Wellsy wrote:
Therefore, did our capitalist make a mistake in introducing the innovation? Not at all. For a transitional period—perhaps a prolonged transitional period—our innovating capitalist made a super-profit above and beyond the previous rate of profit. (4) Once production prices have adjusted to the new lower value of the commodity, a fellow capitalist in the same line of production who has not copied the innovation ends up with an even lower rate of profit and quite likely an outright loss. In the case of a loss, our laggard will lose all his or her capital sooner or later.
I'm going to paraphrase Okishio here:
Those companies that are winning the footrace, for a time, against all other competitors, are winning the footrace.
Julian658 wrote:
Today homeless people have free cell phones. All of that in less than 40 years. If this trend continues the poor will have access to the same luxuries the rich have and it will be FREE!
Julian, the political-economy issue is not simply with existing wealth, and the current class-based unequal distribution of such, but it's moreso about the *control* of society's *ongoing* industrial mass production. Those who do the actual work / production, the workers, should be the ones to collectively control how such massive productivity is directed, and to what ends. (Means-and-ends.)
Means and Ends CHART
---
Julian658 wrote:
The downside of giving people free stuff is a dystopic world where people have no purpose to exist.
Now who's being materialistic -- as though a person's life can be defined and lived entirely through material possessions -- !
wat0n wrote:
If you want to keep the distinction, however, one would then run into the issue of what do you mean about "profit" here. Are you measuring it in terms of use or exchange value?
Profit *can't* be measured in terms of use values -- are you implying some series of anarchronistic *barters* in which one gains from favorable trades, to arrive at a much larger commodity of one's objective?
There's *this* example, but it's obviously propagandistic since it doesn't record the incidental *transaction costs* in any kind of way, nor does it formalize any *socio-political* capital / social capital, as from access to media outlets / celebrity / publicity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_red_paperclipProfit, by definition, is strictly in terms of *exchange values*, which are discrete formal *quantities* of abstracted valuations.
wat0n wrote:
If the prices of commodities tend to go down and unit use values, why wouldn't the capitalist be better off even if profits eventually go back to their normal levels or decrease?
You're forgetting that if commodity prices go down, so does sales revenue, and so then *profits* go down as well -- of course the capitalist *wishes* that profits would eventually go back to their 'normal' levels, for the sake of resumed or increased profits, but that's not what happens historically. Capitalism's inherent dynamic of *overproduction* causes diminished commodity exchange valuations, yielding a declining rate of profit, as already explained on this thread.
wat0n wrote:
I'm asking because it seems part of the criticism is claiming there would be deflation, but without taking the consequences of it to its full extent.
You mean 'devaluation' instead of 'deflation'. Decreasing commodity prices, from overproduction, is better known as 'depreciation', which is *not* deflation -- it's *devaluation*, meaning a relative *loss* of monetary value.
wat0n wrote:
it would also be possible for two different interpretations of Marx to be correct at the same time, even if they lead to different conclusions. Same could hold for other classical economists.
Also, black is white, and night is day. (Nice try, though.)
Julian658 wrote:
Authoritarian socialist nations did a great job with homelessness. They simply did not allow it.
True, in a way, but not in the derogatory meaning that you're connoting....
Homelessness in East Germany
by Lukas Gilbert | November 20th, 2019
There were hardly any homeless people in the GDR — the former East Germany — mostly because state officials put them in jail or in shabby accommodation. At the turn of the century, many East Germans ended up on the street in West Germany.
https://www.realchangenews.org/news/201 ... st-germany
---
blackjack21 wrote:
Many poor people have a better physical standard of living than kings of 200 years ago, but none of the agency or esteem. That's why I say part of the problem is socialism's close alliance with materialism and atheism. They ignore spirituality, agency, self-esteem in any meaningful sense. So cultural marxism ends up becoming something of a freak show holding up the alienated feelings of the transgender person imploring you to use certain pronouns while ignoring the huge problem of homelessness comorbid with drug addiction and mental illness.
Let's end poverty and homelessness, then we can casually discuss those other qualities.
Why *shouldn't* politeness and consideration of others' multicultural differences be a part of everyday and governmental civil society / civil rights -- ?
---
Ganeshas Rat wrote:
That's capitalism, and Gates, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, thousands of them, all are just faceless corrupt androids who introduce us to all flaws of socialism without any of its benefits.
Julian658 wrote:
Perhaps these are the same type of guys [Bezos and Gates] that were high up in the politburo. Some people are just good at thriving no matter where you put them.
The parallel between corporate internal structures and Stalinist-state internal bureaucratic hierarchies is an apt comparison.
Since the social role of capital is necessarily for social-organization (of production), those who benefit the most from private-sector corporate bureaucracies are essentially doing what Politburo-climber-types are doing -- organizing bureaucratically, for the sake of greater scales of coordination and production, for personal prestige and related perks.
---
Julian658 wrote:
Giving a free home to an addict will not work. This would also require a maid service to clean the house, a cook, a visiting nurse, periodic handy man assistance, ongoing in home psych care, etc. A free home for a lunatic will solve nothing.
Someone on another thread pointed out that what's *really* needed is Universal Basic Services, and not just lump-sum cash payments:
viewtopic.php?p=15145656#p15145656---
wat0n wrote:
Too bad he's dead, although I doubt he'd agree with your characterization of his work.
---
ckaihatsu wrote:
Overproduction with respect to market demand for any given item / commodity.
wat0n wrote:
When that happens, prices tend to go down (keeping money supply constant). So what? Why would that necessarily be troublesome?
You've been invoking Okishio in your attempts to deny capitalism's declining rate of profit -- prices that tend to head downward, due to capitalism's dynamic of overproduction, result in declining rates of profit.
---
ckaihatsu wrote:
Again, you're revealing your class bias -- you're only interested in post-production commodity *pricing*. Yes, such market pricing will become detached from prerequisite labor-value inputs, and will be subject to the fluctuating dynamic of market-based supply-and-demand. Such commodity-market pricing dynamics take place *after* the economics of producing the commodity in the first place take place.
wat0n wrote:
How is that class bias?
It's class bias because you're only concerned with addressing the 'exciting' and dramatic realm of finished-commodity fluctuating dynamics of market pricing, according to the balance of supply-and-demand, boosted by speculative bubbles like currently that of cryptocurrencies.
Meanwhile, the *original* valuation of the commodity -- what it cost to produce, from capital depreciation and exploited labor value, is *glossed over*, if not ignored altogether, in typical economics treatments. Bourgeois culture would rather *ignore* the fact of necessary labor inputs, and labor exploitation, in the commodity production process.
---
ckaihatsu wrote:
As usual you're forgetting / are-oblivious-to the *subject matter* at hand, in this case the distinction between machines, versus *people*.
In other words even if machines are "exploited" -- and the economics show that they're not, as others here have delineated -- it wouldn't matter because machines aren't *conscious* and *alive* the way people are. And the economics of capitalism show that, objectively / empirically, workers *are* exploited of their surplus labor value, in the production process, by capital.
wat0n wrote:
Normative, not positive. If the machines are exploited, then quite evidently the owner is if the capitalist doesn't own the machines.
Machines are *not alive*, and are *not exploited* -- and neither are owners. Owners are the *exploiters* of labor-power since, by definition, they're economically *benefitting* from their ownership of either rentier or equity capital, or both.
Rentier capital benefits by extracting mandatory rent payments or interest payments for the formalized parceling-out and leasing of socially-needed capital-based infrastructure such as land or capital, while *equity* capital benefits from the extraction of surplus *labor* value by exploiting workers in the commodity-production process.
---
Julian658 wrote:
Capitalism is not about ideology. Capitalism is about who can do the job for less. The end result is benefit to the consumer.
This is a quaint conception, related more to the primitive-accumulation era of capitalism, meaning late feudalism, or the rise of the merchant class -- these days capitalism is all about maximizing shareholder value, mostly through financialization, as in corporate stock buybacks:
How American CEOs got so rich
Julian658 wrote:
Man is an animal that makes bargains: no other animal does this - no dog exchanges bones with another. Adam Smith. As soon as someone does a better job than Amazon they will be out of business.
$100 million NJ deli linked to shell company E-Waste, whose stock has soared despite having no real business
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/21/100-mil ... waste.html