A question for our Marxists

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Re: A question for our Marxists#15174267

By Wellsy - 26 May 2021 21:34

- 26 May 2021 21:34 #15174267

wat0n wrote: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.

Indeed Airbnb takes a cut from guests and hosts as a commission for bookings, they provide the service of brokering, which is a bit differently than merely advertising as they're trying to directly connect you to the service rather than simply make an appeal to you to use the service. Hence why Airbnb actually pays for advertising and marketing as separate from its app platform as it does need promotion for people to come to the app.

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!

But this is where I'm trying to drill in a distinction between a contract laborer as distinct from the petty bourgeoisie or small business owner. Contract labor isn't so essentially different from the wage laborer as to not be part of the working class.
Here's a good summary to emphasize what I already did in which wages are pushed down in part because of the competition among workers whose livelihood is precarious.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm

There is another instance where workers, those who have nothing to sell but their labour power, not only work for capitalists but also succeed in expanding capital, but still they do not sell their labour power and consequently do not work for wages: this is the case with contract labour, such as in the building trades or with out-sourcing in the clothing trades and so on. In these cases, the workers, i.e., those who actually do the productive work, are forced to act as if they were independent economic agents, private labourers, proprietors in their own right. How is it possible that a profit is made here? Whether a builders labourer is paid an hourly wage or is paid by piece work is a secondary question, (see Chapter 21 of Capital). The piece rate is simply so adjusted to keep the worker’s nose to the grindstone struggling to earn a living. It is much the same with contract labour which is essentially the same as piece work.

How does the labour-hire firm make a profit where the independent contract labourer or out-worker remains as exploited and as proletarian as the conventional wage-worker? This raises much the same question as to how any capitalist makes a profit nowadays.

The labourer has nothing to sell but her labour power. The capitalist owns the social means of production as private property. The labour process of our times cannot be carried on as simple private labour; or rather:— the simple expenditure of the labour of an individual labourer which is not socially coordinated, does not produce enough to live on, let alone make a profit for someone. In Marx’s day, the pre-requisite for socially developed labour were the big factories and materials such as steel and coal which were used in the productive process. In order to work at the socially average level of productivity in those days, one had to have access to factories and so on. These were the private property of a class of people called the bourgeoisie, and these people used their privileged position of ownership of these social means of production to exploit those that had no other means of support other than to work in their factories.

Nowadays, most of these factories are either rust buckets, or take the form of temporary set ups in the enterprise zones of Third World countries. But productive work cannot be carried out without a certain amount of this kind of material, including land, buildings, computers, electricity supply, paper and so on, all of which one needs money to buy, and most importantly, there is always a substantial lead time between productive labour and the return coming back, and in order to be socially productive labour will always be complex, involving the coordinated labour of very many people, including not only immediate co-workers, but the vicarious labour of other in the form of software, science, texts, and so on. Even though the ownership of stuff as such is no longer so important to capital, the ability to bring developed social labour to bear is vital to making a profit, to working at better than subsistence level, and for that invariably an accumulation of money is necessary, i.e., Capital.

Rather than serve as a novel on-ramp to entrepreneuralism, workers who succeed in the sharing economy - such as multiunit AIrbnb hosts and Kitchensurfing shefs with side busiiness - often have significant skills or capital that would also enable them to succeed outside the sharing economy. In addition, successful workers often strive to leave the sharing economy behind by creating firms that offer the benefits and protections of employment, not independent contracting.

This point of the relevative independence of those who use Airbnb to host multiple units and their ability to actually work independently of airbnb if they so chose, to me emphasizes a distinction between them an what may count as employees in the case of those who do all the work themselves. They provide their own personal home space, they do the cleaning and so on.
Consider this piece which argue that under California law currently, Airbnb hosts would be considered independent contractors, but with their proposed ABC test, they would fail to be considered as such.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=004020091089127119019087003092003075120015077012021005105006110113075120101113096030041107053119007034112080088111123066030005053026022082043007070010115071077100090015042078014124113094026075120100102104003108121110093004070120013097119011082097017&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE

1. Part A: Airbnb’s Control
While Airbnb does exert some control over its hosts—such as monitoring their performance through ratings and handling all billing, dispute resolution, and refunds153—a comparison between Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb demonstrates that Airbnb’s exercise of control over its hosts is not nearly as extensive as that exercised over drivers by Uber and Lyft. While Airbnb does monitor host performance through ratings, it does not directly engage in selecting guests for hosts (and hosts for guests) the way Uber and Lyft select passengers for drivers (and drivers for passengers).154 In addition, Airbnb does not set the price of the service, as Uber and Lyft allegedly do.155 An argument could be made that Airbnb’s level of control is limited to what is necessary to achieve the result—a short-term rental satisfactory to both the host and the guest— versus the manner and means by which that result is achieved.156 If an examination of Airbnb’s classification of hosts as independent contractors were limited to the “traditional” control-based classifications tests,157 then Airbnb’s hosts would most likely be considered properly classified as independent contractors. However, under the ABC test, two additional elements must also be satisfied.

2. Part B: Airbnb’s Usual Course of Business
Under Part B of the ABC Test, workers are presumed to be employees if they do not perform work that is outside the usual course of the hiring party’s business. Another way to consider this issue is whether the workers in question are integral and essential to the hiring business.158 Airbnb is an online platform-based business connecting hosts with guests, while Uber and Lyft are online platform-based businesses connecting drivers with passengers. As we have already seen above, courts have dismissed almost out of hand the argument that Uber and Lyft are mere technology companies and not transportation companies (meaning drivers are providing services within the companies’ usual course of business).159

Platform-based businesses argue they are merely a technological intermediary connecting someone seeking services (a ride or room) with someone providing that service (a driver or host).160 In addressing whether Amazon.com can be held strictly liable for injuries arising from a defective product sold on its website by a third-party vendor, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth District of California rejected Amazon.com’s argument that it was merely a technological intermediary connecting a consumer with a thirdparty seller.161 The court’s perspective is instructive: Amazon.com constructed the website that marketed the product in question and accepted payment for the product from the consumer, then paid the vendor after deducting fees. In other words, it stood between and controlled the transaction between the consumer and vendor.162 Similarly, Airbnb stands between and controls the transaction between the consumer and the host.
Are hosts an integrated and essential part of Airbnb’s business? In other words, without hosts, would Airbnb exist?163 To paraphrase the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts (applying that state’s ABC Test, Part B), the realities of Airbnb’s business—where travelers pay Airbnb for short term rentals—encompasses the hosting of travelers.164 The question appears to have been partially answered by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result of decreased booking and cancellations, Airbnb saw its revenues drop precipitously and laid off internal employees.165 If Airbnb cannot survive without its hosts supplying accommodations to guests, hosts are arguably an integral part of Airbnb’s business.

3. Part C: Airbnb Hosts’ Independently Established Trade, Occupation, or Business
To be considered an independent contractor under Part C of the ABC test, the service provider (i.e., Uber driver or Airbnb host) must be customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business in the same nature as the work involved.166 As previously stated, to meet this requirement, courts have held that the worker’s “business” must be able to persist if the relationship with the platform ended.167
Once again, the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic may hold a potential answer to this issue. On one hand, many Airbnb hosts act like independent businesses, maintaining short-term rental properties at such a high caliber and frequency that they qualify for “Superhost” status.168 Now, many Superhosts—who took out significant debt to purchase prime real estate to list on Airbnb—are suffering economically.169 Fundamentally, the pain associated with the pandemic fallout is being felt by hosts as much as by Airbnb’s laid off employees.170
Will hosts who purchased properties be left in a similar state of financial ruin as an employee who loses his or her job?171 Congress evidently thought so by including “Pandemic Unemployment Assistance” in the CARES Act.172 One could argue that treating Airbnb hosts and Uber and Lyft drivers the same under the PUA would not necessarily mean they are all properly classified as self-employed independent contractors, but rather are misclassified entirely and need the same unemployment benefits as “traditional” employees
...
while Airbnb hosts would probably not be reclassified as employees under a “traditional” control-based test, they could very well be reclassified under the ABC Test. Airbnb hosts might actually be considered employees because they are both integral to Airbnb’s business (i.e., Part B is not met) and not necessarily independent businesses themselves (i.e., Part C is not met).

I imagine you and others might emphasize part 1/A, that the lack of such direct control by Airbnb emphasizes how they're not workers but truly are independent. This is certainly a defensible advantage for Airbnb as compared to other platforms for the gig economy and I felt was a weak point in some earlier criticisms. However what does resonate are the other two points which follows from my above points about the relative independence of the individuals to work separately or outside airbnb or not. Those who are solely dependent on airbnb bringing the market to them are more likely to be considered employees while those who have carved out a niche for themselves outside or it or could readily do so and are even close to doing so such as the aspiring hotelier, are more distinctly small business owners.
The article itself seems to go even further to emphasize that those who I would perhaps see as closer to being small business owners are not as such if they remain entirely dependent on the airbnb platform, they are markedly not independent enough to be considered independent contractors but are employees essential to Airbnbs business model.

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

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.

I didn't generalize all interests in starting a business as motivated by leisure but emphasized the interview aspiring to a point of profitability that it became a passive income.
Do you think passive income doesn't exist for those who have ownership and do not have to be so actively involved in their business as they delegrate to employees?

Also lost in your emphasis of merely taking financial risks is also the ability to even take such risks, that is to have such money in order to invest it as capital in the first place. Some people may qualify for loans but plenty don't because their situation doesn't allow great confidence in their ability to pay it back and so is too much risk for those who give out the loans.
The quote on the interviewees emphasizes how they have the skills and capital to pursue a business outside of airbnb. That can be the same aspiration for employees of course, as mentioned, that basically are workers in a extremely precarious situation and thus end up in contract work.

But thinking of the skilled contractor, they tend to be distinguished also in the fact that they sell private labor and as such do have relative independence due to the demand of their skills.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#contract-labour

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.

Here again I think you're trying to emphasize sameness in order to disrupt any distinction between a worker and petit-bourgeois. Instead of emphasizing the precariousness, it all gets subsumed under risk of investment. The idea here that workers are simply taking a risk for the prospect of more 'profit'.
Which again I think is muddying the waters a bit like how one might frame all of prostitution in terms of women who have the means to voluntarily leave the profession compared to those who are coerced into it out of poverty or what ever. As if they're the same person. So to the person who can't find stable employment and is pressed into the gig/sharing economy is equated with the same people who actually succeeded at airbnb in starting up the basis of a small business with airbnb as a starting point to tap into the market.

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?

Airbnb hosts can't simply state there is a room available, they have to appeal to the taste and expectation of their customers to be competitive.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/03/is-running-an-airbnb-profitable-heres-what-you-need-to-know.html

“You have to realize everything should be furnished and it should be fairly new because you are competing with other Airbnb hosts,” Weber says. He pegs the cost at roughly $1,500 per bedroom, plus another $2,000 to $3,000 for the rest of the house and common areas. Which is on par with other experts’ estimates.

Even if you’re not looking to become a superhost, there are some basic equipment that Rusteen recommends investing in:

- a digital keyless entry system to make it easy for guests to access your place remotely (without losing the keys)
WiFi and, depending on the size of your apartment, a WiFi network extender
- a SmartTV
- extra towels (the more you start with, the less frequently you’ll need to do laundry)
toiletries such as shampoo and soap
- pantry staples such as salt, pepper and condiments.

Of course, you could provide many more amenities — from ironing boards to wine openers. Many times, you may need to feel it out and add items as needed by your guests.

“It’s all about acclimating your guests to their new environment, aka your Airbnb listing, as quickly as possible,” says Rusteen, who now manages several properties in the U.S.

Photos can be another way “to set yourself up for success,” Rusteen says. “One of the first things you should do as a host is get professional photographs.” You can expect to spend $100 to $200, on average, for a session. You can actually find photographers for this through the Google Street View professional program.

You can get by without spending a lot to redo your space. Miller, who wrote a book on her experiences, says she spent very little, but she did put in quite a bit of time and work.

“We fixed things that needed fixing, put locks on some cupboards and on the office (so we could lock away valuables), and created a household information folder,” she says.

So it’s important to keep in mind that you will likely put in money or your time, or both, to prepare to rent out your space.
...
Additionally, make sure your insurance covers your new venture. Mistakes happen, so it’s important to think ahead. The big companies such as Airbnb, Homeaway and Vrbo provide liability insurance that covers up to $1 million, but there are restrictions and it can be a challenge submitting claims.

“Anything below $50, just pay it out of pocket,” Rusteen recommends.

If you are worried about being left with a bill for some expensive accidental damage, Rusteen and Weber recommend purchasing short-term rental insurance. And before you start accepting guests, it’s a good idea to read through the fine print of your existing homeowners’ or renters’ insurance policy. Some policies have stipulations that extra renters can negate your entire policy.

Overall, whether you choose to get extra insurance depends on the level of risk you’re comfortable with. Miller discovered that, for her situation, getting home insurance for Airbnb rentals was extremely difficult and costly. Instead, she took the approach of minimizing risk by thoroughly screening her guests and asking for a security deposit.

They basically need to be like a hotel in their services except the host pays for this all upfront, so they need the sort of cash to be able to supply all this. And see how the money saver comes in the form of putting in your own work.
Now the host takes on the risk, puts in the investment and does all the work, but focusing on the earlier quotes, while airbnb doesn't own anything, the person works for airbnb as they are not independent workers who happens o contract with airbnb but are entirely dependent on airbnbs brokering as is airbnb dependent on the host doing all the leg work. They effectively socially coordinate the work which is a prerequisite for them to actually make some money, which they cannot do without airbnb and if they can then they are more distinctly an independent contractor rather than an employee who has to to not only work but bring in the materials, land and so on necessary for the work. A bit like how workers aren't invested in being trained anymore but have to take that as a personal cost, more and more is shifted back onto workers so as to put risks and costs back on individuals and to not detract from profits and make all the more precarious workers as in an unregulated labor market.

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.

Indeed, its a lucrative risk to take.

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 so

Here you would seem to be agreeable with the above points of how the hosts are not independent of airbnb's platform and may not necessarily have the means to be as such if the market for them ends with the lack of airbnb.
Indeed the broader problem being the contradiction between exchange value and use value, there is great need but effective demand is what matters in the economy.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/crisis-theories-underconsumption/

The underconsumptionists point out, correctly, that if capitalist production was production for the needs of the workers, there would not be any crises of overproduction. Capitalist overproduction is overproduction of exchange values, not overproduction of use values. A crisis of overproduction of exchange values breaks out when there is still very much an underproduction of use values, especially use values that the workers themselves need.

However, Airbnb is just par of exacerbating this issue in which human needs become increasingly detached from exchange value. YOu end up with people unable to find housing because there is more money in the short term. See an issue with CHinas use of real estate as investment properties for their wealth which leads to all sorts of unused homes because its about money, not use.

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.

Indeed, New York and all major cities are ridiculous because of the high demand for the small space. I actually enjoy living in a small town where I can afford a decent sized home for a much lower price and works out well having an education and access to the few decent paying jobs here.

Indeed regulations have to be introduced for the changed market to try and balance out some of the effects within some tolerable range. Just like how many hosts are treated as independent contractors as opposed to employees.

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.

Indeed women being primarily tasked with dependents results in them adopting more flexible jobs, and more flexible jobs such as these of course means higher risks, lower pay and so on.
Which is exactly why it benefits businesses to mark them as independent contractors as opposed to employees with what labor laws exist having applicability.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/

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 basically it takes advantage of the structures in which women's responsibilities compel them to look for such flexibility.
The dynamic being that dependents aren't well supported within capitalism and those who receive the most support often are those of the higher wages/incomes.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf

Let’s make a metaphor with the issue of women living in a location in the division of labour as unpaid child-carers; think of “women’s work” as a neighbourhood, and women as people living there, some by choice, some against their will. What options are available to women in this space?

One option is increased child benefits for stay-at-home mothers, thus making life better in the ghetto, a measure welcomed and immediately benefiting people stuck there. It also has the effect of marginally enhancing the status of child-carers, but it is hardly likely to enhance the attractiveness of being a stay-at-home parent sufficiently to encourage men to give up their paid work and become househusbands. It actually emphasises a woman’s role as unpaid child-carer, trapping her in that role, since it is a disincentive to going out to get paid work, stigmatises the mother as a welfare recipient and relieves the male of responsibility for contributing to the upbringing of his own children. This is the kind of affirmative strategy which has immediate appeal but fails to solve the problem, and correspond to all those kinds of public policy strategies that are based around providing services to “areas of special need.” Good and necessary up to a point, but unable to resolve the underlying problems.

Another strategy is to commercialise child-care, thus moving the job into the market and giving women the choice of doing the same work for a wage, or doing a different job while their own kids are cared for in a childcare centre. This is probably more effective in giving women a choice, but it runs into a couple of problems. So long as child-care is stigmatised as “women’s work,” then it remains low-paid and women move out of their homes into lowpaid jobs doing “women’s work.” There is no way out of this trap until the gender division of labour is broken down. Once women are recognised capable of the same kind of work as men, then women can command wages equal to their male partners and make working for a wage worth putting the kids into child-care. Meanwhile, with child-care no longer stigmatised as “women’s work” she is more likely to be left a fair share of domestic duties and child-care centres are treated as seriously as other service. In other words, the “location” — “women’s work” — has to be deconstructed altogether, and “woman” no longer a socially constructed location.
...
However, childrearing is an important social function. It ought not to be an occupation which
is denigrated and no-one should be forced to go into the professional by reason of their
gender, but whoever is there needs to do the job well. If women choose not to be childraisers, then that has to be a matter of choice, not because they have to go out to work and
“can’t afford children.” If we want the next generation to be raised well, then social
arrangements have to be made to make it a worthwhile profession.

Making “women’s work” everyone’s responsibility, means getting men to take on that work
and that generally means a fight for those stuck with “women’s work” not so much to change
themselves or get better recognition for what they do (these too) but to get other people to
accept their responsibility.

Even when one seeks childcare in the paid form its still low and if it isn't low it's simply not affordable for many and negates the point of even going to work.
Flexibility is always appealing but as you recognize it of course entails other costs rather than it being something built into the structure of society to support families.
It's not simply a preference for flexibility, one has to actually consider what are the structural relations which dictate one's opportunities? It is easy to frame workers as all purely voluntary and such and without any coercion under the way in which structural relations of class and so on are made absent in a lot of descriptions of economics.
Touching upon things but not really relating them within the social context all that much, things are just taken as a natural given because there is a kind of naturalization of capitalist production and relations. However it is contestable.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/

Marginalism can abstract away all of society from economic theory because of its claim that capitalism corresponds to a formal rationality rather than a substantive rationality. Formal rationality is a purely technical calculation of means and ends as opposed to substantive rationality which is oriented around values or higher aims. For instance, in Human Action Mises claims that the basis of economics is the natural quantitative relations between objects… so much input can produce so much output, etc. For marginalism any constraints or limits to the system are purely technical, a result of natural scarcity in relation to our timeless wants, not social, and the market is the best mechanism for organizing these desires. This means that the marginalist model will fail if it can be proven that capitalist institutions have a ‘necessary substantive significance in subjecting individuals to social constraint’. In other words, if the limits and constraints of our society can be shown not the result of technical aspects like scarcity but rather the result of social institutions with particular values oriented toward the interests of certain groups of people (ie the capitalist class) than marginalism has not justification for its formal rationality, for its abstraction of society from economics, and the entire edifice of marginalism falls. It is not enough just to point to this abstraction as proof of the ideological nature of marginalism. We have to prove that it is an illegitimate abstraction. This is the common thread underlying all of Clarke’s specific critiques of different aspects of marginalism. (3)

Marginalists begin with the isolated individual making choices in a vacuum and erect all of their basic ideas upon some simple observations about these choices. As the model becomes increasingly complex, adding in more people, more commodities, money, the division of labor, private property, etc. it is claimed that all of their basic observations still hold. The expansion of the model is seen as just a formal matter. But Clarke argues that when we move from individual exchange to a system of exchange we are actually dealing with different phenomenon. In a market economy exchange is no longer and exchange for direct utility; in other words, we aren’t measuring our actual utility for the commodity we give up with the utility for the commodity we buy. Money intercedes as a mediary. We exchange things against money. Use-values are exchanged for values which are socially determined. Any claim to the formal rationality of the individual’s behaviour becomes dependent upon the rationality of the system as a whole.
...
In abstracting away the social relations of capitalism marginalism must assume that these abstract individuals enter exchange with given needs and given resources. Where do these needs and resources come from? The marginalist answer is that this question is outside the sphere of economics- that it doesn’t matter to economic theory where these needs and resources come from. But what if our economic system actually reproduced these needs and resources? If we could show that capitalism produced the hedonistic consumer as well as the conditions of scarcity the consumer confronts then we could expose a disastrous feedback loop at the core of marginalism. It seems that when we just assume given needs and resources we are actually only pretending to abstract away from capitalist social relations. While on the surface marginalists appear to be talking about a universal individual in universal conditions, in actuality they are sneaking all of the social relations of capitalism in the back door. This is very similar to the Bukharin critique I mentioned a few weeks ago.

I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.

Scarcity relates to the application of labor to produce for need. The basis of exchange is the sale of the products of this labor. Thus the need for a theory of value based on human labor, not subjective whims.

Different types of exchange presuppose different production and property relations. The simple commodity exchange (independent producers exchanging the product of their labor in the market) is a popular image in marginalist accounts of exchange (as well as market-anarchism fantasies) yet such a system of exchange has only existed within larger societies dominated by other social relations (ie feudalism, capitalism, state-capitalism/20th century communism). Capitalist exchange presupposes social relations between two social classes, one owning the means of production, the other nothing. As we’ve seen, Marginalism tries to treat all factors of production with the same theoretical tools of subjective preference theory. But the division of the social product into rent, profit and wages actually presupposes antagonistic social relations between classes and thus requires different theoretical ideas.

Marginalists would like to treat the unequal resource endowments of individuals as due to extra-economic factors, consigning these concerns to the fields of history and sociology. But these inequalities don’t just proceed exchange historically. They are actually reproduced by exchange. Capitalism generates a world in which individuals must maintain a certain standard of living in order to survive (try paying the bills without a phone, house, car, work clothes, haircuts, health-care, etc.) and must engage in wage-labor. And wage-labor actively reproduced the two social classes of capitalist and worker and their violently divergent relationships to the means of production. Without scarcity we couldn’t have wage labor. There would be no reason to work. Thus capitalism must constantly reproduce scarcity.

Basically, there is much to question in the way in which some presentations of decisions of people as many simply take what is at face value and do not critique it. A bit like how one might go well women earn less because they don't get the higher paying jobs, why? Because they choose to enter into more flexible lower paying kinds of work in order to care for dependents instead of pursue their careers. Why is that? Well their decisions are made within a social context and only make sense when related to the social whole because individual actions are nonsense confined to only the individual.
https://aifs.gov.au/publications/family-matters/issue-86/persistent-work-family-strain-among-australian-mothers

In conclusion, Australian mothers in recent decades have greatly increased their participation in the labour market. Fathers, however, have not increased their participation in unpaid household work to a matching degree. But, without equal sharing of the dual roles of earner and carer between mothers and fathers, mothers will inevitably feel the work-family tension more keenly. Furthermore, institutional and structural changes supporting mothers' increased workforce participation are few and slow coming. Consequently, working mothers faced with the challenge of reconciling family and work commitments are often forced to find individual solutions. However, work and family life balance is not a problem specific to individual families. Rather, it is a universal problem shared by many families, and as such it requires institutional and structural changes supported by society as a whole.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phi

It is true that actions are carried out by individuals, but such actions are possible and only have meaning in so far as they participate in sociocultural practices. There are two important questions here, Westphal suggests: (1) are individuals the only bearers of psychological states, and (2) can psychological states be understood in individual terms? Individualists answer both questions in the armative, and most holists answer both questions in the negative. Hegel, however, answers the rst question armatively and the second negatively. In other words, it is only individuals who act, have 108 intentions, construct facts, and so forth. Nevertheless, such acts, intentions, and facts cannot be understood apart from sociocultural practices—their meaning can only be understood as interpreted in a sociocultural context.

This is seen in the limitations of microeconomics when expanded to macroeconomics.
http://frankackerman.com/publications/economictheory/Interpreting_Failure_Equilibrium_Theory.pdf

Instability arises in part because aggregate demand is not as well behaved as individual demand. If the aggregate demand function looked like an individual demand function ± that is, if the popular theoretical ®ction of a `representative individual’ could be used to represent market behaviour ± then there would be no problem. Unfortunately, though, the aggregation problem is intrinsic and inescapable. There is no representative individual whose demand function generates the instability found in the SMD theorem (Kirman 1992). Groups of people display patterns and structures of behaviour that are not present in the behaviour of the individual members; this is a mathematical truth with obvious importance throughout the social sciences.

For contemporary economics, this suggests that the pursuit of microfoundations for macroeconomics is futile. Even if individual behaviour were perfectly understood, it would be impossible to draw useful conclusions about macroeconomics directly from that understanding, due to the aggregation problem (Rizvi 1994, Martel 1996). This fact is re¯ected in Arrow’s onesentence summary of the SMD result, quoted at the beginning of this section.

The microeconomic model of behaviour contributes to instability because it says too little about what individuals want or do. From a mathematical standpoint, as Saari suggests, there are too many dimensions of possible variation, too many degrees of freedom, to allow results at a useful level of speci®city. The consumer is free to roam over the vast expanse of available commodities, subject only to a budget constraint and the thinnest possible conception of rationality: anything you can a"ord is acceptable, so long as you avoid blatant inconsistency in your preferences.

The assumed independence of individuals from each other, emphasized by Kirman, is an important part but not the whole of the problem. A reasonable model of social behaviour should recognize the manner in which individuals are interdependent; the standard economic theory of consumption fails to acknowledge any forms of interdependence, except through market transactions. However, merely amending the theory to allow more varied social interactions will not produce a simpler or more stable model. Indeed, if individuals are modelled as following or conforming to the behaviour of others, the interactions will create positive feedback loops in the model, increasing the opportunity for unstable responses to small ¯uctuations (see Section 5)

This is in part why things like class are fundamental, because people aren't abstractly all the same individual making similar decisions. They are subject to different constrains and the constraint of someone who is working class is fundamentally different to that of other classes. As such, one can be critical of the way in which one might try to present workers as the same as other classes in a superficial way. Hiding the coercion of how they're compelled to work to meet their livelihood compared to that of a capitalist.

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

And people are often happy to trade off lower cost for less quality control.
Although it seems as pressure has mounted, Airbnb has become on par in cost with Hotels.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/05/25/airbnb-fees-cleaning-hotels/?outputType=amp
So it's losing that cost advantage perhaps.

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

I also would distinguish between the small business owner and capitalist in terms of risk as a lot of risk for capitalists does not destroy them financially as it does the small business owner who in the long run have a tendency to return to the proletarian class. When one thinks of the losses incurred on Airbnb, they cut those loses by cutting off workers and so on.
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-quietly-fired-hundreds-of-contract-workers-im-one-of-them/
Who is hurt more here, the company owners or the workers?

BUt of course there is a tendency to generalize the small business owner who invests what little excess wealth they have into risky ventures in the hopes of establishing something bigger for themselves like the guy who aspired for a passive income.
Again, a millionaire may take a gamble on something but how much it really hurts them personally as the company owner is distinct in its nature to that of the worker or small business owner.

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?

Well for example one is pretty much making untenable the idea of exploitation of labor and thus the very theory of value. If there are no classes, then the presentation of people as simply equal agents on the market abstracted of their structural relations makes equality of the market seem natural and self evident. Everyone is on par with one another. But as mentioned earlier in simon clarkes critique of marginalism, that the different resource ednowments must be structural if they're to be ongoing and one must look to property and production relations to actually find that labourers are a distinct class from capitalists when they come to the market for exchange of their labour power. And they are coerced into such work by the structural deprivation of any means of subsistence, they have to work to survive. Without such a structural relation, capitalism would not have a means of forcing productivity and intense measures upon the working class.

It's whether the difference marks an essential point of their real attraction to one another. Workers and capitalists are brought into a constant interaction due to structural lacking.
Selecting color as a difference isn't identifying anything essential, a fact can be true but still draw one away from what is the essence of the matter.
If you read those links from Ilyenkov, you might get a grasp of the sort of distinction that is being raised.
Otherwise you will at best reach the point of Kant and still be arbitrary in your logic and selection of features as if concepts are applied externally to the empirical reality.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay3.htm

Having thus drawn the boundaries of logic (‘that logic should have been thus successful is an advantage which it owes entirely to its limitations, whereby it is justified in abstracting indeed, it is under obligation to do so from all objects of knowledge and their differences....’), Kant painstakingly investigated its fundamental possibilities. Its competence proved to be very narrow. By virtue of the formality mentioned, it of necessity left out of account the differences in the views that clashed in discussion, and remained absolutely neutral not only in, say, the dispute between Leibniz and Hume but also in a dispute between a wise man and a fool, so long as the fool ‘correctly’ set out whatever ideas came into his head from God knew where, and however absurd and foolish they were. Its rules were such that it must logically justify any absurdity so long as the latter was not self-contradictory. A self-consistent stupidity must pass freely through the filter of general logic.

Ricardo's labour theory of value was dismissed for its contradictory character, when in fact he was on the right path. Some contradictions are simply errors in ones reasoning, others are more a reflection of the essential quality of a problem.
It is when one identifies the essential fact, the concrete universal, that one resolved the contradiction. Like how Marx distinguishes labour power from labor, he in fact resolved a a contradiction in Ricardo's work.
Marx also resolved the epistemological dichtonomy between materialism and idealism in following Hegel's emphasis on activity as a substance.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html

For the point of his first Thesis on Feuerbach is exactly that the truth lies in the middle: between idealism and materialism, between humanism and postmodernism. That elusive middle is captured by Marx’s claim that the external object, on which humanity depends, is in turn dependent on the formative power of human activity. In other words: nature determines (causes, affects) man, who in turn determines (works upon) nature. Thus man is indirectly self-determining, mediated by nature. This reciprocal determination of man and nature is what Marx means by “praxis". In the first Thesis, therefore, Marx reproaches traditional materialism for not seeing this fundamental importance of praxis, since it (materialism) sees man one-sidedly as subjected to nature and thus it forgets man’s active intervention in nature
...
The fact that this intermediate status of qualia is rarely observed, has everything to do with the traditional opposition between idealism and materialism – precisely the opposition Marx wants to overcome in the first Thesis on Feuerbach. Because traditional materialism stresses one-sidedly the passivity of man with respect to nature, it can understand qualia only as secondary, ie as mere effects in consciousness caused by external objects. And because idealism, in contrast, stresses one-sidedly the (mental) activity of the human subject, it cannot understand qualia as coming from external objects. The result is that materialism and idealism, precisely because of their opposing positions (passivity vs. activity), come to a surprisingly unanimous opinion about the ontological status of sensory qualities: they are merely subjective and not objective. Thus the traditional contrast in philosophy between materialism and idealism has led to a systematic disregard of the true in-between status of sensory qualities. Marx was in a sense the first to rehabilitate that true status of the sensory by taking up a position between materialism and idealism.

Which is in part how he is able to overcome the tendency to treat value as some purely subjective quality rather than a suprasensous objective thing. He doesn't positindividal man against empirical reality, but treats man as a social being developed out of the whole within a particular place.

And class need not be rigid exactly other than one should get to the essentials, otherwise one ends up in the arbitrary tendency of believing everyone is what ever someone says they are. There can be no resolution if reasoning is arbitrary in its selection of what features are essential.
This lengthy passage illustrates what happens when one identifies the essene as those qualities which are shared by all rather than the particular thing which underpins the existence of all other particulars.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm

Let us take this situation – the one of the dialectical inter-relationship between the universal and particular and the individual. Here the “universal” cannot be identified in principle within the composition of particular individuals by means of a formal abstraction by revealing the common, the identical in them. This can be shown most demonstrably in the case of the theoretical difficulties associated with the concept of “man,” the definition of “man’s essence” and the search for his “specific generic definition.”

Such difficulties were described with a superb wit in the well-known satirical novel Les animaux de natures, by Vercors. In the thickets of a tropical forest a community of strange creatures was discovered. On the basis of some criteria current in modern physical anthropology, they are apes or other primeval people. Apparently, this is a peculiar, hitherto unobserved, transient form that has developed from the animal, or purely biological world to the social, human world. The question is, whether or not the Tropi (the name the author gives his invented herd-tribe) have passed the hardly discernible, but all-important border-line between man and animal.

At first glance, the question is of purely academic significance and may be of concern, it seems, only to a particular biologist or anthropologist. However, before long it transpires that it is inter-twined with the fundamental problems of our age in legal, ethical and political aspects, as well as with philosophical problems. The novel’s hero deliberately, with a premeditated intention, murders one of the creatures. This act labels him a murderer, provided the Tropi are human beings. If they are animals the corpus delicti is non-existent. The old priest torments himself with the same question. If the Tropi are human beings he is bound to save their souls and subject them to the rite of baptism. If the Tropi are animals, he runs the risk of repeating the sinful deed of St. Mahel who made the mistake of baptizing penguins and caused a lot of trouble to the heavens. Yet another factor enters in due to a selfish manufacturing interest which at once identifies the Tropi as ideal labor power. Indeed, an animal easy to tame, and unable to grow into the awareness of either trade-unions, or the class struggle, or any requirements except physiological ones – is not this a businessman’s dream?

The argument about the nature of the Tropi involves hundreds of people, dozens of doctrines and theories; it broadens, becomes confused and grows into a debate about entirely different things and values. The characters have to ponder over the criterion whereby a categorical and unambiguous answer could be given. This turns out to be far from simple.

With an emphasis on some “human feature,” Tropi come under the category of humans; on another they do not. An appeal to the sum-total of such features is of little help, for then the question arises about their number. By extending the number of the “features” which have defined “human being” thus far and introducing among their number the one feature that sets aside the Tropi from the hitherto known people, the Tropi are left automatically outside the bounds of the human race. By shrinking their number, by confining them to those which are possessed by the previously known Tropi and humans, one arrives at the definition whereby the Tropi are to be included into the human family with all their ensuing rights. The thought is caught within a vicious circle: indeed, to define the nature of the Tropi, it is required that we first clearly define the nature of man. This, however, cannot be done unless it has been decided beforehand whether or not the Tropi are to be approached as a variety of homo sapiens.

Moreover, a new argument flares up at once over every one of those “common features” which have thus far described man. What is meant by “thought”? What is meant by “language” and “speech?” In one sense animals also possess thought and speech, while in another man alone has it. Thus, each human characteristic becomes debated in the same way as the definition of “man.” There is no end to these debates, while the differences of opinion and back-biting reach the plane of the most general and all-important philosophical, ethical and gnoseological concepts, only to be re-kindled there with renewed vigor and violence.

Indeed, things are far from simple with the lawfully established people, as well. Do all people live and act “human-like?” Or often do they not act more horridly than animals? The argument, therefore, evolves into a discussion as to the kind of living that is or is not to be regarded as “genuinely human.”

All attempts to find this “common and essential feature” whereby one could unmistakably tell a man from an animal, from a “non-human,” stumble over and over again into the age-old logical problem. The “common feature” could be abstracted from “all” the individuals of the given race when and if the set that constitutes the genus has been well-defined. But this is impossible unless there is a general criterion available beforehand for identifying such a “set,” i.e., the very “common feature” sought-for. Indeed, hot water is easy to tell from cold. But what about warm water? One stone does not make a heap, and neither do two. How many stones will be then required for a “heap?” Where is the frontier beyond which a balding man becomes bald? And is there any clear-cut frontier at all? Or, on the contrary, is any frontier, any certitude merely an imaginary line to be drawn solely for the purpose of an artificial classification? Where then is it to be drawn? “It will run where the powers-to-be would choose to draw it,” note the novel’s characters ruefully. Indeed, the subjectively idealistic theories of thought delegate this kind of decision-making to the powers-to-be. So, the voice of “the powers” becomes the criterion of truth, and their will the “universal will” behind which title one can clearly discern unmasked arbitrariness and even individual self-seeking interest.

As we now are conscious from experience that the “common and essential feature,” the determinate and specific distinction of the human race, namely, the concrete-universal definition of “man” and the “human” in people, is not as easy to find as they thought it would be from the outset, the characters in Vercors’ novel turn for the solution to philosophical and sociological concepts. But where is the latter’s criterion of truth? Each criterion claimed for itself universal importance, a monopolistic possession of the universal concept, so that there is really nothing “common,” no agreement between them.

The novel ends with a large question mark, while its hero finds himself in the none-too-enviable position of Buridan’s ass, i.e., with the Marxist concept of the “universal” on the left, and the Christian one on the right; two mutually exclusive concepts of the “universal.” Unprepared to accept either, Vercors’ hero, together with the author, would opt readily for a third alternative, such as would reconcile both teachings, the “common” between them, i.e., the “genuine” understanding of the “universal.”

“Each man is, first of all, a human being, and only after that a follower of Plato, Christ or Marx,” Vercors argues in the post-script to the Russian edition of the novel. “I’d think it rather more important at the present moment to show how, on the basis of that criterion, we can find common points between Marxism and Christianity, than to stress their differences.” [7] Well, from the purely political viewpoint this may be true but does it answer the theoretical problem? It can’t be more true that “human nature,” the universal in man, lies not at all in his adherence to a particular doctrine, whether it be that of the author of “Capital,” or the Sermon on the Mount. But then where does it lie, – in the proposition that a human being is first of all a human being? That’s the only answer Vercors could give to oppose the “lop-sided view” of Marxists who proceed from the “real human relationships in the process of material production.” But any answer, like Vercors’, would push us back to the novel’s beginning, to the starting point of all debates over the essence of man, to the simple naming of the object of contention. To budge from such a standstill, such a tautology, we would have to start all over again.

However, there is one other important conclusion to be made from the Tropi story, which Vercors refuses to make for various reasons, namely, that nothing but tautology can result from the logic with which the novel’s characters seek to resolve the issue, i.e., to find the universal definition of “man” by way of abstraction from the “common,” a feature possessed by every individual representative of the human race, every individual as such. Obviously, a logic based on this conception of the “universal” would fail to lead thought out of its impasse, so as a result the notion of “man in general” remains somewhat elusive. The history of philosophical and sociological thinking proves the point with no less clarity than do the mishaps of Vercors’ characters, described above.

Clearly, any attempt to discover the abstract-common feature equally descriptive of Christ and Nero and Mozart and Goebbels and the Cro-Magnon hunter and Socrates and Xantippe and Aristotle, and so on and so forth, hides the cognitively valuable inside itself, and leads nowhere except to an extremely weak abstraction by no means expressive of the heart of the matter. The only way out of this deadlock, as far as we know, is to turn to Marx with his reliance on a more sound logic, on a more earnest and specific conception of the problem of the “universal”: “... Das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse.” [8]

Distinctly pertinent here is not only the sociological, but also the logical principle underlying Marx’s line of reasoning. If translated into logical language, it would mean the following: universal definitions expressing the essence of a genus, whether human or any other, cannot be effectively searched for amidst abstract, common “features,” such as every particular specimen of the genus possesses.

The “essence” of human nature in general – and of the human nature of each particular human being – cannot be revealed, except through a science-based, critical analysis of the “entire totality,” the “entire ensemble” of the socio-historic relationships of man to man, through a case-study approach and apprehension of the regularities which have and are actually governing the process of origination and evolution of human society as a whole, and of a particular individual.

The particular individual represents “man” in the strict and accurate sense of the word insomuch as he realizes – precisely through his individuality – a certain sum-total of historically-developed capabilities (especially human ways of vital activity), a particular fragment of culture which has developed prior to, and independently of, himself and which he absorbs through the process of education (self-accomplishment of man). In this sense, the human person can be rightly regarded as the individual embodiment of culture, i.e., the “universal” in man. Hence, the universal “essence of man” is only real as a culture, as an historically established and evolutionizing aggregate of all specially human forms of vital activity, as the whole of their ensemble. The “universality” so understood represents, indeed, not the mute generic “similarity” of the individuals but a reality dismembered within itself many times over and in various ways into “special” (“particular”) spheres complementary to, and essentially dependent on, one another and which are, therefore, held together with the ties of common origin as tightly and flexibly as are the bodily organs of a biological species developed from the same ovule.

In other words, the theoretical-logical definition of “the universal in man,” – a concrete generality of human existence, – may and does consist, in view of the above, solely in revealing the extent to which it is necessary for the many and varied forms of specifically human activity, for the social human capabilities and their associated needs to evolve from, and interact with, one another.

Hence in seeking the “most common” definition of the human element in man, the task still cannot be to abstract the formal sameness, or the “abstract” characteristic of each particular individual, but to establish that real and, therefore, special form of human vital activity which is historically and essentially the universal foundation and condition of the emergence of all the rest.

One finds the genus to all other facts in reality, not merely collecting their shared attributes. Finding that which underpins all others means resolving a contradiction, an opposition because it establishes a logical certainty not found through identifying similarity.

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

Indeed warfare is destructive, but often peace is only a semblance based on one group maintaining their power over another. Change for many things doesn't come through consensus or simply from above but illiberal struggles in civil society.

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

Yes, colloquial.

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.

Individuals may have other motives than profit but the logic of the economy compels capitalists to compete and profit.
A capitalist who ceases to do so would not remain one eventually. There is course room in which to not be such an asshole within capitalism to some extent.
Can implement some policies which aren't open class warfare and is sound economically.

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.

Indeed that is my understanding is that generally profit refers to that of the company which gains although the connotation of it allows it to be used more broadly in looser conversation. But wages are of course not profit qualitatively even while both are money.

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.

Well it is psychological as in it is experienced by conscious human beings, but it isn't psychological in that it doesn't simply originate in the individuals psyche but from social relations. Capiatlists are also considered to experience alienation and alienation isn't unique to capitalism, it is just very intense and generalized. The idea of it also relates to our essentially social nature, as opposed to the abstract individualism typical to the origins of liberalism in which individuals have no real ties to one another except the pursuit of their consumptive desires.
[URL]http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf[/ur;]

It is the sale of labor-power and the proletariat's active self-alienation that produces alienation for both capitalist and worker. Hence, Marx writes, “the emancipation of the workers contains universal human emancipation” (MECW 3:280). The workers cannot abolish their own alienation as a class without also abolishing a society based on the separation of human beings from their essential human nature, and abolishing the domination of one man over another.
...
Marx goes on to specify the features of the “rich individuality” that he sees as the highest aim for human beings. He writes that this individuality would be “as all-sided in its production as it is in its consumption.” Capitalism already tends in this direction, as it seeks to make labor increasingly productive and “drives labour beyond the limits of its natural paltriness.” Instead of human activity being constrained to narrow tasks in the division of labor, human beings could participate in a wide variety of activities, developing an array of capacities in different areas, just as human beings consume a range of social products and would consume still more in a society that made these more readily available to them.

Marx writes that labor would not appear as labor, but rather “as the full development of activity itself.” It would lose its character as a necessary evil, an unfortunate means to human existence. There would no longer be a distinction between labor time and leisure time. Labor as it appears in capitalist society would give way to labor as the expression and realization of human existence as such.

With the appearance of rich individuality, natural necessity in its immediate form would disappear and the sphere of human freedom would increase. In the place of natural, biological needs, there would be historically arisen needs—needs that are not the mere biological needs of the species, but the historically produced wants of social beings. Human freedom, as the full expression of developing human beings, would finally be really possible. Of course, the biological needs do not entirely vanish—they form the basis for and set the limits of any historically produced, social needs. But the need for shelter, for example, no longer appears as the bare need for the delicate human flesh to be shielded from the elements, but rather as the need for a comfortable home, with the modern amenities, areas suitable to a range of tasks, and so on. It becomes a need that reflects the state of historical progress which society has reached.
...
Moreover, I take it to be a very standard understanding of morality that morality addresses the question of how human beings should live, and of measuring and learning how to close the gap between human life as it is and human life as it ought to be. Marx's conception of “rich individuality” certainly addresses each of these distinctly moral questions.

The gist I take away in the above link is that Marx's idea of overocming alienation has to do with making labor directly social and not mediated by commodities where things end up with reified properties based on those relations as if they were inherent to the objects themselves like money having value. Human powers and properties are seen as the property of things and things come between human relations in a way which fragments and distances them.

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.

[/QUOTE]
Well I also contested earlier Roemer's view in which labor isn't a special substance or source of value which then leads him to think that any commodity can be conceived as exploited. Basically he doesn't wish to disginstuish labour-power as a particularly distinct commodity but somehow synonymous with all others.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15171183

But yes the ethical qualities does arrive in part because objects aren't to be considered as human subjects and in fact there are aspects in which treating someone as an object is wrong without adequate qualifications of how one engages with the materiality of someone but in a way which is acceptable within the norms of society. I mean, slaves as property did exist and were denied any sense of being human. But we of course consider that wrong now for the most part.
I would following the above summary on aleination that the ethical implications of Marx's critique of the political economy is much farther than the mere gap between necessary and surplus labour. His is much more radical than the Ricardian socialist because what informs his critique is the idea of human beings and thus what they ought to be and could be in contrast to how they are.

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?

Except such preferences are abstracted from structural conditions which inform those preferences, hence the above paper which earlier showed how microeconomics was too unstable to be generalized to macroeconomics because it pretty much doesn't explain anything and leaves outside its purview the very relations which may underpin people's preferences. To which there is a distinction between what structural forces inform the preferences of workers compared to that of a capitalist.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/

So we can show that demand, rather than creating value, is part of the reallocation of labor that is implied in the gap between private and social labor. But we can also take the analysis further and show how demand itself is produced in capitalism. From the perspective of subjectivist island it seems like demand is the product of free, independent minds, viewing reality from some distant, objective standpoint. But in reality our subjectivity is a part of a mode of production. This is nowhere more apparent than in the capitalist mode of production. In capitalism the only type of demand that counts is “effective demand”, that is demand backed up by purchasing power. Consumer demand comes from wages paid to workers. That means we can’t understand demand without first understanding wage labor and exploitation.

The products which consumers buy with this money are not just the random result of psychological preferences. In fact, most of our money goes to the purchase of very basic things we need in order to keep us alive as workers so that we can produce more value for capitalism each day: rent, food, clothes. (8) These are needs and desires dictated to us by capitalism, for the purpose of perpetuating capitalism, not the abstract psychological preferences of isolated individuals. (9)

But the bulk of the demand in society comes not from consumers but from capitalists. You and I buy toothbrushes and pay rent. Capitalists buy factories, assembly lines, natural resources, and private armies. This demand has nothing to do with the personal preferences of capitalists. (10) It has to do with the technical requirements of production, the amount of inputs it takes to make a widget at the SNLT. Some people think that capitalists enter production only in order to meet the demands of consumers. This is a myth. The advertising industry is the best refutation of this myth. Capitalists produce in order to make a profit. Then they go looking for markets. Most of the time they have to create the market by convincing people there is a need for their product. But capitalist firms also sell to each other, totally bypassing the need to find consumer markets. (11.)

This all gives us a very different picture of the subject-object relation than we get in bourgeois economics. Rather than a free society of empowered individuals who are free to act upon their abstract desires and take full-responsibility for their lot in life, Marx’s critique of the capitalist mode of production reveals a world in which individuals are at the mercy of the coercive laws of the market. The sorts of superficial freedoms they have to choose between coke and pepsi pale in comparison to the disciplining of our lives to SNLT and the pursuit of profit.

I would say Marx's value theory for example has a lot to offer in explaining capitalist crisis where others tend to generalize particular aspects and don't have a comprehensive take.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/value-theory-the-transformation-problem-and-crisis-theory/

This blog has concentrated on crisis theory, not value theory. But it has been built on the foundation of value theory. Marx’s distinction between value, exchange value as the form of value, money and prices has played no small role.
...
You can only get so far by assuming a “very simple economy that produces two commodities, iron and wheat.” Indeed, Marx always avoided these kinds of “violent abstractions.” Instead, the path pointed to by Marx, Engels and modern Marxists like Anwar Shaikh who have further developed Marx’s theory in certain respects—for example, by introducing the term direct price—have been key to my current understanding of the world in which we all actually live.

Marx also has an interesting theory of money in that he marks it as a distinct thing and doesn't simply consider it as a generalization of barter.
https://college.holycross.edu/eej/Volume14/V14N4P299_318.pdf
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/

The existence of money demands that we immediately abandon the basic principles of marginal utility. In the simple barter models posed by marginalists both actors can fully judge the use-values of items they are trading. But when we are exchanging things for money we are not just trading two commodities in isolation. Money links each commodity to an entire of world of commodities. Now if it was possible to know the future values of all commodities then it would be possible to generalize the marginalist barter model into a theory of indirect exchange. But we don’t know the future values of things. These are entirely uncertain. In fact, If the values of all commodities were always known we wouldn’t need money because any commodity could serve as money. This compromises the entire marginalist model.

In other words, marginalism can only have a theory of indirect exchange (of commodities traded for money instead of commodities bartered with each other) is all parties have perfect information on prices. But if we make this assumption we can no longer explain competition (or money).

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/world-trade-and-the-false-theory-of-comparative-advantage/

Indeed, Ricardo’s claim that in a capitalist economy based on free trade, comparative rather than absolute advantage prevails depends explicitly on the quantity theory of money and implicitly on Say’s Law.

The quantity theory of money (5) holds that, assuming that the level of commodity production is given, changes in the quantity of money have no effect on real effective monetary demand, output and employment, but only affect nominal prices and wages. For example, the theory holds that if we reduced by one-half the money supply, the prices of commodities including the price of “labor”—actually labor power—would also fall by half, but real incomes, real effective demand, would be unchanged.

This view is called the “neutrality of money.” Essentially, the supporters of the quantity theory of money, which included Ricardo, see money as little more than a means of circulation. Marx, in contrast, strongly rejected the quantity theory of money—and in many places in his works comments that Ricardo’s theory of money was wrong. In Volume III of “Capital,” Marx explained—and provided statistics that proved it in practice—that a flow of money out of a country—Marx uses the example of Britain in the 1830s—caused by a deficit in the balance of trade strongly affects the rate of interest but has no effect on the general price level.

Second, and closely linked to his views on the quantity theory of money, Ricardo accepted Say’s Law. This is the view that a generalized overproduction of commodities is impossible. The supporters of Say’s Law see money as simply a device to overcome the technical difficulties of barter. They believe that in principle we can understand capitalism even if we abstract away money. Since the supporters of Say’s Law abstract away money, they hold that commodities are purchased by commodities. This they hold proves that a general overproduction of commodities is impossible. At most, only a partial overproduction of some commodities backed up by a shortage of other commodities is possible.

In modern terms, the quantity theory of money and Say’s Law, which are closely linked together, support the claim on the part of marginalist economists that a capitalist economy has a strong tendency toward “full employment.” Their view that both rich and poor countries benefit equally from free international trade is based precisely on the part of Ricardian theory that Marx rejected.

One sees how he explains the origin of money having value in commodity production.

I think his identification of labour power, and the essential marker of class (much of his work is built upon that of others into a synthesis so isn't entirely original necessarily) provide a great entry point of analysis which can ground things better than more one sided abstractions that treat individuals in a more abstract manner, not really embedded them in social relations.

I also think marginal utility often conflates what is incommensurate, use value and exchange value. The emphasis on the individuals desire to use something is artbitrarily tied to exchange values of commodities assuming full knowledge of what commodities trade for which is more reflective of a simple commodity exchange unmediated by money. The desire for use values exists across all societies but money as a universal commodity is particular to capitalism. Money predates capitalism but takes time to establish as the universal mediator. So they avoid the issue of money and even value even while they often infer value in models where they assume the equilibrium of supply and demand where the price fluctuations are deemed irrelevant and one considers the value of a thing more directly. Marx adopts the same abstraction to reveal things even while his theory is of nonequilibrium and sees prices following value but coincidentally coinciding with it directly. Political economists of the past have a lot more to explore in the social and political than modern economists who take too much for granted ie are uncritical of the appearences of things. Which isn’t my singular opinion when one takes a view of economics in the long run rather than that confined to the modern marginialists.
[url] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/821 ... ilosophers[/url

n a bold new concluding chapter entitled “The End of the Worldly Philosophy?” Heilbroner reminds us that the word “end” refers to both the purpose and limits of economics. This chapter conveys a concern that today’s increasingly “scientific” economics may overlook fundamental social and political issues that are central to economics. Thus, unlike its predecessors, this new edition provides not just an indispensable illumination of our past but a call to action for our future.

I also think his manner of abstracting puts capitalism in historical perspective rather than generalizing logic of capitalist production back onto the past in representing capitalism as technical expansion of production.
Now there are all sorts of things posd in economics which are true in a sense, they do reflect things which occur in reality and as such aren't somehow automatically dismissed as wrong. Rather I see Marx as not being somehow entirely external and independent of economics but rather critical of somethings as limitations, as foreclosing analysis. FOr example commodity fetishism wouldn't really pop into modern economics at all but it is illustrative of a real phenemon and can help explain other things beyond the economy in fact.

Last edited by Wellsy on 27 May 2021 17:06, edited 2 times in total.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174280

By ckaihatsu - 27 May 2021 00:22

- 27 May 2021 00:22 #15174280

wat0n wrote:
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?

I guess the reason why I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about 'flex' time as you are is because of the gradual declining of *job security* over the past several decades -- to you it's "freelancing", while to others it's either stagnant or declining living standards, declining life expectancy, and/or two or three jobs for a viable household.

wat0n wrote:
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.

Sure -- no argument, but you're pointing to the *rare exceptions* within the proletariat. Most people with material ambitions would rather do okay, with property on their side, than to be stellar by their own merits / accomplishments, *without* the benefit of property / capital.

---

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).

wat0n wrote:
Hold on, are you really trying to imply there is no meaningful difference between slavery and wage labor?

Well, it's still class-based *exploitation* and *oppression* -- I don't mean to *stack* the two, but in both cases (feudalism, capitalism) it's those with property and access to the state apparatus who are empirically favored and who live privileged lives.

---

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.

wat0n wrote:
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?

You're again slipping into *demographic* treatments, which are *tangential* to the political-economy description -- of goods and services being commodity-production, through equity capital and the exploitation of labor-power / the working class.

It's characteristic of the *right*-wing to be dismissive of service-sector / 'pink-collar' types of jobs, favoring *blue*-collar, industrial-type jobs in a very *chauvinistic* / machismo, and nationalistic kind of way -- even though *all* jobs require labor and produce commodities / economic activity.

wat0n wrote:
Certainly the worker that is getting less value for the labor he's providing isn't owning much of that.

Yes, thank you -- this is the *crux* of Marxist political economy, that all workers, by definition, are being economically exploited, so this point can't be stressed enough.

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wat0n wrote:
No, I'm not. I'm simply pointing out that it's [innovation] 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.

wat0n wrote:
The issue is that you are assuming innovation only takes place once.

No, this is not the case -- I just acknowledged 'leapfrogging' as a macro-level, general societal dynamic.

wat0n wrote:
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.

No, this does *not* happen, because business competition and technological / cultural diffusion results in *mass adoption* of previously elite, cutting-edge technologies and techniques, such as robotization / automation, so that *all* industrial production facilities enjoy increased productivity, at sustained or lessened quantities of labor-power. Since there's no longer an edge in computerizing / automating industrial mass production, *no one* has 'the edge' anymore in automating their own machinery, as compared to all other competitors in the industry, who all happen to be using the exact same "advantage". Yes, this does increase *material productivity* for 'x' amount of material inputs, but, because of market pricing, the resulting *overproduction* of commodities, by all factories using automation, means that prices *drop*, *reducing* profits for all, going-forward.

wat0n wrote:
You can infer the per capita GDP growth rate, i.e. approximately the difference between GDP growth and population growth rates, from the series.

Bullshit -- you're just not providing the appropriate kind of data. What's relevant is GDP *growth*, per nation, which can be further sliced into 'per-capita', or not.

wat0n wrote:
In what way is it contrived?

It's a contrived *academic* formulation / line of inquiry that has nothing to do with concerns of political-economy, and so I'm not going to entertain it. Please stop pestering me about it as well.

---

wat0n wrote:
So they are independent contractors.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Or hyper-exploited workers.

wat0n wrote:
Why?

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.

wat0n wrote:
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.

You're being *evasive* again -- my point stands that Uber-type workers are *hyper-exploited* because they're shouldering *infrastructure* costs which are normally an expense to the *employer*.

Again, flexible working hours doesn't change that workers are routinely, consistently economically *exploited* for the hours that they *do* work.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174286

By ckaihatsu - 27 May 2021 02:13

- 27 May 2021 02:13 #15174286

Wellsy wrote:

unity of universality and particularity.

Generalizations-Characterizations

Spoiler: show

---

Wellsy wrote:

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.

philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174288

By ckaihatsu - 27 May 2021 02:29

- 27 May 2021 02:29 #15174288

wat0n wrote:
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?

The best critique of marginal utility -- diminishing returns -- is simply that, as with *all* bourgeois economics, it's only concerned with *post-production* values, meaning market pricing, or the supply-and-demand dynamic over the capital-and-labor inputs required to produce the commodity in the first place, and which confer the commodity's initial value, and pricing.

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

Spoiler: show

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174362

By Rugoz - 27 May 2021 18:15

- 27 May 2021 18:15 #15174362

Wellsy wrote: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.

It matters because the labour theory of value cannot explain the price of labour-power in capitalism (aka wages). Similarly, it cannot explain the price of land for example. When you want a theory about distribution, you need to be able to explain those things.

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

Various potential reasons I suppose. Pension plans, contraception, individualism, feminism etc.

Wellsy wrote:Real wages may increase but what of the state of workers in this scenario and nominal wages?

Nominal wages aren't relevant to questions of distribution.

Wellsy wrote: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.

People always want better and shinier things. It's human nature. The need is only partially created by capitalism. I guess it depends on the product.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174391

By Wellsy - 27 May 2021 22:37

- 27 May 2021 22:37 #15174391

Rugoz wrote:It matters because the labour theory of value cannot explain the price of labour-power in capitalism (aka wages). Similarly, it cannot explain the price of land for example. When you want a theory about distribution, you need to be able to explain those things.

Although it is unclear to me to what extent Marx sought to explain price as many of his abstractions initially seek to treat supply and demand in equilibrium such that price is equivalent to a value expressed quantitatively, and was interested in explaining value as part of the project of revealing the historically contingent social relations of capitalist production. With this focus in mind, the goal isn't to develop a science in which one can predict the fluctuations of the economy and it's value precisely.

Spoiler: show

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/ch05.htm

This inability to see in money the universal measure of value led not only to a series of mistakes about the determination of the general price level. It was directly connected with Ricardo’s false search for an invariable measure of value. This is a problem we have already looked at, but can return to briefly in the light of the discussion of fetishism. To insist, as we have done, that fetishism is a phenomenon of the very being of capital amounts to exactly the same as insisting that the ‘measurement’ of all commodities in one alienated (money) commodity is an objective, necessary process and not the ‘invention’ of man. All those who think there can be some invariable measure of value in fact completely misunderstand the nature of capital. It is because man’s production relations are indirect, relations mediated through things, that there can never be any invariable measure of value, be it ‘labour’, ‘money’ or the currently fashionable Sraffian ‘standard commodity’. Values are measured spontaneously, becoming embodied in one commodity (money) because the production relations are not, and cannot be, planned in advance. To deny this is to deny one of the basic qualities of capitalism as a mode of production. The task of true science here is therefore not to invent fictitious ‘measures’ but to demonstrate how this spontaneous process of measurement actually takes place. The neo-Ricardian school does not even begin to understand this point. All those who wish to discover some standard of value in effect want to transform capitalism into a system capable of conscious planning. In short they want to retain capital while removing its contradictions. Stressing the need for money as a ‘thing’ in which the values of all commodities must be alienated...
...
This futile search for a standard of value for the ‘economist’s stone’, should perhaps enable us to put into some perspective the work of those who believe that Marx’s work suffers from precisely the absence of such a standard. It is no accident that there is no trace of the notion of fetishism in the work of what might he called the ‘Sraffa School’ which has returned to Ricardo for some answers to the current crisis in economic theory. For it is precisely this school which has grappled with what we have tried to show is a quite mistaken problem – namely the search for some abstract standard of value – be it a ‘standard’ or ‘composite’ commodity. Nor is it any accident that this school has ‘discovered’ (one hundred years after Marx!) that capital is a social relation. No doubt this is a welcome advance over the orthodox conception that capital is a stock of goods used in the production of other goods. But in the light of what we have tried to show it must be said that it is quite inadequate merely to stress that capital is no mere thing but a social relation. This was not Marx’s position: he insisted always that capital was a social relation, but one affixed to ‘things’. Marx’s qualification to Galiani involved no small quibble. For in this caveat to Galiani is expressed the essential point of Marx’s notion of fetishism, a notion which is fundamental to his entire analysis of capitalist economy.
...
When therefore Galiani says: Value is a relation between persons ... he ought to have added: a relation between persons expressed as a relation between things. (I, p. 74)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff4.htm#Pill11

For Marx, labour was the basis of all social life, in all epochs, independent of any particular mode of production. In all periods of history man created wealth only through a continual struggle against the forces of nature, of which forces he was of course an integral part. The question, however, remained: to discover the particular social form which this universal process (the labour process) assumed in each epoch of history. Replying to those who thought it necessary (or indeed possible) to ‘prove’ the law of value, Marx wrote:

The nonsense about the necessity of proving the concept of value arises from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of the method of science. Every child knows that a country which ceased to work, I will not say for a year but for a few months, would die. Every child knows too that the mass of products corresponding to different needs require different and qualitatively determined measures of the total labour of society. That this necessity of distributing social labour in definite proportions cannot be done away with by the particular form of social production but can only change the form it assumes, is self evident. What can change in changing historical circumstances, is the form in which these laws operate. And the form which this proportional division of labour operates, in a state of society where the interconnection of social labour is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products. The science consists precisely in working out how the law of value operates. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to ‘explain’ all the phenomena which apparently contradict this law [this was of course aimed at the method of political economy], one would have to give the science before the science. (Marx, Letters to Kugelmann,)

What is the meaning of this passage? Marx here points out to his friend Kugelmann that in every society social labour is distributed in definite proportions. No society can alter this basic law. But the law takes different forms in different societies. Under conditions of commodity production this universal law takes the particular form of the ‘value’ of the products of labour. Simply to say that ‘labour is the measure of value’ (and to call this a ‘labour theory of value’) leaves open what is the crucial question: by what social and historical forces are the activities of men expressed in the values of the products of their labour? Now if bourgeois economy is viewed naturalistically (in the sense that its laws are universalised, identified immediately with the laws of nature) as in the case of political economy, then it is equally ‘natural’ to identify labour in its peculiarly capitalist form with labour in general. It was one of Marx’s great merits that he investigated the specific characteristics of labour under commodity production, a problem not even considered by political economy.

These comments by Marx about the nature of social labour raise another directly related topic. For in these statements Marx is by implication rejecting what for political economy was one of its main tasks – the search for some ‘measure’ of value, or what amounted to the same thing, the attempt to arrive at a true definition or concept of value. (We shall deal later in more detail with this question of Capital’s concepts.) We have seen that in a commodity-producing economy the equalisation of labour is achieved through the equalisation of the products of labour. This is but another way of saying that all varieties of concrete labour are reduced to abstract labour through the market and thus become social labour. But nobody can or does ‘measure’ these many forms of labour empirically. To imagine that this is so would be to ignore an essential feature of commodity production – its spontaneous, anarchic nature. Considerable misunderstandings will arise (as Rubin, Theories of Surplus Value, has rightly pointed out) if the law of value is seen as an ‘instrument’ which makes possible the comparison and measurement of the various products in the act of exchange. It has been widely (and wrongly) believed by many economists and others that Marx emphasised labour precisely as this ‘practical’ standard of value. As opponents of Marx, such writers have directed their efforts to showing that labour could not be accorded this privileged status; they have argued along these lines because of the absence of precisely established units with which to measure the various forms of labour which are different from each other with regard to intensity, skill etc.

Such a line of attack utterly misconceives the nature of Marx’s value theory. It is both impossible and unnecessary to discover a measure of value which will make possible the equalisation of labour or the products of labour. It may be a simple point, but none the less profound, to insist that this equalisation of labour takes place objectively, spontaneously and indirectly – that is, independently of any participants within the capitalist system. It is in this real, objective process that value is measured. Out of the process of the production and circulation of commodities money (gold) arises. Gold is not some ‘external’ measure, standing outside the world of commodities. Nor was it ‘selected’ by conscious planning on the part of economists or politicians. This measure (gold) was historically selected, after long trial and error, in the sense that it was its physical-material properties which enabled gold to select itself as the most suitable money-commodity. The matter can be reformulated thus: it is not money that renders commodities commensurable; on the contrary, it is because all commodities as values are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values find their measure in one and the same commodity. By a social and historical process this commodity is converted into money. Unless the objective nature of these processes is grasped, then the significance of all Marx’s categories of political economy is lost. We have already spoken of the social character of the labour which creates value, summed up in Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Marx insists that the measure of value is not labour-time, but socially-necessary labour-time, that is labour-time required to produce a commodity at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces. And it is only when the producer of a product tries to sell this product on the market that he discovers its real, objective value (if any). During periods of capitalist slump the piles of unsold goods signify that the concrete labour embodied in them was socially unnecessary. Such labour cannot, through the market, be transformed into abstract labour and therefore creates no value. But the owner of capital can never discover this beforehand, even though he may be armed with the latest ‘market research’ techniques and may even have read Capital. The essence of capitalist production here is that he can only discover whether the labour incorporated into his products was socially necessary at the end of the process.

Our task is not, therefore, to seek some measuring rod for the processes of capitalist production. The very process is its own measure. Value does not measure commodities; commodities discover their own measure of value. The task of Marxism is to discover how this is done, to discover the laws and tendencies of this process, laws and tendencies which do not appear empirically on the surface of society but appear always in the form of crises...

In short, instead of the vain search for some formal standard by I which to measure the magnitude of value, Marx set out to abstract the laws of the development of capitalism (‘law of motion’), that is to uncover the (highly contradictory) processes whereby this problem was actually resolved in practice.
...
On this matter of the ‘measure of value’ Marx is in fact making a point of even wider significance which will occupy us later, namely the fact that in this false search for a ‘measure’ of value was involved an equally wrong procedure which believes that science must start with a series of concepts, which can then be tested to see whether they correspond to their empirical manifestation. In his critical comments on Adolph Wagner (Wagner had accused Marx of ‘illogicality’ in splitting the concept of value into exchange-value and use-value) Marx says, inter alia, ‘Above all I do not proceed on the basis of “concepts” and thus not from the “value-concept”.... What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour in contemporary society manifests itself; and this is the “commodity”’ (Marx, Value, Studies by Marx).
...
Marx saw his task as providing a critique of categories of political economy, of demonstrating that they were expressions, in fetishistic form, of definite social conditions. His critique of political economy was therefore the theoretical form of his revolutionary critique of those same social conditions.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch05.htm

Little as Vulgar-Economy knows about the nature of value, yet whenever it wishes to consider the phenomena of circulation in their purity, it assumes that supply and demand are equal, which amounts to this, that their effect is nil. If therefore, as regards the use-values exchanged, both buyer and seller may possibly gain something, this is not the case as regards the exchange-values. Here we must rather say, “Where equality exists there can be no gain.” [5] It is true, commodities may be sold at prices deviating from their values, but these deviations are to be considered as infractions of the laws of the exchange of commodities [6], which in its normal state is an exchange of equivalents, consequently, no method for increasing value. [7]

This is certainly useful in thinking through things even while he in fact maintains their divergence.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2012/08/19/value-and-price-qa/

Q: So rather than the social value of a commodity involving SNLT now the social value just comes from adding the average rate of profit to the cost of production? Have we just replaced labor values altogether with a different theory?

A: This has been one historic criticism of Marx’s theory of price. Bohm-Bawerk accused Marx of literally contradicting himself on the issue. But there is no contradiction. We have seen that even the elementary theory of SNLT involves the deviation of value from price and the redistribution of profit in through exchange. The same happens with the theory of prices of production.

But what of the more general charge that there is no necessary role for labor as the source of value in the theory of prices of production? Even though there is a systematic deviation of prices from value this deviation is still related to labor times. What is the average rate of profit? It is the individual rates of profit of each industry averaged together. The average rate of profit is still determined by the total amount of surplus value produced by the working class as a whole. Thus the capitalist class literally exploits the working class as whole, not just as individuals.

Marx famously held three equalities to be true for the economy as a whole:

1. total value equals total price
2. total surplus value equals total profit
3. total value rate of profit equals total money rate of profit

Bohm-Bawerk responded that these were just tautologies that prove nothing. But they are not meant to prove anything. They merely frame the contours of what value is. Value is not a phenomenon where every commodity is going to magically appear with an exact measure of its labor time. The economy is much to complex for that. Rather, price, though formed wholly of the substance of value, is always a refracted measure of value, reflecting at any moment a number of different determinations.

Basically, it seems as if one wishes to interpret the focus of Marx through the narrowed focus of modern economics which has left a lot of the sort of analysis involved in Marx as simply outside of it's purview which has resulted in the intellectual division between economics and sociology.

But with this skepticism in mind on what Marx's work is expected to achieve, there are those who would point to the prospect of some kinds of calculation.
Basically he sees the reproduction of workers as based on four things:
https://blogs.ubc.ca/socialtheory/2017/09/23/how-is-the-power-of-labour-power-determined/

Firstly, the labourer must be met with the essentials for subsistence.
...
Secondly, one must consider that the needs of the labourer will vary given the period and region that the two find themselves in.
...
Thirdly, Marx makes visible the fact that no owner of labour-power is immortal. Therefore, “Mr. Moneybags” must ackknowledge that not only is he affording the subsistence of the labourer, but also his offspring or “substitutes.”
...
Lastly, the labourer will need a certain level of training to successfully carry out the money owner’s wishes.
...
In conclusion Marx asserts that the total means of subsistence equates to the value of labor-power. He wants the reader to understand that the commodities required to sustain daily production are not all needed at the same rate. Some aspects need only be completed once per labourer. For instance, the training they must undergo is a one-time expenditure. Other aspects like food and fuel need be given daily. While aspects like clothing and material items are given less frequently. Marx conveys, “If the total of the commodities required daily for production of labour-power = A, and those required weekly = B, and those required quarterly = C, and so on, the daily average of these commodities = (365A + 52B + 4C +&c.)/365” (pg. 51). In this, he is stating that the value of labour power can in fact be calculated to a definite amount yet only after carefully reviewing and accounting for the four separate parts discussed in this analysis of his essay.

The passage in full

The value of labour-power resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence. It therefore varies with the value of these means or with the quantity of labour requisite for their production.

Some of the means of subsistence, such as food and fuel, are consumed daily, and a fresh supply must be provided daily. Others such as clothes and furniture last for longer periods and require to be replaced only at longer intervals. One article must be bought or paid for daily, another weekly, another quarterly, and so on. But in whatever way the sum total of these outlays may be spread over the year, they must be covered by the average income, taking one day with another. If the total of the commodities required daily for the production of labour-power = A, and those required weekly = B, and those required quarterly = C, and so on, the daily average of these commodities = (365A + 52B + 4C + &c) / 365.

Suppose that in this mass of commodities requisite for the average day there are embodied 6 hours of social labour, then there is incorporated daily in labour-power half a day’s average social labour, in other words, half a day’s labour is requisite for the daily production of labour-power. This quantity of labour forms the value of a day’s labour-power or the value of the labour-power daily reproduced. If half a day’s average social labour is incorporated in three shillings, then three shillings is the price corresponding to the value of a day’s labour-power. If its owner therefore offers it for sale at three shillings a day, its selling price is equal to its value, and according to our supposition, our friend Moneybags, who is intent upon converting his three shillings into capital, pays this value.

You may disagree with the above holding relevance to the determination of wages, as I certainly haven't shown in great detail how they apply with certainty. But things like training, and that wages serve to meet the needs of those without an alternative means of subsistence, and that people work to provide not only for themselves but in contribution to a family quite often do not stand as entirely unrelated to the dynamics of value of wages.
Even the historical moral element is particular expressed in the divergence in value of labor between countries between say the US and Mexico, or the special economic zones in china (althoughcheap labor is increasingly being shifted to Vietnam before being completed in China). The equal value of people's labor does not yet have a reality even though equality in the abstract is a popular notion with capitalism.

And in regard to explaining the value of land, he does have a theory of rent which he elaborates on the work of Smith and Ricardo.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1248&context=econ_workingpaper
The difficulty of that though is that it is premised on understanding concepts in Capital Volume I and II, as rent comes up in Volume III.

Nominal wages aren't relevant to questions of distribution.

Reflecting on it, yes nominal wages aren't going to help clear things up much. I was concerned about conflating use-value with exchange value as somehow being analogous to real vs nominal wages, but that's not the case at all.
But when considering wages, the earlier answer was about the increased competition among workers who would need to work longer hours or what ever to earn the same amount. But a decrease in wages need not be the case always as would need more context/factors to consider.

But focusing on real wages, a worker can perhaps access greater commodities for their needs, but they also expand the divide between the worker and capitalist class.
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf

8. It should now be noted that according to Marx, to evaluate the effects on the standard of living of the labourers of an increase in wages, it must also be considered that the necessary price of labour “resolves itself into the value of a definite quantity of the means of subsistence” and therefore varies with the value of these means (Marx, 1961, I: 172). To Marx it is indeed a great scientific merit of Ricardo to have distinguished between absolute and relative wages, since the value of wages has “to be reckoned not according to the quantity of the means of subsistence received by the worker, but according to the quantity of labour which these means of subsistence cost”, that is according to the “relative share of the total product, or rather of the total value of this product, which the worker receives”. It is in fact possible that, “reckoned in terms of use-value (quantity of commodities or money), his wages rise as productivity increases and yet the value of the wages may fall and vice versa” (Marx, 1978, II: 419). To consider the “relative or real wages” is therefore the right way to evaluate the social position of the workers. Indeed

“(u)p to this time, wages had always been regarded as something simple and
consequently the worker was considered an animal. But here is considered in his
social relationships. The position of the classes to one another depends more on
relative wages than on the absolute amount of wages” (Marx, 1978: II, 419. See also
Marx, 1978, II: 404).

On the other hand, with respect to these social relationships, Marx noted that with an increase in labour productivity

“the same number of labourers will enable the higher classes to extend, refine, and
diversify the circle of their enjoyments, and thus to widen the economic, social, and
political gulf separating them from their betters” (Marx, 1978, II: 572, italics ours).

9. In this respect Marx further observes that, according to “political economists”, the working class should not receive any surplus wage. According to them, of the individual consumption of the labourer that part alone is productive “which is requisite for the perpetuation of the class, and which therefore must take place in order that the capitalist may have labour-power to consume; what the labourer consumes for his own pleasure beyond that part, is unproductive consumption” (Marx, 1978: II, 573). In this case, if “the same necessaries of life” come to be produced by a shorter labour time, the social position of the workers worsens.26

Yet Marx does not neglect the possibility that the workers participate in increased productivity. It is possible, he observes, that “owing to an increase of productiveness, both the labourer and the capitalist may simultaneously be able to appropriate a greater quantity of these necessaries, without any change in the price of labour-power or in surplus-value” (Marx, 1978, II: 523). However, the usual situation for Marx is that the price of labour-power (or relative wage) falls, and yet this fall will be “accompanied by a constant growth in the mass of the labourer’s means of subsistence”. Thus Marx wrote:

“because in a given country the value of labour is falling relatively to its productivity,
it must not be imagined that wages in different countries are inversely proportional to
the productivity of labour. In fact exactly the opposite is the case. The more productive
one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages as
compared with the other. In England, not only nominal wages but [also] real wages are
higher than on the continent. The worker eats more meat; he satisfies more needs”
(Marx, 1978, II: 16-17).27

But although satisfying more needs, in this situation the relative social position of the workers is worsened, since “the extremes of wealth have increased” (Marx, 1961, I: 660. See also Marx, 1978, II: 523). In fact, if you have a little house near a palace, you feel more uncomfortable and more dissatisfied, because “(o)ur wants and pleasure have their origin in society”, and we “do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification” but “in relation to society”, so that “they are of a relative nature” (Marx, 1884: 33).

People always want better and shinier things. It's human nature. The need is only partially created by capitalism. I guess it depends on the product.

Well indeed desire is inate to humans and there is a tendency for it to tend towards the unbounded.
I think of an example of the excess of desire in the case of a starving person, they do not fantasize about merely meeting their need to simply abate their starvation with some food, but dream of more than they could eat and not just basic food but the finest. Similarly someone dying of thirst may not just imagine water but a coke or something that bit more than mere physiological need.
It's just a point also that in the search for new markets, companies seek to cultivate new needs. The emphasis son physiological needs is easier to make a case of in the earlier stages of capitalism, but less so with our industrialized nations.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm

Nowadays, many people say that “Marx’s theory of value is out of date” by which one can presume is meant “value is no longer determined by the quantity of labour-time required for its production”, for Marx only claimed to describe the dynamics of social relations of the bourgeois society of his day, not to have constructed an eternal scientific theory. The question remains though: is labour-time now irrelevant to value determination? Have we changed our values in this respect?

For example Nike shoes, produced by sweated labour in “free trade zones” by people who do not earn enough in a week to buy one pair of the shoes they produce in five minutes, while Michael Jordan is paid more than the entire Indonesian labour force for lending his name to the product.

Firstly, integral to this trick is maintaining the separation between the workers in these countries and workers in the country where the shoes will be consumed. The act of exchange is an act of measuring the value of one person against that of another.
...
and if there is no way of getting a Nike shoe other than buying one off Nike, then the question is: exactly what need is being fulfilled by buying a Nike shoe? What other equivalent means is there of satisfying this need? Obviously it is not a need that can be fulfilled by just any sneaker, and:

“A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” . [Capital, Chapter 1]

So the fact is that the young person who purchases a Nike sneaker is paying not for the few minutes of labour involved in gluing together the pieces of rubber and plastic, but for the “image” or “aura” surrounding the Brand name which is far more costly.

So it would seem that the claim that the labour theory of value is no longer applicable is misguided; what has changed is the nature of human needs, which in this postmodern world, are very different from what those of the world in which life hinged more around food, warm and security than image, and the manner of their satisfaction. For example, if one determined the value of two hours spent in a cinema watching Moulin Rouge without taking account of the complex emotional and cultural qualities of the images and story line of the movie, and the labour-time involved in producing that, it would be quite impossible to understand what the moviegoers were paying for.

And this is of great significance to Marx's sense of humans as not merely having biological senses but cultivate those senses, humanizes them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/comm.htm

The abolition [Aufhebung] of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities, but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become, subjectively and objectively, human. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object – an object made by man for man. The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theoreticians. They relate themselves to the thing for the sake of the thing, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, [In practice I can relate myself to a thing humanly only if the thing relates itself humanly to the human being. – Note by Marx] and vice versa. Need or enjoyment have consequently lost its egotistical nature, and nature has lost its mere utility by use becoming human use.

http://www.kafu-academic-journal.info/journal/6/164/

But a man differs from an animal above all by the presence of spiritual senses to which artistic taste and moral sense (conscience), the sense of the sublime, pride and love in its human spiritual meaning pertain. On the other hand, from the point of view of historical materialism, the highest spiritual senses do not presuppose additional physical organs, but rather transform and instill the highest ideal meaning into the activity of the natural senses, all the vital functions of a human organism.

The basis of vexation of mind is nothing but pain. Its essence differs, however, from a sudden heart attack. Thirst for justice differs from mere physical thirst. Someone who listens to symphonic music hears it with his ears, but he does not hear just a collection of sounds. Human senses are physically always the same. This means that the highest spiritual qualities do not presuppose different organs but different abilities of an individual which form a richer content of human life and behaviour.

Hence the social form, it is not enough that you need to drink water, but that you do so in a particular form, not from the stream or the gutter but from a bottle/glass.
ANd hence poverty isn't merely that of physical objects, but even the lacking in one's development of human senses.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/o.htm

Further, Marx believed that the progress of bourgeois society would continue to develop human needs. The market, as had been shown by all those before him, would continue to generate rich and poor, but as the productive forces developed, human needs would develop, and the poverty of succeeding generations would be quite different from that of earlier generations.
...
Thus, Marxism sees poverty not so much as in the shortfall of means in meeting needs but in the low level of development of human needs. The person who wants only for their next meal experiences real poverty; the artist in her garret whose heart’s desire is a sublime insight or subtle nuance for their next artistic work is poor, but not as poor as the person who has no idea of art at all.
...
Overcoming poverty is not about the reduction of human need to a level at which everyone can be satisfied, but rather in the fullest development of human needs, for it is human need which drives us, gets us out of bed in the morning, and the central and essential human need is to fulfil and express ourselves by meeting the needs of others.

So capitalism has been integral to the development of new needs, but it also retards them for a great many and in a sense reduces their existence to that of the more physiological.
http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf

Because labor takes on such an unattractive character, instead of recognizing the labor process as the essence of human activity, workers feel that they are truly themselves and truly human only when they are at leisure or satisfying those needs which they have in common with animals.

As a result, therefore, man (the worker) only feels himself freely active in his animal functions –
eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human
functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human
and what is human becomes animal.
Certainly eating, drinking, procreating, etc., are also genuinely human functions. But taken
abstractly, separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate
ends, they are animal functions. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, MECW 3:275)

In the Introduction to this study, I discussed the distinction between natural being and social being. Insofar as humans are natural, biological beings, they have their natural needs more or less in common with other mammals. Their biological make-up is such that in order for the human species to persist and to flourish, human beings must have their biological needs for food, water, housing, and so on, satisfied, and they must continue to propagate themselves as a species through sexual reproduction. Human beings are distinct from other natural beings, however, in that they satisfy these natural needs socially, through the labor process. Human beings, through socially mediated labor, intervene consciously and purposively into their environments in order to satisfy their natural needs and in so doing, transform both their environments and themselves, produce new forms of social interaction, and develop new powers and in turn, new social, historically arisen needs. They produce themselves not merely as natural, but also as social beings. In unalienated labor, human beings recognize this continual process of satisfying social, historically arisen needs and developing new powers as an end in itself, the realization of human beings' essential nature as natural and social beings who satisfy their needs through labor.

In alienated labor, natural, biological needs, instead of being regarded as the ontological basis for a limitless development of social, historically arisen needs, are “separated from the sphere of all other human activity and turned into sole and ultimate ends.” The powers which have been developed in and through human history—capacities for language, for theorizing, for engineering, and so on—are converted into little more than new ways of satisfying man's natural, biological needs and of serving his “animal functions.” As a result of the odious character of labor under capitalism, workers subjectively experience themselves in their “animal functions” as free and active, and experience themselves in their distinctively human functions as little more than animals.

Edit: Something of note for myself that wanted to post considering the broader discussion of people renting out their homes.

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-1/the-marxist-theory-of-ground-rent-pt-2/

How worker-homeowners can share in imperialist super-profits

The homeowners to the extent that they build up equity in their homes—the difference between the value of the home and the remaining mortgage debt—will benefit in the form of the rising value of their homes. The homeowners in their economic role as (very) petty landowners can realize the rising ground rents on the land their homes are built on in various ways.

For example, they can rent out unused rooms in their homes. (5) They can also realize some of the rising value in money form by taking out so-called home equity loans. (6) The inflated magnitude of such home equity loans played a large role, especially in the United States, in the crisis of 2007-2009.

But more frequently the rising rental value of the land that a home is built on is realized when homeowners sell the homes at much higher prices than they paid for them, perhaps at retirement, and then move to an area of the country where real-estate values are much lower—or to a much smaller apartment—the kids are now grown—to retire and live off the “nest egg” that is realized when their homes are sold.

When large numbers of workers become homeowners—especially in imperialist countries—and build up equity in their homes, even if the homes are condo apartments, there are many undesirable consequences from the point of view of the workers’ movement. First, the workers acquire a certain individual material interest in an imperialist foreign policy that produces super-profits for the monopoly capitalists in the given imperialist country.

To the extent that significant sections of workers come to expect and depend on the rise in the value of their homes, the struggle for social insurance—old-age pensions and universal medical insurance—is weakened. One of the reasons that a national health care system has not been realized in the United States—and is still unrealized under Obamacare—is the widespread home ownership in the United States, which has been strongly encouraged since New Deal days by the ruling Democratic and Republican parties.

Therefore, the widespread home ownership among workers in the U.S.—and a few other imperialist countries—is one of the reasons that since World War II we have seen a tremendous weakening of the U.S. trade union movement, the political degeneration of the old workers’ and labor parties in other imperialist countries, and the general rightward movement of politics in the imperialist countries that has marked the post-World War II era.

Let’s examine this question more closely, because it is of great political importance. In the United States, individual home ownership is called the “American Dream.” In the sense of the “American dream,” the rising value of the homes isn’t a real increase in the value of the house as a commodity but the value of the land on which the house is built.

Why workers should reject the ‘American Dream’

The rising value of homes therefore actually expresses the rising mass of the super-profits that corporate America wrings out the world’s industrial workers, some of which takes the form of “rising home values” in the U.S. To its occupant, the home in addition to its basic use value as a means of shelter becomes the equivalent of corporate stock—which entitles its owner to a portion of the surplus value that is produced by the world working class.

In other words, the “American dream” is simply a form of the sharing of super-profits by the U.S. ruling class with sections of the U.S. working class that are able to afford to buy their own homes. This is why class-conscious workers have to reject the “American Dream” and its counterparts in other imperialist countries.

Widespread working-class “home ownership” under capitalism, especially in imperialist countries, also encourages racism. It is well known that in the U.S. “people of color,” especially African Americans, are paid less than white workers. Ground rents and therefore the “value of homes” is generally lower in areas that are inhabited by African Americans and other workers of color. In the U.S. and other imperialist countries, residential segregation, though not formally the law, remains very much a reality.

A particular neighborhood can flip. That is, it might go from white to black or from white to Latino. Particularly with the scanty system of social insurance in the U.S., white homeowners often count on the rising value of their homes for retirement. They are ever fearful that if one African American family or one Latino family moves into the neighborhood, the neighborhood will not only lose its all-white character, it will then “flip” becoming a black or Latino neighborhood. If that happens, the white homeowners may have to sell their homes at a loss or at least with a considerably smaller gain than they had been counting on for their retirement.

Therefore, white homeowners are given a material incentive to oppose the moving of African Americans or Latinos into their neighborhoods. This breeds racism, creates a voting base for extreme right-wing politicians, and breaks down the solidarity of the working class.

An interesting take which situates the tendency for airbnb in places like New York.

https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174471

By ckaihatsu - 28 May 2021 18:26

- 28 May 2021 18:26 #15174471

Wellsy wrote:

Marx saw his task as providing a critique of categories of political economy, of demonstrating that they were expressions, in fetishistic form, of definite social conditions. His critique of political economy was therefore the theoretical form of his revolutionary critique of those same social conditions.

I'd like to note that Marx's critique of political economy may be seen as a development of 'political economy', in the *generic* sense of the term, meaning a 'Marxist political economy'.

Rugoz wrote:
It matters because the labour theory of value cannot explain the price of labour-power in capitalism (aka wages).

That's *exactly* what the labor theory of value explains -- the 'price', or 'value' of labor power, through wages paid-out:

Wellsy wrote:

In conclusion Marx asserts that the total means of subsistence equates to the value of labor-power. He wants the reader to understand that the commodities required to sustain daily production are not all needed at the same rate. Some aspects need only be completed once per labourer. For instance, the training they must undergo is a one-time expenditure. Other aspects like food and fuel need be given daily. While aspects like clothing and material items are given less frequently. Marx conveys, “If the total of the commodities required daily for production of labour-power = A, and those required weekly = B, and those required quarterly = C, and so on, the daily average of these commodities = (365A + 52B + 4C +&c.)/365” (pg. 51). In this, he is stating that the value of labour power can in fact be calculated to a definite amount yet only after carefully reviewing and accounting for the four separate parts discussed in this analysis of his essay.

---

Rugoz wrote:
Similarly, it cannot explain the price of land for example.

Land is a commodity, like anything else. Even land, a rentier-capital asset, requires labor-power to transform initially-found / conquered natural expanse, into people-useful 'land', in its finished form. So the cost of the labor used to develop the land is its initial cost, or value -- after that market dynamics of supply-and-demand take over, for any subsequent exchanges / changes in ownership.

Rugoz wrote:
When you want a theory about distribution, you need to be able to explain those things.

A 'theory about distribution' -- ?

How does supply-and-demand sound to you? Those who can pay the highest price, as at an auction, become the buyers, and the commodity bought is then 'distributed' to them.

Rugoz wrote:
Nominal wages aren't relevant to questions of distribution.

Nominal wages *are* relevant to questions of distribution because wages may represent a *lessened* proportionate economic control of the total economy, versus the proportion controlled by the economics and ownership of the *ruling* (propertied) class -- those with wages will not be able to *access* a greater share of the distribution of total economic output, meaning goods-and-services, and assets.

Wellsy covered this already:

Wellsy wrote:

The position of the classes to one another depends more on
relative wages than on the absolute amount of wages” (Marx, 1978: II, 419. See also
Marx, 1978, II: 404).

On the other hand, with respect to these social relationships, Marx noted that with an increase in labour productivity

“the same number of labourers will enable the higher classes to extend, refine, and
diversify the circle of their enjoyments, and thus to widen the economic, social, and
political gulf separating them from their betters” (Marx, 1978, II: 572, italics ours).

---

Rugoz wrote:
People always want better and shinier things. It's human nature. The need is only partially created by capitalism. I guess it depends on the product.

I won't really debate this axiom, though I'll note that Marxists tend to *deny* that there is anything like a fixed 'human nature', though here it's sounding like 'materialistic betterment' is claimed to be what human nature is.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174682

By wat0n - 29 May 2021 21:08

- 29 May 2021 21:08 #15174682

Wellsy wrote:Indeed Airbnb takes a cut from guests and hosts as a commission for bookings, they provide the service of brokering, which is a bit differently than merely advertising as they're trying to directly connect you to the service rather than simply make an appeal to you to use the service. Hence why Airbnb actually pays for advertising and marketing as separate from its app platform as it does need promotion for people to come to the app.

Indeed, they are more like a broker in that sense.

Wellsy wrote:But this is where I'm trying to drill in a distinction between a contract laborer as distinct from the petty bourgeoisie or small business owner. Contract labor isn't so essentially different from the wage laborer as to not be part of the working class.
Here's a good summary to emphasize what I already did in which wages are pushed down in part because of the competition among workers whose livelihood is precarious.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm

Now see the above how the direct ownership of the means of production doesn't stop a capitalist still profiting from the work of others. You seem to make no distinction in quality between the person who does all the work themselves in maintaining an airbnb directly in their own home with renting out a room in comparison to the person who has the capital to invest in alternative properties and even hire employees or other workers.
The small business owners in fact have the means to become independent of airbnb.
https://c94e25ea-37c0-4c5f-bd71-5f6fcac47514.Perhaps%20because%20risk%20in%20the%20workplace%20is%20no%20longer%20assumed%20solely%20by%20entrepreneurs%20(Hacker,%202006;%20Pugh,%202015),%20workers%20for%20these%20services%20do%20not%20generally%20view%20sharing%20economy%20work%20as%20entrepreneurial%20unless%20they%20have%20taken%20on%20considerable%20financial%20risks%20(such%20as%20renting%20multiple%20apartments)%20and%20hiring%20other%20workers.%20In%20some%20cases,%20such%20as%20with%20Kitchensurfing%20chefs,%20sharing%20economy%20work%20was%20viewed%20as%20part%20of%20a%20marketing%20effort%20for%20a%20separate%20company%20outside%20of%20the%20so-called%20sharing%20economy.%20filesusr.com/ugd/e5771f_112374073d3d403f92f5ebab52170590.pdf

This point of the relevative independence of those who use Airbnb to host multiple units and their ability to actually work independently of airbnb if they so chose, to me emphasizes a distinction between them an what may count as employees in the case of those who do all the work themselves. They provide their own personal home space, they do the cleaning and so on.
Consider this piece which argue that under California law currently, Airbnb hosts would be considered independent contractors, but with their proposed ABC test, they would fail to be considered as such.
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=004020091089127119019087003092003075120015077012021005105006110113075120101113096030041107053119007034112080088111123066030005053026022082043007070010115071077100090015042078014124113094026075120100102104003108121110093004070120013097119011082097017&EXT=pdf&INDEX=TRUE

I imagine you and others might emphasize part 1/A, that the lack of such direct control by Airbnb emphasizes how they're not workers but truly are independent. This is certainly a defensible advantage for Airbnb as compared to other platforms for the gig economy and I felt was a weak point in some earlier criticisms. However what does resonate are the other two points which follows from my above points about the relative independence of the individuals to work separately or outside airbnb or not. Those who are solely dependent on airbnb bringing the market to them are more likely to be considered employees while those who have carved out a niche for themselves outside or it or could readily do so and are even close to doing so such as the aspiring hotelier, are more distinctly small business owners.
The article itself seems to go even further to emphasize that those who I would perhaps see as closer to being small business owners are not as such if they remain entirely dependent on the airbnb platform, they are markedly not independent enough to be considered independent contractors but are employees essential to Airbnbs business model. [/quote]

I'm not making such distinction because the difference is purely one of scale, and in any event some people can actually hire maids to clean rooms they are offering at AirBnB even if they are in their own house. It's an arbitrary distinction for the most part.

Your first text also presumes that capitalists don't often work in their businesses, which is often incorrect as well - even in large businesses it is not strange to find that the owner works managing the business.

As for the ABC test, its application would just lead AirBnB and other platforms to ban hosts (or drivers, for ridesharing apps) for working for too long in it. I can actually imagine this law hurting the same people it purports to benefit for the most part. Another option would be for them to discount all the social security and other taxes from the payments just as they would do for regular employees, but I find the former more likely.

Wellsy wrote:I didn't generalize all interests in starting a business as motivated by leisure but emphasized the interview aspiring to a point of profitability that it became a passive income.
Do you think passive income doesn't exist for those who have ownership and do not have to be so actively involved in their business as they delegrate to employees?

It does exist, just as it exists for the middle class family that rents a second home - insofar both can be regarded as similar and we assume that the process of finding what to invest in, or to rent to, is not actually a time-consuming process itself (to the point that some businesses specialize in both). I don't see what your point is here.

Wellsy wrote:Also lost in your emphasis of merely taking financial risks is also the ability to even take such risks, that is to have such money in order to invest it as capital in the first place. Some people may qualify for loans but plenty don't because their situation doesn't allow great confidence in their ability to pay it back and so is too much risk for those who give out the loans.
The quote on the interviewees emphasizes how they have the skills and capital to pursue a business outside of airbnb. That can be the same aspiration for employees of course, as mentioned, that basically are workers in a extremely precarious situation and thus end up in contract work.

Indeed, the risk-taking aspect is a two-way aspect insofar the lender also takes risk. And yet... Often you see people who are not particularly rich doing just that, either formally or informally.

Wellsy wrote:But thinking of the skilled contractor, they tend to be distinguished also in the fact that they sell private labor and as such do have relative independence due to the demand of their skills.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/o.htm#contract-labour

Here again I think you're trying to emphasize sameness in order to disrupt any distinction between a worker and petit-bourgeois. Instead of emphasizing the precariousness, it all gets subsumed under risk of investment. The idea here that workers are simply taking a risk for the prospect of more 'profit'.
Which again I think is muddying the waters a bit like how one might frame all of prostitution in terms of women who have the means to voluntarily leave the profession compared to those who are coerced into it out of poverty or what ever. As if they're the same person. So to the person who can't find stable employment and is pressed into the gig/sharing economy is equated with the same people who actually succeeded at airbnb in starting up the basis of a small business with airbnb as a starting point to tap into the market.

What makes you believe only skilled workers can and do rent their homes on AirBnB to earn an extra income? And yes, why wouldn't one equate both types of AirBnB hosts or Uber driver? Ultimately, they are in for the same purpose (earning extra income, hedging bets).

Again, the boundaries between the Marxian classes are not really as strong as they were when Marx wrote Dad Kapital. They have not been for a long time now.

Wellsy wrote:Airbnb hosts can't simply state there is a room available, they have to appeal to the taste and expectation of their customers to be competitive.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/03/is-running-an-airbnb-profitable-heres-what-you-need-to-know.html

They basically need to be like a hotel in their services except the host pays for this all upfront, so they need the sort of cash to be able to supply all this. And see how the money saver comes in the form of putting in your own work.
Now the host takes on the risk, puts in the investment and does all the work, but focusing on the earlier quotes, while airbnb doesn't own anything, the person works for airbnb as they are not independent workers who happens o contract with airbnb but are entirely dependent on airbnbs brokering as is airbnb dependent on the host doing all the leg work. They effectively socially coordinate the work which is a prerequisite for them to actually make some money, which they cannot do without airbnb and if they can then they are more distinctly an independent contractor rather than an employee who has to to not only work but bring in the materials, land and so on necessary for the work. A bit like how workers aren't invested in being trained anymore but have to take that as a personal cost, more and more is shifted back onto workers so as to put risks and costs back on individuals and to not detract from profits and make all the more precarious workers as in an unregulated labor market.

AirBnB also takes on some risk in this process, though. For instance, it has the responsibility of making sure that both hosts and their guests are safe, that hosts comply with the law, to warn guests of potentially dangerous hosts (just as Uber has an obligation to simply ban drivers with a criminal history that warrants so - e.g. drivers that have murdered a rider before). Everything you are mentioning is inherent to any platform service, the difference is that AirBnB expanded it to the smallest guy possible, unlike say Booking which hosts more professional hospitality services.

Wellsy wrote:Here you would seem to be agreeable with the above points of how the hosts are not independent of airbnb's platform and may not necessarily have the means to be as such if the market for them ends with the lack of airbnb.
Indeed the broader problem being the contradiction between exchange value and use value, there is great need but effective demand is what matters in the economy.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/crisis-theories-underconsumption/

If hosts don't like AirBnB, they can switch to more traditional means of simply ditching the whole platform aspect and simply market their room in the traditional press (for instance). It's not like the activity would magically disappear if AirBnB did.

Wellsy wrote:However, Airbnb is just par of exacerbating this issue in which human needs become increasingly detached from exchange value. YOu end up with people unable to find housing because there is more money in the short term. See an issue with CHinas use of real estate as investment properties for their wealth which leads to all sorts of unused homes because its about money, not use.

I don't think you can really compare both here. AirBnB is offering a fairly concrete use value (matching hosts with guests), isn't it?

It seems to me, instead, that some people are reacting to this newfound possibility of much easier matching by putting rooms online. When those housing regulations were set up, this didn't exist so I'm not surprised to see that the current zoning laws are not working. Maybe some rezoning would be warranted? I don't know.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed, New York and all major cities are ridiculous because of the high demand for the small space. I actually enjoy living in a small town where I can afford a decent sized home for a much lower price and works out well having an education and access to the few decent paying jobs here.

Indeed regulations have to be introduced for the changed market to try and balance out some of the effects within some tolerable range. Just like how many hosts are treated as independent contractors as opposed to employees.

If hosts were forced to rent X amounts of room per month, I'd agree with you that they are comparable to wage workers. But they are not, which is why AirBnB is more like a platform - even if regulators decide to force them to put limits on their collaborators' schedules and the like.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed women being primarily tasked with dependents results in them adopting more flexible jobs, and more flexible jobs such as these of course means higher risks, lower pay and so on.
Which is exactly why it benefits businesses to mark them as independent contractors as opposed to employees with what labor laws exist having applicability.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/freelance-independent-contractor-union-precariat/

So basically it takes advantage of the structures in which women's responsibilities compel them to look for such flexibility.
The dynamic being that dependents aren't well supported within capitalism and those who receive the most support often are those of the higher wages/incomes.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf

Even when one seeks childcare in the paid form its still low and if it isn't low it's simply not affordable for many and negates the point of even going to work.
Flexibility is always appealing but as you recognize it of course entails other costs rather than it being something built into the structure of society to support families.
It's not simply a preference for flexibility, one has to actually consider what are the structural relations which dictate one's opportunities? It is easy to frame workers as all purely voluntary and such and without any coercion under the way in which structural relations of class and so on are made absent in a lot of descriptions of economics.
Touching upon things but not really relating them within the social context all that much, things are just taken as a natural given because there is a kind of naturalization of capitalist production and relations. However it is contestable.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/

Basically, there is much to question in the way in which some presentations of decisions of people as many simply take what is at face value and do not critique it. A bit like how one might go well women earn less because they don't get the higher paying jobs, why? Because they choose to enter into more flexible lower paying kinds of work in order to care for dependents instead of pursue their careers. Why is that? Well their decisions are made within a social context and only make sense when related to the social whole because individual actions are nonsense confined to only the individual.
https://aifs.gov.au/publications/family-matters/issue-86/persistent-work-family-strain-among-australian-mothers

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=phi

This is seen in the limitations of microeconomics when expanded to macroeconomics.
http://frankackerman.com/publications/economictheory/Interpreting_Failure_Equilibrium_Theory.pdf

This is in part why things like class are fundamental, because people aren't abstractly all the same individual making similar decisions. They are subject to different constrains and the constraint of someone who is working class is fundamentally different to that of other classes. As such, one can be critical of the way in which one might try to present workers as the same as other classes in a superficial way. Hiding the coercion of how they're compelled to work to meet their livelihood compared to that of a capitalist.

Of course that the need for mothers to have more flexible schedules may come from social pressures, such as taking care of children. But this isn't the businesses' or even the economic system's fault, and we know this because the same problems existed in historical non-capitalist societies, including the real socialist ones. Instead, it's more like the economic system has to adapt to them and their constraints.

Wellsy wrote:And people are often happy to trade off lower cost for less quality control.

Sure, it's why motels and 1-star hotels exist.

Wellsy wrote:Although it seems as pressure has mounted, Airbnb has become on par in cost with Hotels.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2021/05/25/airbnb-fees-cleaning-hotels/?outputType=amp
So it's losing that cost advantage perhaps.

Indeed, it is also possible that's happening. I mean, it's bound to happen eventually that there will be some segmentation going on.

Wellsy wrote:I also would distinguish between the small business owner and capitalist in terms of risk as a lot of risk for capitalists does not destroy them financially as it does the small business owner who in the long run have a tendency to return to the proletarian class. When one thinks of the losses incurred on Airbnb, they cut those loses by cutting off workers and so on.
https://www.wired.com/story/airbnb-quietly-fired-hundreds-of-contract-workers-im-one-of-them/
Who is hurt more here, the company owners or the workers?

BUt of course there is a tendency to generalize the small business owner who invests what little excess wealth they have into risky ventures in the hopes of establishing something bigger for themselves like the guy who aspired for a passive income.
Again, a millionaire may take a gamble on something but how much it really hurts them personally as the company owner is distinct in its nature to that of the worker or small business owner.

It all depends on their tolerance for risk, honestly. You can also find capitalists who manage to go ruin themselves by taking too much risk.

Wellsy wrote:Well for example one is pretty much making untenable the idea of exploitation of labor and thus the very theory of value. If there are no classes, then the presentation of people as simply equal agents on the market abstracted of their structural relations makes equality of the market seem natural and self evident. Everyone is on par with one another. But as mentioned earlier in simon clarkes critique of marginalism, that the different resource ednowments must be structural if they're to be ongoing and one must look to property and production relations to actually find that labourers are a distinct class from capitalists when they come to the market for exchange of their labour power. And they are coerced into such work by the structural deprivation of any means of subsistence, they have to work to survive. Without such a structural relation, capitalism would not have a means of forcing productivity and intense measures upon the working class.

I don't see how that critique of marginalism is accurate either. I don't think it ignores inequality of endowments, at all, and it's not a theory about that. It's a demand-focused theory of value.

I think you may be interested in the second fundamental theorem of welfare economics, which actually deals with endowments (and arrives to an interesting conclusion, by the way, if you consider what marginalism is usually associated to).

Wellsy wrote:It's whether the difference marks an essential point of their real attraction to one another. Workers and capitalists are brought into a constant interaction due to structural lacking.
Selecting color as a difference isn't identifying anything essential, a fact can be true but still draw one away from what is the essence of the matter.
If you read those links from Ilyenkov, you might get a grasp of the sort of distinction that is being raised.
Otherwise you will at best reach the point of Kant and still be arbitrary in your logic and selection of features as if concepts are applied externally to the empirical reality.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/essays/essay3.htm

Ricardo's labour theory of value was dismissed for its contradictory character, when in fact he was on the right path. Some contradictions are simply errors in ones reasoning, others are more a reflection of the essential quality of a problem.
It is when one identifies the essential fact, the concrete universal, that one resolved the contradiction. Like how Marx distinguishes labour power from labor, he in fact resolved a a contradiction in Ricardo's work.
Marx also resolved the epistemological dichtonomy between materialism and idealism in following Hegel's emphasis on activity as a substance.
http://critique-of-pure-interest.blogspot.com/2011/12/between-materialism-and-idealism-marx.html

Which is in part how he is able to overcome the tendency to treat value as some purely subjective quality rather than a suprasensous objective thing. He doesn't positindividal man against empirical reality, but treats man as a social being developed out of the whole within a particular place.

And class need not be rigid exactly other than one should get to the essentials, otherwise one ends up in the arbitrary tendency of believing everyone is what ever someone says they are. There can be no resolution if reasoning is arbitrary in its selection of what features are essential.
This lengthy passage illustrates what happens when one identifies the essene as those qualities which are shared by all rather than the particular thing which underpins the existence of all other particulars.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm

One finds the genus to all other facts in reality, not merely collecting their shared attributes. Finding that which underpins all others means resolving a contradiction, an opposition because it establishes a logical certainty not found through identifying similarity.

Hmmm so let me see if I understand correctly. Can a worker become a capitalist, or a capitalist become a worker, under Marxian economics? How about for the same person to be both at the same time?

Wellsy wrote:Indeed warfare is destructive, but often peace is only a semblance based on one group maintaining their power over another. Change for many things doesn't come through consensus or simply from above but illiberal struggles in civil society.

And resistance to change also doesn't come through consensus and the like. I don't see what your point is here.

Now lasting change often does come through consensus, and tends to be less traumatic too. But I agree such consensus is not really the norm, except when it becomes self-evident that such change is necessary.

Wellsy wrote:Individuals may have other motives than profit but the logic of the economy compels capitalists to compete and profit.
A capitalist who ceases to do so would not remain one eventually. There is course room in which to not be such an asshole within capitalism to some extent.
Can implement some policies which aren't open class warfare and is sound economically.

Note that in this case I'm referring to government. Narrow concerns about economic profit don't happen simply because being in government is not just about economic profit. You can for instance attempt to impose your cultural preferences through the government, something that does beyond simple economic profit.

Wellsy wrote:Indeed that is my understanding is that generally profit refers to that of the company which gains although the connotation of it allows it to be used more broadly in looser conversation. But wages are of course not profit qualitatively even while both are money.

They are in the specific case of the human capital investment situation. The reason is that here we assume hours are basically fixed, or that wages are calculated as an annual rate, and here the model is about how workers prepare themselves for competing in the labor market.

Wellsy wrote:Well it is psychological as in it is experienced by conscious human beings, but it isn't psychological in that it doesn't simply originate in the individuals psyche but from social relations. Capiatlists are also considered to experience alienation and alienation isn't unique to capitalism, it is just very intense and generalized. The idea of it also relates to our essentially social nature, as opposed to the abstract individualism typical to the origins of liberalism in which individuals have no real ties to one another except the pursuit of their consumptive desires.
[URL]http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf[/ur;]

The gist I take away in the above link is that Marx's idea of overocming alienation has to do with making labor directly social and not mediated by commodities where things end up with reified properties based on those relations as if they were inherent to the objects themselves like money having value. Human powers and properties are seen as the property of things and things come between human relations in a way which fragments and distances them.

Do you have some extra ideas about the psychological aspects of alienation here? I'm asking because even outside of capitalism, it would be a thing. The serf toiling in the farm to be able to eat something and pay tribute to his lord, could also be regarded as being alienated from his labor. Am I correct?

Wellsy wrote:Well I also contested earlier Roemer's view in which labor isn't a special substance or source of value which then leads him to think that any commodity can be conceived as exploited. Basically he doesn't wish to disginstuish labour-power as a particularly distinct commodity but somehow synonymous with all others.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15171183

He doesn't because it doesn't HAVE to be from a positive or analytical point of view.

Wellsy wrote:But yes the ethical qualities does arrive in part because objects aren't to be considered as human subjects and in fact there are aspects in which treating someone as an object is wrong without adequate qualifications of how one engages with the materiality of someone but in a way which is acceptable within the norms of society. I mean, slaves as property did exist and were denied any sense of being human. But we of course consider that wrong now for the most part.
I would following the above summary on aleination that the ethical implications of Marx's critique of the political economy is much farther than the mere gap between necessary and surplus labour. His is much more radical than the Ricardian socialist because what informs his critique is the idea of human beings and thus what they ought to be and could be in contrast to how they are.

Right, but the issue with ethics in this case is that its not about explaining human behavior. Even worse, there are often tradeoffs involved and indeed in some cases one can analyze the same situation from different ethical perspectives and arrive to different conclusions about it.

Marx purported that his socialism was scientific, so mixing ethics in there is actually a problem from that point of view.

Wellsy wrote:Except such preferences are abstracted from structural conditions which inform those preferences, hence the above paper which earlier showed how microeconomics was too unstable to be generalized to macroeconomics because it pretty much doesn't explain anything and leaves outside its purview the very relations which may underpin people's preferences. To which there is a distinction between what structural forces inform the preferences of workers compared to that of a capitalist.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/

Microeconomics is not easily generalizable to macroeconomics for other reasons (not really related to the specific preferences), and even then macroeconomics is often microfounded.

But leaving that aside, the issue is that marginalism doesn't really aim to explain why people have the preferences they have. Instead, marginalists will say "assuming preferences have these characteristics, then this will happen". The key ones are completeness and transitivity, further assumptions just make exposition easier.

At last, even preferences themselves are not explained only as a social construction. Indeed, some advances of neuroscience have been used to inform mainstream economics, particularly when it comes to e.g. justifying hyperbolic discounting (its justification is biological, not cultural or social). Again, what this calls for is to inform economic modelling based on other social sciences, and even on biology.

Wellsy wrote:I would say Marx's value theory for example has a lot to offer in explaining capitalist crisis where others tend to generalize particular aspects and don't have a comprehensive take.
https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/value-theory-the-transformation-problem-and-crisis-theory/

In what way, exactly? Would you please summarize from that source?

Of course Austrians have their own models of economic crises. So do Keynesians, monetarists, etc.

Interestingly, they are often not mutually exclusive and can be useful to analyze them from different perspectives. I do believe though that in practice Marxian economists miss some aspects of crises, for starters these can take many shapes and one thing I've noted is that they have a tendency to disregard inflationary crises in particular.

Wellsy wrote:Marx also has an interesting theory of money in that he marks it as a distinct thing and doesn't simply consider it as a generalization of barter.
https://college.holycross.edu/eej/Volume14/V14N4P299_318.pdf
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/world-trade-and-the-false-theory-of-comparative-advantage/

One sees how he explains the origin of money having value in commodity production.

I don't think that's an accurate take of how one can consider the role of money even in marginalism. There are ways to introduce it more formally, both as a commodity (money itself has intrinsic value) and as a way to e.g. reduce search costs.

Wellsy wrote:I think his identification of labour power, and the essential marker of class (much of his work is built upon that of others into a synthesis so isn't entirely original necessarily) provide a great entry point of analysis which can ground things better than more one sided abstractions that treat individuals in a more abstract manner, not really embedded them in social relations.

Maybe, but what's the empirical support for that? Particularly if you accept the class divisions are not all that rigid in practice.

Wellsy wrote:I also think marginal utility often conflates what is incommensurate, use value and exchange value. The emphasis on the individuals desire to use something is artbitrarily tied to exchange values of commodities assuming full knowledge of what commodities trade for which is more reflective of a simple commodity exchange unmediated by money. The desire for use values exists across all societies but money as a universal commodity is particular to capitalism. Money predates capitalism but takes time to establish as the universal mediator. So they avoid the issue of money and even value even while they often infer value in models where they assume the equilibrium of supply and demand where the price fluctuations are deemed irrelevant and one considers the value of a thing more directly. Marx adopts the same abstraction to reveal things even while his theory is of nonequilibrium and sees prices following value but coincidentally coinciding with it directly. Political economists of the past have a lot more to explore in the social and political than modern economists who take too much for granted ie are uncritical of the appearences of things. Which isn’t my singular opinion when one takes a view of economics in the long run rather than that confined to the modern marginialists.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82120.The_Worldly_Philosophers

Aren't you engaging in a bit of a circular reasoning by taking Marxian concepts like use and exchange values for granted?

Wellsy wrote:I also think his manner of abstracting puts capitalism in historical perspective rather than generalizing logic of capitalist production back onto the past in representing capitalism as technical expansion of production.
Now there are all sorts of things posd in economics which are true in a sense, they do reflect things which occur in reality and as such aren't somehow automatically dismissed as wrong. Rather I see Marx as not being somehow entirely external and independent of economics but rather critical of somethings as limitations, as foreclosing analysis. FOr example commodity fetishism wouldn't really pop into modern economics at all but it is illustrative of a real phenemon and can help explain other things beyond the economy in fact.

Hmmm, maybe. I think it goes both ways in the sense that history is also a source that can inform economic modeling as it is (we want them to explain history, don't we?) and at the same time economic models can help us understand the past. Now if what you mean is that Marx took this idea seriously by also presenting a theory of history, well yes I think that's true - he does seem to have taken this really far. I do believe this is a contribution of his theory of history, more than his economic theories though.

ckaihatsu wrote:I guess the reason why I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about 'flex' time as you are is because of the gradual declining of *job security* over the past several decades -- to you it's "freelancing", while to others it's either stagnant or declining living standards, declining life expectancy, and/or two or three jobs for a viable household.

Maybe, but how does erasing those flexible options help with that at all? Also, life expectancy isn't declining.

ckaihatsu wrote:Sure -- no argument, but you're pointing to the *rare exceptions* within the proletariat. Most people with material ambitions would rather do okay, with property on their side, than to be stellar by their own merits / accomplishments, *without* the benefit of property / capital.

I meant it from a narrowly financial point of view. Also, you can also find plenty of poor/low earning petit bourgeois people.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, it's still class-based *exploitation* and *oppression* -- I don't mean to *stack* the two, but in both cases (feudalism, capitalism) it's those with property and access to the state apparatus who are empirically favored and who live privileged lives.

But even in those societies, it's clearly better to be a workers or even a serf than to be someone else's property.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're again slipping into *demographic* treatments, which are *tangential* to the political-economy description -- of goods and services being commodity-production, through equity capital and the exploitation of labor-power / the working class.

No, they are not just tangential. It affects how work is carried out and therefore relations between workers and also between workers and their bosses.

ckaihatsu wrote:It's characteristic of the *right*-wing to be dismissive of service-sector / 'pink-collar' types of jobs, favoring *blue*-collar, industrial-type jobs in a very *chauvinistic* / machismo, and nationalistic kind of way -- even though *all* jobs require labor and produce commodities / economic activity.

The left does that too, it was fairly common - in fact, the standard - up to the 1970s.

ckaihatsu wrote:Yes, thank you -- this is the *crux* of Marxist political economy, that all workers, by definition, are being economically exploited, so this point can't be stressed enough.

I was actually referring to the worker in the commune, as it doesn't really solve that problem.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, this is not the case -- I just acknowledged 'leapfrogging' as a macro-level, general societal dynamic.

Yes, you are - if not, you'd not be saying what you're saying about Okishio's insight.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, this does *not* happen, because business competition and technological / cultural diffusion results in *mass adoption* of previously elite, cutting-edge technologies and techniques, such as robotization / automation, so that *all* industrial production facilities enjoy increased productivity, at sustained or lessened quantities of labor-power. Since there's no longer an edge in computerizing / automating industrial mass production, *no one* has 'the edge' anymore in automating their own machinery, as compared to all other competitors in the industry, who all happen to be using the exact same "advantage". Yes, this does increase *material productivity* for 'x' amount of material inputs, but, because of market pricing, the resulting *overproduction* of commodities, by all factories using automation, means that prices *drop*, *reducing* profits for all, going-forward.

...Which is why then some businesses try to get an edge by innovating, which of course is a risky venture in itself (you may invest a lot and get zero returns). It's also why venture capital exists, as new businesses may aim to do so and then be bought by a larger one (which basically buy the patent/technology).

ckaihatsu wrote:Bullshit -- you're just not providing the appropriate kind of data. What's relevant is GDP *growth*, per nation, which can be further sliced into 'per-capita', or not.

I don't think you know what GDP per capita is, it's the only explanation for you to say something like this :eh:

ckaihatsu wrote:It's a contrived *academic* formulation / line of inquiry that has nothing to do with concerns of political-economy, and so I'm not going to entertain it. Please stop pestering me about it as well.

It's not contrived at all, actually. Unless you believe uranium nowadays has the same use value it had in 1358.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're being *evasive* again -- my point stands that Uber-type workers are *hyper-exploited* because they're shouldering *infrastructure* costs which are normally an expense to the *employer*.

Again, flexible working hours doesn't change that workers are routinely, consistently economically *exploited* for the hours that they *do* work.

Or maybe they are actually using their own capital (say, the car) to get income.

ckaihatsu wrote:The best critique of marginal utility -- diminishing returns -- is simply that, as with *all* bourgeois economics, it's only concerned with *post-production* values, meaning market pricing, or the supply-and-demand dynamic over the capital-and-labor inputs required to produce the commodity in the first place, and which confer the commodity's initial value, and pricing.

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

Spoiler: show

How is that a critique at all?

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174688

By ckaihatsu - 29 May 2021 21:36

- 29 May 2021 21:36 #15174688

[ INCLUSION, FROM PREVIOUSLY: ]

Wellsy wrote:

But although satisfying more needs, in this situation the relative social position of the workers is worsened, since “the extremes of wealth have increased” (Marx, 1961, I: 660. See also Marx, 1978, II: 523). In fact, if you have a little house near a palace, you feel more uncomfortable and more dissatisfied, because “(o)ur wants and pleasure have their origin in society”, and we “do not measure them in relation to the objects which serve for their gratification” but “in relation to society”, so that “they are of a relative nature” (Marx, 1884: 33).

viewtopic.php?p=15174391#p15174391

Rugoz wrote:
People always want better and shinier things. It's human nature. The need is only partially created by capitalism. I guess it depends on the product.

ckaihatsu wrote:
I won't really debate this axiom, though I'll note that Marxists tend to *deny* that there is anything like a fixed 'human nature', though here it's sounding like 'materialistic betterment' is claimed to be what human nature is.

viewtopic.php?p=15174471#p15174471

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174887

By ckaihatsu - 30 May 2021 21:05

- 30 May 2021 21:05 #15174887

Wellsy wrote:
This point of the relevative independence of those who use Airbnb to host multiple units and their ability to actually work independently of airbnb if they so chose, to me emphasizes a distinction between them an what may count as employees in the case of those who do all the work themselves.

wat0n wrote:
I'm not making such distinction because the difference is purely one of scale, and in any event some people can actually hire maids to clean rooms they are offering at AirBnB even if they are in their own house. It's an arbitrary distinction for the most part.

Again, you're not *listening* -- the 'arbitrary distinction' is still a *real* one, one that hinges on whether one is maintaining one's own property for the sake of renting it out, in which case the single-property, non-employer most resembles an *employee* of AirBnB or Uber or whatever. On the other hand, if one has *multiple* properties and uses wage labor for their upkeep, for rental revenue, then it's the *property* that's the 'protagonist' / determining factor in the economic situation, and the owner / leaser is thus truly independent of AirBnB.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
I guess the reason why I'm not nearly as enthusiastic about 'flex' time as you are is because of the gradual declining of *job security* over the past several decades -- to you it's "freelancing", while to others it's either stagnant or declining living standards, declining life expectancy, and/or two or three jobs for a viable household.

wat0n wrote:
Maybe, but how does erasing those flexible options help with that at all? Also, life expectancy isn't declining.

American Life Expectancy Dropped By A Full Year In 1st Half Of 2020

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/18/96879143 ... rom%202019.

More consistent employment, with full-time weekly work hours, equates to better job security overall.

---

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.

wat0n wrote:
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:
Sure -- no argument, but you're pointing to the *rare exceptions* within the proletariat. Most people with material ambitions would rather do okay, with property on their side, than to be stellar by their own merits / accomplishments, *without* the benefit of property / capital.

wat0n wrote:
I meant it from a narrowly financial point of view. Also, you can also find plenty of poor/low earning petit bourgeois people.

Correct -- again, you're choosing to emphasize / are-more-concerned-with *strata*, than with *class*. Class relations are based on the private ownership of private property, while 'strata' is more about gross income, by whatever means.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, it's still class-based *exploitation* and *oppression* -- I don't mean to *stack* the two, but in both cases (feudalism, capitalism) it's those with property and access to the state apparatus who are empirically favored and who live privileged lives.

wat0n wrote:
But even in those societies, it's clearly better to be a workers or even a serf than to be someone else's property.

I think you're being rather *glib*, since being a slave in antiquity, or a serf / slave, or a wage laborer, means to spend much / most of one's life in the service of others.

That said, yes, there are distinctions to make, and, incidentally, you're confirming Marx's historical materialism here, which you've railed against in other posts.

It is sometimes argued that slavery could not have been central to these [ancient Greek] states because slaves did not constitute anything like a majority of the population.43 But as G E M De Ste Croix has pointed out in his marvellous study, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, their proportion in the population and even the contribution of their labour to the overall social product is not the issue. What matters is how important they were to producing the surplus, for without this there could be no life of idleness for the ruling class, no freeing of writers and poets from relentless physical toil and no resources for marvels like the Acropolis. The ruling class owed its position to the control of land cultivated mainly by slaves, to such an extent that the classic Greek writers and philosophers saw the ownership of slaves as essential to a civilised life. So Aristotle could lump the master and slave as the essential elements of the household alongside the husband and wife, father and children, while Polybus speaks of slaves and cattle as the essential requirements of life.44

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 65

---

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.

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.

wat0n wrote:
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:
You're again slipping into *demographic* treatments, which are *tangential* to the political-economy description -- of goods and services being commodity-production, through equity capital and the exploitation of labor-power / the working class.

wat0n wrote:
No, they are not just tangential. It affects how work is carried out and therefore relations between workers and also between workers and their bosses.

No, you're dissembling by putting forth simple empirical *descriptions* instead of focusing on the *economic function* of both -- 'physical' production, or the manufacturing of tangible goods, requires labor and produces commodities just as much as *services* do.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
It's characteristic of the *right*-wing to be dismissive of service-sector / 'pink-collar' types of jobs, favoring *blue*-collar, industrial-type jobs in a very *chauvinistic* / machismo, and nationalistic kind of way -- even though *all* jobs require labor and produce commodities / economic activity.

wat0n wrote:
The left does that too, it was fairly common - in fact, the standard - up to the 1970s.

Perhaps, though I doubt it, and I think you're spuriously *conflating* the two, as a dodge.

Haughty attitudes over industrial-type jobs really smacks of right-wing nationalism, chauvinism, and machismo.

---

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.

wat0n wrote:
Certainly the worker that is getting less value for the labor he's providing isn't owning much of that.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Yes, thank you -- this is the *crux* of Marxist political economy, that all workers, by definition, are being economically exploited, so this point can't be stressed enough.

wat0n wrote:
I was actually referring to the worker in the commune, as it doesn't really solve that problem.

Correct -- the worker in a commune is still a *microcosm* of the working class in general, since all wage laborers are *dispossessed* compared to the *landlord* of the property, any associated capital ownership, management authority, etc., as I already described.

---

wat0n wrote:
The issue is that you are assuming innovation only takes place once.

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, this is not the case -- I just acknowledged 'leapfrogging' as a macro-level, general societal dynamic.

wat0n wrote:
Yes, you are - if not, you'd not be saying what you're saying about Okishio's insight.

You need to be clear about what *scale* you're implying -- for the individual *owner*, a novel innovation may provide a *temporary* advantage temporally, which Okishio assumes to be *permanent*. But if all 'innovations' *remained* advantageous then there'd be no general slipping of prices, and declining rates of profit, as we're all used to seeing as industries mature, homogenize, and overproduce-for.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, this does *not* happen, because business competition and technological / cultural diffusion results in *mass adoption* of previously elite, cutting-edge technologies and techniques, such as robotization / automation, so that *all* industrial production facilities enjoy increased productivity, at sustained or lessened quantities of labor-power. Since there's no longer an edge in computerizing / automating industrial mass production, *no one* has 'the edge' anymore in automating their own machinery, as compared to all other competitors in the industry, who all happen to be using the exact same "advantage". Yes, this does increase *material productivity* for 'x' amount of material inputs, but, because of market pricing, the resulting *overproduction* of commodities, by all factories using automation, means that prices *drop*, *reducing* profits for all, going-forward.

wat0n wrote:
...Which is why then some businesses try to get an edge by innovating, which of course is a risky venture in itself (you may invest a lot and get zero returns). It's also why venture capital exists, as new businesses may aim to do so and then be bought by a larger one (which basically buy the patent/technology).

You're just describing mergers-and-acquisitions, particularly for financial *salvage* operations, for underperforming capital outlays. My point stands that 'innovation' is fleeting as it becomes widely adopted, lessening its initial advantage on an elite basis.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Bullshit -- you're just not providing the appropriate kind of data. What's relevant is GDP *growth*, per nation, which can be further sliced into 'per-capita', or not.

wat0n wrote:
I don't think you know what GDP per capita is, it's the only explanation for you to say something like this

GDP growth (real)

2020 (est) −3.5 %
2019 2.20%
2018 3.00%
2017 2.30%
2016 1.70%
2015 3.10%
2014 2.50%
2013 1.80%
2012 2.20%
2011 1.60%
2010 2.60%
2009 −2.5 %
2008 −0.2 %
2007 1.90%
2006 2.90%
2005 3.30%
2004 3.80%
2003 2.80%
2002 1.80%
2001 1.00%
2000 4.10%
1999 4.80%
1998 4.50%
1997 4.40%
1996 3.70%
1995 2.70%
1994 4.00%
1993 2.70%
1992 3.60%
1991 −0.1 %
1990 1.90%
1989 3.70%
1988 4.20%
1987 3.50%
1986 3.50%
1985 4.20%
1984 7.20%
1983 4.60%
1982 −1.8 %
1981 2.60%
1980 −0.2 %

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_o ... tates#Data

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
It's a contrived *academic* formulation / line of inquiry that has nothing to do with concerns of political-economy, and so I'm not going to entertain it. Please stop pestering me about it as well.

wat0n wrote:
It's not contrived at all, actually. Unless you believe uranium nowadays has the same use value it had in 1358.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're being *evasive* again -- my point stands that Uber-type workers are *hyper-exploited* because they're shouldering *infrastructure* costs which are normally an expense to the *employer*.

Again, flexible working hours doesn't change that workers are routinely, consistently economically *exploited* for the hours that they *do* work.

wat0n wrote:
Or maybe they are actually using their own capital (say, the car) to get income.

Since they are at the behest of *Uber's* "brokerage" authority there is no formal accounting of what value the vehicle provides to the driver's "business", since it *isn't* a business, which *would* use accounting to give a dollar value to such a capital investment. Since this kind of data isn't necessary for someone to work for Uber (etc.) it's clear that Uber functions moreso in an *employer* capacity / role, than as a 'business partner' to an independent driver's own 'business'.

*All* workers have *expenses*, but that doesn't mean that they're all automatically *businesses* from that fact alone.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
The best critique of marginal utility -- diminishing returns -- is simply that, as with *all* bourgeois economics, it's only concerned with *post-production* values, meaning market pricing, or the supply-and-demand dynamic over the capital-and-labor inputs required to produce the commodity in the first place, and which confer the commodity's initial value, and pricing.

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
How is that a critique at all?

It's a critique because marginal utility only references a particular time-stage of the commodity life-cycle -- 'marginal utility' is only concerned with supply-and-demand fluctuating market pricing, which only happens *after* the commodity is produced.

Marginal utility can't address any *non-consumer* role within economic functioning / the economy, so it's necessarily limited in *scope*, and isn't some kind of all-encompassing theory that covers all of economics.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174900

By wat0n - 30 May 2021 21:47

- 30 May 2021 21:47 #15174900

ckaihatsu wrote:Again, you're not *listening* -- the 'arbitrary distinction' is still a *real* one, one that hinges on whether one is maintaining one's own property for the sake of renting it out, in which case the single-property, non-employer most resembles an *employee* of AirBnB or Uber or whatever. On the other hand, if one has *multiple* properties and uses wage labor for their upkeep, for rental revenue, then it's the *property* that's the 'protagonist' / determining factor in the economic situation, and the owner / leaser is thus truly independent of AirBnB.

So, if I hire a maid to clean a spare room for renting it on AirBnB = I'm not independent of Airbnb, if I buy a second property and hire her to do the same there = I'm independent of Airbnb.

Okay. But it does not make sense, and arguably the second guy is more dependent on the platform - not as a worker, but as a businessman - since those properties need to be maintained, that costs money and Airbnb is a platform critical to their business plan. They could actually find traditional alternatives, but they would need to take a loss in the short term while they adjust.

ckaihatsu wrote:American Life Expectancy Dropped By A Full Year In 1st Half Of 2020

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/18/96879143 ... rom%202019.

More consistent employment, with full-time weekly work hours, equates to better job security overall.

Yeah, it dropped because of the mortality of the virus. Other countries will experience drops in their life expectancy as the data comes in.

ckaihatsu wrote:Correct -- again, you're choosing to emphasize / are-more-concerned-with *strata*, than with *class*. Class relations are based on the private ownership of private property, while 'strata' is more about gross income, by whatever means.

But it's not an irrelevant issue at all.

ckaihatsu wrote:I think you're being rather *glib*, since being a slave in antiquity, or a serf / slave, or a wage laborer, means to spend much / most of one's life in the service of others.

I didn't think you were this individualistic. But the same holds for those living in a commune or for hunter-gatherers.

ckaihatsu wrote:That said, yes, there are distinctions to make, and, incidentally, you're confirming Marx's historical materialism here, which you've railed against in other posts.

In what way?

ckaihatsu wrote:No, you're dissembling by putting forth simple empirical *descriptions* instead of focusing on the *economic function* of both -- 'physical' production, or the manufacturing of tangible goods, requires labor and produces commodities just as much as *services* do.

The different nature of both goods and services also has economic consequences. It's not just a random empirical point.

It's hard to export services while such trade is common for products. This obvious fact has deep economic consequences in practice.

ckaihatsu wrote:Perhaps, though I doubt it, and I think you're spuriously *conflating* the two, as a dodge.

Haughty attitudes over industrial-type jobs really smacks of right-wing nationalism, chauvinism, and machismo.

I'm not an industrial fetishist :lol:

But it's common back in the day.

ckaihatsu wrote:Correct -- the worker in a commune is still a *microcosm* of the working class in general, since all wage laborers are *dispossessed* compared to the *landlord* of the property, any associated capital ownership, management authority, etc., as I already described.

But it's not a capitalist system at all, is it?

ckaihatsu wrote:You need to be clear about what *scale* you're implying -- for the individual *owner*, a novel innovation may provide a *temporary* advantage temporally, which Okishio assumes to be *permanent*. But if all 'innovations' *remained* advantageous then there'd be no general slipping of prices, and declining rates of profit, as we're all used to seeing as industries mature, homogenize, and overproduce-for.

If all innovations are advantageous, they become the new standard. Then, a new innovation may arise and become a new standard in the future, but in the meantime the early adopters will benefit and society will benefit too, for a while.

As long as new innovations are being carried out, the process will tend to repeat itself. Indeed, it's why R&D has such an important social role.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're just describing mergers-and-acquisitions, particularly for financial *salvage* operations, for underperforming capital outlays. My point stands that 'innovation' is fleeting as it becomes widely adopted, lessening its initial advantage on an elite basis.

You have to see it from the perspective of the capitalist who sells her business in this case. For her, the whole point was to device a new technology, and then sell the rights to it to a big guy. She makes bank, then retires.

ckaihatsu wrote:Since they are at the behest of *Uber's* "brokerage" authority there is no formal accounting of what value the vehicle provides to the driver's "business", since it *isn't* a business, which *would* use accounting to give a dollar value to such a capital investment. Since this kind of data isn't necessary for someone to work for Uber (etc.) it's clear that Uber functions moreso in an *employer* capacity / role, than as a 'business partner' to an independent driver's own 'business'.

*All* workers have *expenses*, but that doesn't mean that they're all automatically *businesses* from that fact alone.

No, and keeping accounting also defines a business as such. What defines the worker as such is a relation of dependence and subordination that Uber drivers don't have.

ckaihatsu wrote:It's a critique because marginal utility only references a particular time-stage of the commodity life-cycle -- 'marginal utility' is only concerned with supply-and-demand fluctuating market pricing, which only happens *after* the commodity is produced.

Marginal utility can't address any *non-consumer* role within economic functioning / the economy, so it's necessarily limited in *scope*, and isn't some kind of all-encompassing theory that covers all of economics.

Why? You can actually address public goods using that theory for instance...

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174937

By ckaihatsu - 31 May 2021 03:18

- 31 May 2021 03:18 #15174937

wat0n wrote:
So, if I hire a maid to clean a spare room for renting it on AirBnB = I'm not independent of Airbnb, if I buy a second property and hire her to do the same there = I'm independent of Airbnb.

Okay. But it does not make sense, and arguably the second guy is more dependent on the platform - not as a worker, but as a businessman - since those properties need to be maintained, that costs money and Airbnb is a platform critical to their business plan. They could actually find traditional alternatives, but they would need to take a loss in the short term while they adjust.

How does this not-make-sense -- ?

You're *confirming* that there's a *gradient* here, from those who are solely *dependent* on the umbrella brokerage-type company (AirBnB, Uber, etc.), and so moreso resemble *employees*, to those who use such client-brokerage companies more as an 'outsourcing' business service (B2B), and whose businesses are demonstrably *not* dependent on any one such outsourcing service -- particularly due to using *multiple* properties and *wage* labor for the maintenance of those properties.

In other words you'd rather ignore matters of *scale* and *power* in these economic linkages / relationships, so as to be willfully blinkered.

wat0n wrote:
Yeah, it dropped because of the mortality of the virus. Other countries will experience drops in their life expectancy as the data comes in.

Life expectancy in the US keeps going down, and a new study says America's worsening inequality could be to blame

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-life ... ow-2019-11

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Correct -- again, you're choosing to emphasize / are-more-concerned-with *strata*, than with *class*. Class relations are based on the private ownership of private property, while 'strata' is more about gross income, by whatever means.

wat0n wrote:
But it's not an irrelevant issue at all.

My point remains untrammeled that you're more inclined to *empirical* matters such as demographics and descriptions, than to identifying the *why*, meaning the *knowledge* / science as to these social phenomena.

philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
I think you're being rather *glib*, since being a slave in antiquity, or a serf / slave, or a wage laborer, means to spend much / most of one's life in the service of others.

wat0n wrote:
I didn't think you were this individualistic. But the same holds for those living in a commune or for hunter-gatherers.

Many survived in wide regions of the world until only a few hundred years ago, and the remnants of a few still exist at the time of writing. It has been by studying these that anthropologists such as Richard Lee have been able draw conclusions about what life was like for the whole of our species for at least 90 percent of its history.

The reality was very different to the traditional Western image of such people as uncultured ‘savages’,10 living hard and miserable lives in ‘a state of nature’, with a bitter and bloody struggle to wrest a livelihood matched by a ‘war of all against all’, which made life ‘nasty, brutish and short’.11

People lived in loose-knit groups of 30 or 40 which might periodically get together with other groups in bigger gatherings of up to 200. But life in such ‘band societies’ was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more ‘civilised’ agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them ‘the original affluent society’.12

There were no rulers, bosses or class divisions in these societies. As Turnbull wrote of the Mbuti pygmies of Congo, ‘There were no chiefs, no formal councils. In each aspect of…life there might be one or two men or women who were more prominent than others, but usually for good practical reasons… The maintenance of law was a cooperative affair’.13 People cooperated with each other to procure the means of livelihood without either bowing before a great leader or engaging in endless strife with each other. Ernestine Friedl reported from her studies, ‘Men and women alike are free to decide how they will spend each day: whether to go hunting or gathering, and with whom’.14 Eleanor Leacock told of her findings: ‘There was no…private land ownership and no specialisation of labour beyond that of sex… People made decisions about the activities for which they were responsible. Consensus was reached within whatever group would be carrying out a collective activity’.15 Behaviour was characterised by generosity rather than selfishness, and individuals helped each other, offering food they had obtained to other band members before taking it themselves. Lee comments, ‘Food is never consumed alone by a family: it is always shared out among members of a living group or band… This principle of generalised reciprocity has been reported of hunter-gatherers in every continent and in every kind of environment’.16 He further reports that the group he studied, the !Kung17 people of the Kalahari (the so called ‘Bushmen’), ‘are a fiercely egalitarian people, and they have evolved a series of important cultural practices to maintain this equality, first by cutting down to size the arrogant and boastful, and second by helping those down on their luck to get back in the game’.18 An early Jesuit missionary noted of another hunter-gathering people, the Montagnais of Canada, ‘The two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans do not reign in their great forests—I mean ambition and avarice…not one of them has given himself to the devil to acquire wealth’.19

There was very little in the way of warfare, as Friedl notes:

Contests for territory between the men of neighbouring foraging groups are not unknown… But on the whole, the amount of energy men devote to training for fighting or time spent on war expeditions among hunter-gatherers is not great… Conflicts within bands are normally settled by the departure of one of the parties to the dispute.20

Such evidence completely refutes claims by people such as Ardrey that the whole prehistory of humanity, from the time of Australopithecus—the first ape-like animal to walk on two legs—through to the emergence of literacy, was based on the ‘killing imperative’, that ‘hunter-gatherer bands fought over water holes which tended all too often to vanish under the baking African sun’, that we are all ‘Cain’s children’, that ‘human history has turned on the development of superior weapons...for genetic necessity’, and that, therefore, only a thin veneer of ‘civilisation’ conceals an instinctive ‘delight in massacre, slavery, castration and cannibalism’.21

This is of immense importance for any arguments about ‘human nature’. For, if such a nature exists, it was moulded by natural selection during the long epoch of hunting and gathering. Richard Lee is quite right to insist:

It is the long experience of egalitarian sharing that has moulded our past. Despite our seeming adaptation to life in hierarchical societies, and despite the rather dismal track record of human rights in many parts of the world, there are signs that humankind retains a deep-rooted sense of egalitarianism, a deep-rooted commitment to the norm of reciprocity, a deep-rooted…sense of community.22

From a very different perspective, Friedrich von Hayek, the favourite economist of Margaret Thatcher, complained that humans have ‘long- submerged innate instincts’ and ‘primordial emotions’ based on ‘sentiments that were good for the small band’, leading them to want ‘to do good to known people’.23

‘Human nature’ is, in fact, very flexible. In present day society it enables some people, at least, to indulge in the greed and competitiveness that Hayek enthused over. It has also permitted, in class societies, the most horrific barbarities—torture, mass rape, burning alive, wanton slaughter. Behaviour was very different among foraging peoples because the requirements of obtaining a livelihood necessitated egalitarianism and altruism.

Hunters and gatherers were necessarily intensely dependent on one another. The gatherers usually supplied the most reliable source of food, and the hunters that which was most valued. So those who specialised in hunting depended for their daily survival on the generosity of those who gathered, while those who specialised in gathering—and those who were temporarily unsuccessful in the hunt—relied for valued additions to their diet on those who managed to kill animals. The hunt itself did not usually consist of an individual male hero going off to make a kill, but comprised a group of men (sometimes with the auxiliary assistance of women and children) working together to chase and trap a prey. At every point, the premium was on cooperation and collective values. Without them, no band of foragers could have survived for more than a few days.

Harman, _People's History of the World, pp. 6-8

---

wat0n wrote:
But even in those societies, it's clearly better to be a workers or even a serf than to be someone else's property.

ckaihatsu wrote:
That said, yes, there are distinctions to make, and, incidentally, you're confirming Marx's historical materialism here, which you've railed against in other posts.

wat0n wrote:
In what way?

You're making distinctions regarding different types of exploitation and oppression ('workers', 'serf', 'someone else's property [slavery in antiquity]'). These different types of socio-economic subordination correspond to different *modes of production* from history (capitalism, feudalism, and ancient slavery, respectively) -- which is a *Marxist* conception.

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

---

wat0n wrote:
The different nature of both goods and services also has economic consequences. It's not just a random empirical point.

It's hard to export services while such trade is common for products. This obvious fact has deep economic consequences in practice.

So you've now shifted the context -- yet again -- to that of *international trade*, to describe empirical variability there.

You're not denying that wage labor produces both goods and services, which are commodities and also economic activity, as distinct from *rentier* capital (land, money, assets), which *don't* produce new commodities of goods *or* services.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Perhaps, though I doubt it, and I think you're spuriously *conflating* the two, as a dodge.

Haughty attitudes over industrial-type jobs really smacks of right-wing nationalism, chauvinism, and machismo.

wat0n wrote:
I'm not an industrial fetishist

But it's common back in the day.

I've found such attitudes to *continue* to exist through the present, though, yes, I think they were more typical of the U.S.'s turn *inward*, post-1960s, to fomenting *internal* colonies, as in the South, during the period of deindustrialization.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Correct -- the worker in a commune is still a *microcosm* of the working class in general, since all wage laborers are *dispossessed* compared to the *landlord* of the property, any associated capital ownership, management authority, etc., as I already described.

wat0n wrote:
But it's not a capitalist system at all, is it?

What isn't?

wat0n wrote:
If all innovations are advantageous, they become the new standard. Then, a new innovation may arise and become a new standard in the future, but in the meantime the early adopters will benefit and society will benefit too, for a while.

You're just mirroring Okishio's triumphalism. It's business positivism, that's all, since you're wantonly ignoring the *downside*, as I already outlined -- Marx's declining rate of profit, basically.

wat0n wrote:
As long as new innovations are being carried out, the process will tend to repeat itself. Indeed, it's why R&D has such an important social role.

And the sun is always shining, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and unicorns exist if you look for them, etc.

You acknowledged earlier that capitalism is not reducible to innovation, yet now you're sounding like an *innovation fetishist*.

wat0n wrote:
You have to see it from the perspective of the capitalist who sells her business in this case. For her, the whole point was to device a new technology, and then sell the rights to it to a big guy. She makes bank, then retires.

Well, again, you're flitting around and mixing-scales -- do you want to discuss the *individual* capitalist, with anthologies of case studies, or do you want to discuss *capitalism* as a whole, and its general dynamics throughout history?

I'm here for the *politics*, myself.

---

wat0n wrote:
No, and keeping accounting also defines a business as such. What defines the worker as such is a relation of dependence and subordination that Uber drivers don't have.

I'll have to *beg to differ* -- the Uber driver typically *does* have a relation of dependence on the employer / broker because the driver-entity is not necessarily a viable business model *outside of* -- or even *within* -- the Uber employment / brokerage relationship.

Just because Uber *exists* doesn't mean that it's automatically a viable vehicle of *employment*, or 'business', for the typical Uber driver / employee, and *especially* so if said driver / employee doesn't have a pre-existing *book of business* / client list of their own, before starting with Uber.

Your business-positivism *bias* is showing through, in *assuming* that just because innovative-type businesses *exist*, that they're automatically *good* and socially beneficial for all involved, with no attached stories of dissatisfaction. This is called 'Panglossian'.

It begins with a young man, Candide, who is living a sheltered life in an Edenic paradise and being indoctrinated with Leibnizian optimism by his mentor, Professor Pangloss.[8] The work describes the abrupt cessation of this lifestyle, followed by Candide's slow and painful disillusionment as he witnesses and experiences great hardships in the world. Voltaire concludes Candide with, if not rejecting Leibnizian optimism outright, advocating a deeply practical precept, "we must cultivate our garden", in lieu of the Leibnizian mantra of Pangloss, "all is for the best" in the "best of all possible worlds".

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

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
It's a critique because marginal utility only references a particular time-stage of the commodity life-cycle -- 'marginal utility' is only concerned with supply-and-demand fluctuating market pricing, which only happens *after* the commodity is produced.

Marginal utility can't address any *non-consumer* role within economic functioning / the economy, so it's necessarily limited in *scope*, and isn't some kind of all-encompassing theory that covers all of economics.

wat0n wrote:
Why? You can actually address public goods using that theory for instance...

Okay, different sector, still the role of *consumer*, though.

Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show

Re: A question for our Marxists#15174947

By wat0n - 31 May 2021 04:45

- 31 May 2021 04:45 #15174947

ckaihatsu wrote:How does this not-make-sense -- ?

You're *confirming* that there's a *gradient* here, from those who are solely *dependent* on the umbrella brokerage-type company (AirBnB, Uber, etc.), and so moreso resemble *employees*, to those who use such client-brokerage companies more as an 'outsourcing' business service (B2B), and whose businesses are demonstrably *not* dependent on any one such outsourcing service -- particularly due to using *multiple* properties and *wage* labor for the maintenance of those properties.

In other words you'd rather ignore matters of *scale* and *power* in these economic linkages / relationships, so as to be willfully blinkered.

No, both are clients in the B2B sense. The difference however is that the second guy, the one who bought several properties to go all into AirBnB is more financially exposed than the guy that is only using it to get some extra income.

Note too that both would be hiring a worker (the maid) to do the cleaning too, and thus both would be engaging in exploitation if one used Marxian terms here. Am I correct?

ckaihatsu wrote:Life expectancy in the US keeps going down, and a new study says America's worsening inequality could be to blame

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-life ... ow-2019-11

Wasn't that due to the opioid epidemic?

ckaihatsu wrote:My point remains untrammeled that you're more inclined to *empirical* matters such as demographics and descriptions, than to identifying the *why*, meaning the *knowledge* / science as to these social phenomena.

philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

I'm very inclined to those because theory needs to be informed by them. A theory that doesn't explain what we observe is not all that useful.

As for your text about hunter-gatherers, that doesn't change the fact that they had to devote most of their time to work, which was critical for their survival. It was a classless society, but that's simply because they were banding in small groups often related by blood, so we could consider them to be clans, where relations could of course be more egalitarian and less hierarchical since the communities were so small. But that doesn't mean at all that those societies were in a position to allow you to do anything else but fight for survival (where the fighting was against other animals and the inclemencies of nature rather than other bands of humans, in that sense they were just fighting a different kind of war).

ckaihatsu wrote:You're making distinctions regarding different types of exploitation and oppression ('workers', 'serf', 'someone else's property [slavery in antiquity]'). These different types of socio-economic subordination correspond to different *modes of production* from history (capitalism, feudalism, and ancient slavery, respectively) -- which is a *Marxist* conception.

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

Sure, but that isn't in contradiction with other schools. Indeed, the Marxian paradigm may be wrong as it fails to account for several aspects of reality, but that does not mean it is completely useless.

ckaihatsu wrote:So you've now shifted the context -- yet again -- to that of *international trade*, to describe empirical variability there.

It's just an example of how that distinction is actually important in a practical and even purely theoretical sense.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're not denying that wage labor produces both goods and services, which are commodities and also economic activity, as distinct from *rentier* capital (land, money, assets), which *don't* produce new commodities of goods *or* services.

Certainly not, although if anything I would say wage (and contract) labor at this point is actually more relevant for services than goods. At least than for industrial goods.

And that is actually important, because it affects labor relations. For instance, the fact that plenty of services require physicality and that they cannot be stored (meaning, then, that they require the client to be present at the moment the service is performed) may actually give more bargaining power to workers - but for goods, the business could produce a lot, have a huge inventory elsewhere and then get tough when negotiating and resisting a potential strike. Example: The UK's 1984-1985 miners' strike was won by Thatcher because she made sure to keep large inventories of coal to be able to withstand the unions for a long time before getting tough with them, and that's something she had planned ever since she was elected in 1979. Had this been a service area, say, healthcare, she would have been unable to pull this off at all.

ckaihatsu wrote:I've found such attitudes to *continue* to exist through the present, though, yes, I think they were more typical of the U.S.'s turn *inward*, post-1960s, to fomenting *internal* colonies, as in the South, during the period of deindustrialization.

Of course they continue to exist through the present. It's an anachronism, one that is unfortunately still relevant. It's understandable why, but it's an anachronism nonetheless.

Now, as I said, this is also common in the left and particularly among Marxists in fact, at least in the Spanish speaking world where they usually refer to "obreros" (which could be translated as "workers" but it's more specific to workers in sectors like manufacturing, mining, construction and other similar industrial sectors - service workers would generally not be considered to be "obreros"). Maybe here the language barrier is relevant?

ckaihatsu wrote:What isn't?

The commune.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're just mirroring Okishio's triumphalism. It's business positivism, that's all, since you're wantonly ignoring the *downside*, as I already outlined -- Marx's declining rate of profit, basically.

ckaihatsu wrote:And the sun is always shining, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and unicorns exist if you look for them, etc.

You acknowledged earlier that capitalism is not reducible to innovation, yet now you're sounding like an *innovation fetishist*.

It's not "triumphalism" or "innovation fetishism", it's simply a statement of the consequences of the standard Marxian assumptions of Okishio's time. Of course, if innovation was to stop being productive for instance (e.g. all possible discoveries about the world would have already been made and incorporated into the productive processes), diminishing returns would hit in and there would be stagnation. That's actually an insight from mainstream neoclassical economics too, and one way the process would show would indeed with a downward trend in profits. But we are not in that world, not for now.

If that happened I could indeed imagine the end of capitalism, since it would not make much sense to take so much risks innovating (hence one mayor advantage of capitalism would be useless) and, while markets would probably still be useful, they could be useful in an economy where the government would in practice engage in a lot of planning since most problems would be more about engineering and incentive compatibility than anything else.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, again, you're flitting around and mixing-scales -- do you want to discuss the *individual* capitalist, with anthologies of case studies, or do you want to discuss *capitalism* as a whole, and its general dynamics throughout history?

I'm here for the *politics*, myself.

That behavior has consequences for capitalism as a whole, though, since the buyer would be implementing this innovation, thereby helping to spread it to the rest of the economy. As such, it also has subtle political consequences as well.

ckaihatsu wrote:I'll have to *beg to differ* -- the Uber driver typically *does* have a relation of dependence on the employer / broker because the driver-entity is not necessarily a viable business model *outside of* -- or even *within* -- the Uber employment / brokerage relationship.

That sort of dependence isn't why they would be employees though. Under this reasoning, if I market a hotel room in Booking then I must work for them since I'm depending on them to generate sales. This is clearly not true.

If all ride-sharing went away, then the industry would indeed disappear but those drivers could as well try to find jobs as (say) taxi drivers.

ckaihatsu wrote:Just because Uber *exists* doesn't mean that it's automatically a viable vehicle of *employment*, or 'business', for the typical Uber driver / employee, and *especially* so if said driver / employee doesn't have a pre-existing *book of business* / client list of their own, before starting with Uber.

You could say the same about any job, though.

ckaihatsu wrote:Your business-positivism *bias* is showing through, in *assuming* that just because innovative-type businesses *exist*, that they're automatically *good* and socially beneficial for all involved, with no attached stories of dissatisfaction. This is called 'Panglossian'.

No, I'm not assuming that it's good because it's new. I think it's good because it is giving people more flexibility on how to manage their lives.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, different sector, still the role of *consumer*, though.

Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show

There is also a marginalist theory of production. It's actually more believable than the consumer one in many ways, and it's closer to Marxian concepts than you'd probably realize too - the big difference lies in how they consider capital costs but the broad idea in both cases still relies on assuming a profit maximizing business. They just maximize different things.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175106

By ckaihatsu - 01 Jun 2021 01:11

- 01 Jun 2021 01:11 #15175106

ckaihatsu wrote:
How does this not-make-sense -- ?

You're *confirming* that there's a *gradient* here, from those who are solely *dependent* on the umbrella brokerage-type company (AirBnB, Uber, etc.), and so moreso resemble *employees*, to those who use such client-brokerage companies more as an 'outsourcing' business service (B2B), and whose businesses are demonstrably *not* dependent on any one such outsourcing service -- particularly due to using *multiple* properties and *wage* labor for the maintenance of those properties.

In other words you'd rather ignore matters of *scale* and *power* in these economic linkages / relationships, so as to be willfully blinkered.

wat0n wrote:
No, both are clients in the B2B sense.

'Clients' -- ?

How so?

'Clients' are synonymous with 'customers' and 'consumers', and would be the ones who are *partaking* of the service, whether it's a ride somewhere or a night's stay. We've been discussing the *providers* of the service, whether it's transportation or lodging, to ascertain what the individual's role is in regards to the *service* being provided.

If the individual is *overshadowed* by the larger, singular business operations (of the brokerage / Uber / AirBnB), then the individual is more of an *employee*, due to lack of capital, business flexibility / options, revenue, and power. If the individual is simply 'outsourcing' some of their 'sales office' to a brokerage / Uber / AirBnB, with a pre-existing book of business of their own, then they're more of a 'vendor' in their own right, similarly to Uber or AirBnB, but at a lesser scale of operations.

wat0n wrote:
The difference however is that the second guy, the one who bought several properties to go all into AirBnB is more financially exposed than the guy that is only using it to get some extra income.

Sure, I won't disagree -- that only makes my point *for* me, though, that such a 'vendor' is more of a *capitalist* (investor), and *not* a basic 'when-do-I-start' kind of *employee* / worker who just happens to kick-in the personal expense of a vehicle or the home that they're living in.

wat0n wrote:
Note too that both would be hiring a worker (the maid) to do the cleaning too, and thus both would be engaging in exploitation if one used Marxian terms here. Am I correct?

No, I think that this part is *presumptuous*. What about the proprietor of one's own property (through AirBnB), who does all of the cleaning *themselves*, as an employee would, if they worked through an employer -- ?

You're assuming that the 'guy [...] using it to get some extra income' *isn't* self-exploiting.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Life expectancy in the US keeps going down, and a new study says America's worsening inequality could be to blame

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-life ... ow-2019-11

wat0n wrote:
Wasn't that due to the opioid epidemic?

I don't do journalism myself, so I can only go by the information from the sources that I find -- that article, from 2019, said that life expectancy in the U.S. is declining due to worsening inequality.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Correct -- again, you're choosing to emphasize / are-more-concerned-with *strata*, than with *class*. Class relations are based on the private ownership of private property, while 'strata' is more about gross income, by whatever means.

wat0n wrote:
But it's not an irrelevant issue at all.

ckaihatsu wrote:
My point remains untrammeled that you're more inclined to *empirical* matters such as demographics and descriptions, than to identifying the *why*, meaning the *knowledge* / science as to these social phenomena.

philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
I'm very inclined to those because theory needs to be informed by them. A theory that doesn't explain what we observe is not all that useful.

You're not discussing the *theory* at all, though, which, in this case, is about *class*. If you want to include a treatment of class, based on particulars of 'strata', then go right ahead. Discussing *only* strata, though, is mere *empiricism*, as I mentioned, and doesn't inform as to *why* the social world is the way it is.

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

---

wat0n wrote:
As for your text about hunter-gatherers, that doesn't change the fact that they had to devote most of their time to work,

You *missed* the following part, from the excerpt, that *refutes* your erroneous contention:

But life in such ‘band societies’ was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more ‘civilised’ agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them ‘the original affluent society’.12

---

wat0n wrote:
which was critical for their survival. It was a classless society, but that's simply because they were banding in small groups often related by blood, so we could consider them to be clans, where relations could of course be more egalitarian and less hierarchical since the communities were so small. But that doesn't mean at all that those societies were in a position to allow you to do anything else but fight for survival (where the fighting was against other animals and the inclemencies of nature rather than other bands of humans, in that sense they were just fighting a different kind of war).

'War' isn't really the appropriate term to use, but, sure, your point is taken that there was certain *work* to be done -- though you may be *dramatizing* such daily chores, a little bit.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're making distinctions regarding different types of exploitation and oppression ('workers', 'serf', 'someone else's property [slavery in antiquity]'). These different types of socio-economic subordination correspond to different *modes of production* from history (capitalism, feudalism, and ancient slavery, respectively) -- which is a *Marxist* conception.

[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
Sure, but that isn't in contradiction with other schools. Indeed, the Marxian paradigm may be wrong as it fails to account for several aspects of reality, but that does not mean it is completely useless.

Again you're *dissembling* -- you're *not denying* that your observations of different modes of production from history supports Marx's 'historical determinism'.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, you're dissembling by putting forth simple empirical *descriptions* instead of focusing on the *economic function* of both -- 'physical' production, or the manufacturing of tangible goods, requires labor and produces commodities just as much as *services* do.

wat0n wrote:
The different nature of both goods and services also has economic consequences. It's not just a random empirical point.

It's hard to export services while such trade is common for products. This obvious fact has deep economic consequences in practice.

ckaihatsu wrote:
So you've now shifted the context -- yet again -- to that of *international trade*, to describe empirical variability there.

wat0n wrote:
It's just an example of how that distinction is actually important in a practical and even purely theoretical sense.

You're repeatedly being *disingenuous* by digressing from the point at hand -- if you can't dispute that both goods and services are *commodities*, then maybe just leave off of that point instead of disingenuously rambling away on a tangent.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're not denying that wage labor produces both goods and services, which are commodities and also economic activity, as distinct from *rentier* capital (land, money, assets), which *don't* produce new commodities of goods *or* services.

wat0n wrote:
Certainly not,

Okay, thanks -- I appreciate your forthrightness, for a change, on this one.

wat0n wrote:
although if anything I would say wage (and contract) labor at this point is actually more relevant for services than goods. At least than for industrial goods.

And that is actually important, because it affects labor relations. For instance, the fact that plenty of services require physicality and that they cannot be stored (meaning, then, that they require the client to be present at the moment the service is performed) may actually give more bargaining power to workers - but for goods, the business could produce a lot, have a huge inventory elsewhere and then get tough when negotiating and resisting a potential strike. Example: The UK's 1984-1985 miners' strike was won by Thatcher because she made sure to keep large inventories of coal to be able to withstand the unions for a long time before getting tough with them, and that's something she had planned ever since she was elected in 1979. Had this been a service area, say, healthcare, she would have been unable to pull this off at all.

Regarding *economic activity*, there *is no* distinction to be made. Labor is required for the commodity-production of both goods and services.

On your *empirical* points, I'll point-out that *packages* could be transported by a *delivery service*, which requires labor, but does *not* require the client to be present for the receiving / execution of the service itself.

The business norm *these* days is 'just-in-time' inventories, meaning that companies are under financial pressure to *not* have a lot of capital invested in stock / inventories that just sit around, regardless of conscious class-warfare planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-t ... d_benefits

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
I've found such attitudes to *continue* to exist through the present, though, yes, I think they were more typical of the U.S.'s turn *inward*, post-1960s, to fomenting *internal* colonies, as in the South, during the period of deindustrialization.

wat0n wrote:
Of course they continue to exist through the present. It's an anachronism, one that is unfortunately still relevant. It's understandable why, but it's an anachronism nonetheless.

Now, as I said, this is also common in the left and particularly among Marxists in fact, at least in the Spanish speaking world where they usually refer to "obreros" (which could be translated as "workers" but it's more specific to workers in sectors like manufacturing, mining, construction and other similar industrial sectors - service workers would generally not be considered to be "obreros"). Maybe here the language barrier is relevant?

Semantics aside, I'd be more interested in seeing to what extents the three types of labor (blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar) receive coverage and *analysis* by any given organization.

You're blithely accusing *Marxists* of using biased language but you're not providing any *sources* for such a sweeping, serious accusation. (If 'obreros' is applied consistently to coverage of *all* kinds of workers in media outlets, then it's *not biased*.)

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Correct -- the worker in a commune is still a *microcosm* of the working class in general, since all wage laborers are *dispossessed* compared to the *landlord* of the property, any associated capital ownership, management authority, etc., as I already described.

wat0n wrote:
But it's not a capitalist system at all, is it?

ckaihatsu wrote:
What isn't?

wat0n wrote:
The commune.

Which commune? Where is it?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're just mirroring Okishio's triumphalism. It's business positivism, that's all, since you're wantonly ignoring the *downside*, as I already outlined -- Marx's declining rate of profit, basically.

ckaihatsu wrote:
And the sun is always shining, there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and unicorns exist if you look for them, etc.

You acknowledged earlier that capitalism is not reducible to innovation, yet now you're sounding like an *innovation fetishist*.

wat0n wrote:
It's not "triumphalism" or "innovation fetishism", it's simply a statement of the consequences of the standard Marxian assumptions of Okishio's time. Of course, if innovation was to stop being productive for instance (e.g. all possible discoveries about the world would have already been made and incorporated into the productive processes), diminishing returns would hit in and there would be stagnation. That's actually an insight from mainstream neoclassical economics too, and one way the process would show would indeed with a downward trend in profits. But we are not in that world, not for now.

Again you're disingenuously *jumping around* different contexts -- now you're going *societal*-scale, so as to ignore the falling prices, shrinking revenues, and declining rate of profit at the *per-company* scale.

Dealing with the *civilizational totality* of innovation is to miss the trees for the forest.

wat0n wrote:
If that happened I could indeed imagine the end of capitalism, since it would not make much sense to take so much risks innovating (hence one mayor advantage of capitalism would be useless) and, while markets would probably still be useful, they could be useful in an economy where the government would in practice engage in a lot of planning since most problems would be more about engineering and incentive compatibility than anything else.

You previously acknowledged, though, that capitalism is not *driven* by innovation -- in 2008-2009 its 'cutting-edge' was *subprime mortgages*, which *crashed*, as expected, since it was overhyped *bad debt*, a *financial* phenomenon, and not an 'innovation' one.

You're belying that you want socialism to be Stalinism, and that you want Stalinism to include markets.

---

wat0n wrote:
You have to see it from the perspective of the capitalist who sells her business in this case. For her, the whole point was to device a new technology, and then sell the rights to it to a big guy. She makes bank, then retires.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, again, you're flitting around and mixing-scales -- do you want to discuss the *individual* capitalist, with anthologies of case studies, or do you want to discuss *capitalism* as a whole, and its general dynamics throughout history?

I'm here for the *politics*, myself.

wat0n wrote:
That behavior has consequences for capitalism as a whole, though, since the buyer would be implementing this innovation, thereby helping to spread it to the rest of the economy. As such, it also has subtle political consequences as well.

Innovation fetishist.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
I'll have to *beg to differ* -- the Uber driver typically *does* have a relation of dependence on the employer / broker because the driver-entity is not necessarily a viable business model *outside of* -- or even *within* -- the Uber employment / brokerage relationship.

wat0n wrote:
That sort of dependence isn't why they would be employees though. Under this reasoning, if I market a hotel room in Booking then I must work for them since I'm depending on them to generate sales. This is clearly not true.

You're not providing enough information / details in this scenario, though -- the determining factor would be the *size* of your existing business, *before* outsourcing your marketing (to whatever extent).

The proprietor or driver who *has no* capital invested is functionally an *employee*, in relation to AirBnB / Uber / etc., because their own residential property, or vehicle, or whatever, is *incidental* to the operation and is not a significant business-type outlay of capital.

---

wat0n wrote:
If all ride-sharing went away, then the industry would indeed disappear but those drivers could as well try to find jobs as (say) taxi drivers.

To the non-invested employee-type driver / worker, that sea-change in industry existence would just be a new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss event in one's work life.

A *business* owner / driver / proprietor would have to shift capital around to avoid losing-out while the ride-sharing ship sank.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Just because Uber *exists* doesn't mean that it's automatically a viable vehicle of *employment*, or 'business', for the typical Uber driver / employee, and *especially* so if said driver / employee doesn't have a pre-existing *book of business* / client list of their own, before starting with Uber.

wat0n wrote:
You could say the same about any job, though.

Exactly. Now you get it -- it's the *precariousness* of existence for those who aren't cushioned by a buffer of cash / capital.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Your business-positivism *bias* is showing through, in *assuming* that just because innovative-type businesses *exist*, that they're automatically *good* and socially beneficial for all involved, with no attached stories of dissatisfaction. This is called 'Panglossian'.

wat0n wrote:
No, I'm not assuming that it's good because it's new. I think it's good because it is giving people more flexibility on how to manage their lives.

This is an *incomplete* assessment / characterization, though, because I could cite the 'ultimate' flexibility of someone just staying-home, day-after-day, indefinitely, which isn't very realistic, but is eminently 'flexible' for them.

You're choosing to myopically look at work-time 'flexibility', to the detriment of *all other* relevant work-experience factors / components. Why not look at *job security* instead -- ?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, different sector, still the role of *consumer*, though.

Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
There is also a marginalist theory of production. It's actually more believable than the consumer one in many ways, and it's closer to Marxian concepts than you'd probably realize too - the big difference lies in how they consider capital costs but the broad idea in both cases still relies on assuming a profit maximizing business. They just maximize different things.

Okay, I'm listening. You can go ahead and explain it.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175109

By wat0n - 01 Jun 2021 03:07

- 01 Jun 2021 03:07 #15175109

ckaihatsu wrote:'Clients' -- ?

How so?

'Clients' are synonymous with 'customers' and 'consumers', and would be the ones who are *partaking* of the service, whether it's a ride somewhere or a night's stay. We've been discussing the *providers* of the service, whether it's transportation or lodging, to ascertain what the individual's role is in regards to the *service* being provided.

If the individual is *overshadowed* by the larger, singular business operations (of the brokerage / Uber / AirBnB), then the individual is more of an *employee*, due to lack of capital, business flexibility / options, revenue, and power. If the individual is simply 'outsourcing' some of their 'sales office' to a brokerage / Uber / AirBnB, with a pre-existing book of business of their own, then they're more of a 'vendor' in their own right, similarly to Uber or AirBnB, but at a lesser scale of operations.

If you're outsourcing you are in fact paying for a service. And indeed, who's paying who here? Is AirBnB paying the host or the host has to pay AirBnB?

If you don't want to see them as contractors, then it makes more sense to see them as clients, who have to fulfill terms of service.

ckaihatsu wrote:Sure, I won't disagree -- that only makes my point *for* me, though, that such a 'vendor' is more of a *capitalist* (investor), and *not* a basic 'when-do-I-start' kind of *employee* / worker who just happens to kick-in the personal expense of a vehicle or the home that they're living in.

Or maybe that guy simply decided to take more risk than the person who simply rents a single room.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, I think that this part is *presumptuous*. What about the proprietor of one's own property (through AirBnB), who does all of the cleaning *themselves*, as an employee would, if they worked through an employer -- ?

You're assuming that the 'guy [...] using it to get some extra income' *isn't* self-exploiting.

Self-exploiting? Jesus, do you realize how silly that is?

Anyway, do you at least reckon that if the single room host hires a maid he's exploiting her under the Marxian definition?

ckaihatsu wrote:I don't do journalism myself, so I can only go by the information from the sources that I find -- that article, from 2019, said that life expectancy in the U.S. is declining due to worsening inequality.

More than inequality, it seems to be a result of the fall of rural America:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144704/

ckaihatsu wrote:You're not discussing the *theory* at all, though, which, in this case, is about *class*. If you want to include a treatment of class, based on particulars of 'strata', then go right ahead. Discussing *only* strata, though, is mere *empiricism*, as I mentioned, and doesn't inform as to *why* the social world is the way it is.

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

My point is, it seems Marxian class isn't as strongly related as it used to be with income, which isn't all that surprising.

ckaihatsu wrote:You *missed* the following part, from the excerpt, that *refutes* your erroneous contention:

Which is a silly claim compared to our modern, industrial societies.

ckaihatsu wrote:'War' isn't really the appropriate term to use, but, sure, your point is taken that there was certain *work* to be done -- though you may be *dramatizing* such daily chores, a little bit.

Well, you guys are also dramatizing work in our current society a fair amount as well.

ckaihatsu wrote:Again you're *dissembling* -- you're *not denying* that your observations of different modes of production from history supports Marx's 'historical determinism'.

This isn't in contradiction with what I mentioned. OTOH, the reason why his scheme works is because it takes technological changes into account. Marx is right in that sense, but it's an insight most contemporary economists would not disagree with.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're repeatedly being *disingenuous* by digressing from the point at hand -- if you can't dispute that both goods and services are *commodities*, then maybe just leave off of that point instead of disingenuously rambling away on a tangent.

I gave you a concrete historical example of a strike that failed squarely because the workers were producing a storable good after that point.

ckaihatsu wrote:Regarding *economic activity*, there *is no* distinction to be made. Labor is required for the commodity-production of both goods and services.

On your *empirical* points, I'll point-out that *packages* could be transported by a *delivery service*, which requires labor, but does *not* require the client to be present for the receiving / execution of the service itself.

The business norm *these* days is 'just-in-time' inventories, meaning that companies are under financial pressure to *not* have a lot of capital invested in stock / inventories that just sit around, regardless of conscious class-warfare planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-t ... d_benefits

Right, but plenty of services do require physicality. As for just in time inventories, you're correct but that's precisely because they haven't been necessary like they were for Thatcher.

ckaihatsu wrote:Semantics aside, I'd be more interested in seeing to what extents the three types of labor (blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar) receive coverage and *analysis* by any given organization.

You're blithely accusing *Marxists* of using biased language but you're not providing any *sources* for such a sweeping, serious accusation. (If 'obreros' is applied consistently to coverage of *all* kinds of workers in media outlets, then it's *not biased*.)

Nowadays, I've seen "obreros" being used mostly in leftist and, strangely enough, fascist circles. The former includes Marxists of course, but it's not limited to them. I think it's a fallacy at this point since most workers tend to work in the service industries.

ckaihatsu wrote:Which commune? Where is it?

You could consider a Kibbutz circa 1930 for example.

ckaihatsu wrote:Again you're disingenuously *jumping around* different contexts -- now you're going *societal*-scale, so as to ignore the falling prices, shrinking revenues, and declining rate of profit at the *per-company* scale.

Dealing with the *civilizational totality* of innovation is to miss the trees for the forest.

How am I suddenly jumping into the "social" scale now? You do realize that's how Okishio's point was understood at the time, right?

ckaihatsu wrote:You previously acknowledged, though, that capitalism is not *driven* by innovation -- in 2008-2009 its 'cutting-edge' was *subprime mortgages*, which *crashed*, as expected, since it was overhyped *bad debt*, a *financial* phenomenon, and not an 'innovation' one.

You're belying that you want socialism to be Stalinism, and that you want Stalinism to include markets.

Of course capitalism isn't driven by innovation. That doesn't mean it's not important for the long run performance of the system.

ckaihatsu wrote:Innovation fetishist.

It's just a reality.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're not providing enough information / details in this scenario, though -- the determining factor would be the *size* of your existing business, *before* outsourcing your marketing (to whatever extent).

The proprietor or driver who *has no* capital invested is functionally an *employee*, in relation to AirBnB / Uber / etc., because their own residential property, or vehicle, or whatever, is *incidental* to the operation and is not a significant business-type outlay of capital.

So if I offered a room or a small dwelling on a platform like Booking it would suddenly be different? Care to explain why?

ckaihatsu wrote:To the non-invested employee-type driver / worker, that sea-change in industry existence would just be a new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss event in one's work life.

A *business* owner / driver / proprietor would have to shift capital around to avoid losing-out while the ride-sharing ship sank.

Plenty of capitalists can't simply shift capital away, even large ones.

Also, it would not be a simple change of bosses. It would meaningfully change his working conditions and would lose flexibility as a result.

ckaihatsu wrote:Exactly. Now you get it -- it's the *precariousness* of existence for those who aren't cushioned by a buffer of cash / capital.

"Any job" includes the self-employed and capitalists.

ckaihatsu wrote:This is an *incomplete* assessment / characterization, though, because I could cite the 'ultimate' flexibility of someone just staying-home, day-after-day, indefinitely, which isn't very realistic, but is eminently 'flexible' for them.

Is it so unrealistic? There are now plenty of jobs that are remote, and that seems likely to stay.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're choosing to myopically look at work-time 'flexibility', to the detriment of *all other* relevant work-experience factors / components. Why not look at *job security* instead -- ?

I'm not, of course flexibility comes at the price of lower security. This is a two way street, and in practice people will need to choose between flexibility and security.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, I'm listening. You can go ahead and explain it.

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

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175230

By ckaihatsu - 01 Jun 2021 23:38

- 01 Jun 2021 23:38 #15175230

ckaihatsu wrote:
How does this not-make-sense -- ?

You're *confirming* that there's a *gradient* here, from those who are solely *dependent* on the umbrella brokerage-type company (AirBnB, Uber, etc.), and so moreso resemble *employees*, to those who use such client-brokerage companies more as an 'outsourcing' business service (B2B), and whose businesses are demonstrably *not* dependent on any one such outsourcing service -- particularly due to using *multiple* properties and *wage* labor for the maintenance of those properties.

In other words you'd rather ignore matters of *scale* and *power* in these economic linkages / relationships, so as to be willfully blinkered.

wat0n wrote:
No, both are clients in the B2B sense.

ckaihatsu wrote:
'Clients' -- ?

How so?

'Clients' are synonymous with 'customers' and 'consumers', and would be the ones who are *partaking* of the service, whether it's a ride somewhere or a night's stay. We've been discussing the *providers* of the service, whether it's transportation or lodging, to ascertain what the individual's role is in regards to the *service* being provided.

If the individual is *overshadowed* by the larger, singular business operations (of the brokerage / Uber / AirBnB), then the individual is more of an *employee*, due to lack of capital, business flexibility / options, revenue, and power. If the individual is simply 'outsourcing' some of their 'sales office' to a brokerage / Uber / AirBnB, with a pre-existing book of business of their own, then they're more of a 'vendor' in their own right, similarly to Uber or AirBnB, but at a lesser scale of operations.

wat0n wrote:
If you're outsourcing you are in fact paying for a service. And indeed, who's paying who here? Is AirBnB paying the host or the host has to pay AirBnB?

If you don't want to see them as contractors, then it makes more sense to see them as clients, who have to fulfill terms of service.

You're *digressing* again -- the topic of this segment has been about whether an individual working for Uber or AirBnB is an employee, or an independent business.

A business, outsourcing to such a broker, is implicitly paying *per head* for the business brought in via Uber or AirBnB (etc.)

The *revenue* comes from paying customers, so *those* are the clients, and *not* the individual driver / proprietor, or the driving / lodging *business*, since those are the *providers* of the service, not the customers.

For the sake of clarity we could say that the service providers are the *retail* end of the transportation or lodging service, while the Uber / AirBnB brokerage is the *wholesale* end of the transportation or lodging service, respectively.

Regarding the issue of employee-or-vendor, I'll reiterate that we can go by the yardstick of the provider's pre-existing *business* / capital / client-list, *before* signing on with the brokerage. Small-scale involvement, as with one's own vehicle or dwelling, would make one's role that of an *employee*, functionally, while an investor in their own business, particularly if they're hiring / exploiting outside labor, means that it's definitely a business.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Sure, I won't disagree -- that only makes my point *for* me, though, that such a 'vendor' is more of a *capitalist* (investor), and *not* a basic 'when-do-I-start' kind of *employee* / worker who just happens to kick-in the personal expense of a vehicle or the home that they're living in.

wat0n wrote:
Or maybe that guy simply decided to take more risk than the person who simply rents a single room.

Again, you're making my point for me that those who do *not* invest capital are functionally *employees*, and not business owners.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, I think that this part is *presumptuous*. What about the proprietor of one's own property (through AirBnB), who does all of the cleaning *themselves*, as an employee would, if they worked through an employer -- ?

You're assuming that the 'guy [...] using it to get some extra income' *isn't* self-exploiting.

wat0n wrote:
Self-exploiting? Jesus, do you realize how silly that is?

Anyway, do you at least reckon that if the single room host hires a maid he's exploiting her under the Marxian definition?

Think about it -- the service provider is shouldering the expenses of *infrastructure* (dwelling or vehicle), plus *operating expenses* (heat, utilities, gasoline, maintenance), *plus* their own labor for cleaning and upkeep, *in addition to* the regular labor-power of driving or providing hospitality, respectively, for the actual *service*, as advertised. Their share of the revenue comes through the *broker*, so there's nothing to guarantee that they're being properly compensated for all of these material inputs that they're providing, as the retail service to customers / clients.

In other words there's the real possibility that the provider here, as a non-business individual, could actually suffer a *loss* through providing this service, because of the onerous overhead for what is functionally a *job*, with the job *tasks* being handed-down from the company. Now what regular job can you think of in which the employee is at the risk of *losing money*, like getting a negative-paycheck -- ?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
I don't do journalism myself, so I can only go by the information from the sources that I find -- that article, from 2019, said that life expectancy in the U.S. is declining due to worsening inequality.

wat0n wrote:
More than inequality, it seems to be a result of the fall of rural America:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144704/

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're not discussing the *theory* at all, though, which, in this case, is about *class*. If you want to include a treatment of class, based on particulars of 'strata', then go right ahead. Discussing *only* strata, though, is mere *empiricism*, as I mentioned, and doesn't inform as to *why* the social world is the way it is.

Consciousness, A Material Definition

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
My point is, it seems Marxian class isn't as strongly related as it used to be with income, which isn't all that surprising.

Again, you're being detached and talking apples-and-oranges. There's nothing to indicate that (Marxist) *class* is defined solely by income levels -- you're again devolving to *empiricism*, meaning *demographics*, instead of attempting to see *why* the income inequality (and wealth inequality) dynamic persists.

Here's a reminder of how class is defined -- by the relative share of surplus labor value, in the production of commodities:

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

---

wat0n wrote:
As for your text about hunter-gatherers, that doesn't change the fact that they had to devote most of their time to work,

ckaihatsu wrote:
You *missed* the following part, from the excerpt, that *refutes* your erroneous contention:

But life in such ‘band societies’ was certainly no harder than for many millions of people living in more ‘civilised’ agricultural or industrial societies. One eminent anthropologist has even called them ‘the original affluent society’.12

wat0n wrote:
Which is a silly claim compared to our modern, industrial societies.

You're switching contexts again, because your claim that hunter-gatherer existence was *laborious*, is *unsupported* by the evidence.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
'War' isn't really the appropriate term to use, but, sure, your point is taken that there was certain *work* to be done -- though you may be *dramatizing* such daily chores, a little bit.

wat0n wrote:
Well, you guys are also dramatizing work in our current society a fair amount as well.

Actually, *no* Marxist is 'dramatizing' anything. See the 'Labor & Capital' diagram above -- it's as *didactic* as anything can get, and definitely *not* dramatic.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Again you're *dissembling* -- you're *not denying* that your observations of different modes of production from history supports Marx's 'historical determinism'.

wat0n wrote:
This isn't in contradiction with what I mentioned.

Correct. That's what I just said.

wat0n wrote:
OTOH, the reason why his scheme works is because it takes technological changes into account. Marx is right in that sense, but it's an insight most contemporary economists would not disagree with.

Technology -- the 'material conditions of production' -- is only *half* of the equation:

Historical materialism, also known as the materialist conception of history, is a methodology used by scientific socialist and Marxist historiographers that focuses on human societies and their development through history, arguing that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideals. This was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) as the "materialist conception of history".[1] It is principally a theory of history which asserts that the material conditions of a society's mode of production, or in Marxist terms the union of a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development.

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

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're repeatedly being *disingenuous* by digressing from the point at hand -- if you can't dispute that both goods and services are *commodities*, then maybe just leave off of that point instead of disingenuously rambling away on a tangent.

wat0n wrote:
I gave you a concrete historical example of a strike that failed squarely because the workers were producing a storable good after that point.

This historical event, plus the material quality of storable (goods) versus non-storable (services), has *nothing* to do with the point of this segment, which is that both goods and services are both *commodities* and produce new economic value -- unlike *rentier* capital, which does *not* produce commodities or any new values.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Regarding *economic activity*, there *is no* distinction to be made. Labor is required for the commodity-production of both goods and services.

On your *empirical* points, I'll point-out that *packages* could be transported by a *delivery service*, which requires labor, but does *not* require the client to be present for the receiving / execution of the service itself.

The business norm *these* days is 'just-in-time' inventories, meaning that companies are under financial pressure to *not* have a lot of capital invested in stock / inventories that just sit around, regardless of conscious class-warfare planning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-t ... d_benefits

wat0n wrote:
Right, but plenty of services do require physicality.

And plenty of services do *not* require in-person physicality, like online (automated by-definition) services -- which are *so* hyper-leveraged by digital technology that many are even *free*, and do not require ongoing labor per-user *whatsoever*, like email, search engines, weather forecasts, etc. -- also consider *utilities* like electricity, natural gas, gasoline, etc., in which the service-providing of them is *also* highly automated with minimal 'in-person' labor required for the provision of the service to *numerous* customers and end-users.

wat0n wrote:
As for just in time inventories, you're correct but that's precisely because they haven't been necessary like they were for Thatcher.

Yeah, it's different *these* days:

Strike at a G.M. Parts Plant Is Affecting Much of Company

By Keith Bradsher
March 8, 1996

General AMotors assembly plants began running out of brakes and shutting down today, as a three-day strike at two brake parts factories in Dayton, Ohio, threatened to cripple car and truck production from the world's largest auto maker.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/08/us/s ... mpany.html

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Semantics aside, I'd be more interested in seeing to what extents the three types of labor (blue-collar, white-collar, and pink-collar) receive coverage and *analysis* by any given organization.

You're blithely accusing *Marxists* of using biased language but you're not providing any *sources* for such a sweeping, serious accusation. (If 'obreros' is applied consistently to coverage of *all* kinds of workers in media outlets, then it's *not biased*.)

wat0n wrote:
Nowadays, I've seen "obreros" being used mostly in leftist and, strangely enough, fascist circles. The former includes Marxists of course, but it's not limited to them. I think it's a fallacy at this point since most workers tend to work in the service industries.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Which commune? Where is it?

wat0n wrote:
You could consider a Kibbutz circa 1930 for example.

Okay -- so who *owns* it, who *manages* it, and how are the workers there getting paid?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Again you're disingenuously *jumping around* different contexts -- now you're going *societal*-scale, so as to ignore the falling prices, shrinking revenues, and declining rate of profit at the *per-company* scale.

Dealing with the *civilizational totality* of innovation is to miss the trees for the forest.

wat0n wrote:
How am I suddenly jumping into the "social" scale now? You do realize that's how Okishio's point was understood at the time, right?

No, Okishio addresses the *ground-level* business-by-business perspective, to say that one business' use of innovation in an elite way confers a business *advantage* over the competition -- it's *temporary*, though, as you've acknowledged, and, on-the-whole *no* business benefits in the long-term, because of the tendency for *everyone's* rate of profit to decline, throughout the entire industry, as such innovations become common practice and are thus no longer advantageous.

---

wat0n wrote:
If that happened I could indeed imagine the end of capitalism, since it would not make much sense to take so much risks innovating (hence one mayor advantage of capitalism would be useless) and, while markets would probably still be useful, they could be useful in an economy where the government would in practice engage in a lot of planning since most problems would be more about engineering and incentive compatibility than anything else.

ckaihatsu wrote:
You previously acknowledged, though, that capitalism is not *driven* by innovation -- in 2008-2009 its 'cutting-edge' was *subprime mortgages*, which *crashed*, as expected, since it was overhyped *bad debt*, a *financial* phenomenon, and not an 'innovation' one.

You're belying that you want socialism to be Stalinism, and that you want Stalinism to include markets.

wat0n wrote:
Of course capitalism isn't driven by innovation. That doesn't mean it's not important for the long run performance of the system.

---

wat0n wrote:
That behavior has consequences for capitalism as a whole, though, since the buyer would be implementing this innovation, thereby helping to spread it to the rest of the economy. As such, it also has subtle political consequences as well.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Innovation fetishist.

wat0n wrote:
It's just a reality.

The reality that you're describing, but ignoring the implications-of, is Marx's declining rate of profit.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're not providing enough information / details in this scenario, though -- the determining factor would be the *size* of your existing business, *before* outsourcing your marketing (to whatever extent).

The proprietor or driver who *has no* capital invested is functionally an *employee*, in relation to AirBnB / Uber / etc., because their own residential property, or vehicle, or whatever, is *incidental* to the operation and is not a significant business-type outlay of capital.

wat0n wrote:
So if I offered a room or a small dwelling on a platform like Booking it would suddenly be different? Care to explain why?

(See the initial segment, for discussion on this topic.)

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
To the non-invested employee-type driver / worker, that sea-change in industry existence would just be a new-boss-same-as-the-old-boss event in one's work life.

A *business* owner / driver / proprietor would have to shift capital around to avoid losing-out while the ride-sharing ship sank.

wat0n wrote:
Plenty of capitalists can't simply shift capital away, even large ones.

Also, it would not be a simple change of bosses. It would meaningfully change his working conditions and would lose flexibility as a result.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Just because Uber *exists* doesn't mean that it's automatically a viable vehicle of *employment*, or 'business', for the typical Uber driver / employee, and *especially* so if said driver / employee doesn't have a pre-existing *book of business* / client list of their own, before starting with Uber.

wat0n wrote:
You could say the same about any job, though.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Exactly. Now you get it -- it's the *precariousness* of existence for those who aren't cushioned by a buffer of cash / capital.

wat0n wrote:
"Any job" includes the self-employed and capitalists.

You're not recognizing the crucial distinction here -- 'self-employed' means 'self-exploiting' because the 'self-employed' are bringing their own *infrastructure* and *resources* into the operations of the *job*, which an employee typically doesn't have to do, since those components are historically the functions / investments of *capital*.

And, for those who have a cushion of cash or capital -- capitalists -- there *is no* 'job' -- the "job", so-to-speak, is to look after the *capital*, because that's what's producing *revenue*, or gains, if handled correctly. But the "job", or "work" itself, regarding the capital, isn't itself producing any new commodities or economic value -- it's just the *overhead* of looking after the capital, so that it functions to the benefit of the capital-owner.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
This is an *incomplete* assessment / characterization, though, because I could cite the 'ultimate' flexibility of someone just staying-home, day-after-day, indefinitely, which isn't very realistic, but is eminently 'flexible' for them.

wat0n wrote:
Is it so unrealistic? There are now plenty of jobs that are remote, and that seems likely to stay.

Okay, noted.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're choosing to myopically look at work-time 'flexibility', to the detriment of *all other* relevant work-experience factors / components. Why not look at *job security* instead -- ?

wat0n wrote:
I'm not, of course flexibility comes at the price of lower security. This is a two way street, and in practice people will need to choose between flexibility and security.

*Or*, instead of the two having to be a trade-off, why isn't there counter-austerity-type *support* for those who have employment, and/or need employment, the way that Wall Street enjoys government injections of billions of dollars per month -- ?

Certainly government has the most appropriate existing infrastructure and organization for providing *job support* to those who need it for living their daily lives, and yet such support doesn't exist these days. Why isn't there job security *and* flexibility, at the same time?

---

wat0n wrote:
There is also a marginalist theory of production. It's actually more believable than the consumer one in many ways, and it's closer to Marxian concepts than you'd probably realize too - the big difference lies in how they consider capital costs but the broad idea in both cases still relies on assuming a profit maximizing business. They just maximize different things.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, I'm listening. You can go ahead and explain it.

wat0n wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_maximization

Okay, this has *nothing* to do with Marxism, and you're far from clear in describing how profit maximization utilizes the dynamic / practice of marginalism.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175239

By wat0n - 02 Jun 2021 01:00

- 02 Jun 2021 01:00 #15175239

ckaihatsu wrote:You're *digressing* again -- the topic of this segment has been about whether an individual working for Uber or AirBnB is an employee, or an independent business.

A business, outsourcing to such a broker, is implicitly paying *per head* for the business brought in via Uber or AirBnB (etc.)

The *revenue* comes from paying customers, so *those* are the clients, and *not* the individual driver / proprietor, or the driving / lodging *business*, since those are the *providers* of the service, not the customers.

For the sake of clarity we could say that the service providers are the *retail* end of the transportation or lodging service, while the Uber / AirBnB brokerage is the *wholesale* end of the transportation or lodging service, respectively.

Regarding the issue of employee-or-vendor, I'll reiterate that we can go by the yardstick of the provider's pre-existing *business* / capital / client-list, *before* signing on with the brokerage. Small-scale involvement, as with one's own vehicle or dwelling, would make one's role that of an *employee*, functionally, while an investor in their own business, particularly if they're hiring / exploiting outside labor, means that it's definitely a business.

I'm not "digressing", it's actually a fairly cogent idea: Since when do workers pay commission to their bosses to work?

ckaihatsu wrote:Again, you're making my point for me that those who do *not* invest capital are functionally *employees*, and not business owners.

How so?

ckaihatsu wrote:Think about it -- the service provider is shouldering the expenses of *infrastructure* (dwelling or vehicle), plus *operating expenses* (heat, utilities, gasoline, maintenance), *plus* their own labor for cleaning and upkeep, *in addition to* the regular labor-power of driving or providing hospitality, respectively, for the actual *service*, as advertised. Their share of the revenue comes through the *broker*, so there's nothing to guarantee that they're being properly compensated for all of these material inputs that they're providing, as the retail service to customers / clients.

In other words there's the real possibility that the provider here, as a non-business individual, could actually suffer a *loss* through providing this service, because of the onerous overhead for what is functionally a *job*, with the job *tasks* being handed-down from the company. Now what regular job can you think of in which the employee is at the risk of *losing money*, like getting a negative-paycheck -- ?

None, which is precisely why it makes little sense to claim AirBnB hosts and Uber drivers are dependent workers. Independent contractors can actually post a net loss as part of the contract, so can clients.

ckaihatsu wrote:Again, you're being detached and talking apples-and-oranges. There's nothing to indicate that (Marxist) *class* is defined solely by income levels -- you're again devolving to *empiricism*, meaning *demographics*, instead of attempting to see *why* the income inequality (and wealth inequality) dynamic persists.

Here's a reminder of how class is defined -- by the relative share of surplus labor value, in the production of commodities:

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

I never said so, although you introduced the income variable yourself into the mix by trying to draw a distinction between AirBnB hosts who rent a single room and those who rent several homes. Much of the Marxian dynamics doesn't work well when workers out earn the capitalists they work for.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're switching contexts again, because your claim that hunter-gatherer existence was *laborious*, is *unsupported* by the evidence.

How so?

Wiki wrote:Sahlins' theory has been challenged by a number of scholars in the field of anthropology and archaeology. Many have criticized his work for only including time spent hunting and gathering while omitting time spent on collecting firewood, food preparation, etc. Other scholars also assert that hunter-gatherer societies were not "affluent" but suffered from extremely high infant mortality, frequent disease, and perennial warfare.[9][10] This appears to be true not only of historical foraging cultures, but also prehistoric and primeval ones.

David Kaplan collected references to several problems with the "original affluent society" theory and especially the McCarthy and McArthur and Lee studies, including the definitions of "affluence," "work," and "leisure," the nutritional adequacy of the hunter-gatherer's diet, and the occurrence of "demand-sharing," the constant pressure to share as a disincentive to increased effort.[11]

It's amazing I even need to bother posting the above.

ckaihatsu wrote:Actually, *no* Marxist is 'dramatizing' anything. See the 'Labor & Capital' diagram above -- it's as *didactic* as anything can get, and definitely *not* dramatic.

If you are saying hunter-gatherers were affluent in any meaningful sense, I'd say that's quite a dramatization.

ckaihatsu wrote:Technology -- the 'material conditions of production' -- is only *half* of the equation:

Indeed, but without it the rest simply can't happen. This includes e.g. the ideological and cultural changes.

ckaihatsu wrote:This historical event, plus the material quality of storable (goods) versus non-storable (services), has *nothing* to do with the point of this segment, which is that both goods and services are both *commodities* and produce new economic value -- unlike *rentier* capital, which does *not* produce commodities or any new values.

Yet the their production and consumption works differently for both, and that has practical consequences. It's not just an arbitrary distinction.

ckaihatsu wrote:And plenty of services do *not* require in-person physicality, like online (automated by-definition) services -- which are *so* hyper-leveraged by digital technology that many are even *free*, and do not require ongoing labor per-user *whatsoever*, like email, search engines, weather forecasts, etc. -- also consider *utilities* like electricity, natural gas, gasoline, etc., in which the service-providing of them is *also* highly automated with minimal 'in-person' labor required for the provision of the service to *numerous* customers and end-users.

But those services are not as labor intensive as those who do, and therefore much of the current labor relations take place in industries that rely on physicality.

ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah, it's different *these* days:

Not sure about what point you are trying to make here.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay -- so who *owns* it, who *manages* it, and how are the workers there getting paid?

Workers, workers through voting, normally they would be paid equally at the time.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, Okishio addresses the *ground-level* business-by-business perspective, to say that one business' use of innovation in an elite way confers a business *advantage* over the competition -- it's *temporary*, though, as you've acknowledged, and, on-the-whole *no* business benefits in the long-term, because of the tendency for *everyone's* rate of profit to decline, throughout the entire industry, as such innovations become common practice and are thus no longer advantageous.

Cue my point about having a continuous stream of innovations.

ckaihatsu wrote:The reality that you're describing, but ignoring the implications-of, is Marx's declining rate of profit.

How so?

ckaihatsu wrote:You're not recognizing the crucial distinction here -- 'self-employed' means 'self-exploiting' because the 'self-employed' are bringing their own *infrastructure* and *resources* into the operations of the *job*, which an employee typically doesn't have to do, since those components are historically the functions / investments of *capital*.

And, for those who have a cushion of cash or capital -- capitalists -- there *is no* 'job' -- the "job", so-to-speak, is to look after the *capital*, because that's what's producing *revenue*, or gains, if handled correctly. But the "job", or "work" itself, regarding the capital, isn't itself producing any new commodities or economic value -- it's just the *overhead* of looking after the capital, so that it functions to the benefit of the capital-owner.

How many people actually get to be capitalists in that way?

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, noted.

Do you think that newfound possibility represents a change in labor relations?

ckaihatsu wrote:*Or*, instead of the two having to be a trade-off, why isn't there counter-austerity-type *support* for those who have employment, and/or need employment, the way that Wall Street enjoys government injections of billions of dollars per month -- ?

Certainly government has the most appropriate existing infrastructure and organization for providing *job support* to those who need it for living their daily lives, and yet such support doesn't exist these days. Why isn't there job security *and* flexibility, at the same time?

You mean like the Danish flexicurity system?

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, this has *nothing* to do with Marxism, and you're far from clear in describing how profit maximization utilizes the dynamic / practice of marginalism.

It does because a comparison of marginal quantities (marginal income = marginal cost) is the first order condition of the equation to solve the profit maximization problem. Just like a similar comparison of marginal quantities and another first order condition, since it's a different problem, determines a representative agent's demands for each good and service.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175263

By ckaihatsu - 02 Jun 2021 05:43

- 02 Jun 2021 05:43 #15175263

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're *digressing* again -- the topic of this segment has been about whether an individual working for Uber or AirBnB is an employee, or an independent business.

A business, outsourcing to such a broker, is implicitly paying *per head* for the business brought in via Uber or AirBnB (etc.)

The *revenue* comes from paying customers, so *those* are the clients, and *not* the individual driver / proprietor, or the driving / lodging *business*, since those are the *providers* of the service, not the customers.

For the sake of clarity we could say that the service providers are the *retail* end of the transportation or lodging service, while the Uber / AirBnB brokerage is the *wholesale* end of the transportation or lodging service, respectively.

Regarding the issue of employee-or-vendor, I'll reiterate that we can go by the yardstick of the provider's pre-existing *business* / capital / client-list, *before* signing on with the brokerage. Small-scale involvement, as with one's own vehicle or dwelling, would make one's role that of an *employee*, functionally, while an investor in their own business, particularly if they're hiring / exploiting outside labor, means that it's definitely a business.

wat0n wrote:
I'm not "digressing", it's actually a fairly cogent idea: Since when do workers pay commission to their bosses to work?

You're correct to imply that workers *shouldn't* be paying a commission to their bosses to work, so maybe the 'cut' that brokers like AirBnB and Uber take from effectively-employee drivers and proprietors (etc.) isn't 'just-business' but is downright *abusive*, along with being economically exploitative, for those who function as employees in their work roles as drivers and proprietors.

---

wat0n wrote:
Or maybe that guy simply decided to take more risk than the person who simply rents a single room.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Again, you're making my point for me that those who do *not* invest capital are functionally *employees*, and not business owners.

wat0n wrote:
How so?

The person who simply rents a single room, and does not hire outside labor, is effectively an employee on their own grounds, since they thought to just get some extra income, and they're the one who has to *maintain* and do *upkeep* for the sake of the service they're providing, that of *lodging*.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Think about it -- the service provider is shouldering the expenses of *infrastructure* (dwelling or vehicle), plus *operating expenses* (heat, utilities, gasoline, maintenance), *plus* their own labor for cleaning and upkeep, *in addition to* the regular labor-power of driving or providing hospitality, respectively, for the actual *service*, as advertised. Their share of the revenue comes through the *broker*, so there's nothing to guarantee that they're being properly compensated for all of these material inputs that they're providing, as the retail service to customers / clients.

In other words there's the real possibility that the provider here, as a non-business individual, could actually suffer a *loss* through providing this service, because of the onerous overhead for what is functionally a *job*, with the job *tasks* being handed-down from the company. Now what regular job can you think of in which the employee is at the risk of *losing money*, like getting a negative-paycheck -- ?

wat0n wrote:
None, which is precisely why it makes little sense to claim AirBnB hosts and Uber drivers are dependent workers. Independent contractors can actually post a net loss as part of the contract, so can clients.

Clients wouldn't be posting a 'net loss' because clients are the paying customers, and are *not* the retailers of transit and lodging.

You're not disputing that a driver / host / etc. could actually post a net loss, meaning that if they need to *live* off of this 'independent-contractor' *job*, then their individual *life and livelihood* is being decreased by this employment, just as if they were to receive a negative-paycheck from a regular job.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Again, you're being detached and talking apples-and-oranges. There's nothing to indicate that (Marxist) *class* is defined solely by income levels -- you're again devolving to *empiricism*, meaning *demographics*, instead of attempting to see *why* the income inequality (and wealth inequality) dynamic persists.

Here's a reminder of how class is defined -- by the relative share of surplus labor value, in the production of commodities:

[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show

wat0n wrote:
I never said so, although you introduced the income variable yourself into the mix by trying to draw a distinction between AirBnB hosts who rent a single room and those who rent several homes. Much of the Marxian dynamics doesn't work well when workers out earn the capitalists they work for.

No, I'm discussing 'income' for varying types of service providers according to the simple metric of how much they have invested in their *business*, if any. For the average 'extra-income' person they're *self-exploiting* by having to kick-in their own assets just to effectively work a job.

If the actual on-the-ground service provider out-earns the broker that they work for, per-hour of their own labor, then *good* -- they *should* because they're the ones providing the labor, infrastructure, resources, and upkeep for the sake of the service-product. If they *don't* get the full value back of what they're materially providing then the economic relationship is one of *abuse* as well as being economically exploitative.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're switching contexts again, because your claim that hunter-gatherer existence was *laborious*, is *unsupported* by the evidence.

wat0n wrote:
How so?

Wiki wrote:
Sahlins' theory has been challenged by a number of scholars in the field of anthropology and archaeology. Many have criticized his work for only including time spent hunting and gathering while omitting time spent on collecting firewood, food preparation, etc. Other scholars also assert that hunter-gatherer societies were not "affluent" but suffered from extremely high infant mortality, frequent disease, and perennial warfare.[9][10] This appears to be true not only of historical foraging cultures, but also prehistoric and primeval ones.

David Kaplan collected references to several problems with the "original affluent society" theory and especially the McCarthy and McArthur and Lee studies, including the definitions of "affluence," "work," and "leisure," the nutritional adequacy of the hunter-gatherer's diet, and the occurrence of "demand-sharing," the constant pressure to share as a disincentive to increased effort.[11]

wat0n wrote:
It's amazing I even need to bother posting the above.

'Amazing' -- to have the collection of research around the topic of the prehistorical past?

You sound easily *floored*, for whatever reason, by basic scientific inquiry.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Actually, *no* Marxist is 'dramatizing' anything. See the 'Labor & Capital' diagram above -- it's as *didactic* as anything can get, and definitely *not* dramatic.

wat0n wrote:
If you are saying hunter-gatherers were affluent in any meaningful sense, I'd say that's quite a dramatization.

Still not a dramatization -- it's either *accurate*, or it isn't.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Technology -- the 'material conditions of production' -- is only *half* of the equation:

Historical materialism, also known as the materialist conception of history, is a methodology used by scientific socialist and Marxist historiographers that focuses on human societies and their development through history, arguing that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideals. This was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) as the "materialist conception of history".[1] It is principally a theory of history which asserts that the material conditions of a society's mode of production, or in Marxist terms the union of a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development.

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

wat0n wrote:
Indeed, but without it the rest simply can't happen. This includes e.g. the ideological and cultural changes.

Actually the 'other half' isn't so much ideological and cultural as much as it's empirical *social organization*, for whatever reason, whether that's class-motivated, or not.

And you have the *causality* backwards -- it's due to social organization in the first place that technology is even *possible* at all.

The origins of our species go much further back into the mists of time than 100,000 years. Our distant ancestors evolved out of a species of ape which lived some four or five million years ago in parts of Africa. For some unknown reason members of this species gave up living in trees, as do our closest animal relatives, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo (often called the ‘pygmy chimpanzee’), and took to walking upright. They were able to survive in their new terrain by cooperating more than any other species of mammal, working together to make rudimentary tools (as chimps sometimes do) to dig up roots, reach high berries, gather grubs and insects, kill small animals and frighten off predators. The premium was on cooperation with each other, not competition against one another. Those who could not learn to adopt such forms of cooperative labour, and the new patterns of mental behaviour that went with them, died out. Those who could survived and reproduced.

Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 4

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
This historical event, plus the material quality of storable (goods) versus non-storable (services), has *nothing* to do with the point of this segment, which is that both goods and services are both *commodities* and produce new economic value -- unlike *rentier* capital, which does *not* produce commodities or any new values.

wat0n wrote:
Yet the their production and consumption works differently for both, and that has practical consequences. It's not just an arbitrary distinction.

If you want to explore encyclopedia entries for 'production' and 'consumption', go right ahead -- keep us updated here on this thread, please.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
And plenty of services do *not* require in-person physicality, like online (automated by-definition) services -- which are *so* hyper-leveraged by digital technology that many are even *free*, and do not require ongoing labor per-user *whatsoever*, like email, search engines, weather forecasts, etc. -- also consider *utilities* like electricity, natural gas, gasoline, etc., in which the service-providing of them is *also* highly automated with minimal 'in-person' labor required for the provision of the service to *numerous* customers and end-users.

wat0n wrote:
But those services are not as labor intensive as those who do, and therefore much of the current labor relations take place in industries that rely on physicality.

*All* industries rely on 'physicality', in the sense that actual *workers* have to do *physical* tasks of one kind or another -- whether blue-collar, white-collar, or pink-collar -- and the nature of the work done has nothing to do with the balance of class forces, or 'labor relations', if you like.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Yeah, it's different *these* days:

Strike at a G.M. Parts Plant Is Affecting Much of Company

By Keith Bradsher
March 8, 1996

General AMotors assembly plants began running out of brakes and shutting down today, as a three-day strike at two brake parts factories in Dayton, Ohio, threatened to cripple car and truck production from the world's largest auto maker.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/08/us/s ... mpany.html

wat0n wrote:
Not sure about what point you are trying to make here.

If you need it spelled-out for you, the point is that reduced inventories means that supply-chains are more vulnerable to work stoppages, even for lack of smaller parts, because of the dearth of redundant / auxiliary supplies on-hand, which would require non-performing capital outlays.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay -- so who *owns* it, who *manages* it, and how are the workers there getting paid?

wat0n wrote:
Workers, workers through voting, normally they would be paid equally at the time.

Got any *source* material here that addresses my questions?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, Okishio addresses the *ground-level* business-by-business perspective, to say that one business' use of innovation in an elite way confers a business *advantage* over the competition -- it's *temporary*, though, as you've acknowledged, and, on-the-whole *no* business benefits in the long-term, because of the tendency for *everyone's* rate of profit to decline, throughout the entire industry, as such innovations become common practice and are thus no longer advantageous.

wat0n wrote:
Cue my point about having a continuous stream of innovations.

You're *still* missing the point -- you're *aching* to dictate the scope of examination according to your immediate willful wants for argumentation, but the real world doesn't work that way. Business enterprises work according to the larger economic dynamics of supply-and-demand, so if one business has an innovative advantage, all competitors are going to want to get that same innovation, and once they do, there's no more advantage to *anyone* in that industry.

Another way of saying it is that you're forgetting that a half-full glass of water is also half-empty.

---

wat0n wrote:
That behavior has consequences for capitalism as a whole, though, since the buyer would be implementing this innovation, thereby helping to spread it to the rest of the economy. As such, it also has subtle political consequences as well.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Innovation fetishist.

wat0n wrote:
It's just a reality.

ckaihatsu wrote:
The reality that you're describing, but ignoring the implications-of, is Marx's declining rate of profit.

wat0n wrote:
How so?

Well, why do prices tend to decline once a market becomes saturated, followed by declining rates of profit?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're not recognizing the crucial distinction here -- 'self-employed' means 'self-exploiting' because the 'self-employed' are bringing their own *infrastructure* and *resources* into the operations of the *job*, which an employee typically doesn't have to do, since those components are historically the functions / investments of *capital*.

And, for those who have a cushion of cash or capital -- capitalists -- there *is no* 'job' -- the "job", so-to-speak, is to look after the *capital*, because that's what's producing *revenue*, or gains, if handled correctly. But the "job", or "work" itself, regarding the capital, isn't itself producing any new commodities or economic value -- it's just the *overhead* of looking after the capital, so that it functions to the benefit of the capital-owner.

wat0n wrote:
How many people actually get to be capitalists in that way?

Try Wikipedia.

---

wat0n wrote:
Is it so unrealistic? There are now plenty of jobs that are remote, and that seems likely to stay.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, noted.

wat0n wrote:
Do you think that newfound possibility represents a change in labor relations?

It certainly looks that way from what I've seen reported in the media.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
*Or*, instead of the two having to be a trade-off, why isn't there counter-austerity-type *support* for those who have employment, and/or need employment, the way that Wall Street enjoys government injections of billions of dollars per month -- ?

Certainly government has the most appropriate existing infrastructure and organization for providing *job support* to those who need it for living their daily lives, and yet such support doesn't exist these days. Why isn't there job security *and* flexibility, at the same time?

wat0n wrote:
You mean like the Danish flexicurity system?

Hmmmm, I'm unfamiliar with that -- got any source material?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, this has *nothing* to do with Marxism, and you're far from clear in describing how profit maximization utilizes the dynamic / practice of marginalism.

wat0n wrote:
It does because a comparison of marginal quantities (marginal income = marginal cost) is the first order condition of the equation to solve the profit maximization problem. Just like a similar comparison of marginal quantities and another first order condition, since it's a different problem, determines a representative agent's demands for each good and service.

I think you're confusing main-and-marginal, though -- an agent's *initial* 'demands' / requirements for particular goods and services is the 'main' component, and marginalism is unable to speak to *that* aspect since it's concerned with each *additional* quantity of an already-established, *pre-defined* good and/or service in the first place.

Wanna take another stab at it?

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175269

By wat0n - 02 Jun 2021 06:27

- 02 Jun 2021 06:27 #15175269

ckaihatsu wrote:You're correct to imply that workers *shouldn't* be paying a commission to their bosses to work, so maybe the 'cut' that brokers like AirBnB and Uber take from effectively-employee drivers and proprietors (etc.) isn't 'just-business' but is downright *abusive*, along with being economically exploitative, for those who function as employees in their work roles as drivers and proprietors.

Or maybe you're just misunderstanding what the nature of their relationship is, because you're analyzing it from the wrong perspective.

ckaihatsu wrote:The person who simply rents a single room, and does not hire outside labor, is effectively an employee on their own grounds, since they thought to just get some extra income, and they're the one who has to *maintain* and do *upkeep* for the sake of the service they're providing, that of *lodging*.

Or maybe he's actually acting as a small business, you know. Indeed, as you said this guy is the one who owns the capital, not AirBnB.

ckaihatsu wrote:Clients wouldn't be posting a 'net loss' because clients are the paying customers, and are *not* the retailers of transit and lodging.

You're not disputing that a driver / host / etc. could actually post a net loss, meaning that if they need to *live* off of this 'independent-contractor' *job*, then their individual *life and livelihood* is being decreased by this employment, just as if they were to receive a negative-paycheck from a regular job.

Business clients can indeed pose a loss, what are you talking about?

As for the second paragraph, it's part of the nature of being a contractor and not a wage worker: You are taking risks wage workers don't take, but the flipside is that you are more independent.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, I'm discussing 'income' for varying types of service providers according to the simple metric of how much they have invested in their *business*, if any. For the average 'extra-income' person they're *self-exploiting* by having to kick-in their own assets just to effectively work a job.

If the actual on-the-ground service provider out-earns the broker that they work for, per-hour of their own labor, then *good* -- they *should* because they're the ones providing the labor, infrastructure, resources, and upkeep for the sake of the service-product. If they *don't* get the full value back of what they're materially providing then the economic relationship is one of *abuse* as well as being economically exploitative.

So a businessman who loses money is being exploited by... Whom?

ckaihatsu wrote:'Amazing' -- to have the collection of research around the topic of the prehistorical past?

You sound easily *floored*, for whatever reason, by basic scientific inquiry.

You mean the one that questions that silly theory about hunter gatherers?

ckaihatsu wrote:Still not a dramatization -- it's either *accurate*, or it isn't.

If you say so...

ckaihatsu wrote:Actually the 'other half' isn't so much ideological and cultural as much as it's empirical *social organization*, for whatever reason, whether that's class-motivated, or not.

And you have the *causality* backwards -- it's due to social organization in the first place that technology is even *possible* at all.

Causality goes both ways here, honestly. Technological changes quite evidently affects social organization as well.

ckaihatsu wrote:If you want to explore encyclopedia entries for 'production' and 'consumption', go right ahead -- keep us updated here on this thread, please.

Not sure about what this response is supposed to mean.

ckaihatsu wrote:*All* industries rely on 'physicality', in the sense that actual *workers* have to do *physical* tasks of one kind or another -- whether blue-collar, white-collar, or pink-collar -- and the nature of the work done has nothing to do with the balance of class forces, or 'labor relations', if you like.

Right but some are way more intensive in it than others.

ckaihatsu wrote:If you need it spelled-out for you, the point is that reduced inventories means that supply-chains are more vulnerable to work stoppages, even for lack of smaller parts, because of the dearth of redundant / auxiliary supplies on-hand, which would require non-performing capital outlays.

Absolutely, but Thatcher did exactly the opposite since she was the one who picked up the fight with the miners, and won.

ckaihatsu wrote:Got any *source* material here that addresses my questions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kibbutz

ckaihatsu wrote:You're *still* missing the point -- you're *aching* to dictate the scope of examination according to your immediate willful wants for argumentation, but the real world doesn't work that way. Business enterprises work according to the larger economic dynamics of supply-and-demand, so if one business has an innovative advantage, all competitors are going to want to get that same innovation, and once they do, there's no more advantage to *anyone* in that industry.

Another way of saying it is that you're forgetting that a half-full glass of water is also half-empty.

Which is why some businesses will then try to come up with a new innovation, gain that temporary competitive advantage to pay for it and get profits, and then it will spread across the economy over time. Then the process will repeat, and is still repeating - although it should indeed stop at some point. When that happens, chances are that capitalism will have ran its course.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, why do prices tend to decline once a market becomes saturated, followed by declining rates of profit?

Although that's true, see above. The whole point is that as long as the process above takes place, diminishing returns will not hit (note that if these exist, then you can arrive to a result similar to the Marxian one).

ckaihatsu wrote:Try Wikipedia.

So not many?

ckaihatsu wrote:It certainly looks that way from what I've seen reported in the media.

I agree. It's hard to predict their full extent, though,

ckaihatsu wrote:Hmmmm, I'm unfamiliar with that -- got any source material?

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

It's a very interesting option, plenty of advantages although it is admittedly expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
I think you're confusing main-and-marginal, though -- an agent's *initial* 'demands' / requirements for particular goods and services is the 'main' component, and marginalism is unable to speak to *that* aspect since it's concerned with each *additional* quantity of an already-established, *pre-defined* good and/or service in the first place.

Wanna take another stab at it?[/quote]

I'm not. The marginal part is actually an optimization result, i.e. it has a mathematical justification.

Of course another question is just up to what extent businesses actually make decisions that way. In reality, businesses would not be able to tell you what their cost function is - they don't know. But this assumption of excessive knowledge is also an apparent weakness present in Marxian theory, particularly more formalized theory, and I say "apparent" because it's not as bad as it seems: As long as businesses are trying to maximize profits, they'll approach something that looks like the first order condition of marginal income (or revenue) = marginal cost.

Of course what "marginal revenue" actually consists of depends on the market structure. In a perfectly competitive market, it will just equal the price for instance. But this does not hold for e.g. a monopoly. That's where you begin to expand neoclassical theory to different situations and make assumptions about the industrial organization, and things can get quite interesting from there. It's a whole, huge, field in economics after all.

And what "marginal cost" consists of will depend on technology, the industrial organization of factor markets (labor markets, capital markets, etc) among other things. And the latter are also whole, huge, fields in economics although labor has become way, way broader than simply being about labor markets.

Re: A question for our Marxists#15175417

By ckaihatsu - 02 Jun 2021 23:41

- 02 Jun 2021 23:41 #15175417

wat0n wrote:
I'm not "digressing", it's actually a fairly cogent idea: Since when do workers pay commission to their bosses to work?

ckaihatsu wrote:
You're correct to imply that workers *shouldn't* be paying a commission to their bosses to work, so maybe the 'cut' that brokers like AirBnB and Uber take from effectively-employee drivers and proprietors (etc.) isn't 'just-business' but is downright *abusive*, along with being economically exploitative, for those who function as employees in their work roles as drivers and proprietors.

wat0n wrote:
Or maybe you're just misunderstanding what the nature of their relationship is, because you're analyzing it from the wrong perspective.

Okay, then, what *did* you mean with that statement?

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
The person who simply rents a single room, and does not hire outside labor, is effectively an employee on their own grounds, since they thought to just get some extra income, and they're the one who has to *maintain* and do *upkeep* for the sake of the service they're providing, that of *lodging*.

wat0n wrote:
Or maybe he's actually acting as a small business, you know. Indeed, as you said this guy is the one who owns the capital, not AirBnB.

Well, this is the issue that's in front of us -- sure, a host has a better material position than someone hired to *clean* the place, because the wage worker presumably doesn't have a place of *their* own to lease out, similarly, and so has to provide cleaning services to *others*, for *wages*.

So in that sense someone who's able to lease out real estate is obviously leveraging *capital*, but it may be to such a small extent, with the capital frozen-up in that real estate for one's own housing needs, that whatever revenue is received from leasing it out is really effectively more like a *wage*, for lodging / maintenance / upkeep / cleaning, for one's own ongoing personal expenses, moreso than being a serious 'small business', for profit-making. (Ditto for driving for hire, etc.)

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
Clients wouldn't be posting a 'net loss' because clients are the paying customers, and are *not* the retailers of transit and lodging.

You're not disputing that a driver / host / etc. could actually post a net loss, meaning that if they need to *live* off of this 'independent-contractor' *job*, then their individual *life and livelihood* is being decreased by this employment, just as if they were to receive a negative-paycheck from a regular job.

wat0n wrote:
Business clients can indeed pose a loss, what are you talking about?

Who exactly do you consider to be the 'business clients', and how exactly would they post a loss when they're not involved in providing hosting or driving services?

wat0n wrote:
As for the second paragraph, it's part of the nature of being a contractor and not a wage worker: You are taking risks wage workers don't take, but the flipside is that you are more independent.

The *issue* here, though, is that regardless of a participant's *intentions*, they may *find themselves* to be in a grossly disadvantageous material position in relation to Uber or AirBnB, and so the situation / relation may be in need of *regulation* so that people looking for a little 'extra income' don't wind up losing personal life and living wherewithal when they were reasonably expecting to *make money*, as one does in a job -- for them the situation *most resembles* a job, empirically, since they're not necessarily in a 'small business' mindset and motivation.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
No, I'm discussing 'income' for varying types of service providers according to the simple metric of how much they have invested in their *business*, if any. For the average 'extra-income' person they're *self-exploiting* by having to kick-in their own assets just to effectively work a job.

If the actual on-the-ground service provider out-earns the broker that they work for, per-hour of their own labor, then *good* -- they *should* because they're the ones providing the labor, infrastructure, resources, and upkeep for the sake of the service-product. If they *don't* get the full value back of what they're materially providing then the economic relationship is one of *abuse* as well as being economically exploitative.

wat0n wrote:
So a businessman who loses money is being exploited by... Whom?

In *this* case it's not even clear that the 'extra-income' person is *in* a small-business mentality or mode of operations -- they're reasonably expecting some *extra income*, considering that they're willing to do the work, and even to include some personal property that they depend on for their own daily life and living. Why should they be expected to risk a *loss* of that in some unstated rough-and-tumble market environment when they were sold on participation according to the 'extra income' promise -- ?

You're presuming that these 'extra income' types are all conforming to your 'businessman' mentality, when they may just be looking for some 'light, flexible employment' using their own equipment, and are *not* looking for competitive swimming in a sea of sharks.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
'Amazing' -- to have the collection of research around the topic of the prehistorical past?

You sound easily *floored*, for whatever reason, by basic scientific inquiry.

wat0n wrote:
You mean the one that questions that silly theory about hunter gatherers?

No, *you're* the name-caller. (grin)

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ckaihatsu wrote:
Still not a dramatization -- it's either *accurate*, or it isn't.

wat0n wrote:
If you say so...

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ckaihatsu wrote:
Actually the 'other half' isn't so much ideological and cultural as much as it's empirical *social organization*, for whatever reason, whether that's class-motivated, or not.

And you have the *causality* backwards -- it's due to social organization in the first place that technology is even *possible* at all.

wat0n wrote:
Causality goes both ways here, honestly. Technological changes quite evidently affects social organization as well.

Okay, I won't bicker, but I'll note that society and *civilization* require a certain 'baseline' level of social cohesion and cooperation, which, in modern times, means a sound *economy* / economics -- when the capitalist economy *tanks*, as it did in 2008-2009 and then in early 2020, the bourgeois U.S. government had to *scramble* just to keep the shit afloat.

No economy = no technology = no civilization.

---

ckaihatsu wrote:
If you want to explore encyclopedia entries for 'production' and 'consumption', go right ahead -- keep us updated here on this thread, please.

wat0n wrote:
Not sure about what this response is supposed to mean.

You could always *ask*, since I'm right here.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
*All* industries rely on 'physicality', in the sense that actual *workers* have to do *physical* tasks of one kind or another -- whether blue-collar, white-collar, or pink-collar -- and the nature of the work done has nothing to do with the balance of class forces, or 'labor relations', if you like.

wat0n wrote:
Right but some are way more intensive in it than others.

(Feel free to elaborate.)

My point remains intact that many goods and services are *so* labor-leveraged and automated that they're either *free* or effectively free, like email, Wikipedia, the weather forecast, some sheets of paper, the news, etc.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
If you need it spelled-out for you, the point is that reduced inventories means that supply-chains are more vulnerable to work stoppages, even for lack of smaller parts, because of the dearth of redundant / auxiliary supplies on-hand, which would require non-performing capital outlays.

wat0n wrote:
Absolutely, but Thatcher did exactly the opposite since she was the one who picked up the fight with the miners, and won.

And I replied that times are *different* now, and I provided a counter-example, from the news from 1996. (Would you like to repeat all of this a *second* time -- ?)

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ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay -- so who *owns* it, who *manages* it, and how are the workers there getting paid?

wat0n wrote:
Workers, workers through voting, normally they would be paid equally at the time.

ckaihatsu wrote:
Got any *source* material here that addresses my questions?

wat0n wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kibbutz

In 2010, there were 270 kibbutzim in Israel. Their factories and farms account for 9% of Israel's industrial output, worth US$8 billion, and 40% of its agricultural output, worth over $1.7 billion.[4] Some kibbutzim had also developed substantial high-tech and military industries. For example, in 2010, Kibbutz Sasa, containing some 200 members, generated $850 million in annual revenue from its military-plastics industry.[5]

Okay, thanks. This information is insufficient for me to determine if the workers are being economically *exploited*, like all other wage workers are, everywhere else in the world. It appears that kibbutz workers *are* exploited since the economics are touted as being very *profitable* for the enterprises themselves, which, by definition, would require the laborers to be exploited of their surplus labor value.

But I can't say for certain unless I see information that speaks to the specifics of wages, revenue, and profits.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
You're *still* missing the point -- you're *aching* to dictate the scope of examination according to your immediate willful wants for argumentation, but the real world doesn't work that way. Business enterprises work according to the larger economic dynamics of supply-and-demand, so if one business has an innovative advantage, all competitors are going to want to get that same innovation, and once they do, there's no more advantage to *anyone* in that industry.

Another way of saying it is that you're forgetting that a half-full glass of water is also half-empty.

wat0n wrote:
Which is why some businesses will then try to come up with a new innovation, gain that temporary competitive advantage to pay for it and get profits, and then it will spread across the economy over time. Then the process will repeat, and is still repeating - although it should indeed stop at some point. When that happens, chances are that capitalism will have ran its course.

Okay -- back to leapfrogging at the *societal* scale.

For the individual / specific *business*, the *downside* is the falling prices regime, the drying-up of markets due to market saturation, and the declining rate of profit, which may or may *not* revive for the individual / particular business with the possible advent of some new innovation.

I'll actually give the historical example of the *United States*, and then, later, *Japan*, since both went through periods of plummeting market share for their industrially manufactured products, due to new competition from China, and then South Korea. Neither country has ever really fully economically recovered from those catastrophic events, so there's no happy intranational technological 'leapfrogging' for either of *those* two advanced countries.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, why do prices tend to decline once a market becomes saturated, followed by declining rates of profit?

wat0n wrote:
Although

wat0n wrote:
that's true,

Okay -- I'm going to *hold* you to this admission. (grin)

wat0n wrote:
see above. The whole point is that as long as the process above takes place, diminishing returns will not hit (note that if these exist, then you can arrive to a result similar to the Marxian one).

Can't you see that you're being *presumptuous*, though, in expecting / relating that 'leapfrogging' will apply evenly to *all* businesses, and to *all* nations, against the onslaught of declining rates of profit and up-and-coming competition from newer, more-contemporized players in the market -- ?

You're on the verge of touting an outright Panglossian *mythology* of 'a rising tide will lift all boats'. No. It doesn't work that way -- ask Lehman Brothers (etc.).

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wat0n wrote:
How many people actually get to be capitalists in that way?

ckaihatsu wrote:
Try Wikipedia.

wat0n wrote:
So not many?

I'm saying that I'm not here to entertain your academic trivia-type questions, so you may want to go do your own research to satisfy whatever whims you may have for demographic information.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
It certainly looks that way from what I've seen reported in the media.

wat0n wrote:
I agree. It's hard to predict their full extent, though,

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ckaihatsu wrote:
Hmmmm, I'm unfamiliar with that -- got any source material?

wat0n wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity

It's a very interesting option, plenty of advantages although it is admittedly expensive.

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

Okay, I'm all for any reforms that are soundly anti-austerity in practice.

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ckaihatsu wrote:
I think you're confusing main-and-marginal, though -- an agent's *initial* 'demands' / requirements for particular goods and services is the 'main' component, and marginalism is unable to speak to *that* aspect since it's concerned with each *additional* quantity of an already-established, *pre-defined* good and/or service in the first place.

Wanna take another stab at it?

wat0n wrote:
I'm not. The marginal part is actually an optimization result, i.e. it has a mathematical justification.

Of course another question is just up to what extent businesses actually make decisions that way. In reality, businesses would not be able to tell you what their cost function is - they don't know. But this assumption of excessive knowledge is also an apparent weakness present in Marxian theory, particularly more formalized theory, and I say "apparent" because it's not as bad as it seems: As long as businesses are trying to maximize profits, they'll approach something that looks like the first order condition of marginal income (or revenue) = marginal cost.

Of course what "marginal revenue" actually consists of depends on the market structure. In a perfectly competitive market, it will just equal the price for instance. But this does not hold for e.g. a monopoly. That's where you begin to expand neoclassical theory to different situations and make assumptions about the industrial organization, and things can get quite interesting from there. It's a whole, huge, field in economics after all.

And what "marginal cost" consists of will depend on technology, the industrial organization of factor markets (labor markets, capital markets, etc) among other things. And the latter are also whole, huge, fields in economics although labor has become way, way broader than simply being about labor markets.

Okay, my point stands that marginalism is *still* entirely about consuming / consumption / procurement, whether that's consumer goods for the consumer, or procurements for the corporation.

I find it amusing that you're running interference for corporate boardroom decision-making, making it sound as though the numbers themselves just *somehow* autonomously drive the spreadsheets without any human intervention.

It's fun.

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