-economy goods producers -- non-financial.


Anecdotal? Have you heard about clusters of innovation?

Yes, of course business want to maximize profits. We all know that - and some use innovation to do that. There are different strategies to achieve this end, and innovation is one of them. What's your point?

ckaihatsu wrote:You're talking about a 'constant stream of innovation' in terms of *society* -- though I'd call it capitalist *incrementalism* myself -- and not in terms of each private enterprise.

Yes, for the individual producer it *is* more like a *gamble*, as to whether 'innovation' is also a good investment, or not.

You obviously don't realize that if an innovation is applied more widely by producers then that's *bad* for business, cutting against Okishio's triumphalism, though it's *good* for the consumer since prices fall due to overproduction / oversupply.


Why? They are becoming more productive, and if the stream is constant then the process will be repeating itself with the first adopters being able to get some temporary economic profits as a result.

Also, how do you explain things like leapfrogging otherwise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging

ckaihatsu wrote:Again, a non-zero positive *doesn't cut it* -- what matters is whether the *growth* of the economy's size is matching *population growth*, or not.


Which is why I posted per capita GDP.

ckaihatsu wrote:I'm not entertaining your academic speculation.


I'll take that as a no.

ckaihatsu wrote:Or hyper-exploited workers.


Why?
#15173951
Rugoz wrote:That labour theory of value cannot explain prices in a pure exchange economy. The production part is essential (needless to say it has severe limitations even then).

Of course other, almost as old theories, can, but I won't mention them because I would be crucified. :lol:

I do wonder how significant such a criticism is because 1. Marx analysis isn't a theory of everything under capitalism but about Capital and what he sees as essential to it.
http://crisiscritique.org/political11/Andrew%20Kliman.pdf
I think this seriously misconstrues what Capital is about. It is entitled Capital for a reason. It is not entitled Everything You Need to Know about What Takes Place within Capitalism, or even Everything You Need to Know about Capitalism. It focuses specifically on capital––the process in and through which value “self-expands,” or becomes a bigger amount of value. It is about how that self-expansion is produced, how it is reproduced (renewed and repeated), and how the whole process is reflected, imperfectly, in the conventional thinking and concepts of economists and business people.

This does not mean that Capital is reductive. There is a crucial difference between having a specific focus and being reductive. I don’t think Marx wrote or suggested anywhere that the process of value’s self-expansion is the only thing within capitalism that matters or that other processes can be reduced to it. It does affect a lot of other things, sometimes in crucial ways––and this is perhaps the main reason that a book on Capital is mistaken for an Everything About Capitalism book––but to recognize the interrelationships is not to reduce these other things to the self-expansion of value.

Of course, there is some sense in which any book with a specific focus “leaves out” or “overlooks” other things, but we don’t normally complain that a cookbook leaves out or overlooks instructions for changing the oil in your car or any analysis of international politics. The charge that Capital “fails” to discuss many aspects of capitalism and what takes place within it seems to me to be similarly inappropriate and unfair.

This sentiment as applied to the abstraction of a pure exchange economy needs to go further than simply stating that he doesn't necessarily perform such an analysis. So simply saying Huh, Marx doesn't account for this doesn't really mean much other than it could point to something which provides insight outside of his own analysis.

2. It can be useful to abstract certain things up to a point, if what one wishes to explain need only entail the assumption of consumers with certain resources in which to exchange that is fine.
However, whether such an abstraction is legitimate is of course based on what is being asked and answered, such that such a narrow focus might entirely leave out important things. Like how early neoclassical economists ignored the qualitative difference between commodities exchange via bartering or when money serves as the universal mediatary. Generalizing from a bartering example as if it was the same as an economy in which people trade money for commodities, conflates two different things and serves to obscure differences from one's analysis.
This being a significant point in the Marxist tradition that one begins with a simple empirical phenomenon that contains all the qualities of the more complex.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm#unit
This helps illustrate the idea well enough in its implications for analysis. If the basic unit does not in a sense contain the larger whole in it's qualities, than one closes off certain avenues of analysis and even creates false dilemmas if one actually recognizes such limitation.
[URL]https://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/words/ch01.htm[URL]
The first of these forms of analysis begins with the decomposition of the complex mental whole into its elements. This mode of analysis can be compared with a chemical analysis of water in which water is decomposed into hydrogen and oxygen. The essential feature of this form of analysis is that its products are of a different nature than the whole from which they were derived. The elements lack the characteristics inherent in the whole and they possess properties that it did not possess. When one approaches the problem of thinking and speech by decomposing it into its elements, one adopts the strategy of the man who resorts to the decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen in his search for a scientific explanation of the characteristics of water, its capacity to extinguish fire or its conformity to Archimedes law for example. This man will discover, to his chagrin, that hydrogen burns and oxygen sustains combustion. He will never succeed in explaining the characteristics of the whole by analysing the characteristics of its elements. Similarly, a psychology that decomposes verbal thinking into its elements in an attempt to explain its characteristics will search in vain for the unity that is characteristic of the whole. These characteristics are inherent in the phenomenon only as a unified whole. When the whole is analysed into its elements, these characteristics evaporate. In his attempt to reconstruct these characteristics, the investigator is left with no alternative but to search for external, mechanical forms of interaction between the elements.

For Marx, his basic unit of analysis is the commodity, which is the earliest part of Capital, which strikes one as odd because direct commodity exchange isn't that prevalent under capitalism as everything is pretty much mediated by money.
But one has to trace such things to show the real connection between things such that one can see the essential development of things.
This is precisely why Marx criticizes some as having one-sided abstractions, they focus on attributes which are thought to be inessential which plays an ideological role of naturalizing capitalist relations of production in focusing on that which is shared across history, thus its continuity but not what actually distinguishes it.
It's like how some people lack any sense of distinction for what is human and only define as a quantitatively more complex kind of ape.

So I don't know what to make of your characterization of a an emphasis on production as somehow a limiting factor as it is clearly a necessary presupposition of a lot of things. In fact, prior to commodities, it is in fact the basic premise of humans themselves.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
In the Grundrisse, Marx refers to these needs, “historic needs— needs created by production itself,” “needs which are themselves the offspring of social production and intercourse,” as “social needs”. Social needs, the “needs created by production itself,” have their basis in the natural needs towards which production was historically first directed and which must still at present continually be satisfied. As Marx writes in The German Ideology,

The first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, [is that humans] must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life24.

So production isn't something just specific to capitalism of course but is a general part of human existence, as part of what distinguishes us is our transformation of the environment to meet our needs.
Man is inseparable in his nature from the world which has as a whole has shaped and been shaped by in a reciprocal relation.

And our production of things these presume our consumption, except in the case where one has a surplus, not for consumption and thus trades, hence the earliest forms of commodity exchange arise when production developed far enough to meet the need of another where oneself had no need for the excess.
Having things to consume and trade with presumes that the objects come from somewhere somehow, and people always labor in a definitive wayat different times.
The subsistence farmer being quite different to the modern worker in their work as well as the social relations which underpin their kinds of exchange.


Why should past wages determine the value of labour-power? In other words, how do they affect the (re)production of labor? That's what needs to be explained.

I assume that Marx allowed that there is a gap between the value of labour-power and the price of it i.e. wages, but that wages do on average tend to approximate their value of labour-power, the sort of anchoring of price which prices may bounce around.
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf
Moreover, when considering cyclical variations in labour unemployment as distinct from changes in permanent unemployment associated with capital accumulation, Marx distinguished a short run market wage rate14 from a long run market wage rate - which indeed, we may say, is, like the subsistence wage, an average or ‘normal’ wage, to be included in the normal price of commodities. Thus, in dealing with changes in the average market wage, Marx tells us he will abstract from “the great periodically recurring forms that the changing phases of the industrial cycle impress on [the surplus-population]” (Marx, 1961, I: 642). In this latter case, the changes in the wage rate (relative to the average one) will be due to the effects that oscillations of the labour demand around the average or usual level of employment (see also Smith, 1776: 85) can have on the relative force of the parties involved in wage bargaining , and those effects probably vanish when the actual level of employment comes back to its normal level. In the other case, a higher average demand for labour will be satisfied by drawing on, or increasing, the “customary supply of labour” (Marx, 1961, I: 613), respectively through a reduction in permanent labour unemployment or in labour underemployment, so that the wage rate could remain (at least to a certain extent) at its natural or necessary level, with no need for any change in population.

However I take it that with this tendency in mind, wages change but hold some continuity from earlier, not having rapid fluctuations out of nowhere but having relative stability and which there is a minimum to which wages will fall for workers such that they are still accessible to the needs of capital.
As stated above, together with the unemployment and underemployment of labour, Marx considers the degree of organisation of the workers, as well as social and political factors. All of them have some degree of autonomy in determining the strength of the workers in wage bargaining, and thus in determining if the wage rate will be higher or equal to, the subsistence wage – the wage inherited from the past, and forming a minimum floor in wage bargaining25

However there is great 'elasticity' to wages also.
17 In order to explain why wages do not fall below the necessary wages you do not thus need to appeal (see Cottrell and Darity, 1988: 179) to non-competing groups or unemployed people avoiding regular competition with currently employed workers by means of their transformation in a stratum of “broken and degraded workers” – though such a phenomenon can in part happen. Actually, as noted by Green (1991: 206), labour supply is viewed by Marx as particularly elastic “in the region of the value of labour power”, and common humanity, tacit combinations among workers and capitalists, the intervention of the State and so on can be seen as the factors assuring a (at least relative) wage rigidity.

https://sci-hub.se/https://academic.oup.com/cje/article-abstract/15/2/199/1735068?redirectedFrom=PDF
Finally, in this interpretation Marx's wages theory remains applicable also after the development of forms of welfare state intervention unknown to Marx himself in the midnineteenth century. The rise of the 'social wage' removes the absolute dependency on gaining paid work for survival. Among the lower-paid strata of workers, firms cannot lower wages without inducing at least some of their workers to quit in favour of dependence on 'historically and morally' determined minimum state benefits. Here, the state sector functions like the non-capitalist spheres which in Marglin's interpretation provide the infinitely elastic labour supply. I do not wish to exclude that interpretation from the list of factors contributing to high elasticity; however, recourse to and from the state sector would seem more plausible as a mode of short-run adjustment than migration between town and country.

In sum, given a certain population, the labour supply to capitalist industry is particularly elastic in the region of the value of labour-power: collective or individual decisions are affected not so much by the absolute real wage but the real wage relative to the value of labour-power...


It seems Marx connects the position of the worker in distinction to the slave or the serf also where the distinction between necessary labor, that which equals ones subsistence and unnecessary labor, the surplus for the capitalist is hidden within production as its easy to see one's wages as payment for the entirety of the work hours. The idea being that there must be a particular amount of work which is equivalent to meeting ones subsistence if they owned the means to produce and own that which they produced.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm
We see, further: The value of 3s. by which a part only of the working-day – i.e., 6 hours’ labour-is paid for, appears as the value or price of the whole working-day of 12 hours, which thus includes 6 hours unpaid for. The wage form thus extinguishes every trace of the division of the working-day into necessary labour and surplus-labour, into paid and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour. In the corvée, the labour of the worker for himself, and his compulsory labour for his lord, differ in space and time in the clearest possible way. In slave labour, even that part of the working-day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of existence, in which, therefore, in fact, he works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. [8] In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.



I said the opposite, fertility did not keep up with capital accumulation.

My mistake, sorry.

What do you take to be the reason behind this?
Perhaps in part that during industrialization, fertility rates tend to decline?


https://in.bgu.ac.il/en/humsos/Econ/Documents/seminars/abstracts/November%2024-2016.pdf
You mean labor-saving innovations. But why would they affect wages negatively? Let's assume a capitalist introduces a new machine that produces twice the output for the same labor input (i.e. a process innovation). That capitalist will set the price slighty (to not say marginally :eek:) below the current price to capture the market and maximize his profits. He obviously has no intention to pay his workers more, but there will be other capitalists jealous of his fat profits. They will introduce the new machine as well and again set the price slightly below the current to capture the market and hence profit. That process continues until prices are cut in half and real wages have doubled.

Real wages may increase but what of the state of workers in this scenario and nominal wages?
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf
Due to the uncertain effects of changes in wages both on capital accumulation and population growth rate, in this respect Marx emphasised especially the tendency of introducing machinery as a reaction to a rise in wages. Over time it would bring about an increase in employment that is progressively less than the increase in total capital22, thus assuring, for a given population growth rate, a stable or even increasing labour reserve army, and hence an increasing competition among the labourers, which will allow “the capitalist to beat down the price of labour” and “to screw up (….) the working-time” (Marx, 1961, I: 549. See also idem, 635-636).

https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/notes-on-karl-marxs-wage-labor-and-capital-decdc49b566b
Capital (the capitalist) has to always seek a greater division of labor and new machinery in order to compete with other capitals (wealth of other capitalists). But what does this do to wages? First, increase in the division of labor makes one worker able to do what it used to take many to do. This means that there ends up being more competition between workers. Second, the greater the division of labor, the simpler the labor and, therefore, the cheaper the labor. Of course, the simplification of labor means that the labor becomes more and more mind-numbing and soul-crushing (capital gives zero fucks about this though). The less specialized the work, the greater the competition for it, since anybody can do it. Simplification of labor means a cut in the cost of production, which means that one’s labor power has less value, i.e., wages drop. This drop in wages has nothing to do with the moral character of the capitalist — it is a structural effect of capital accumulation or the logic of capital itself. The moral sentiment and character of the particular capitalist has nothing to do with it. The worker must maintain his wage by either working longer or more intensely or both. This produces more competition between workers, which means that the cost of wages is driven down. Not only does capitalism pit the worker against the capitalist — it also pits worker against worker. “To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together” (47). In other words, the more capital grows, the more the worker gets fucked.

Although the above is simplified as there are all sorts of ways to speak of different factors in pushing the direction of wages one way or another as economies can be quite dynamic.

It might, though when demand is exhausted, capitalists will focus on product innovations instead. That's hard to do in some sectors, such as agriculture (an apple is an apple), hence employment in those sectors will shrink.

Indeed can't really do much to change ingredients.
I could see workers being retained if a product can be built upon to increase demand even if its superfluous i.e. creates new needs that don't really add much to the product but can convince the customer that they should do it.
#15174076
wat0n wrote:Indeed, I wasn't referring to AirBnB (which is just an intermediary and advertiser, very much like posting an ad in a newspaper was back in the day) - I was referring to the property owner in this case.

I guess its a question of whether the payment AirBnB takes is equivalent to paying for advertising. My impression was they skimmed off the top where as an advertiser doesn't get a cut out of your services but is paid for specified services.
However, very much unlike a mere advertiser, Airbnb regulates how people work and thus can discipline the workforce.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf
Although workers are told that they are independent, they are often held to a series of behavior and responsiveness requirements that are set by the companies. For instance, Uber drivers are expected to maintain at least a 4.6 rating (out of 5 starts) and to accept at least 80% of ride requests; failure to do so can result in deactivation (Hullinger, 2015). Airbnb host must respond within 24 hours or their account will be temporarily deactivated. For those sites where the client gets to pick from various services providers - such as Airbnb and Taskrabbit - complex algorithms determine who is shown, when they are shown and what is shown. And companies can and do make changes at will, often leaving workers scrambling to keep up. These sudden changes to platform design, service offerings and algorithms leave workers feeling less like independent small business owners and more like beleaguered employees of a capricious boss.

And the gloss for marketing purposes is that its a sharing economy rather than just a different business model in which the major benefactor is Airbnb which has made billions.
https://www.uu.nl/sites/default/files/iwse_2015.28_microentrepreneur_or_precariat_workshop_abstract_ravenelle_march_2015_0.pdf
. Airbnb, worth a comparatively paltry $13 billion, is the second most valuable private company in Silicon Valley (Lorenzetti, 2014).

Where clearly a lot of those who work under Airbnb in the precarious form of contract workers is exactly that they are quite easy to let go as easily as they're picked up which is part of the appeal of contract labor over and above long term labor.
Yet even with this explosive growth and investment, these companies are not creating full-time jobs with benefits, but short-term, gig employment where, in the words of one CEO, "you can hire 10,000 people for 10 to 15 minutes. When they're done, those 10,000 people just melt away" (Associated Press, 2013).


The sharing/gig economy is one which is precarious, puts greater onus on the worker in taking the risk, providing services and so on while someone steps in and skims off the top.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm
The rise of the self-employed “gig” worker, in this respect, mirrors the rise of the zero-hour contract. It is a return to the “time wages” and “piece wages” that Marx describes in Capital. As the New York Times comments in the same article as above:

“Piecemeal labor is hardly a new phenomenon. But as expedited by technology and packaged as apps, it has taken on a shinier veneer under new rubrics: the sharing economy, the peer economy, the collaborative economy, the gig economy.”

High unemployment, competition for jobs, and the downward pressure on wages have served to intensify the race to the bottom for workers, creating even more precarious terms and conditions. A new term has even been coined to describe those suffering under the emergence of such extremely precarious employment: “The Precariat”. As the NYT goes on to explain:

“If these marketplaces are gaining traction with workers, labour economists say, it is because many people who can’t find stable employment feel compelled to take on ad hoc tasks. In July, 9.7 million Americans were unemployed, and an additional 7.5 million were working part-time jobs because they could not find full-time work, according to estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics…”

“With piecemeal gigs easier to obtain than long-term employment, a new class of labourer, dependent on precarious work and wages, is emerging. In place of the ‘proletariat,’ Guy Standing, a labour economist, calls them the ‘precariat’…”

“…The companies essentially channel one-off tasks to the fastest taker or lowest bidder, he says, pitting workers against one another in a kind of labour elimination match.”

Whilst the benefits of the on-demand economy for consumers have been lauded, it is the benefits for the capitalists that are far clearer to see. No need for businesses to provide sick pay and holiday pay, or to contribute towards national insurance and pensions. Indeed, this tendency towards classifying workers as “self-employed” has already been seen in Britain, where the number of self-employed workers has been on the rise since the onset of the 2008 crisis, and unions have fought against “bogus” self-employment by companies in the construction industry, who are trying to cut labour costs by outsourcing and employing “self-employed” workers through agencies.

Basically they're polishing a turd, oh it's so free, when it is clearly part of an undermining of the position of workers, fragmenting them further.
I also think it's interesting to see how there is a conflict over AirBnB's public relations campaigns in how they present themselves primarily as people who are sharing a private room of their homes and those who assert that it is infact simply a way for property owners to bypass regulation and laws in doing short term rentals of their other properties.
Which to me communicates that even if we think of the average worker selling a room for short term use, this is simply the encroaching commodification into one's personal life, the logic of capital becoming more pervasive. WHen I speculate the situation of such a worker, assuming they're not lying to a land lord and at least have a mortgage, the money functions as another means to pay for subsistence such as the mortgage on the home, assuming they have a property that is even that desirable. Which speaks to my intuition of the working class as in a structural relation of maintaining up payments on their needs to survive such as paying off the property regularly so as not to default and be made homeless.
And I see the characterizations of this 'sharing' or gig economy is precisely that it reflects the instability of labor, and has been dubbed the precariat, people who cannot find suitable long term paying work.
And as such, there is still a distinct difference between the working making a few bucks as they labor to maintain the room like a hotel with cleaning, amenities, wifi and so on, unlike that of those who own multiple properties and hire services and eventually may cut out airbnb as the middle man who are petty bourgeois proper.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf
In contrast to the entrepreneurial ethos, workers generally do not view their app-driven work as entrepreneurship, but simply as a tool to make money. When asked if they viewed themselves as entreprenuers, many participants workers laughed and responded with an overwhelming "no":

No. No. (laughs) .... I fell like an entrepreneur would be if I inveted this idea, but it's really just like I am doing this because somebody else created the infrastructure that makes it possible to do this (Ramona, 28 Airbnb host).

I don't really. (laughs) 'cause I don't feel like I'm doing anything. I'm not really going out and trying to promote myself as a Taskrabbit. I'm just, you know, putting in the hours that I'm free (Christina, 30 Taskrabbit).

No, not at all. I would need to come up with something original or at least like, if I was doing this on my own and getting my own customers, maybe (Francesco, 29, Kitchensurfing chef).

Perhaps because Airbnb is less time consuming than Taskrabbit - most hosts mentioned spending less than a handful of weekly hours on their hosting efforts - many more Airbnb hosts had side business than Taskrabbit workers. However, even though they often considered their side of work to be entrepreneurial, they often did not consider their Airbnb work to qualify as entrepreneurialism or small business management. THis is perhaps best illustrated by James, who works for a social media start-up, and rents his apartment on Airbnb. He does not view his Airbnb work as entrepreneurialism, but he descries himself as an "ebay junkie" who is constantly seeking the adage of "buy low, sell high." His description of his ebay efforts clearly demonstrates that he has an entreprenerial mindset, it is just not applied to Airbnb...

This contrasts with those who actually own multiple properties and hire others to do the cleaning and so on, as they aspire to have a passive income, they basically are petty-bourgeoisie unlike the 'hustlers' i.e. workers who are little different than anyone else who simply provides a direct service, except with the mediation of Airbnb, someone takes a slice and sets certain rules while avoiding a lot of the costs of start up and risks. Airbnb loses nothing if something terrible happens to a person's home and rarely helps a lot of people in spite of their asserted protections unless it hurts their public relations.
In the case of the chefs, I have already shared the example of the tailor and so on where they directly sell a service in the form of their labor, they aren't receiving a wage but receive compensation for the work done, like the tailor going around working people's cloth.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf
There were two major exceptions to the non entrepreneur mindset among participants: successful Airbnb hosts with multiple listenings they have turned into de facto hotels, and Kitchensurfing chefs who had food-related side business such as serving as a freelance personal chef. For the chefs in particular, the service platforms were often used as an introduction to prospective clients. Workers then market themselves to clients directly by demonstrating their skills and distributing personal contact information, cutting out the platform as "middleman"
...
... Successful Airbnb hosts who had multiple units or who felt that they treated their listings as a company - often by hiring others, incorporating as a business or otherwise professionalising their work - also described themselves as entrepreneurs. Of the 23 hosts interviewed, two used Airbnb to maintain second apartments where they didn't live, and three others maintained multiple apartments. One individual, Yosef,27, who was publicly active in the Airbnb campaign, attended a highly prestigious and expensive hotel and hospitality college in New York. With plans to one day become a professional hotelier, he was not letting his age or lack of degree deter him in the meantime. With assistance from his family, he rented two three-bedroom apartments on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that he listed for 30-night stints as qausi-hotels, with up to two people per bedroom. He also manages 10 listenings owned by associates and rents the spare bedroom of his two-bedroom rent-stabilized West Village apartment.

When asked if he views himself as an entrepreneur, Yosef is quick to detail his exploits, including time spent selling spare video games as a child. He describes Airbnb as his biggest entrepreneurial effort in part because of the financial risks involved, but also admits that the platform made it easy:

I don't feel I did much because the platform was already there. But taking on a lease... paying a deposit, monthly rent, furnishing an apartment, - so putting down almost eight or 10 grand, assuming the risk of a yearly lease...

In addition to running his Airbnb listings, Yosef incorporated his venture, registering it as a limited liability company in 2014 and launching a company website. He even organizes events for his guests, such as a party on the rooftop of his home in the West Village.

I own a hotel. I'm a hotelier. I just have a room here and an apartment there, but I currently have 25 guests in this city staying in my places. They all have my phone number. Anything happens, I'm in charge of them. That's the exact same thing as in a hotel.... Until I have that chain of hotels, I just have a chain of different apartments over this island.

Likewise, Josh, 32, had a self-described Airbnb "syndicate" involving eight separate apartment listings when I interviewed him in may 2015. The eight listings were split between three profiles in order to avoid drawing attention from the authorities or from Airbnb. Originally a small-timer user who rented out his apartment when faced with an overlap between leases, he is now firmly established in Airbnb and hopes to one day write a book advising others on how to be successful hosts. He explains, "This has become a business. I have lots of places, I have cleaning people I have to pay. I have - you know - responsibilities. If I stopped paying attention to it, it would collapse, right?" For Josh his entrepreneurialism was so successful that he hired his fiancee's undocumented immigrant mother to manage the listings, turning it into a family business and pure investment. In his words:"We want to do a little manual labor as possible and turn it into passive income."

Josh was not the only host who talked about outsourcing. When self-described entrepreneurs in the sharing economy workers become successful, they begin to resemble mainstream firms. Ryan, 27, maintains multiple AIrbnb listings with a business partner, as his company has grown, he has started hiring assistants to manage the day-to-day business. Unlike most workers in the sharing economy, he gives his employees full benefits, including health insurance.

However, rather than embrace these individuals as role models for the rest of the Airbnb community - after all, these are th workers who have taken Airbnb's entrepreneurial messaging to hearts - these are the New York City hosts that Airbnb tries to ignore or disclaim. Although New York is one of the largest Airbnb markets, with more than 25,000 active hosts (Airbnb in the City, 2014), since 2010 it has been illegal in New York State to rent out entire apartments in multi-unit dwellings for less than 30 days. A Scatching report in October 2014 from the New York Attorney General found that 72% of Airbnb listings for entire units from January 2010 through June 2014 ran afoul of this and other codes (Airbnb in the City, 2014). Although AIrbnb has taken the stance that it is helping hosts to keep their homes in teh face of escalating rents, the report found that large scale operates dominated the service: only 6% of the hosts made 36% of the revenue earning in New York ($168 Million), and these corporate users offers anywhere from three to 272 listings (Streitfeld, 2014). Even though Airbnb's host marketing emphasizes users' ability to make money, AIrbnb does not hold these users up as role models but has described them as "bad actors" and stressed the need for "sensible rules that stop bad actors and protector regular people who simply want to share the home in which they live" (Streitfeld, 2014).

The above are clearly different from those who rent out only a room and are doing all the leg work as they own multiple properties and employ people or hire people to maintain those properties. They are small business owners and one could perhaps imagine pitching the path to being a successful small business, i.e. the American dream, but small business is always limited by any pushback by dominant capitalists who establish monopolies and so on and simply outcompete them when it comes to competing in the same market.

The later part being that those who actually succeed in Airbnb are basically petty-bourgeoisie property owners and part of their success is that just like Uber, they're basically unregulated and undercut the costs of the old industries that are already regulated. These are people who have the financial means to actually use money as investment and not in subsistence terms like paying off the house or what ever, hence the ideal of one fo the interviewees seeking a 'passive' income.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-regulatory-obligations/
Property owners do benefit from Airbnb’s capacity to lower the transaction costs of operating short-term rentals, but the beneficiaries are disproportionately white and high-wealth households. Wealth from property ownership is skewed, with higher-wealth and white households holding a disproportionate share of housing wealth overall—and an even more disproportionate share of housing wealth from nonprimary residences because they are much more likely to own nonprimary residential property (such as multi-unit Airbnb rentals).

You usually need to ask your landlord if subletting is allowed... Landlords often don't like it because they want to be in control on who lives in the property.

The issue in the case of New York is that it not only undercuts the hotel industry and undermines zoning laws and so on, is that it impacts the housing market as people are making money off multiple properties for tourists and stuff, people don't actually live in the houses. So it undermines what could be actual homes and thus diminishes the available property for as such, which in New York is already expensive as shit which is why those people who own such desirable locations can make a decent buck compared to those who can't afford to even own such a property to live in for themselves.

So overall, I'm not seeing the breakdown of class distinctions and in fact the romantic view of Airbnb marketing of we're helping people to keep their homes, providing jobs when it reflects the encroachment of commodifying one's own living space to get by because of the precarious of work for many, this just further emphasizes a cynicism around the 'alternative' of the sharing or gig economy. It's simply part of the seemingly decentralization of work but actually it simply decentralizes workers themselves while Airbnb or Uber still calls the shots and assumes less liability than a traditional business. And the best one can hope for is to become a small business owner which is a distinct enough class position rather than a simultaneous one of being a worker and small business owner. The intuition being about the role such money serves, where clearly the earliest quotes exemplify workers who work to meet their personal needs and costs, they are labouring, to try and make some extra money to get by. They aren't expanding value in the way the capitalist does or even the small business owner who employs a few people.

So after all this I have to say I am worried that you're not actually looking that close enough perhaps and are trying to emphasize ownership in a way that distorts the structural relations of class which can be see as an ideological front in undermining class consciousness. Because that gloss quickly wears off if one is bullshitting themselves they're small time business owner but it's just them cleaning and so on a private room for some extra cash.

Why would it make such a significant difference? Wouldn't a petite bourgeois still be bourgeois despite busting his ass running his business?

Petty bourgeoisie are not bourgeois though, so I find this confusing.
But I raised the point because I wanted to appeal to not a definition but an intuition you might have that if workers work to reproduce their subsistence (not physical but all modern needs they may have), even if they save a bit extra, how would you put this on par with a capitalist? Who employs others en masse?
A capitalist may in some sense work hard, also, but what is the structural relation of themselves to the company and how it functions. A small business owner does a lot of work but they also unlike the person who directly sells their labor, manage other people. Basically, the definition of class isn't whether you work hard or not and as such isn't necessarily the essential part in exemplifying the structural social relations of class.


Why wouldn't acquiring skills through training or getting degrees be a form of capital accumulation in this view, if this is being done to achieve earnings? You can actually approach the decision of whether to get a degree (e.g. a masters) from a financial point of view, and I'm guessing plenty of people do (I did at least, it wasn't the only criterion but it was a major factor in the decision).

It still seems like you're equating enhancing the cost of your labor-power in the form of wages with that of capital under the pretense of investment to expand its value.
But there seems to be no real examination of the cyclical process in which money exists as capital and expands in value based on surplus labor thus producing a greater sum of money in direct comparison with simply being able to earn higher wage.

I just don't think it's making a very precise comparison but a very superficial one in order to equate them. To find similarities in a vague sense can be a poor manner of abstracting and flattening things out so as to be equated but completely ignored their distinctions.


Not quite, in this case I'm trying to stick to something closer to how Marxians see class rather than simply a bunch of income strata. My point is that the same person can both be a worker and behave like a capitalist depending on the context, owing to how the labor markets have changed in the last few decades. After all, no one stops you from driving an Uber after work or renting a room of your house (or a second dwelling) to have some extra income. Likewise, making your career decisions is more sophisticated than it was in the 19th century and it is also easier and more common to switch employers than it used to be in the mid 20th century.

Class distinctions are just not as strong as they used to be.

Except here you seem to equate earning income with like profit as the added value compared to what one invested.
Indeed it is much more common to switch careers and the chaos of the labor market is itself presented as a kind of freedom. To view oneself in such an abstract and individualized way that there is no real relation to broader dynamics.


https://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm
We are here at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology: the freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the "psychological" subject endowed which propensities s/he strives to realize. And this especially holds today, in the era of what sociologists like Ulrich Beck call "risk society," 3 when the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change jobs every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay? Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern or "second modernity" ideologist will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom, of the "escape from freedom," of the immature sticking to old stable forms... Even better, when this is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies, then it's as if I were to automatically interpret all these changes as the results of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by the market forces.

The other view of things being:


It is different because contract laborers have more freedom to decide how they work than wage workers do.

Do they? What specific freedom does it entail? Is this not following the above example of freedom merely as choice, freedom in the formal sense. Maybe there is choice in some clients depending on how in demand one is. But it seems a lot like the idea that in a workers coop the increased decision making from workers on the direction of the company while a positive attribute, doesn't negate it being capitalist production simply because capital isn't personified by a capitalist.
It seems to me that contract labor in fact reflects instability, insecurity, and puts all sorts of increased risk not he worker as he can be denied benefits and tossed at a notice. It has been my impression that
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-quietly-fired-hundreds-of-contract-workers-im-one-of-them/
For 13 months, I worked full-time as a contract copywriter on a social impact initiative at Airbnb—and before that, for four months on a marketing project for the company. My office life resembled that of any full-time employee: I snacked on charcuterie boards and fresh ahi poke bowls, rejiggered my calendar to accommodate conflicting meetings, and cheered for employees on their work anniversaries (a peculiar Silicon Valley ritual that celebrates equity accruing).

Unlike full-time employees, contract workers aren’t entitled to Airbnb’s premium health care, generous 401(k), unlimited paid vacation time, transportation coverage, and stock options. I was employed by the temp agency Pro Unlimited, but my only contact with the agency was to file time sheets and to inquire about accrued sick-day hours.

On April 21, over a sterile one-way video call, a representative from Pro Unlimited read from what appeared to be a script to inform me and hundreds of others that our contracts would be cut short, effective the following week. In a blog post, Airbnb’s chief executive Brian Chesky claimed that the company would “optimize for 1:1 communication” regarding layoffs, a curious promise given that the ratio for communicating with contractors was more like 1:500. For a company that prides itself on cultivating human connection, Airbnb’s approach to laying off 534 contractors with its partner agency was remarkably callous. (In May, 300 additional contractors were laid off; employed by agencies like California-based catering company Bon Appétit, they filled food, facilities, and security roles.)

Two weeks later, the company laid off 1,900 employees. They received at least 14 weeks severance pay, four months of mental health support, and health insurance coverage for one year for US employees, in addition to receiving equity. Forbes lauded Chesky for giving “a master class in empathy and compassion,” and Business Insider praised the company’s approach to layoffs as “uniquely generous.” This glowing coverage failed to reckon with the full picture of layoffs, which includes an invisible workforce of contractors locked out from accessing those benefits.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch20.htm
If the hour’s wage is fixed so 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-measure of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio


daily value of labour-power
working-day of a given number of hours’

it, of course, 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. He can, under the pretense of paying “the normal price of labour,” abnormally lengthen the working-day without any corresponding compensation to the labourer. Hence the perfectly rational revolt in 1860 of the London labourers, employed in the building trades, against the attempt of the capitalists to impose on them this sort of wage by the hour. The legal limitation of the working-day puts an end to such mischief, although not, of course, to the diminution of employment caused by the competition of machinery, by changes in the quality of the labourers employed, and by crises partial or general.

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm
Contract labour is a form of wage labour in which the worker is treated by the employer as an independent proprietor “providing a service”.

This form of wage labour, however, denies the worker any continuity or security of employment because every contract, be it for a day or a month, is a distinct contract of sale. Since the pretence is that the labourer is an equal economic agent, the worker is usually responsible for their own social-security payments, and must put aside money to pay tax and for their own retirement etc. It may very well be the case that the worker “hires” some fellow workers and lifts themselves up to the position of a kind of leading-hand or overseer, and indeed there may be a continuous scale from the most oppressed day-labourer up to a small-scale capitalist providing day-labour and earning a good living, not unlike the Triads who supply day labour for the Japanese corporations (see Toyotism). Small service-providers, consultants, self-employed “change managers”, etc. who are hired on contract are not generally referred to as “contract labour”, since in their case they are genuinely petit-bourgeois engaged in the sale of private labour.

Not only does contract labour, like casualisation, serve to force the price of labour power down to a minimum and maximise the insecurity of life for the worker, but contract labour is used to undermine the class-consciousness of the workers and intensify competition between workers, as the pretence is actually sustained that the contract worker is not a proletarian at all, but a proprietor.

The term ‘contracting out’, a form of commodification, also referred to as ‘out-sourcing’, first entered the English language in the 1890s in relation to the manufacturing industry. While contracting-out constitutes a further extension of the division of labour, it also invariably involves a reduction in the quality of work and a further alienation (or distancing) of the worker from his or her labour.


And when thinking what such freedom is entailed in this kind of work I immediately think of how lbierals conceive of freedom as freedom of choice where as I am not so attached strictly to having a multitude of choices, as they can all be shit, limited even whilst seemingly infinite but all opposed to a more radical choice of not wanting the very conditions of that choice.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm
This is what the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom ultimately amounts to: “formal” freedom is the freedom of choice WITHIN the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates.

It's a bit like talking about the freedom to choose employers, but never to really question the very nature of the system which makes one dependent on an employer.
[URL]https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/notes-on-karl-marxs-wage-labor-and-capital-decdc49b566b/url]
Sure, the workers can quit his job whenever he wants, but this is merely an abstract freedom. Yes, the worker can quit his job and find another one. But can he really choose to quit wage labor itself or the “whole class of buyers” (20)? If he quits wage slavery altogether, then he faces the perils of unemployment (hunger, poverty, low social status, etc.). True freedom would entail not having to sell one’s labor power to any capitalist and still be fine. So while the wage slave is not owned by any capitalist in particular he is, in fact, effectively owned by the capitalist class.



Indeed, technological change is a necessary condition but I would also not say it's sufficient for such a change to take place. And yet... It's precisely technology what often introduces the disruption necessary to shake the system and make the leap to one that is more efficient.

As for how Marx saw the production of services, thanks for pointing that out. It's just that most examples mentioned in these discussions apply to the production of physical goods for the most part, and most of the terms used by Marx also lend themselves to think mostly in terms of physical production.

Indeed, you might find some sympathy in Marx here where he considers the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production as a kind of driving force in human history.
https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/production.pdf
The manner in which the development of the forces and relations of production occurs, and the effects of this development, have been the subject of one of the main controversies in Marxist thought. The most straightforward interpretation of the celebrated passage from the Preface is this: within a mode of production there is a correspondence both between forces and relations, and as a result of this, between the relations of production and legal, ideological and other social relations (the second correspondence being one between BASE AND SUPERSTRUCTURE). The correspondence appears to be one where the forces of production are primary, the relations of production are determined by the forces, and they themselves determine the superstructure. These respective positions of the three elements in the chain of causation acquire significance from their implications for historical development. Thus, the development of the forces of production leads to a contradiction between them and the relations of production (which 'turn into their fetters'), and the intensification of this contradiction leads to the breakdown of the existing mode of production and its superstructure. One problem with this interpretation of the central historical role of forces and relations of production turns on the central question. Is it valid to conceive of the forces of production as the prime movers?

The above being a kind of mechanical structuralist interpretation but the idea isn't wrong, just limited in it's lack of agency for a social subject which enacts the changes, engages in the struggles in so on, as it is people who make history.


Yeah, I'm taking a broader meaning of the term here. If you stick to the definition of "profit" a business would use, then you'd of course be right (except for some particular cases such as some state-owned enterprises).

Well this is kind of a point as to why the state owning things isn't necessarily an advancement except to the ideal extent that the government is answerable to it's people more directly than a company perhaps.
But the same relations may still prevailed as things are nationalized.
I just think profit used as an equivalent to wage loses all specificity and is a colloquial usage which muddies the waters on what are distinctions in the economy where there are specific relations which underpin the distinction of money as profit and money as wages which are in part tied to one's class position.
Where even if you don't want to focus on more industrial examples because the industrialized world has largely shifted it's massive industries offshore for cheap labor for greater profit, the general position of workers is that of having to work to reproduce their own means of existence. They have to regularly consume food, pay for rent, maintenance of appliances, the car and so on, all sorts of needs for the modern person which if they lose they job, they can readily lose.
Where the opposing intuition is that for the capitalists, they can make money all without actually doing something that very day. Jeff Bezos was still making millions even if he went on vacation, and it wasn't like he was at risk of losing his subsistence should he continue to do so. Shit he can clearly retire with the wealth he has, similarly for a lot of other even smaller capitalists who aren't billionaires.


So in a nutshell you don't really disagree with my example? I'm asking because one problem with organizing production under a commune would indeed be that more productive members may be getting (or believe they are getting) less than what they are contributing to it. More generally, it would seem that there would be an incentive not to work "too hard" if living in a commune because there will be a point in which you will not benefit from it.

I agree with the sentiment that if someone is slacking that it can create a demoralizing effect, in the same way that it occurs in the workplace when someone on your team isn't pulling their weight it creates more work for everyone else.
However, I imagine such a diffisuion of responsibility and having to implement means in which to put the boot up someones ass has to exist no matter what kind of production.

But I can't go to deep because I don't really give too much thought to communes as they're a kind of prefirguative politics that I don't really care for but I won't bore you with further details as to why.

I see, although not aiming to fully compensate workers kind of undermines the criticism that the capitalist mode of production fails to... Fully compensate workers.

Well I'm not sure how much that Marx's criticism is directly aimed at the point of paying workers in full.
Again, this is a Ricardian Socialist notion, Marx is a more encompassing criticism of the entire basis of commodity production and exchange as alienating, culminating in capitalism. That is it was Ricardian Socialists who had not yet the concept of labor power and considered that labour simply wasn't being paid it's equivalent, thus demanding better wages.
Can see Engels mock such an attitude: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm#:~:text=A%20fair%20day's%20wages%2C%20under,and%20to%20propagate%20his%20race.
Marx would actually say that by the standards of the political economy, that there is no contradiction in the equivalent exchange principle, as workers are simply paid the equivalent to their labour-power, which is justice under the current economic system. Marx of course is critical of exploitation but not under the notion that workers should simply be compensated in full.

My impression of Marx is that the socialization of production, that is, workers coming together rather than as independent workers subsisting, requires the socialization of it's ownership such as to undermine the basis of workers exploitation by depriving them of their means of subsistence. However, not as a return to individual workers subsisting, but at a new kind based on the socialization of labor.

However, in the initial stage of socialism/communism, it does seem that Marx proposes that there be some kind of compensation of labor in an equivalent form.
But I can retort with my discussion across the thread in which I don't have much of a grasp on the kinds of proposals that seek to achieve as much. Only a few resources of those who claim some outlines.



I agree both are not literally the same thing, but they do share some essential traits (in particular, both include foregoing present consumption to be able to earn more in the future by becoming more productive - that is, the profit motive is relevant to both). One difference is that the capitalist is actually investing in a physical object, which of course has its own consequences (it can be resold, it can be expropriated, etc) and unless production is fully automated it also requires hiring labor to generate a profit (although it should be noted that for human capital, you would need to be hired, work under contract or start your own business to generate a profit too).

Still, I think the similarities are at least as relevant as the difference between them. Both for theoretical and practical reasons.

I do not readily buy into the abistnence approach, as it seems to equate the capitalist to that of the worker who works for subsistence but capitalists are in no such position.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3
Moreover, the capitalist gets rich, not like the miser, in proportion to his personal labour and restricted consumption, but at the same rate as he squeezes out the labour-power of others, and enforces on the labourer abstinence from all life’s enjoyments.

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/
Time-preference theory, usually associated with Bohm-Bawerk, attempts to work dig its way out of this hole by explaining profit not through the physical/technical aspects of production but through the differences in subjective time preference between those who want things now (workers desire wages) and those who are willing to wait (capitalists who wait for their profit).

But here too we can’t really understand a period of production time without recourse to the very social features that time-preference theory wants to abstract away. A production period is dependent on the rate of profit and of wage rates, both social phenomena that can’t be reduced to time preferences. Clarke argues that concepts like ‘marginal productivity of capital’ and the ’roundaboutness of production’ have no meaning abstracted away from the social relations of capitalism since the aim of capitalist production is to produce value, not physical quantities. We can’t measure productivity or roundaboutness in non-value terms because without value we have no standard of unit that all of these diverse inputs and outputs can be reduced to. Also, what reason do we have for being so sure that time preference is always positive and not negative? Sometimes, in conditions of uncertainty for instance, we prefer to delay gratification. This absolute assertion that we prefer present goods over past goods seems an indefensible assertion. Even further, capitalist investment strategies have nothing to do with delaying gratification or measuring investments against consumption. Capitalists constantly invest in production in pursuit of profit for profit’s sake, compelled on by competition not their subjective preferences.

To emphasize the bottom point:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/12641/33292_1.pdf?sequence=1
Most governments that I have spoken to have no understanding of private capitalism. Now I have heard people say that you should feel privileged to be committed to invest in Australia. Really! The whole world is our oyster so what is so special about here? New Zealand is the same! Their attitude is we are permitting you to invest. So what! The whole world is on offer to us so what is so good about you? They think that they are the pearls in the oyster of the world. Australians in Canberra are remote from the real world. They don’t understand why you invest. It isn’t something that they have ever been involved in and they say, ‘We have improved the conditions — so now you do your bit’. What do they mean — my turn? We don’t have turns; we put our money out when we think that it’s good for us. That’s all we do. We don’t look for any other reason — it’s not a turn. Not when …Keating or Howard or other politicians say we have made all the conditions right, now it’s up to you to go and do it, unless we can see the market we are not going to invest.14


So I'm not sure how well the delayed gratification fits with the capitalist as their wealth isn't the same as the worker who deprives themselves of pleasures in order to save that bit more.
Which is in fact one of the alienating features for Marx, that money comes to posses the power, the authority to allow one lives needs and pleasures as if it were inherent to currency itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm
Marx recognized that the science of capitalistic economy, despite its worldly and pleasure-seeking appearance, "is a truly moral science, the most moral of all sciences. Its principal thesis is the renunciation of life and of human needs. The less you eat, drink, buy books, go to the theatre or to balls, or to the public house [ Br., pub], and the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you will be able to save and the greater will become your treasure which neither moth nor rust will corrupt -- your capital. The less you are, the less you express your life, the more you have, the greater is your alienated life and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theatre. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power; and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you, can purchase everything; it is the true opulence. But although it can do all this, it only desires to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subservient to it. When one owns the master, one also owns the servant, and one has no need of the master's servant. Thus all passions and activities must be submerged in avarice. The worker must have just what is necessary for him to want to live, and he must want to live only in order to have this." [51]

One can indeed create the miser out of such a fixation on money as the representation of wealth in general, not living now under the pretense of living tomorrow.

That one can find similarities doesn't mean they are essential features of those things.
I can find two objects of the same color, but this holds not relevance for the concept of a thing. As was found with the classic issue of claiming a universal that all swans are white and discovering empirically that there exist black swans in Australia. This being because their color is inessential to the concept of being a swan. When considering what is essential, it must capture that which makes it impossible for it to exist in reality if it were without that feature, that it would simply not be that qualtiiatively distinct thing which makes it what it is.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra5a.htm
The proposition ‘All swans are white’ does not present any difficulties for comprehension from the point of view of logic precisely because it does not express the necessity of the connection between the two definitions. The proposition ‘All objects of nature are extensive’ is quite a different matter. A swan may just as well be non-white, whereas the proposition ‘All objects of nature are extensive’ implements a necessary synthesis of two definitions. Unextended objects of nature are non-existent – and contrariwise, there can be no extension that would not be an attribute of an object of nature.

In other words, a theoretical proposition is a linking of abstractions each of which expresses a definiteness without which the thing ceases to be what it is, it ceases to exist as a given thing.

swan may be painted any colour other than white – it will not cease to be a swan. But extension cannot be taken away from an object of nature without destroying that object itself. A theoretical proposition must therefore contain only those abstractions which express the forms of existence of the given object necessarily inherent in it.

TO make another example of how one can find similarities, and flatten out things in order to equate them...
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm
The fundamental feature of these approchements and similitudes lies in their completely ignoring the material foundation of the various currents, that is, their class nature and by that token their objective historical role. Instead they evaluate and classify different currents according to some external and secondary manifestation, most often according to their relation to one or another abstract principle which for the given classifier has a special professional value. Thus to the Roman pope Freemasons and Darwinists, Marxists and anarchists are twins because all of them sacrilegiously deny the immaculate conception. To Hitler, liberalism and Marxism are twins because they ignore “blood and honor”. To a democrat, fascism and Bolshevism are twins because they do not bow before universal suffrage. And so forth.

Undoubtedly the currents grouped above have certain common features. But the gist of the matter lies in the fact that the evolution of mankind exhausts itself neither by universal suffrage, not by “blood and honor,” nor by the dogma of the immaculate conception.

I emphasize the class basis as I think while you try to consider the worker not in terms of their money, but how they work and relate to a means of working, you seem to think that the class distinction collapses in the role money serves a distinctive role based on one's class position.
Such that the worker who spends money on something may vaguely be thought to investing in something in order to have a return considered profit. But I do not readily see the same relations that make them belong to the same class or simultaneously to both classes and thus destroying the very concept of class and thus implying a classless society.

Thanks for the response. So what you are saying, basically, is that while Marx makes the distinction between use and exchange values, in reality neither corresponds to the broader notion of "value" and that use values aren't all that important in practice. Am I correct?

Yeah, Marx can sometimes be confusing in his use of the term value, and he seems to see it as a concept which entails the unity of opposites of use and exchange value within the commodity.
Use-value is still important because the reason a commodity sells would be it's use in the majority of cases, that I wish to pay for something because I want to use/consume it being a motivating factor and it's particular use is of prime importance for me as the buyer. But there is the sense that exchange-value is clearly distinct from use-value and this is the issue where there can be a conflation and jumping from these aspects in production and commodities themselves.

But yes, neither in themselves represent "value", but they do in some sense seem to underpin it. Value is seen as a metaphysical and unreal, but it is for Marx something very real but is suprasenous, represented through the relations and activity of people in often tangible means.
Think like how a written word has its physical form which you're reading now, but the concept which it evokes is distinct, it isn't physically the word, it is something in the mind.
However, there are things which are suprasenous, that is that can't be found upon examining the tangible and physical properties of a thing but seem to coincide with that object. Typically these are simply stated to be subjective, but there are suprasenous things which are independent any individual consciousness because they're (philosophically defined) material, they're objective.
Value is this kind of objective thing.

But I don't really have much of a concept of it having not studied Marx enough to get a sense of his concept.
#15174099
Wellsy wrote:I guess its a question of whether the payment AirBnB takes is equivalent to paying for advertising. My impression was they skimmed off the top where as an advertiser doesn't get a cut out of your services but is paid for specified services.
However, very much unlike a mere advertiser, Airbnb regulates how people work and thus can discipline the workforce.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf


How is it any different from newspapers having their own terms of service for posting ads?

Wellsy wrote:And the gloss for marketing purposes is that its a sharing economy rather than just a different business model in which the major benefactor is Airbnb which has made billions.
https://www.uu.nl/sites/default/files/iwse_2015.28_microentrepreneur_or_precariat_workshop_abstract_ravenelle_march_2015_0.pdf


I'm not sure about how that negates my point, though.

Wellsy wrote:Where clearly a lot of those who work under Airbnb in the precarious form of contract workers is exactly that they are quite easy to let go as easily as they're picked up which is part of the appeal of contract labor over and above long term labor.

The sharing/gig economy is one which is precarious, puts greater onus on the worker in taking the risk, providing services and so on while someone steps in and skims off the top.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm

Basically they're polishing a turd, oh it's so free, when it is clearly part of an undermining of the position of workers, fragmenting them further.
I also think it's interesting to see how there is a conflict over AirBnB's public relations campaigns in how they present themselves primarily as people who are sharing a private room of their homes and those who assert that it is infact simply a way for property owners to bypass regulation and laws in doing short term rentals of their other properties.
Which to me communicates that even if we think of the average worker selling a room for short term use, this is simply the encroaching commodification into one's personal life, the logic of capital becoming more pervasive. WHen I speculate the situation of such a worker, assuming they're not lying to a land lord and at least have a mortgage, the money functions as another means to pay for subsistence such as the mortgage on the home, assuming they have a property that is even that desirable. Which speaks to my intuition of the working class as in a structural relation of maintaining up payments on their needs to survive such as paying off the property regularly so as not to default and be made homeless.
And I see the characterizations of this 'sharing' or gig economy is precisely that it reflects the instability of labor, and has been dubbed the precariat, people who cannot find suitable long term paying work.
And as such, there is still a distinct difference between the working making a few bucks as they labor to maintain the room like a hotel with cleaning, amenities, wifi and so on, unlike that of those who own multiple properties and hire services and eventually may cut out airbnb as the middle man who are petty bourgeois proper.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf


Wellsy wrote:Do they? What specific freedom does it entail? Is this not following the above example of freedom merely as choice, freedom in the formal sense. Maybe there is choice in some clients depending on how in demand one is. But it seems a lot like the idea that in a workers coop the increased decision making from workers on the direction of the company while a positive attribute, doesn't negate it being capitalist production simply because capital isn't personified by a capitalist.
It seems to me that contract labor in fact reflects instability, insecurity, and puts all sorts of increased risk not he worker as he can be denied benefits and tossed at a notice. It has been my impression that
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-quietly-fired-hundreds-of-contract-workers-im-one-of-them/

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch20.htm

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm


And when thinking what such freedom is entailed in this kind of work I immediately think of how lbierals conceive of freedom as freedom of choice where as I am not so attached strictly to having a multitude of choices, as they can all be shit, limited even whilst seemingly infinite but all opposed to a more radical choice of not wanting the very conditions of that choice.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm

It's a bit like talking about the freedom to choose employers, but never to really question the very nature of the system which makes one dependent on an employer.
[URL]https://thedangerousmaybe.medium.com/notes-on-karl-marxs-wage-labor-and-capital-decdc49b566b/url]


This answer below applies to these two points:

Just as AirBnB can easily let workers go (although it's not hard to do in the US in general), contracted workers can also enjoy freedoms wage workers can't such as (for instance) deciding when to work, how much to work (customers are the ones rating them) and more generally how to manage their time and effort - even one of your sources mentions that most AirBnB hosts surveyed don't believe it's too hard to be a host there. It's a give and take, just like living in a commune also has a give and take aspect in how labor relations work.

It sounds as if you wanted to have your cake and eat it too here.

Wellsy wrote:This contrasts with those who actually own multiple properties and hire others to do the cleaning and so on, as they aspire to have a passive income, they basically are petty-bourgeoisie unlike the 'hustlers' i.e. workers who are little different than anyone else who simply provides a direct service, except with the mediation of Airbnb, someone takes a slice and sets certain rules while avoiding a lot of the costs of start up and risks. Airbnb loses nothing if something terrible happens to a person's home and rarely helps a lot of people in spite of their asserted protections unless it hurts their public relations.
In the case of the chefs, I have already shared the example of the tailor and so on where they directly sell a service in the form of their labor, they aren't receiving a wage but receive compensation for the work done, like the tailor going around working people's cloth.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf


Actually I would say that AirBnB can lose reputation, both prospective customers and prospective hosts may switch to other platforms if they believe there are safety concerns involved. Again, I would say it's not all that different from how it works for other advertisers and other platforms.

Wellsy wrote:The above are clearly different from those who rent out only a room and are doing all the leg work as they own multiple properties and employ people or hire people to maintain those properties. They are small business owners and one could perhaps imagine pitching the path to being a successful small business, i.e. the American dream, but small business is always limited by any pushback by dominant capitalists who establish monopolies and so on and simply outcompete them when it comes to competing in the same market.


Care to explain who's the monopolist in the room rental market? :eh:

What is it so different about renting a room on AirBnB vs doing so by advertising it in a newspaper? Keep in mind that even hotels could use AirBnB to market their rooms.

Wellsy wrote:The later part being that those who actually succeed in Airbnb are basically petty-bourgeoisie property owners and part of their success is that just like Uber, they're basically unregulated and undercut the costs of the old industries that are already regulated. These are people who have the financial means to actually use money as investment and not in subsistence terms like paying off the house or what ever, hence the ideal of one fo the interviewees seeking a 'passive' income.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benefits-of-airbnb-no-reason-for-local-policymakers-to-let-airbnb-bypass-tax-or-regulatory-obligations/


Indeed, and that's because AirBnB and Uber are disrupting their traditional industries. Yet I would say the current arrangement is more efficient than how those markets worked before Uber and AirBnB showed up.

Wellsy wrote:The issue in the case of New York is that it not only undercuts the hotel industry and undermines zoning laws and so on, is that it impacts the housing market as people are making money off multiple properties for tourists and stuff, people don't actually live in the houses. So it undermines what could be actual homes and thus diminishes the available property for as such, which in New York is already expensive as shit which is why those people who own such desirable locations can make a decent buck compared to those who can't afford to even own such a property to live in for themselves.


What percentage of NYC's housing stock would this amount to and why shouldn't zoning laws adapt to the technological change? Aren't these laws part of the problem when it comes to affordability?

Wellsy wrote:So overall, I'm not seeing the breakdown of class distinctions and in fact the romantic view of Airbnb marketing of we're helping people to keep their homes, providing jobs when it reflects the encroachment of commodifying one's own living space to get by because of the precarious of work for many, this just further emphasizes a cynicism around the 'alternative' of the sharing or gig economy. It's simply part of the seemingly decentralization of work but actually it simply decentralizes workers themselves while Airbnb or Uber still calls the shots and assumes less liability than a traditional business. And the best one can hope for is to become a small business owner which is a distinct enough class position rather than a simultaneous one of being a worker and small business owner. The intuition being about the role such money serves, where clearly the earliest quotes exemplify workers who work to meet their personal needs and costs, they are labouring, to try and make some extra money to get by. They aren't expanding value in the way the capitalist does or even the small business owner who employs a few people.

So after all this I have to say I am worried that you're not actually looking that close enough perhaps and are trying to emphasize ownership in a way that distorts the structural relations of class which can be see as an ideological front in undermining class consciousness. Because that gloss quickly wears off if one is bullshitting themselves they're small time business owner but it's just them cleaning and so on a private room for some extra cash.


I'm not "romanticizing" the gig economy, I just see it as an useful venue to diversify income sources since they give you ample freedom to decide on when and how to work. No one stops you from renting a room on AirBnB, driving an Uber over the weekend or Friday night and keeping a 9-5 job.

This flexible nature also means the relations between suppliers (drivers, hosts) and the platforms are not really the same as the rigid nature in the relations between wage workers and businessowners.

Wellsy wrote:Petty bourgeoisie are not bourgeois though, so I find this confusing.
But I raised the point because I wanted to appeal to not a definition but an intuition you might have that if workers work to reproduce their subsistence (not physical but all modern needs they may have), even if they save a bit extra, how would you put this on par with a capitalist? Who employs others en masse?
A capitalist may in some sense work hard, also, but what is the structural relation of themselves to the company and how it functions. A small business owner does a lot of work but they also unlike the person who directly sells their labor, manage other people. Basically, the definition of class isn't whether you work hard or not and as such isn't necessarily the essential part in exemplifying the structural social relations of class.


Sure, yet you said AirBnB hosts (and actually Uber "drivers" too, since you can own several cars and hire people to drive them) are somehow different from small property owners or owners of a small taxi company. In reality, they are not and if anything these platforms allow regular people to compete with them as well.

If you want to drive for a fee, you don't need to work for a taxi company or even get a government permit (depending on jurisdiction), you can just set up an Uber account. If you want to rent a room or a second dwelling, you can also do it on AirBnB on top of using the other traditional platforms.

Wellsy wrote:It still seems like you're equating enhancing the cost of your labor-power in the form of wages with that of capital under the pretense of investment to expand its value.
But there seems to be no real examination of the cyclical process in which money exists as capital and expands in value based on surplus labor thus producing a greater sum of money in direct comparison with simply being able to earn higher wage.

I just don't think it's making a very precise comparison but a very superficial one in order to equate them. To find similarities in a vague sense can be a poor manner of abstracting and flattening things out so as to be equated but completely ignored their distinctions.


Wellsy wrote:I do not readily buy into the abistnence approach, as it seems to equate the capitalist to that of the worker who works for subsistence but capitalists are in no such position.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3

https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/

To emphasize the bottom point:
https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au/bitstream/handle/10072/12641/33292_1.pdf?sequence=1


So I'm not sure how well the delayed gratification fits with the capitalist as their wealth isn't the same as the worker who deprives themselves of pleasures in order to save that bit more.
Which is in fact one of the alienating features for Marx, that money comes to posses the power, the authority to allow one lives needs and pleasures as if it were inherent to currency itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm

One can indeed create the miser out of such a fixation on money as the representation of wealth in general, not living now under the pretense of living tomorrow.

That one can find similarities doesn't mean they are essential features of those things.
I can find two objects of the same color, but this holds not relevance for the concept of a thing. As was found with the classic issue of claiming a universal that all swans are white and discovering empirically that there exist black swans in Australia. This being because their color is inessential to the concept of being a swan. When considering what is essential, it must capture that which makes it impossible for it to exist in reality if it were without that feature, that it would simply not be that qualtiiatively distinct thing which makes it what it is.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra5a.htm

TO make another example of how one can find similarities, and flatten out things in order to equate them...
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/morals/morals.htm

I emphasize the class basis as I think while you try to consider the worker not in terms of their money, but how they work and relate to a means of working, you seem to think that the class distinction collapses in the role money serves a distinctive role based on one's class position.
Such that the worker who spends money on something may vaguely be thought to investing in something in order to have a return considered profit. But I do not readily see the same relations that make them belong to the same class or simultaneously to both classes and thus destroying the very concept of class and thus implying a classless society.


I will also address these two ideas since my point is also basically the same.

What makes you believe a capitalist is not delaying consumption by (re)investing profits? Along with taking on risk, which is also something a worker who gets a degree is doing when deciding what to get a degree on, both are essential features of investment as it is. A capitalist, particularly a small one, is also deciding to forego buying something he or she wants in exchange for more consumption in the future as a result of expecting the investment to be profitable.

You say that they are not the same because the worker is earning a "subsistence wage" yet it seems that the definition of "subsistence" is actually changing over time, ironically due to the advances of capitalism, and is not based on fulfilling biological or even core social needs. In reality, plenty of workers can and do save to invest on their skills (or open businesses and become capitalists themselves) and that fact alone doesn't mean that they are somehow not workers under Marxian definitions. Unless of course you believe that an Apple engineer who saves money to get a MA and then jump to a higher paying job at, say, Google is not a wage worker :|

This I think is an example of how an application of Marxian definitions can actually cloud one's understanding of something as relevant as investment decisions. And yes, they are relevant because even human capital investment represents a substantial fraction of GDP in most countries.

Wellsy wrote:Except here you seem to equate earning income with like profit as the added value compared to what one invested.
Indeed it is much more common to switch careers and the chaos of the labor market is itself presented as a kind of freedom. To view oneself in such an abstract and individualized way that there is no real relation to broader dynamics.


https://www.lacan.com/freedom.htm

The other view of things being:


Why wouldn't I treat both as sharing some relevant essential features? In this case, both the worker and the capitalist are earning more as a result of the investment, if their expectations realize.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed, you might find some sympathy in Marx here where he considers the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production as a kind of driving force in human history.
https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/production.pdf

The above being a kind of mechanical structuralist interpretation but the idea isn't wrong, just limited in it's lack of agency for a social subject which enacts the changes, engages in the struggles in so on, as it is people who make history.


I think it's more like those social changes are simply not possible if the technical change doesn't happen first. And if it does, the social changes are inevitable if they'll lead to a more efficient production.

Wellsy wrote:Well this is kind of a point as to why the state owning things isn't necessarily an advancement except to the ideal extent that the government is answerable to it's people more directly than a company perhaps.
But the same relations may still prevailed as things are nationalized.


Indeed, but I'd say the government's view of what constitutes a "profit" is different from that of a capitalist. For a capitalist, it's very narrow: Just make money. But a government may regard having massive losses in its SOEs as worthwhile if, for example, it allows it to keep the monopoly on the use of force. The latter can be way more valuable than whatever profits several large businesses may get as that can allow the government to keep taxation up, and if the elites running it are corrupt enough, its members can personally benefit from it and often at a lower risk

Wellsy wrote:I just think profit used as an equivalent to wage loses all specificity and is a colloquial usage which muddies the waters on what are distinctions in the economy where there are specific relations which underpin the distinction of money as profit and money as wages which are in part tied to one's class position.
Where even if you don't want to focus on more industrial examples because the industrialized world has largely shifted it's massive industries offshore for cheap labor for greater profit, the general position of workers is that of having to work to reproduce their own means of existence. They have to regularly consume food, pay for rent, maintenance of appliances, the car and so on, all sorts of needs for the modern person which if they lose they job, they can readily lose.
Where the opposing intuition is that for the capitalists, they can make money all without actually doing something that very day. Jeff Bezos was still making millions even if he went on vacation, and it wasn't like he was at risk of losing his subsistence should he continue to do so. Shit he can clearly retire with the wealth he has, similarly for a lot of other even smaller capitalists who aren't billionaires.


But that intuition isn't quite correct, is it? Even if you let someone else manage your wealth, you have to make sure as a large and rich as hell capitalist that your manager isn't screwing you over in the process. You know, like it actually happened in Wall Street in 2008 in some cases.

Wellsy wrote:I agree with the sentiment that if someone is slacking that it can create a demoralizing effect, in the same way that it occurs in the workplace when someone on your team isn't pulling their weight it creates more work for everyone else.
However, I imagine such a diffisuion of responsibility and having to implement means in which to put the boot up someones ass has to exist no matter what kind of production.

But I can't go to deep because I don't really give too much thought to communes as they're a kind of prefirguative politics that I don't really care for but I won't bore you with further details as to why.


I'd be interested in reading a Marxian critique of communes.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your point, although those mechanisms can also be alienating in practice, can't they?

Wellsy wrote:Well I'm not sure how much that Marx's criticism is directly aimed at the point of paying workers in full.
Again, this is a Ricardian Socialist notion, Marx is a more encompassing criticism of the entire basis of commodity production and exchange as alienating, culminating in capitalism. That is it was Ricardian Socialists who had not yet the concept of labor power and considered that labour simply wasn't being paid it's equivalent, thus demanding better wages.
Can see Engels mock such an attitude: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm#:~:text=A%20fair%20day's%20wages%2C%20under,and%20to%20propagate%20his%20race.
Marx would actually say that by the standards of the political economy, that there is no contradiction in the equivalent exchange principle, as workers are simply paid the equivalent to their labour-power, which is justice under the current economic system. Marx of course is critical of exploitation but not under the notion that workers should simply be compensated in full.

My impression of Marx is that the socialization of production, that is, workers coming together rather than as independent workers subsisting, requires the socialization of it's ownership such as to undermine the basis of workers exploitation by depriving them of their means of subsistence. However, not as a return to individual workers subsisting, but at a new kind based on the socialization of labor.

However, in the initial stage of socialism/communism, it does seem that Marx proposes that there be some kind of compensation of labor in an equivalent form.
But I can retort with my discussion across the thread in which I don't have much of a grasp on the kinds of proposals that seek to achieve as much. Only a few resources of those who claim some outlines.


That's fair, but what's behind even the mere use of the word "exploitation" is an ethical aspect, isn't it? It isn't a purely empirical or positive notion.

Wellsy wrote:Yeah, Marx can sometimes be confusing in his use of the term value, and he seems to see it as a concept which entails the unity of opposites of use and exchange value within the commodity.
Use-value is still important because the reason a commodity sells would be it's use in the majority of cases, that I wish to pay for something because I want to use/consume it being a motivating factor and it's particular use is of prime importance for me as the buyer. But there is the sense that exchange-value is clearly distinct from use-value and this is the issue where there can be a conflation and jumping from these aspects in production and commodities themselves.

But yes, neither in themselves represent "value", but they do in some sense seem to underpin it. Value is seen as a metaphysical and unreal, but it is for Marx something very real but is suprasenous, represented through the relations and activity of people in often tangible means.
Think like how a written word has its physical form which you're reading now, but the concept which it evokes is distinct, it isn't physically the word, it is something in the mind.
However, there are things which are suprasenous, that is that can't be found upon examining the tangible and physical properties of a thing but seem to coincide with that object. Typically these are simply stated to be subjective, but there are suprasenous things which are independent any individual consciousness because they're (philosophically defined) material, they're objective.
Value is this kind of objective thing.

But I don't really have much of a concept of it having not studied Marx enough to get a sense of his concept.


How does Marx see that underlying notion of value? Could it be compatible with e.g. marginalist notions of it?

I'm starting from the basis that Marx does not equate value with labor (power).
#15174119
wat0n wrote:
My point is that the same person can both be a worker and behave like a capitalist depending on the context, owing to how the labor markets have changed in the last few decades. After all, no one stops you from driving an Uber after work or renting a room of your house (or a second dwelling) to have some extra income. Likewise, making your career decisions is more sophisticated than it was in the 19th century and it is also easier and more common to switch employers than it used to be in the mid 20th century.

Class distinctions are just not as strong as they used to be.



Wellsy wrote:
And is contract labor somehow essentially different to wage labor generally? That it exists doesn't pose some sort of contradiction to Marx. They still have to sell their labour to survive and as such are part of the working class.
Unless you're wanting to characterize something more like a tradesman who is more petty-bourgeoisie and runs his own company with a few apprentices.
But again, I'm not really seeing much on the face of the concept being an issue.



wat0n wrote:
It is different because contract laborers have more freedom to decide how they work than wage workers do.



Wat0n, you really need to *listen* to Wellsy -- he's covered all of this stuff in detail with you already, but you're showing yourself to be too petulant and willful for the time spent among all of us to be of any value.

By focusing on the aspect of time-flexibility you're falling for employer *marketing*, basically ('work / life balance'), when in fact the employer-worker material *relationship* hasn't changed in the slightest. Whether the worker is producing a good or a service, the employer is *still* making more off of the worker's labor-time than the worker is receiving in the form of a wage.

Wellsy already covered the difference between *class*, and 'strata', and you're repeatedly, continually falling for the concept of (socio-economic status) 'strata', with a blind-spot to understanding material *class* exploitation of labor-power, by the capitalist employer.

Here, for the record, since you continue to ignore it anyway....


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Wellsy wrote:
Indeed, technological change in production is but a precondition to changing an economic structure.



Yup, I have 'technology / technique' as being greater in magnitude than economics:


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Wellsy wrote:



Ideality, according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in the thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object.



(This concept of 'ideality' would equate directly to Marx's term of 'value', in my understanding.)


---


Wellsy wrote:
And often the ideal of airbnb peeps is actually to have a distinct and separate property just like a landlord, but its of course smaller scale than having a hotel with a series of rooms depending on how big the property is.
And we would have to examine the dynamic in the sort of work the person running the airbnb is doing and the money made. Are they earning so much that they are more like a landlord or are they more breaking even when one considers how much they're busting their ass to maintain the place and provide clean sheets and all that.



wat0n wrote:
Why would it make such a significant difference? Wouldn't a petite bourgeois still be bourgeois despite busting his ass running his business?



Yes -- for once you have it correct. The bourgeois benefits from *ownership*, which the proletarian does *not* enjoy.

Whether the AirBnB property owner works a *little* or a *lot* is still a matter of *overhead* to the property itself. If the same person decides to spend money to hire a *worker* to maintain the lease property, it's *still* overhead, meaning that no new commodities are being produced. The leasing, for revenue, and possibly profit, is based on pre-existing *rentier* capital, the property itself.


---


wat0n wrote:
Why wouldn't acquiring skills through training or getting degrees be a form of capital accumulation in this view, if this is being done to achieve earnings? You can actually approach the decision of whether to get a degree (e.g. a masters) from a financial point of view, and I'm guessing plenty of people do (I did at least, it wasn't the only criterion but it was a major factor in the decision).



This is a *misnomer* -- sure, there are incrementally higher-skilled tiers for jobs ('strata'), but the *real* money is in *social organization*, or being a 'corporate tool', basically, at the expense of one's own individuality. Hence *class*, again.


---


wat0n wrote:
Class distinctions are just not as strong as they used to be.


wat0n wrote:
It is different because contract laborers have more freedom to decide how they work than wage workers do.



At *most* all you're doing is making the distinction between serf / slave labor, and *wage* labor, here. Yes, wage laborers have relatively more *geographical* freedom, and concomitant civil rights thereof, give-or-take, but you're emphasizing this distinction at the expense of a *class* analysis of socio-*material* relationships, yet again (employer-vs.-worker, or capital-owner-vs.-labor-seller).


---


wat0n wrote:
As for how Marx saw the production of services, thanks for pointing that out. It's just that most examples mentioned in these discussions apply to the production of physical goods for the most part, and most of the terms used by Marx also lend themselves to think mostly in terms of physical production.



You're falsely dichotomizing goods-and-services, since -- as Wellsy has already explained -- both involve the exploitation of labor-power for their production as commodities, under capitalism.


---


wat0n wrote:
So in a nutshell you don't really disagree with my example? I'm asking because one problem with organizing production under a commune would indeed be that more productive members may be getting (or believe they are getting) less than what they are contributing to it. More generally, it would seem that there would be an incentive not to work "too hard" if living in a commune because there will be a point in which you will not benefit from it.



Blinkered again -- you're looking at *cultural* (group) issues, while ignoring the material reality of who provides the *labor* for the commune, and who owns the *land* and *infrastructure* of the commune itself, since such is necessarily a *given* within our current world of capitalism.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is practically *anecdotal* -- like you 'heard', from a little birdie, that some companies are 'constant innovators'.

Also, 'constant innovation' isn't the goal of business -- much innovation is 'bleeding edge', meaning that being so 'cutting-edge' actually *backfires* and causes 'bleeding', such as the hemorrhaging of investment capital in whatever speculative tech venture didn't pan out.

The *point* of business is to make money, and the money to be made is in *finance* these days, and also in government bailout money, so the actual real-world economic activity of making tangible useful products for consumers isn't what it used to be -- hence the current *inflation* in the consumer markets that you've been pointing to, since consumers are increasingly chasing after a lesser number of thin-profit-margin real-economy goods producers -- non-financial.



wat0n wrote:
Anecdotal? Have you heard about clusters of innovation?

Yes, of course business want to maximize profits. We all know that - and some use innovation to do that. There are different strategies to achieve this end, and innovation is one of them. What's your point?



My point is that you've been *fetishizing* 'innovation' as though it's the be-all and end-all of capitalism, which it's not, which you're now acknowledging.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're talking about a 'constant stream of innovation' in terms of *society* -- though I'd call it capitalist *incrementalism* myself -- and not in terms of each private enterprise.

Yes, for the individual producer it *is* more like a *gamble*, as to whether 'innovation' is also a good investment, or not.

You obviously don't realize that if an innovation is applied more widely by producers then that's *bad* for business, cutting against Okishio's triumphalism, though it's *good* for the consumer since prices fall due to overproduction / oversupply.



wat0n wrote:
Why? They are becoming more productive, and if the stream is constant then the process will be repeating itself with the first adopters being able to get some temporary economic profits as a result.

Also, how do you explain things like leapfrogging otherwise?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging



The key word here is *temporary*. For any given innovator the reduction in cost, versus competitors, for above-average profits, is *temporary*.

As I noted above you're constantly flitting about around various *scales* / contexts of approach and analysis, to opportunistically fit your rhetoric. Okishio's line, parroted by you, falls flat in validity once the 'temporary' period has expired for any given 'innovator' -- and then Marx's 'declining rate of profit' kicks-in *on the whole*, for all producers across the entire industry.

Sure -- 'leapfrogging' -- but now we're at a *macro*-scale, looking at all of society over time, which is no longer about any given *specific* innovation and its effect for the *individual* producer, on a *temporary* basis.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Again, a non-zero positive *doesn't cut it* -- what matters is whether the *growth* of the economy's size is matching *population growth*, or not.



wat0n wrote:
Which is why I posted per capita GDP.



Per capita GDP is not GDP *growth*, whether per-nation or per-capita, per-nation.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I'm not entertaining your academic speculation.



wat0n wrote:
I'll take that as a no.



No, it's not a 'no' -- I'm *not addressing* your contrived formulation.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Or hyper-exploited workers.



wat0n wrote:
Why?



You already admitted that the Uber / Uber-type company is only providing the *advertising*, while the driver / worker has to provide *everything else*, including their own exploited labor-power, driving. It's one thing to commute to an office to go do one's work, but it's another thing to have to provide the "office" oneself, as a worker, in order to be able to work in the first place.
#15174125
ckaihatsu wrote:Wat0n, you really need to *listen* to Wellsy -- he's covered all of this stuff in detail with you already, but you're showing yourself to be too petulant and willful for the time spent among all of us to be of any value.

By focusing on the aspect of time-flexibility you're falling for employer *marketing*, basically ('work / life balance'), when in fact the employer-worker material *relationship* hasn't changed in the slightest. Whether the worker is producing a good or a service, the employer is *still* making more off of the worker's labor-time than the worker is receiving in the form of a wage.

Wellsy already covered the difference between *class*, and 'strata', and you're repeatedly, continually falling for the concept of (socio-economic status) 'strata', with a blind-spot to understanding material *class* exploitation of labor-power, by the capitalist employer.

Here, for the record, since you continue to ignore it anyway....


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image


I did listen yet I can tell there are meaningful differences between both. If I'm sick, and I Uber, I don't even need to call in sick. If I don't feel like working and don't need the money, I don't have to (yet as a wage worker I would, even if I don't want to and I'm willing to not be paid for the day since it would disrupt everyone else's work).

Can you appreciate that these are two examples of having more freedom to manage your time as you wish?


ckaihatsu wrote:This is a *misnomer* -- sure, there are incrementally higher-skilled tiers for jobs ('strata'), but the *real* money is in *social organization*, or being a 'corporate tool', basically, at the expense of one's own individuality. Hence *class*, again.


That depends. There are wage laborers that effectively make more, and work less, than some petite bourgeois. Consider for example the cases of top doctors and also top university professors.

ckaihatsu wrote:At *most* all you're doing is making the distinction between serf / slave labor, and *wage* labor, here. Yes, wage laborers have relatively more *geographical* freedom, and concomitant civil rights thereof, give-or-take, but you're emphasizing this distinction at the expense of a *class* analysis of socio-*material* relationships, yet again (employer-vs.-worker, or capital-owner-vs.-labor-seller).


Hold on, are you really trying to imply there is no meaningful difference between slavery and wage labor? :eek:

ckaihatsu wrote:You're falsely dichotomizing goods-and-services, since -- as Wellsy has already explained -- both involve the exploitation of labor-power for their production as commodities, under capitalism.


Am I? There are also essential differences between both. For instance, it's usually impossible to store a service but it is common to store and keep inventory of goods.

Doesn't the above affect the work relationship in practical terms?

ckaihatsu wrote:Blinkered again -- you're looking at *cultural* (group) issues, while ignoring the material reality of who provides the *labor* for the commune, and who owns the *land* and *infrastructure* of the commune itself, since such is necessarily a *given* within our current world of capitalism.


Certainly the worker that is getting less value for the labor he's providing isn't owning much of that.

ckaihatsu wrote:My point is that you've been *fetishizing* 'innovation' as though it's the be-all and end-all of capitalism, which it's not, which you're now acknowledging.


No, I'm not. I'm simply pointing out that it's a reality in capitalism, no one has claimed businesses innovate for the sake of it.

ckaihatsu wrote:The key word here is *temporary*. For any given innovator the reduction in cost, versus competitors, for above-average profits, is *temporary*.

As I noted above you're constantly flitting about around various *scales* / contexts of approach and analysis, to opportunistically fit your rhetoric. Okishio's line, parroted by you, falls flat in validity once the 'temporary' period has expired for any given 'innovator' -- and then Marx's 'declining rate of profit' kicks-in *on the whole*, for all producers across the entire industry.

Sure -- 'leapfrogging' -- but now we're at a *macro*-scale, looking at all of society over time, which is no longer about any given *specific* innovation and its effect for the *individual* producer, on a *temporary* basis.


The issue is that you are assuming innovation only takes place once. In reality, there could be a stream of innovation (done by the business itself or the business itself could be adopting new technology) that sustain Okishio's insight.

ckaihatsu wrote:Per capita GDP is not GDP *growth*, whether per-nation or per-capita, per-nation.


You can infer the per capita GDP growth rate, i.e. approximately the difference between GDP growth and population growth rates, from the series.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, it's not a 'no' -- I'm *not addressing* your contrived formulation.


In what way is it contrived?

ckaihatsu wrote:You already admitted that the Uber / Uber-type company is only providing the *advertising*, while the driver / worker has to provide *everything else*, including their own exploited labor-power, driving. It's one thing to commute to an office to go do one's work, but it's another thing to have to provide the "office" oneself, as a worker, in order to be able to work in the first place.


Advertising and matching, that is, telling the driver where the rider is (which is also valuable, isn't it?). But yes, the rest is up to the driver yet he or she can drive whenever desired and is under no obligation to do so just because Uber wants to.
#15174146
wat0n wrote:How is it any different from newspapers having their own terms of service for posting ads?

Again, do advertisers in the paper or where ever take a commission of each booking? Because my understanding is you pay for their service of advertising and that's the extent of the exchange, they don't get to dip into your pocket for every sale you make. It sounds like a different relationship to an ad in a newspaper to me.

I'm not sure about how that negates my point, though.

Well the point is to emphasize that those who run Airbnb or more specifically own it, are those which make the profit here. The rhetoric of a sharing economy glosses over how the economy isn't one of sharing things directly but is mediated by money and is about the renting of services and goods. That in itself isn't something radically new or external to capitalism.

This answer below applies to these two points:

Just as AirBnB can easily let workers go (although it's not hard to do in the US in general), contracted workers can also enjoy freedoms wage workers can't such as (for instance) deciding when to work, how much to work (customers are the ones rating them) and more generally how to manage their time and effort - even one of your sources mentions that most AirBnB hosts surveyed don't believe it's too hard to be a host there. It's a give and take, just like living in a commune also has a give and take aspect in how labor relations work.

It sounds as if you wanted to have your cake and eat it too here.

Indeed that is the big appeal for gig/contract work of this type, the flexibility. .And that can have great appeal.
But I think one may also emphasize that for the worker, as opposed to the aspiring small business owner, it is probable that their work isn't strictly one of leisure but of need.
In fact isn't the rating system itself a reflection of the explicit competition among the different drivers, or hosts.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm
At the moment, self-employed workers offering their services via such apps are competing on price and quality, with ratings given to “taskers”, etc. by customers meaning that intense competition between workers is explicit. Regulation and/or unionisation have been suggested to resist this, with possibilities including the introduction of a minimum wage rate for all those working in the on-demand economy. Whichever way you look at it, the rules of the game are currently stacked firmly in favour of the capitalists.

As Dean Baker, a Washington think-tank economist, commented in the New York Times, “You are getting people to self-exploit in ways we have regulations in place to prevent.” Stanley Aronowitz, a researcher at the City University of New York, stated in the same article that, “It might as well be called wage slavery in which all the cards are held, mediated by technology, by the employer, whether it is the intermediary company or the customer.”

Similar suggestions have been made in relation to the “sharing” economy. Currently, big companies in the “sharing” economy offer no protection for their suppliers or their customers. For example, AirBnB hosts or guests are liable for damages, which would typically be covered by the hotel or hostel in a normal hotel business. The same situation exists in the on-demand economy, with Uber drivers having all liability for the maintenance and insurance of their vehicles. Again, it is the workers who are made to pay all the costs whilst the bosses reap the profits.

And of course the flexibility while definitely real for some, it is also the case that while you're not directly being dictated to by an employer your hours, what propels you to work may still be the need to earn money to meet your own needs i.e. the structural condition of workers.

In fact, the flexibility seems to be inherently tied to a great deal of work outside of what is paid or in the case of airbnb is actually providing the very means for the service to be realized such as your home space, supplies, cleaning and so on.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/
2 The Creative Class
What about the “creative class” of freelancers who view work as a labor of love, who put in long hours for sheer love of the game? As the saying goes, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”

In this view, creative work is the “antithesis of alienation” — as Nicole Cohen puts its — because cultural workers who deal in ideas or self-expression are granted “relative autonomy in the labor process,” with a degree of control and self-direction in their work. Working from home, in particular, frees the worker from the tight control of the employer — dress codes, Internet filters, and restrictions on breaks; capitalists have realized that, as Cohen describes it, “control over production can be surrendered if it is not an impediment to exploitation.” If the worker isn’t salaried, all that matters is whether the job gets done.

Freelancers are commonly thought of as working in creative, white-collar fields like media, publishing, and tech. But the category is actually quite expansive and includes people as varied as cabinet-makers, nannies, sex workers, insurance agents, administrative assistants, artists, translators and interpreters (and my own occupation, copy editors).

Some of these occupations, like artists and writers, are creative; some straddle the line between creativity and (more often) straightforward corporate production (translators, editors, and copywriters); others perform “noncreative” tasks like child care, sex work, surrogate childbearing, or housekeeping.

The reason the creative, media, and tech sectors are so often identified with freelancing is that these industries adopted the casualized freelance model much earlier and much more thoroughly than other industries. As Cohen points out, the shift to precarious forms of employment was pioneered in cultural industries, which have “serv[ed] as a model of flexible, project-based work for other industries.”

That model is now reproduced everywhere from universities to health care to hair salons. But working freelance doesn’t “mean an escape from exploitation or labor-capital antagonism,” as she notes — “corporations that rely on freelance labor have developed alternative methods of extracting surplus value from workers . . . including an increase in unpaid labor time and the aggressive pursuit of copyrights.” That unpaid time includes everything from researching and pitching articles to invoicing, project management, marketing and sales, and administrative work, all once the responsibility of the employer.

Now, there is a grain of truth here: creative labor can indeed be more fulfilling. Personally, I like working from home, editing for clients like Haymarket Books and Historical Materialism, a lot more than I liked editing corporate training materials in a windowless basement office. I do push myself to work long hours in order to take on projects I really love.

But the “portfolio career,” in which creative workers juggle multiple clients and simultaneous projects in order to make ends meet while using those projects to market their skills and land the next project, is a balancing act.

For every amazing biography of Frantz Fanon, there are many hours of proofreading corporate reports and writing websites for real-estate brokers to pay the rent, the student-loan debt, and the health insurance premiums.

The freelance writers surveyed by Cohen regarded serious, long-form journalism as a luxury, something they fit in around the tedious bill-paying gigs that took up the vast majority of their time. While freelancers do sometimes enjoy more “individuality . . . liberty, independence, and self-control” (as Marx put it) than in-house workers, it is tightly restricted by the necessity of selling your labor power in an atmosphere of increased competition and downward pressure on wages.

3. But It’s Voluntary!
Are freelancers pushed or do they jump? Does it matter?

People freelance for many reasons. Some really are in it for fortune and glory, as the stereotypes about carefree millennials would have it; the Freelancers Union survey found that many respondents had chosen freelance work and were happy with that choice.

There is no question that not having a boss has a great deal to offer: no office politics, no pantyhose, no sexual harassment from lecherous supervisors, no fetching anyone coffee, no commute. Freelancers also have the right to turn down projects, though that freedom of consent is contingent upon an abundance of work.

As appealing as these features are, though, they are not necessarily the material drivers of the decision to freelance.

A very large chunk of freelancers work as independent contractors because their industries have restructured, eliminating fixed employment and job security. In publishing and print media, for example, writers, editors, designers, and other media professionals now freelance because the industry is structured around a heavily exploited skeleton crew in the office and a reserve army of freelance labor to be subcontracted at will.

Others freelance because their industry restructured before they got there, or was created around the reserve-army model to begin with. This is particularly the case for younger workers in tech and digital media, where the kinds of stable jobs that Guy Standing would consider the jobs of the “true proletariat” never existed in the first place.

Finally, there’s a category, often underestimated, of workers who are forced into freelance work because the conditions of traditional employment have squeezed them out by refusing to accommodate workers’ basic human needs, like sick days and parental leave.

The Family Medical Leave Act, which allows some workers to take unpaid maternity leave, applies to less than 10 percent of all employers; the US and Papua New Guinea are the only countries in the world that do not guarantee any maternity leave by law.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 75 percent of full-time US workers and 27 percent of part-time workers have some paid sick days. The average full-time worker with a tenure of less than five years — the average length of employment — has eight to nine days of paid sick leave per year. This time may or may not also include vacation days, since many employers prefer a policy of “paid time off” to be used for illness or vacation.

Parents (particularly single parents) and people dealing with disabilities or chronic illness are faced with a choice: work sick and forgo needed medical care for themselves and their children, or face being fired under their employer’s attendance policy. If you can’t get disability or can’t afford to be a stay-at-home parent, the only choice left is freelancing. More than 40 percent of respondents to the Freelancers Union survey listed schedule flexibility as a primary motivation for freelancing.

Given that the burdens of child care and elder care are disproportionately placed on women, the gender balance of the freelance workforce is highly skewed. I recently attended a conference for freelance editors at which more than 75 percent of the attendees were female.

Surprisingly, recent Bureau of Labor Statistics findings show that the wage gap for women, which is 77 cents on the dollar for white women and as low as 51 cents for black and Latina women, appears to be mitigated or even eliminated in the freelance world, depending on other factors such as race. This suggests that some workers may calculate that employer discrimination makes the situation so impossible that they are better off fending for themselves, outside formal employment.

So can these workers be said to have jumped, or were they pushed?

So yes there is flexibility, here which is pitched as the freedom of the worker but no you are still a worker who must sell themselves to survive.
The point being here not a having your cake and eating it too, the proposal that people don't work, but emphasizing the structural relation which still compels the person into that work even if it's not personified with some prick sending you threats of losing your job or what ever. The emphasis on the precariousness of the persons ability to sustain themselves instead becomes the disciplining factor. Because why would someone prefer to say work a 9-5 job among adding in extra hours if they have child care responsibilities for example?
I would indeed love the flexibility of consistent and stable work along side the ability to step out for the needs of my family.
Flexibility here in gig work can achieve that better but only to a point where money isn't the deciding factor and one can actually stop working and prioritize their time and effort else where.


Actually I would say that AirBnB can lose reputation, both prospective customers and prospective hosts may switch to other platforms if they believe there are safety concerns involved. Again, I would say it's not all that different from how it works for other advertisers and other platforms.

Airbnb does a lot to maintain its public relations, as such its public perception means a great deal to it. The same issue of safety concerns has arisen with Uber which itself has prompted the call for regulation. Just as I speculate occurred with the initial industries providing these services, where people complain and force change upon the companies in some way if they do not themselves address it.

I still think the distinction between the advertiser and airbnb would be that the latter takes a commission. A real estate agent has to advertise, but it's not the advertiser taking apart of their commission which they take from the sale of the house, that's the company they're employed by. In fact, airbnb is often labelled as a broker. Which is clearly what they do, they arrange the meeting between buyers and seller sand take a commission for it.

It's an emphasis because of course there exist workers who may earn a great deal as to put some space between the maintenance of their lifestyle and having something extra.

And in focusing on Airbnb, those who make a profit are indeed aspiring small business owners or already are despite the marketed image of just everyday people renting out a room.

My emphasis hasn't been that people have to work, the point is emphasizing the qualitative nature of their work and the function of what they earn.


Care to explain who's the monopolist in the room rental market? :eh:

What is it so different about renting a room on AirBnB vs doing so by advertising it in a newspaper? Keep in mind that even hotels could use AirBnB to market their rooms.

Well airbnb isn't a monopoly, they do have to compete with traditional hotels, hostels, and even other similar app platforms.
But my point was more to speak about the precariousness even of small business owners should a larger company wish to push into their market, they generally cannot compete or are simply bought out. This is what a lot of the large tech firms have done in recent years, they 'devour' the small or destroy them.

But in terms of what effect airbnb has, those who make a profit are those with multiple properties which it disavows. More and more property gets consilidated among land owners and makes long term housing increasingly unaffordable due to the lucrative money to be made in short-term rentals.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm
With the growth of the “sharing” / on-demand economy, there has been a re-emergence of the “small is beautiful” rhetoric that was popular in previous decades. The idea then, embraced by the liberal bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie, was that the economy would be driven forward not by giant multinationals, but by a wave of smaller, more innovative businesses.

The rise of the internet and app based economy, where start-ups can reach valuations of billions with only a skeleton staff, has given the “small is beautiful” movement a new lease of life. Like the American gold rushes of the 19th Century, the promise is made today that any budding young entrepreneur can get rich quick – all they need is a good idea and a bundle of enthusiasm and audacity. There’s gold in them thar hills!

But such jubilant and euphoric calls are frequently heard at the beginning of every new bubble. Marx highlighted the nature and dynamics of such bubbles in Capital, which arise from the anarchic nature of the capitalist market: a new market opens up; early pioneers make super-profits in the absence of competition; a herd mentality sets in as hordes of investors pile in, afraid of missing the party; the sector becomes bloated with excess capacity; and crisis sets in as the capitalists find they are over-burdened with debts they cannot pay back, as a result of borrowing money on the assumption of profits that can never be realised.

This is the pattern of every bubble, from the earliest recorded cases, such as the Dutch tulip mania of the 1600s, to the modern case of American shale gas. Now with cash hoards piling up in the hands of the capitalists, but without any avenue for profitable investment, stock market prices and the amounts of money being thrown at start-ups are becoming increasingly separated from the real state of the economy.

One doesn’t have to go back many years to find the most recent example in the tech industry: that of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the new millennium – a bubble that burst, leaving a sharp economic downturn in its wake.

Today, new info-tech-based companies are being valued at eye-watering amounts. Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat, and Instagram have been valued at $11bn, $19bn, $20bn, and $35bn respectively – and yet none have any source of income. All the signs of another tech-bubble are there; again, another reflection of the enormous overproduction that exists on a world scale, and the dearth of genuinely profitable places for the rich to put their money.

Investors, meanwhile, are pouring money into the “sharing” / on-demand economy. AirBnB and Uber, valued at $26bn and $41bn respectively, have raised over $8bn in funds respectively, without yet actually making a profit for their investors. All this money is being gained from investors on the promise that these companies will solidify a monopoly position for themselves and will eventually, therefore, be able to make super-profits in the not-too-distant future.

Indeed, the fact that companies such as AirBnB and Uber must establish themselves as monopolies before they can make a profit is a powerful punch in the face of the “small is beautiful” argument. The tech industry, so often lauded for its dynamic and fast-growing start-ups is still – like every other sector – dominated by monopolies. Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon: all of these household names and giant multinationals have a near-monopolistic hold in their respective markets. And, as the purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram by Facebook show, the small will always end up being swallowed up by the big.

The same is true of the “sharing” economy. For example, Zipcar, a car “sharing” company and early pioneer of the “sharing” economy, was bought up by Avis, a massive multinational car-hire company, in early 2013. Meanwhile, whilst companies like AirBnB promote themselves as being a platform for ordinary people to make a bit of money on the side by renting out their spare rooms, one study of AirBnB’s business in New York found that approximately 50% of AirBnB’s revenue generated in the Big Apple came from those with multiple listings – i.e. landlords. Similarly, three-quarters of AirBnB’s business is for whole-home rentals – clearly not a case of ordinary people making some pocket money on the side.



Indeed, and that's because AirBnB and Uber are disrupting their traditional industries. Yet I would say the current arrangement is more efficient than how those markets worked before Uber and AirBnB showed up.

Indeed it is incredibly efficient and that is the strength of such technology in quickly establishing the exchange.


What percentage of NYC's housing stock would this amount to and why shouldn't zoning laws adapt to the technological change? Aren't these laws part of the problem when it comes to affordability?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-york-city-housing-stock-reduction-study
Short-term rental companies like Airbnb are flooding New York City’s housing market, reducing available housing stock citywide by 10%, a new study has revealed.

More than 55% of rooms or apartments listed on Airbnb in New York are illegal, according to the report, which is the result of research commissioned by two affordable housing advocacy groups: Housing Conservation Coordinators and MFY Legal Services.

The report focused on what it called “impact listings”, defined as entire home or apartment listings rented out illegally by commercial hosts, either multiple units for at least three months a year or single listings rented for at least six months a year.

The authors found 8,000 units fitting that description, the report says, noting that the landlords or hosts made more than $300m from renting them out short-term. If such units were returned to the rental market, according to the report, the number of vacant units available to rent citywide would rise 10%.


Are you against housing regulations? Because it seems to me the negative effects of stuff like Airbnb has on housing for people who actually want to live in them is not great.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45083954

https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm
Whilst AirBnB and other such companies may help improve in allocating specific resources more efficiently, they are not re-investing their profits into solving the problem of scarcity where it exists. In other words, they are doing nothing to develop the productive forces.

The case of AirBnB is a perfect example. This major player of the “sharing” economy is ultimately benefitting from the fact that there is a lack of housing and affordable accommodation in society. But rather than re-investing its profits into solving the shortage of housing, as would occur within a socialist plan of production, AirBnB simply spends its profits on advertising and marketing in order to expand its share of the market. This is the basis for its entire business model.

At the same time, there are many examples of how AirBnB, rather than helping to solve the housing crisis, is actually responsible for exaccerbating it. Many landlords who previously rented to long-term tenants are now instead choosing to cash-in and turn their properties purely into short-term lets and holiday homes, at much higher rates than those on the long-term rental market. The result is to price renters out of areas they could previously afford and to reduce the supply of housing available to rent. Instead of efficiently allocating resources, then, AirBnB actual serves to increase scarcity.

I mean sure if I thought that the market was some overwhelming good in meeting human needs it wouldn't need regulation, but if we disregard human needs in a sole focus on the quantitative cost of things and forget all externalities then yeah screw regulations. Except that only thinking flies in the imagination of American libertarian sorts of the free market-solving everything as its taken as an inherent good, and even equated with freedom even if it empirically reduces freedom for people.
It seems to me that the more and more companies like Airbnb and Uber disrupt the traditional markets, the more they prompt regulation and the more they end up just like those already regulated markets. Maybe they won't be entirely regulated out and pushed that far and able to occupy a niche which regular hotels cannot perform.
But if it creates enough problems for people to act on it, then it may go that way.

Regulation can increase the cost of things, but it also is ideally meant to set certain quality and safety standards.
Where as airbnbs probable increase in rental prices and the diminishing availability of long term rentals offers no such improvement along with the increased costs.
I'm not "romanticizing" the gig economy, I just see it as an useful venue to diversify income sources since they give you ample freedom to decide on when and how to work. No one stops you from renting a room on AirBnB, driving an Uber over the weekend or Friday night and keeping a 9-5 job.

This flexible nature also means the relations between suppliers (drivers, hosts) and the platforms are not really the same as the rigid nature in the relations between wage workers and businessowners.

Well that it can be an advantage but why would having multiple jobs or means of income be an advantage? Due to the risk of losing everything with one job, not putting all eggs in one basket which emphasizes the precariousness of people if they need such an advantage due to the unreliability of stable work and income. Your example itself mentions someone doing more work over and above their already existing 9-5 job. Some people are game and want to work all that time, however the real rub for workers is the free time they have. If you're constantly gunning for work there is something behind it. Some cases that can be personal aversion to some psychological thing and hence they throw themselves into work, a lot of the drug users I worked with were great workers, it was a great way to avoid things by throwing themselves into it hard.
On the other hand if I offer someone some money, would they work less? This would suggest that they are working for some important need, that they feel they must work to get that extra money.
At least this is how things would be for many of the workers who are part of the gig economy unless they are already small time business owners.

But I would agree that a difference would be the point at which you might stop working compared to the times I worked at the prison doing little during lockdowns but had to remain because they owned that time of mine.
It being easier for the airbnb in part because the maintenance doesn't require as much weekly as driving perhaps does.




Sure, yet you said AirBnB hosts (and actually Uber "drivers" too, since you can own several cars and hire people to drive them) are somehow different from small property owners or owners of a small taxi company. In reality, they are not and if anything these platforms allow regular people to compete with them as well.

If you want to drive for a fee, you don't need to work for a taxi company or even get a government permit (depending on jurisdiction), you can just set up an Uber account. If you want to rent a room or a second dwelling, you can also do it on AirBnB on top of using the other traditional platforms.

Yeah seems some people do have a 'fleet' of cars going and offer luxury cars as a niche.
Indeed I marked a distinction within examples of airbnb hosts where someone renting out a room on their own property and being the one working to clean it and provide stuff is distinct from those who owned multiple properties and employed people. In the study I linked, itself the people experienced their hosting very differently based on that. It was reflected in their sense of whether they were being entrepreneurial or not. I used that in part as a proxy for how the person just renting out a room and doing all the work themselves is directly labouring to earn an income. The small business owner example itself explicitly mentioned trying to create a means of passive income, that is earning a great deal for doing less.

Well that is the great appeal of uber and airbnb, is that it bypasses the laws until of course laws are in place and slap 'em. Those in NYC may receive a hefty fine if they're seen hosting multiple places which aren't their own.
To which might want to argue against the kind of professionalization which puts a hold on an industry, like how you need a license to perform certain professions and so on. But such regulations are also widely accepted as a kind of quality control also. Not only in quality of the service or good, but also in it's broader effects as mentioned above on the rise in rent prices due to reduced availability of long term rentals among property owners.





I will also address these two ideas since my point is also basically the same.

What makes you believe a capitalist is not delaying consumption by (re)investing profits? Along with taking on risk, which is also something a worker who gets a degree is doing when deciding what to get a degree on, both are essential features of investment as it is. A capitalist, particularly a small one, is also deciding to forego buying something he or she wants in exchange for more consumption in the future as a result of expecting the investment to be profitable.

You say that they are not the same because the worker is earning a "subsistence wage" yet it seems that the definition of "subsistence" is actually changing over time, ironically due to the advances of capitalism, and is not based on fulfilling biological or even core social needs. In reality, plenty of workers can and do save to invest on their skills (or open businesses and become capitalists themselves) and that fact alone doesn't mean that they are somehow not workers under Marxian definitions. Unless of course you believe that an Apple engineer who saves money to get a MA and then jump to a higher paying job at, say, Google is not a wage worker :|

This I think is an example of how an application of Marxian definitions can actually cloud one's understanding of something as relevant as investment decisions. And yes, they are relevant because even human capital investment represents a substantial fraction of GDP in most countries.

My point isn't that the capitalist ISN'T, delaying consumption but a point against the common notion that delayed consumption is the basis of capitalist wealth as opposed to the structural relation in which they extract surplus labor from employees.


Why wouldn't I treat both as sharing some relevant essential features? In this case, both the worker and the capitalist are earning more as a result of the investment, if their expectations realize.

Because sameness is arbitrary and doesn't denote a real world relationship which draws things into relation to one another. And it is also part of the tendency to in fact break distinctions, because how would sameness be essential?
It is the property which one lacks which constitutes the attraction with the other. Just like in a chemical reaction, same chemicals do not produce some qualitatively new reaction.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/
While it’s certainly the case that class structures can and do change over time (as Bertell Ollman points out, Marx was quick to note this, especially in relation to the United States), it’s important to define them not with a list of attributes in common but in terms of the relations of production — the conflict that lies at the heart of all class struggle.

Aligning freelancers ideologically with the goals of the petit-bourgeoisie (which some Marxists also do, as Eric Olin Wright documents in Classes), even though most have far more in common with the working class, erects yet another barrier to prevent them from organizing and demanding rights as workers. As Richard Seymour puts it: “The attempt to obscure, or ‘disappear,’ the concept of class is a deliberate politicized mission.”

This is why I am critical of your approach as it seems to simply approach the matter as that tof individuals and without class distinction, you use the words capitalist and worker but how do they even exist distinctly in your framing where they are described in the same terms.
Here is a lengthy section to help understand.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1g.htm
We have thus established that thinking in concepts is directed at revealing the living real unity of things, their concrete connection of interaction rather than at defining their abstract unity, dead identity.

The analysis of the category of interaction shows directly, however, that mere sameness, simple identity of two individual things is by no means an expression of the principle of their mutual connection.

In general, interaction proves to be strong if an object finds in another object a complement of itself, something, that it is lacking as such.

‘Sameness’ is always assumed, of course, as the premise or condition under which the link of interconnection is established. But the very essence of interconnection is not realised through sameness. Two gears are locked exactly because the tooth of the pinion is placed opposite a space between two teeth of the drive gear rather than opposite the same kind of tooth.

When two chemical particles, previously apparently identical, are ‘locked’ into a molecule, the structure of each of them undergoes a certain change. Each of the two particles actually bound in the molecule has its own complement in the other one: at each moment they exchange the electrons of their outermost shell, this mutual exchange binding them into a single whole. Each of them gravitates towards the other, because at each given moment its electron (or electrons) is within the other particle, the very same electron which it lacks for this precise reason. Where such a continually arising and continually disappearing difference does not exist, no cohesion or interaction exists either; what we have is more or less accidental external contact.

If one were to take a hypothetical case, quite impossible in reality-two phenomena absolutely identical in all their characteristics-one would be hard put to it to imagine or conceive a strong bond or cohesion or interaction between them.

It is even more important to take this point into account when we are dealing with links between two (or more) developing phenomena involved in this process. Of course, two completely identical phenomena may very well coexist side by side and even come into certain contact. This contact, however, will not yield anything new at all until it elicits in each of them internal changes which will transform them into different and mutually opposed moments within a certain coherent whole.

Patriarchal subsistence households, each of which produces within itself everything that it needs, the same things that a neighbouring household produces, do not need one another. There are no strong links between them, for there is no division of labour, an organisation of labour under which one does something that someone else does not. Where differences arise between subsistence households, the possibility for mutual exchange of labour products also arises for the first time. The bond emerging..-here consolidates and further develops the difference and, along with it, the mutual connection. The development of differences between once identical (and precisely for this reason indifferently coexisting) households is the development, of mutual links between them, it is the process of their transformation into distinct and opposed elements, of a single economic whole, integral producing organism.

In general, the development of forms of labour division is at the same time the development of forms of interaction between men in the production of material life. Where there is no division of labour, not in the elementary form even, there is no society – there is only a herd bound by biological rather than social tied. Division of labour may take antagonistic class form and it may, on the other hand, take the form of comradely collaboration. Yet it always remains division of labour and can never be ‘identification’ of all forms of labour: communism assumes maximal development of each individual’s capabilities both in spiritual and material production, rather than levelling of these abilities. Each individual here becomes a personality in the full and noble meaning of this concept exactly because every other individual interacting with him is also a unique creative individuality rather than a being performing the same stereotype, standardised, abstractly identical actions or operations. Such operations are in general moved outside the scope of human activity and handed over to machines. And exactly for this reason each individual here is needed by and of interest to others much more than in the world of capitalist division of labour. The social links binding personality to personality are here much more direct, comprehensive and strong than the links in commodity production.

That is why concreteness understood as an expression of living, factual, objective bond and interaction between real individual things, cannot be expressed as an abstract identity, bare equality, or pure similarity of things under consideration. Any instance of real interaction in nature, society, or consciousness, he it ever so elementary, necessarily contains identity of the distinct, a unity of opposites, rather than mere identity. Interaction assumes that one object realises its given specific nature only through its interrelation with another object and cannot exist outside this relation as such, as ‘this one’, as a specifically definite object.

To express the individual in thought, to understand the individual in its organic links with other instances of the individual and the concrete essence of their connection, one must not look for a naked abstraction, for an identical feature abstractly common to all of them taken separately.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling4.htm#Pill5
Hegel rejected this Kantian view of the concept on the grounds that it was confined to what he called abstract identity or abstract universality. Some aspect common to a range of objects is isolated (abstracted) as that which is ‘general’ to them, to be set against a ‘particular’ which, on this view, can exist on its own. The necessity of the aspects chosen can never be demonstrated and, given that this necessity cannot be established, these ‘aspects’ out of which the general is constructed must remain ultimately arbitrary. In short, regularity in appearance is not sufficient to establish necessity.
...
Hegel objected to the Kantian method of arriving at concepts because it made it impossible to trace the connection between the individual and the particular. All objects not included in a class were set against those standing outside this class. Identity (conceived as a dull sameness) and opposition were placed into two rigidly opposed criteria of thought. The direction Hegel took in trying to overcome the limitations imposed by such rigidity of thinking led to far richer results, and it was a method which guided Marx throughout Capital.

For Hegel a concept was primarily a synonym for the real grasping of the essence of phenomena and was in no way limited simply to the expression of something general, of some abstract identity discernible by the senses in the objects concerned. A concept (if it was to be adequate) had to disclose the real nature of a thing and this it must do not merely by revealing what it held in common with other objects, but also its special nature, in short its peculiarity. The concept was a unity of universality and particularity. Hegel insisted that it was necessary to distinguish between a universality which preserved all the richness of the particulars within it and an abstract ‘dumb’ generality which was confined to the sameness of all objects of a given kind. Further, Hegel insisted, this truly universal concept was to be discovered by investigating the actual laws of the origin, development and disappearance of single things. (Even before we take the-discussion further, it should be clear that here lay the importance of Marx’s logical-historical investigation of the cell-form of bourgeois economy, the commodity.) Thought that was limited to registering or correlating empirically perceived common attributes was essentially sterile – it could never come anywhere near to grasping the law of development of phenomena. One crucial point followed from this which has direct and immediate importance for Capital. It was this: the real laws of phenomena do not and cannot appear directly on the surface of the phenomena under investigation in the form of simple identicalness. If concepts could be grasped merely by finding a common element within the phenomena concerned then this would be equivalent to saying that appearance and essence coincided, that there was no need for science.

This in fact leads to the very problem of having concepts relate to individual cases because one simply abstracts the sameness. This sort of view of essence has long be refuted by Wittgensteins point of familial resemblance where you cannot recreate the ancestor based on the collection of shared attributes because not every family member has the exact same attributes and the real ancestor isn't simply the averaging of such attributes.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm
If you understand these then you might see how you are pretty much avoiding class as an essential concept because you seem t have a superficial sense of class in the marxist sense and not get my point of how you erase it through sameness and how this is antithetical to Marx's method.
It is what leads to your odd conclusion on the mixing of class positions because the qualities are shared across them, there is no essential feature marking one class from another and thus follows the apparent obsoletion of class amidst capitalism.

I think it's more like those social changes are simply not possible if the technical change doesn't happen first. And if it does, the social changes are inevitable if they'll lead to a more efficient production.

Indeed, which Marx tempers that the solution to a problem arises simultaneously with the problem itself. Basically, the same conditions which exacerbate things are also the precondition to their solution. I imagine if it is otherwise then there is a kind of inevitability felt about things that isn't simply the product of hegemony, because concepts are introduced which pose what the problem is and its ideal solution.


Indeed, but I'd say the government's view of what constitutes a "profit" is different from that of a capitalist. For a capitalist, it's very narrow: Just make money. But a government may regard having massive losses in its SOEs as worthwhile if, for example, it allows it to keep the monopoly on the use of force. The latter can be way more valuable than whatever profits several large businesses may get as that can allow the government to keep taxation up, and if the elites running it are corrupt enough, its members can personally benefit from it and often at a lower risk

Well this seems to treat profit as a subjective evaluation of gain rather than profit as a quantitative gain in money.
Like a part of the difference between the input costs at the start of a cycle of production compared to the output and how things are sold with a net benefit which allows a difference between the return of a similar input cost for the next cycle of production but has additional money.
A state owned business can run along the same lines of course.
Being beholden to state interests doesn't necessarily change the fact of whether this process in making a profit occurs simply because the state actors are willing to lose money for alternative ends.
This makes me think that you perhaps see profit as a kind of psychologically-based evaluation of things.


But that intuition isn't quite correct, is it? Even if you let someone else manage your wealth, you have to make sure as a large and rich as hell capitalist that your manager isn't screwing you over in the process. You know, like it actually happened in Wall Street in 2008 in some cases.

Indeed they might have to monitor such wealth, but that effort in itself isn't part of generating that wealth. Which is the point in distinguishing money as it functions for the capitalist from the money which works as wages. Why even have the terms which distinguish wages from profit.

I'd be interested in reading a Marxian critique of communes.

I don't really disagree with the rest of your point, although those mechanisms can also be alienating in practice, can't they?

Well one would have to get into specifics of what the commune functions like to delinate what is alienating.
This is perhaps a good summary on alienation.

[URL]https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch05.htm/url]
A misunderstanding of Marx on this point is widespread, even among socialists. It is believed that Marx spoke primarily of the economic exploitation of the worker, and the fact that his share of the product was not as large as it should be, or that the product should belong to him, instead of to the capitalist. But as I have shown before, the state as a capitalist, as in the Soviet Union, would not have been any more welcome to Marx than the private capitalist. He is not concerned primarily with the equalization of income. He is concerned with the liberation of man from a kind of work which destroys his individuality, which transforms him into a thing, and which makes him into the slave of things. Just as Kierkegaard was concerned with the salvation of the individual, so Marx was, and his criticism of capitalist society is directed not at its method of distribution of income, but its mode of production, its destruction of individuality and its enslavement of man, not by the capitalist, but the enslavement of man -- worker and capitalist -- by things and circumstances of their own making.

There is also the issue of the continuity of the concept in Marx's mature work.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
To be fair, Wood clarifies that this is only a “provisional” suggestion, but it is worth mentioning all the same that Marx in no way psychologizes alienation in the way that Wood suggests he does. Although alienation often does involve or lead to a sense of personal ennui, the concept of alienation in Marx's later work is by no means simply a description of a psychological state. It describes the real position of the human being with relation to the forces of production in a capitalist society, and plays an explanatory role insofar as it is impossible to understand, in Marx's theory, how the human being is stunted and diminished without deploying it.

With regard to this question, I am in wholehearted agreement with Eugene Kamenka, who writes:

[I]n the economic magnum opus of his mature period—Das Kapital—he does not rely on the term 'alienation' at all. Was it, then, one of the casualties of his tendency toward economic reductionism? Had it been dropped as a 'philosophic' or 'ethical' concept having no place in his new objective and scientific historical materialism?

The answer is no. The positive content which Marx gave to the term 'alienation' remains central to the position he is expounding in Capital. The mental process of objectifying one's own product and allowing it to dominate one Marx now calls the fetishism of commodities; it remains the same process. Man's loss of control over his labour power Marx calls his dehumanisation; it, too, is the same process—a process which for Marx remains of central importance to the understanding of capitalism. Man's loss of control over the product of his work Marx now calls exploitation; a term which does not mean that Marx thinks the capitalist is getting too much—more than is 'reasonable', but which underlines his insistence that what belongs to one man, or to men in general, is being appropriated by others, or by some men in particular. Exploitation is made possible by the creation of surplus value; but its basic ground for Marx remains the alienation of man from his labour power, the fact that man's activity becomes a commodity. In the German Ideology and in Marx's economic notes and drafts made between 1850 and 1859 the connexion of all this with the term 'alienation' is made specific. But we do not need to have the connexion made specific, to have the actual term flourished in the text, to see precisely the same theme in Wage Labour and Capital, the Critique of Political Economy and Capital itself. (Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism, pp.144-5)

I do not think it is possible to seriously maintain that the concept of alienation undergoes any significant revisions at least from the time it appears in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and through the rest of Marx's works following the Manuscripts, and I certainly do not think it is correct to maintain that Marx abandons the concept altogether.



That's fair, but what's behind even the mere use of the word "exploitation" is an ethical aspect, isn't it? It isn't a purely empirical or positive notion.

Indeed there is an ethical aspect I believe in that Marx is criticizing capitalism not in some mere descriptive analysis but his work isn't merely emotive either, rather his work complicates the usual view in which facts and values are somehow so distinct as to have no clear relation.
Like in the above, the point of exploitation isn't simply to say things are bad, but to provide a clear analysis which illuminates the essential qualities of capital/ism.

A great way to illustrate why such a breakdown may have occurred with modernism is explained by Alisdair MacIntyre who was initially a Marxist but is now a Thomist Catholic of sorts. The gist of which is that man is presupposed an individual prior to society and thus without a clear purpose.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub
The important thing to realize is that the Enlightenment Project didn't simply happen to fail , it had to fail. What doomed the Enlightenment Project from its inception was its loss of the concept of telos. The word telos is borrowed from classical Greek and means "end" or "purpose." When applied to human morality the term signifies the answer to the question, "What is human life for?'' In Aristotle's day (fourth century BC), moral reasoning was an argument consisting of three terms. The first term was the notion of the untutored human nature that so desperately needed moral guidance. The second term was human nature conceived in terms of having fulfilled its purpose or achieved its te/os. The third term, moral imperatives, was that set of instructions for moving from the untutored self toward the actualized telos. In this way moral precepts weren't snatched out of thin air but got their "punch" or their "oughtness" from the concrete notion of what human life was for. 5

The wristwatch is a good example of how this works. If we ask, "What is the wristwatch for?" the usual answer is that watches are for timekeeping. 6 To put it more technically, we could say that the purpose or telos of the watch is timekeeping. Or, to put it in still other terms, we can say that the watch is functionally defined as a mechanism for keeping time. Knowledge of this telos enables us to render judgment against a grossly inaccurate watch as a "bad" watch. Furthermore, our functional definition also allows us to identify the functional imperative for watches: "Watches ought to keep time well."

Because the Enlightenment rejected the traditionally shared concept of what human life is for and started, as it were, from scratch by inventing the idea of humans as "autonomous individuals," the concept of telos, so very central to morality, was lost. Having rejected the received account of telos, the only remaining option upon which moral principles might be grounded was the untutored human nature-the very thing in need of guidance and, by nature, at odds with those guiding principles!

The results of the failure of the Enlightenment Project were farreaching. First, without the notion of telos serving as a means for moral triangulation, moral value judgments lost their factual character. And, of course, if values are "factless," then no appeal to facts can ever settle disagreements over values. It is in this state of affairs that emotivism, with its claim that moral values were nothing but matters of preference, flourishes as a theory.

I can elaborate on this as its of great interest to me the ethical content of Marx as many deny it and assert Marx only as purely objective.

How does Marx see that underlying notion of value? Could it be compatible with e.g. marginalist notions of it?

I'm starting from the basis that Marx does not equate value with labor (power).

Well I see people explain it as being the socially necessary labor time but that doesn't really explain it well enough.

But I don't think its like value in marginalism as it seems that Marxists would argue that marginalists in fact deny the existence of value as Marx conceives it.
Consider this summary
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/h.htm#:~:text=The%20notion%20of%20the%20theory,the%20buyer%20gets%20%E2%80%9Csaturated%E2%80%9D.
The theory of marginal utility was developed independently William Stanley Jevons (England 1871), Karl Menger (Austria 1871) and Leon Walras (Switzerland, 1874) and formed the foundation for all subsequent bourgeois economic science.

John Stuart Mill was the first to call into question the concept of value, which was central to all political economy up to that time. Drawing on the positivist philosophy which began to grow in influence from the 1840s, Mill characterised value as “metaphysical”, proposing that economic science should focus instead on the phenomena of price and utility.

Mill however, did not succeed in making the crucial break-through in this field which became known as “the marginal revolution”. The concept of margin arose from the well-established application of differential calculus to the natural sciences. Instead of trying to find a law expressing the relation of price to other phenomena, Walras and Jevons propounded economic laws in terms of the rate of change in price resulting from a change in a supply or demand.

The other significant component which marked the departure of bourgeois economic science from the tradition of political economy was this: political economy had for its aim to explain why people lived the way they did, and part of this was to explain why and how the wealth of the world was distributed in the way it was, i.e., why there were rich and poor for example. The new economic science was definitively not interested in investigating this, but took distribution as a given. This change was also tied up with a change in ethical conceptions: whereas Adam Smith had been concerned to understand why people placed a greater or lesser value on things, the new economic science was not interested in this. Mill and Bentham’s Utilitarianism was founded on the conception of “freedom of the individual” to the extent that enquiry into virtue, ie., into why we value this or that, was ruled out. Adam Smith arrived at the conclusion that value was determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour embodied in the production of a commodity, for Utilitarianism, value was “in the eye of the beholder”.

One other important change flows from the above changes in orientation, especially the placing of “supply and demand” in centre-stage: although “value” was denied by the theory, it in fact remained, but instead of being regarded as an objective attribute of the process of production, it was transformed into a subjective attribute of the process of consumption. Or put it another way, the focus shifted from the supply side to the demand side.

So these factors taken together laid the basis for the marginal revolution: positivist rejection of metaphysical value for real price, subjectivism in values, abandonment of enquiry into the origin of wealth, application of differential calculus, and the triumph of utilitarian ethics.

Whereas Marx had shown that the concept of value was a dialectical unity of quantity (exchange-value) and quality (use-value), political economy and marginal economic science, both saw utility as a quantitative entity, which was commensurate with exchange value. Thus, Mill could say that someone would purchase a commodity only if its utility (for him!) exceeded its price (set by the seller).

The notion of the theory of marginal utility is this: someone will go on buying more of a commodity at a given price, so long as its utility is greater than the price, but the utility of each new product purchased declines as the buyer gets “saturated”. Contrariwise, a buyer will sell a product at a price so long as the utility of the money for him is greater than the price.

Given this simple idea, it becomes an easy matter to generate hundreds of differential equations which connect various factors involved in exchange of commodities, money supply and so on, all of which, in one way or another rest on hypothetical, unrealistic models of human psychology as implied in the previous paragraph, and all of course, in the name of science.

And this shift where value is seen as some kind of subjective evaluation seems to also be contentious as undermining any sound basis on which to investigate the objectivity of value and is seen as a limiting factor which is unable to explain facts which Marx's analysis does.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/bukharin-on-the-subjectiveobjective-value-debate/
#15174177
Wellsy wrote:Again, do advertisers in the paper or where ever take a commission of each booking? Because my understanding is you pay for their service of advertising and that's the extent of the exchange, they don't get to dip into your pocket for every sale you make. It sounds like a different relationship to an ad in a newspaper to me.


Fair point, although for instance a paper-based advertising platform, where you can permanently market a property, would not be a one time thing as just a newspaper ad. I think they could charge you as a percentage of your earnings.

Wellsy wrote:Well the point is to emphasize that those who run Airbnb or more specifically own it, are those which make the profit here. The rhetoric of a sharing economy glosses over how the economy isn't one of sharing things directly but is mediated by money and is about the renting of services and goods. That in itself isn't something radically new or external to capitalism.


They are not the only ones making profits though. Hosts also make profits in this process (however small they may be), which is why they participate at all!

Wellsy wrote:Indeed that is the big appeal for gig/contract work of this type, the flexibility. .And that can have great appeal.
But I think one may also emphasize that for the worker, as opposed to the aspiring small business owner, it is probable that their work isn't strictly one of leisure but of need.
In fact isn't the rating system itself a reflection of the explicit competition among the different drivers, or hosts.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm

And of course the flexibility while definitely real for some, it is also the case that while you're not directly being dictated to by an employer your hours, what propels you to work may still be the need to earn money to meet your own needs i.e. the structural condition of workers.

In fact, the flexibility seems to be inherently tied to a great deal of work outside of what is paid or in the case of airbnb is actually providing the very means for the service to be realized such as your home space, supplies, cleaning and so on.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/

So yes there is flexibility, here which is pitched as the freedom of the worker but no you are still a worker who must sell themselves to survive.
The point being here not a having your cake and eating it too, the proposal that people don't work, but emphasizing the structural relation which still compels the person into that work even if it's not personified with some prick sending you threats of losing your job or what ever. The emphasis on the precariousness of the persons ability to sustain themselves instead becomes the disciplining factor. Because why would someone prefer to say work a 9-5 job among adding in extra hours if they have child care responsibilities for example?
I would indeed love the flexibility of consistent and stable work along side the ability to step out for the needs of my family.
Flexibility here in gig work can achieve that better but only to a point where money isn't the deciding factor and one can actually stop working and prioritize their time and effort else where.


Hold on, what makes you believe people start businesses out of leisure? :eh:

The way I see it, at least, is that they do it because they are more profitable - adjusted for risk and discounting future flows - than the alternatives. Likewise, workers also don't start businesses for the same reason, as you mention you for instance value stability - but there are those who don't, and are more willing to take risk if the payoff is good enough. Because, yes, starting a business is far from a safe bet, at all.

Perhaps a different issue lies with people who inherit an already established business. But even they are taking risk, in this case the risk that comes with having to make all the major decisions and where if you mess up, you'll have to face responsibilities for it.

This is not to say, of course, there aren't businessowners who don't intrinsically love what they do. But there are also workers who intrinsically love what they do as well.

Wellsy wrote:Airbnb does a lot to maintain its public relations, as such its public perception means a great deal to it. The same issue of safety concerns has arisen with Uber which itself has prompted the call for regulation. Just as I speculate occurred with the initial industries providing these services, where people complain and force change upon the companies in some way if they do not themselves address it.

I still think the distinction between the advertiser and airbnb would be that the latter takes a commission. A real estate agent has to advertise, but it's not the advertiser taking apart of their commission which they take from the sale of the house, that's the company they're employed by. In fact, airbnb is often labelled as a broker. Which is clearly what they do, they arrange the meeting between buyers and seller sand take a commission for it.

It's an emphasis because of course there exist workers who may earn a great deal as to put some space between the maintenance of their lifestyle and having something extra.

And in focusing on Airbnb, those who make a profit are indeed aspiring small business owners or already are despite the marketed image of just everyday people renting out a room.

My emphasis hasn't been that people have to work, the point is emphasizing the qualitative nature of their work and the function of what they earn.


I would not be so sure that regular people renting a room aren't making a profit either - it's a small complement to their usual net income (net of taxes and costs to work their regular jobs such as commuting), of course, but just what costs are they taking on, really?

Wellsy wrote:Well airbnb isn't a monopoly, they do have to compete with traditional hotels, hostels, and even other similar app platforms.
But my point was more to speak about the precariousness even of small business owners should a larger company wish to push into their market, they generally cannot compete or are simply bought out. This is what a lot of the large tech firms have done in recent years, they 'devour' the small or destroy them.


Well, often people will actually start businesses with a good idea precisely so some big fish will buy them off, letting them instantly make a huge profit. This of course doesn't work all too often - most startups fail - but if you hit the jackpot you do it big time.

Wellsy wrote:But in terms of what effect airbnb has, those who make a profit are those with multiple properties which it disavows. More and more property gets consilidated among land owners and makes long term housing increasingly unaffordable due to the lucrative money to be made in short-term rentals.
https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm


Indeed, although the flipside is that if you do away with it current hosts and guests lose as a result of ending this market. I actually think that the issue isn't so much AirBnB but broader problems in some large real estate markets, problems that have been around since long before AirBnB came into fruition.


Wellsy wrote:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-york-city-housing-stock-reduction-study


Are you against housing regulations? Because it seems to me the negative effects of stuff like Airbnb has on housing for people who actually want to live in them is not great.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-45083954

https://www.marxist.com/the-sharing-economy-the-future-of-jobs-and-postcapitalism-part-one.htm

I mean sure if I thought that the market was some overwhelming good in meeting human needs it wouldn't need regulation, but if we disregard human needs in a sole focus on the quantitative cost of things and forget all externalities then yeah screw regulations. Except that only thinking flies in the imagination of American libertarian sorts of the free market-solving everything as its taken as an inherent good, and even equated with freedom even if it empirically reduces freedom for people.
It seems to me that the more and more companies like Airbnb and Uber disrupt the traditional markets, the more they prompt regulation and the more they end up just like those already regulated markets. Maybe they won't be entirely regulated out and pushed that far and able to occupy a niche which regular hotels cannot perform.
But if it creates enough problems for people to act on it, then it may go that way.

Regulation can increase the cost of things, but it also is ideally meant to set certain quality and safety standards.
Where as airbnbs probable increase in rental prices and the diminishing availability of long term rentals offers no such improvement along with the increased costs.


Indeed, there needs to be some regulation for sure but there are tradeoffs involved, particularly when it comes to zoning. Sure, you can have strict laws and keep your quality of life (with reduced density) but it comes at the cost of ever increasing property prices. And of course, you can densify like crazy if you want to have cheaper property prices but you'll have to deal with the quality of life costs that comes with it.

I don't think there are free lunches here, AirBnB would justify reform simply because it did not exist when these regulations were drafted and hence some adjustment would be warranted.

Construction standards are a different matter, I think, and I fully agree with having demanding standards in all. Nowadays it seems the bulk of a property's costs comes from land, at least in large cities, not the structures themselves anyway.

Wellsy wrote:Well that it can be an advantage but why would having multiple jobs or means of income be an advantage? Due to the risk of losing everything with one job, not putting all eggs in one basket which emphasizes the precariousness of people if they need such an advantage due to the unreliability of stable work and income. Your example itself mentions someone doing more work over and above their already existing 9-5 job. Some people are game and want to work all that time, however the real rub for workers is the free time they have. If you're constantly gunning for work there is something behind it. Some cases that can be personal aversion to some psychological thing and hence they throw themselves into work, a lot of the drug users I worked with were great workers, it was a great way to avoid things by throwing themselves into it hard.
On the other hand if I offer someone some money, would they work less? This would suggest that they are working for some important need, that they feel they must work to get that extra money.
At least this is how things would be for many of the workers who are part of the gig economy unless they are already small time business owners.

But I would agree that a difference would be the point at which you might stop working compared to the times I worked at the prison doing little during lockdowns but had to remain because they owned that time of mine.
It being easier for the airbnb in part because the maintenance doesn't require as much weekly as driving perhaps does.


Indeed, and I agree that it's not great. But I can imagine people that definitely benefit from Uber, for instance I can imagine a single mother of 3 probably preferring to Uber or to be an AirBnB host over working on a rigid schedule, mostly because of the kids, if she made the same.

Honestly the way to think about the gig economy is more about the options and flexibility it offers than anything else. And it comes with a cost, namely, that you take on more risk than on a more traditional wage work arrangement. So at some point, it's up to how much you need or prefer flexible arrangements over rigid but safer ones.

Wellsy wrote:Yeah seems some people do have a 'fleet' of cars going and offer luxury cars as a niche.
Indeed I marked a distinction within examples of airbnb hosts where someone renting out a room on their own property and being the one working to clean it and provide stuff is distinct from those who owned multiple properties and employed people. In the study I linked, itself the people experienced their hosting very differently based on that. It was reflected in their sense of whether they were being entrepreneurial or not. I used that in part as a proxy for how the person just renting out a room and doing all the work themselves is directly labouring to earn an income. The small business owner example itself explicitly mentioned trying to create a means of passive income, that is earning a great deal for doing less.

Well that is the great appeal of uber and airbnb, is that it bypasses the laws until of course laws are in place and slap 'em. Those in NYC may receive a hefty fine if they're seen hosting multiple places which aren't their own.
To which might want to argue against the kind of professionalization which puts a hold on an industry, like how you need a license to perform certain professions and so on. But such regulations are also widely accepted as a kind of quality control also. Not only in quality of the service or good, but also in it's broader effects as mentioned above on the rise in rent prices due to reduced availability of long term rentals among property owners.


Indeed, here there are tradeoffs too. But Uber and AirBnB not also help with matching but with monitoring quality to some extent.

Wellsy wrote:My point isn't that the capitalist ISN'T, delaying consumption but a point against the common notion that delayed consumption is the basis of capitalist wealth as opposed to the structural relation in which they extract surplus labor from employees.


Hmmmm, I think both go hand in hand here. Along with risk taking, which is another feature of capitalists...

Wellsy wrote:Because sameness is arbitrary and doesn't denote a real world relationship which draws things into relation to one another. And it is also part of the tendency to in fact break distinctions, because how would sameness be essential?
It is the property which one lacks which constitutes the attraction with the other. Just like in a chemical reaction, same chemicals do not produce some qualitatively new reaction.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/

This is why I am critical of your approach as it seems to simply approach the matter as that tof individuals and without class distinction, you use the words capitalist and worker but how do they even exist distinctly in your framing where they are described in the same terms.
Here is a lengthy section to help understand.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/abstract/abstra1g.htm

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/pilling4.htm#Pill5

This in fact leads to the very problem of having concepts relate to individual cases because one simply abstracts the sameness. This sort of view of essence has long be refuted by Wittgensteins point of familial resemblance where you cannot recreate the ancestor based on the collection of shared attributes because not every family member has the exact same attributes and the real ancestor isn't simply the averaging of such attributes.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm
If you understand these then you might see how you are pretty much avoiding class as an essential concept because you seem t have a superficial sense of class in the marxist sense and not get my point of how you erase it through sameness and how this is antithetical to Marx's method.
It is what leads to your odd conclusion on the mixing of class positions because the qualities are shared across them, there is no essential feature marking one class from another and thus follows the apparent obsoletion of class amidst capitalism.


What relevant real world economic phenomenon is missed by not taking the class distinction into account?

You say that both are different, and indeed it's different. But for example a red and a green apple are different too. So... what's the practical importance of that difference, even more so when class is far from being as rigid as it was 150 years ago?

Wellsy wrote:Indeed, which Marx tempers that the solution to a problem arises simultaneously with the problem itself. Basically, the same conditions which exacerbate things are also the precondition to their solution. I imagine if it is otherwise then there is a kind of inevitability felt about things that isn't simply the product of hegemony, because concepts are introduced which pose what the problem is and its ideal solution.


Absolutely, and sometimes resistance is harmful for society at large, for a very long time.

Wellsy wrote:Well this seems to treat profit as a subjective evaluation of gain rather than profit as a quantitative gain in money.


Indeed, in this case "profit" simply is what you are trying to optimize.

Wellsy wrote:Like a part of the difference between the input costs at the start of a cycle of production compared to the output and how things are sold with a net benefit which allows a difference between the return of a similar input cost for the next cycle of production but has additional money.
A state owned business can run along the same lines of course.
Being beholden to state interests doesn't necessarily change the fact of whether this process in making a profit occurs simply because the state actors are willing to lose money for alternative ends.
This makes me think that you perhaps see profit as a kind of psychologically-based evaluation of things.


In this specific case, I see it in that way, yes. Of course I don't think most actual businesses operate that way, I think it's a better way to understand agents that are not maximizing a narrowly economic profit.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed they might have to monitor such wealth, but that effort in itself isn't part of generating that wealth. Which is the point in distinguishing money as it functions for the capitalist from the money which works as wages. Why even have the terms which distinguish wages from profit.


Well, it actually depends doesn't it? I mean, if you try to model (formally) a worker's decision to invest in human capital, you may as well take the profit of such investment (discounted wages after investing - cost of investment - opportunity costs of investing (foregone discounted future wages if no investment is done)) and call it a "net discounted wage increase".

On the other hand, if what you are trying to explain is labor markets it makes more sense to see wage as the price of labor. Same if you are trying to model how firms make their decisions (i.e. try to maximize profits).

Normally when economists talk about "profits" in a colloquial context, they mean firm profits but in other contexts they may simply mean "whatever net benefits the agent is trying to accrue". That can of course correspond to wages (specifically, wage*labor) too.

Wellsy wrote:Well one would have to get into specifics of what the commune functions like to delinate what is alienating.
This is perhaps a good summary on alienation.

[URL]https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch05.htm/url]

There is also the issue of the continuity of the concept in Marx's mature work.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf


How could alienation be eliminated under this view? I'm asking because it sounds like a psychological phenomenon, perhaps as a result of the division of labor as done in a factory or industrial setting in general (including the production of some services) rather than an economic one.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed there is an ethical aspect I believe in that Marx is criticizing capitalism not in some mere descriptive analysis but his work isn't merely emotive either, rather his work complicates the usual view in which facts and values are somehow so distinct as to have no clear relation.
Like in the above, the point of exploitation isn't simply to say things are bad, but to provide a clear analysis which illuminates the essential qualities of capital/ism.

A great way to illustrate why such a breakdown may have occurred with modernism is explained by Alisdair MacIntyre who was initially a Marxist but is now a Thomist Catholic of sorts. The gist of which is that man is presupposed an individual prior to society and thus without a clear purpose.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=rel_fac_pub

I can elaborate on this as its of great interest to me the ethical content of Marx as many deny it and assert Marx only as purely objective.


Indeed, I would not say he's being purely emotive but that's where e.g. someone like Roemer comes up and says that the narrowly positive aspect of it could be applied to any input. That is, the ethical relevance only comes when the exploited input is labor, which makes sense to some extent.

Wellsy wrote:Well I see people explain it as being the socially necessary labor time but that doesn't really explain it well enough.

But I don't think its like value in marginalism as it seems that Marxists would argue that marginalists in fact deny the existence of value as Marx conceives it.
Consider this summary
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/t/h.htm#:~:text=The%20notion%20of%20the%20theory,the%20buyer%20gets%20%E2%80%9Csaturated%E2%80%9D.

And this shift where value is seen as some kind of subjective evaluation seems to also be contentious as undermining any sound basis on which to investigate the objectivity of value and is seen as a limiting factor which is unable to explain facts which Marx's analysis does.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/08/18/bukharin-on-the-subjectiveobjective-value-debate/


I think that some of the criticism of marginal utility is misplaced. The issue is not that it's "circular", it's simply that it's taking the preferences as a given. That is not so much as an argument against using marginalism but more of an argument for attempting to unify some social science fields as means to explain why do people have the preferences they have, as the marginalist approach will generally take preferences as given. That is, often results will actually be dependent on the assumptions you make about preferences. Once you explain why people have the preferences they have, you can break that apparent circularity.

What relevant economic phenomena are better explained using a Marxian theory of value over a marginalist one?
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