How did you become a socialist? - Page 14 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#15028458
Pants-of-dog wrote:And again you have failed to answer a basic question about aocialism.

What is "aocialism?"
Your apparent lack of knowledge about Marxism implies that.

Your lack of spelling implies that you don't know what socialism is.
#15028543
I know what the means of production are.

I know how they support the class system, and how it can be used as a tool to oppress people.

I know how the state could, but probably will not, function as a tool to dismantle capitalism.

I know that history is a repository of facts that can help us understand social phenomena.

But feel free to identify as a socialist. You seem like a very nationalist one.
#15028657
SSDR wrote:Different races/ethnicities have different standards and tastes. You cannot change that. Those differences are social borders, thus making your spouting neo Marxism useless.

Pants-of-dog wrote:But feel free to identify as a socialist. You seem like a very nationalist one
SSDR's view of race seems closest to that of Werner Sombart , yet even he acknowledged that an African could have a German spirit , and vice versa . https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Sombart#Late_career_and_National_Socialism So I feel that if anything , as far as I can make out , SSDR seems to me to be most closely characteristic of the Nouvelle Droit . P.S. As an aside , and in the interest of full disclosure , my one paternal first cousin has had a son to an African-American man . Plus , our family is in all likelihood " Black Dutch" . So this matter is somewhat personal for me .
#15028664
I became a socialist after being familiarized with Marxist labor theory. It’s elementary and makes an exceeding amount of sense. However, I’m not certain how socialism should best be implemented because the Soviet model collapsed, the Chinese model has betrayed socialism entirely, and parliamentary socialist movements consistently move towards becoming liberal capitalist parties.
#15028822
Bulaba Jones wrote:
I became a socialist after being familiarized with Marxist labor theory. It’s elementary and makes an exceeding amount of sense. However, I’m not certain how socialism should best be implemented


Bulaba Jones wrote:
because the Soviet model collapsed, the Chinese model has betrayed socialism entirely, and parliamentary socialist movements consistently move towards becoming liberal capitalist parties.



Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions
#15028901
Respectfully, my statement is rhetorical. I have no solution I’m confident in because while there are theoretical ideas and even some small-time concrete examples, I don’t think socialism can be implemented at the moment. There is an absence of a demand for it on a national scale anywhere in the West, and the state apparatus of any developed country (and their governing business interests) simply won’t allow it.

I don’t see it as a matter of “which ideas sound best,”but a matter of it having too many obstacles to overcome right now.
#15028934
Bulaba Jones wrote:I became a socialist after being familiarized with Marxist labor theory.

Which is wrong. Marx's "contribution" was to remove from classical economics the knowledge that the factory owner's role is entirely different from the landowner's role.
It’s elementary and makes an exceeding amount of sense.

It makes no sense. It just incorrectly blames the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker. That's all there is to it.
However, I’m not certain how socialism should best be implemented because the Soviet model collapsed,

Socialism can't work because it is inconsistent with objective reality.
the Chinese model has betrayed socialism entirely,

Socialism betrayed China.
and parliamentary socialist movements consistently move towards becoming liberal capitalist parties.

Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.
#15029001
Deutschmania wrote:SSDR's view of race seems closest to that of Werner Sombart

He is very intelligent.
SSDR seems to me to be most closely characteristic of the Nouvelle Droit.

I strongly dislike Antonio Gramsci. I am very much against the Third World. I am also a nationalist; I realize that there are differences between various nationalities and ethnic groups.
P.S. As an aside , and in the interest of full disclosure , my one paternal first cousin has had a son to an African-American man . Plus , our family is in all likelihood.

If I offended you then I apologize.
#15029089
Bulaba Jones wrote:
Respectfully, my statement is rhetorical. I have no solution I’m confident in because while there are theoretical ideas and even some small-time concrete examples, I don’t think socialism can be implemented at the moment. There is an absence of a demand for it on a national scale anywhere in the West, and the state apparatus of any developed country (and their governing business interests) simply won’t allow it.

I don’t see it as a matter of “which ideas sound best,”but a matter of it having too many obstacles to overcome right now.



I appreciate your thoroughness of thought and expression.

I'd like to point out that the Syrian international proxy war has morphed over to Yemen, and we have Sunni (Saudia Arabia), versus Shia (Iran), which has become the World War 3 of the current period.

It's for this reason alone that I think the topic of socialism is more relevant than ever, because what does the world gain from these unending global wars that are supposed to bring an end to conflict through clear and decisive dominance -- ? Even the U.S. at this point, the vaunted 'supercop' to the world, is at risk of being pulled into this current battlefield, though it's already decisively on the Saudi side.

I don't think that the U.S. should be backing the backward, aristocratic Saudi dynasties, but here we are. Socialism would overthrow all of this petro-imperialism, to situate the administration of the world's resources within the working class itself, once and for all.
#15029093
Truth To Power wrote:
Which is wrong. Marx's "contribution" was to remove from classical economics the knowledge that the factory owner's role is entirely different from the landowner's role.

It makes no sense. It just incorrectly blames the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker. That's all there is to it.



I've pointed out previously that libertarians like yourself are *living in the past*, with your insistence on the fantasy *family farm* agricultural model.

By glossing over modern *factory* production -- today's norm, even for agriculture -- you're trying to pretend that all that matters is the land, when in fact it's the *mass production of commodities*, as off the assembly line, that's at stake for a current world population of *billions* that all need to eat and drink, have housing, transportation, etc.


Truth To Power wrote:
Socialism can't work because it is inconsistent with objective reality.



Incorrect. See the point, above, that I just made, as a counter-argument.


Truth To Power wrote:
Socialism betrayed China.



Mao could have done a *lot* better, granted, but he was ultimately revisionist in his politics, anyway, though solidly anti-imperialist.


Truth To Power wrote:
Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



Well, the landowner and the factory owner are both *ownership*, obviously, but the difference between the two is a matter of rentier capital versus *equity* capital, respectively.

Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital), which confers the reward of *interest* and *rent collection* for such asset-holding, which is a *drain* / cost to funds required to *pay* such interest and rents to the asset-holder. Also note that the (land) asset itself is economically *non-productive*, even if farming is done on it, because people need to eat food, regardless, so that they can work modern jobs that *are* productive to the economy.

On the other hand, *equity* capital *can* contribute to social production since it uses speculative investments (part of capitalism) to exploit labor, to produce commodities for consumption, unlike land's feudal-like parasitism in the economy.

Your conflating of socialists with capitalists is erroneous since socialists look- and struggle-for the *overthrow* of commodity-based social relations (as over commodity production), to a worker-*collectivist* social order, post-capitalism.

And I just explained the objective economic difference between the landowner and the factory owner. You're barely even a libertarian with this line of yours, and you sound much more like a feudalist-reactionary instead, maybe of the kind of Nepal or Tibet.
#15029692
ckaihatsu wrote:I've pointed out previously that libertarians like yourself are *living in the past*, with your insistence on the fantasy *family farm* agricultural model.

That's just something you made up, and has nothing to do with anything I said.
By glossing over modern *factory* production -- today's norm, even for agriculture -- you're trying to pretend that all that matters is the land,

Again, that has nothing to do with anything I said. You are just makin' $#!+ up.
when in fact it's the *mass production of commodities*, as off the assembly line, that's at stake for a current world population of *billions* that all need to eat and drink, have housing, transportation, etc.

And that is not going to happen without the supplier of producer goods -- the factory owner -- whose contribution enables the necessary high productivity of labor.
Incorrect. See the point, above, that I just made, as a counter-argument.

My statement was correct as a matter of objective physical fact. Your "counter-argument" was not even relevant. Socialism can't work on a large scale because it considers the provider of producer goods to be as superfluous to production as the owner of land, and that is just factually incorrect. Without the factory owner, there is no factory for the socialist to steal. But without the landowner, the land is still there, and available for productive use.
Mao could have done a *lot* better, granted, but he was ultimately revisionist in his politics, anyway, though solidly anti-imperialist.

Mao was a socialist who killed tens of millions of people by attempting to implement socialism.
Well, the landowner and the factory owner are both *ownership*, obviously, but the difference between the two is a matter of rentier capital versus *equity* capital, respectively.

Equity just means ownership. Equity is a portion of ownership, especially as represented by corporate shareholding. It is completely irrelevant to the difference between the landowner and the factory owner.
Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital),

You are blathering incoherently again. An asset is simply something that is owned and can be liquidated. Land and factories are therefore both assets. You just can't tell the difference between them because you are a socialist (capitalists can't either).
which confers the reward of *interest* and *rent collection* for such asset-holding,

No. Land yields a return called rent, whose defining characteristic is that it is obtained by depriving others of something that would otherwise have been available. Interest is a return proportional to time and amount that is given in return for temporary use of purchasing power.
which is a *drain* / cost to funds required to *pay* such interest and rents to the asset-holder.

No. Rent is paid for land, which would otherwise have been available, and is therefore a spurious cost imposed in return for no contribution from the owner. Interest is paid for use of purchasing power which would NOT otherwise have been available: its owner had to provide it.
Also note that the (land) asset itself is economically *non-productive*,

That is just nonsense. The land user gains the advantage of the desirable services and infrastructure government provides, the opportunities and amenities the community provides, and the physical qualities nature provides at that location. It is the land OWNER that is economically non-productive, not the land.
even if farming is done on it, because people need to eat food, regardless, so that they can work modern jobs that *are* productive to the economy.

You are blathering incoherently again. Land, labor, and producer goods like factories all contribute to production whether they are modern or not. The worker provides labor that would not otherwise be available, so he earns wages; the owner of producer goods provides the tools, buildings, etc. that make labor far more productive and would not otherwise be available, so he earns the market return to his contribution; but the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from its owner or any previous owner, so the landowner does NOT make any contribution to production to earn his rent return. He is simply legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide.
On the other hand, *equity* capital *can* contribute to social production since it uses speculative investments (part of capitalism) to exploit labor,

No, you are again just objectively wrong. Speculation seeks to obtain a return by anticipating changes in price. Contribution of producer goods seeks a return by increasing the efficiency of production and making labor more productive. One cannot exploit labor simply by offering the worker access to opportunities to be more productive that he would not otherwise have had, and that is all the owner of producer goods has the power to do.
to produce commodities for consumption, unlike land's feudal-like parasitism in the economy.

The contribution of the owner of producer goods is to make labor more productive, whether that labor is producing consumer goods, producer goods, or services.
Your conflating of socialists with capitalists is erroneous

I didn't conflate them. I simply identified the fact that they are both making the same error, though for opposite reasons: the socialist pretends producer goods are land to justify stealing producer goods; the capitalist pretends land is producer goods to justify stealing land.
since socialists look- and struggle-for the *overthrow* of commodity-based social relations (as over commodity production), to a worker-*collectivist* social order, post-capitalism.

Uninformative blather.
And I just explained the objective economic difference between the landowner and the factory owner.

No you didn't. You got it completely wrong, demonstrating that you haven't a clue what the difference is. I explained the actual objective difference. See above.
You're barely even a libertarian with this line of yours, and you sound much more like a feudalist-reactionary instead, maybe of the kind of Nepal or Tibet.

Blather unrelated to anything I said.
#15029892
Bulaba Jones wrote:
I became a socialist after being familiarized with Marxist labor theory.



Truth To Power wrote:
Which is wrong. Marx's "contribution" was to remove from classical economics the knowledge that the factory owner's role is entirely different from the landowner's role.

It makes no sense. It just incorrectly blames the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker. That's all there is to it.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I've pointed out previously that libertarians like yourself are *living in the past*, with your insistence on the fantasy *family farm* agricultural model.



Truth To Power wrote:
That's just something you made up, and has nothing to do with anything I said.



You were trying to *dismiss* the Marxist theory of labor value, so instead of engaging with the *content* of Marxist labor theory you're instead just presenting a false dichotomy, that between factory ownership and the ownership of the underlying land.

I've already delineated how the two are similar (capital ownership), and how they're different (equity vs. rentier capital), in my previous post.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
By glossing over modern *factory* production -- today's norm, even for agriculture -- you're trying to pretend that all that matters is the land,



Truth To Power wrote:
Again, that has nothing to do with anything I said. You are just makin' $#!+ up.



To be clear, what I'm saying is that you're incorrectly trying to blame only *land ownership* when factory ownership is just a different form of capital. Both non-productive (rentier-type) *and* productive (equity-type) kinds of capital ownership exploit workers, who only have a wage to cover all of life's expenses, both for rent *and* for the purchase of life-critical commodities, for consumption.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
when in fact it's the *mass production of commodities*, as off the assembly line, that's at stake for a current world population of *billions* that all need to eat and drink, have housing, transportation, etc.



Truth To Power wrote:
And that is not going to happen without the supplier of producer goods -- the factory owner -- whose contribution enables the necessary high productivity of labor.



Okay, so we *agree* then on the empirical basics.

My point, though, goes *further*, to identify the factory owner(s) / controller(s)-of-producer-goods, as *exploiting* (stealing-from) what the products of workers' labor value are worth on the market, to the owner / exploiter of that labor value.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



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ckaihatsu wrote:
Incorrect. See the point, above, that I just made, as a counter-argument.



Truth To Power wrote:
My statement was correct as a matter of objective physical fact. Your "counter-argument" was not even relevant. Socialism can't work on a large scale because it considers the provider of producer goods to be as superfluous to production as the owner of land, and that is just factually incorrect. Without the factory owner, there is no factory for the socialist to steal. But without the landowner, the land is still there, and available for productive use.



Okay, this part does help to clarify the dichotomy that you're asserting -- what you're *missing*, though, is that *both* are needed, the commodity-producing factory *and* the land it sits on, correct?

Without the factory and its equipment, society can't get modern commodities like medicine, transportation, computers, etc., and without the designations of land parcels, through capitalist private property ownership, society wouldn't necessarily have a way of parcelling out land for this-or-that.

But all of this is within the context of *capitalism* -- socialism *can* work on a large-scale, instead of capitalism, because the existence of producer goods / factories doesn't *require* the institution of private property ownership. Those goods, both producer-type and consumer-type, *already* exist due to the efforts of commodified human labor power, and so we have factories and developed land, and produced goods in the world today.

Once workers *organize* and lay-claim to all of the stuff that they've / we've produced, the workers of the world can simply *take-back* that which they've produced and were ripped-off for, to run such factories and equipment in their / our *own* best interests, without needing the system of private capital ownership to *distribute* such producer goods, etc. Capitalism's 'invisible hand' can be replaced by liberated-workers' own collective *self-determination*, with explicitly *pre-planned* channeling of this-for-that, especially given today's computational prowess ('Big Data'), for mass-consciously *planning* how social production gets done, without capital ownership anywhere.

Remember, *nothing* gets done without human labor, so there's no 'stealing' involved -- it's simply labor, collectively, taking-back what they / we ourselves produced in the first place, while repressing all private claims to the same.


Truth To Power wrote:
Mao was a socialist who killed tens of millions of people by attempting to implement socialism.



Amazing -- you're obviously attempting to indict socialism on the basis of its ideology itself, *in a vacuum*.

I'll remind that the most populous country in the world inherently has a *global* impact, and that the international context for China at that time was this:



[In] 1916, China was politically fragmented. Its Beijing-based government was internationally recognized but virtually powerless; regional warlords controlled most of its territory.[92][93] In the late 1920s, the Kuomintang, under Chiang Kai-shek, the then Principal of the Republic of China Military Academy, was able to reunify the country under its own control with a series of deft military and political maneuverings, known collectively as the Northern Expedition.[94][95] The Kuomintang moved the nation's capital to Nanjing and implemented "political tutelage", an intermediate stage of political development outlined in Sun Yat-sen's San-min program for transforming China into a modern democratic state.[96][97] The political division in China made it difficult for Chiang to battle the communist People's Liberation Army (PLA), against whom the Kuomintang had been warring since 1927 in the Chinese Civil War. This war continued successfully for the Kuomintang, especially after the PLA retreated in the Long March, until Japanese aggression and the 1936 Xi'an Incident forced Chiang to confront Imperial Japan.[98]

The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), a theater of World War II, forced an uneasy alliance between the Kuomintang and the PLA. Japanese forces committed numerous war atrocities against the civilian population; in all, as many as 20 million Chinese civilians died.[99] An estimated 40,000 to 300,000 Chinese were massacred in the city of Nanjing alone during the Japanese occupation.[100] During the war, China, along with the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union, were referred to as "trusteeship of the powerful"[101] and were recognized as the Allied "Big Four" in the Declaration by United Nations.[102][103] Along with the other three great powers, China was one of the four major Allies of World War II, and was later considered one of the primary victors in the war.[104][105] After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Taiwan, including the Pescadores, was returned to Chinese control. China emerged victorious but war-ravaged and financially drained. The continued distrust between the Kuomintang and the Communists led to the resumption of civil war. Constitutional rule was established in 1947, but because of the ongoing unrest, many provisions of the ROC constitution were never implemented in mainland China.[106]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Rep ... %80%931949)



And:



The Long March: 1934–1935

On October 14, 1934, the Red Army broke through the KMT line on the Jiangxi Soviet's south-west corner at Xinfeng with 85,000 soldiers and 15,000 party cadres and embarked on the "Long March". In order to make the escape, many of the wounded and the ill, as well as women and children, were left behind, defended by a group of guerrilla fighters whom the KMT massacred.[129][130] The 100,000 who escaped headed to southern Hunan, first crossing the Xiang River after heavy fighting,[130][131] and then the Wu River, in Guizhou where they took Zunyi in January 1935. Temporarily resting in the city, they held a conference; here, Mao was elected to a position of leadership, becoming Chairman of the Politburo, and de facto leader of both Party and Red Army, in part because his candidacy was supported by Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin. Insisting that they operate as a guerrilla force, he laid out a destination: the Shenshi Soviet in Shaanxi, Northern China, from where the Communists could focus on fighting the Japanese. Mao believed that in focusing on the anti-imperialist struggle, the Communists would earn the trust of the Chinese people, who in turn would renounce the KMT.[132]

From Zunyi, Mao led his troops to Loushan Pass, where they faced armed opposition but successfully crossed the river. Chiang flew into the area to lead his armies against Mao, but the Communists outmanoeuvred him and crossed the Jinsha River.[133] Faced with the more difficult task of crossing the Tatu River, they managed it by fighting a battle over the Luding Bridge in May, taking Luding.[134] Marching through the mountain ranges around Ma'anshan,[135] in Moukung, Western Szechuan, they encountered the 50,000-strong CPC Fourth Front Army of Zhang Guotao, and together proceeded to Maoerhkai and then Gansu. Zhang and Mao disagreed over what to do; the latter wished to proceed to Shaanxi, while Zhang wanted to retreat east to Tibet or Sikkim, far from the KMT threat. It was agreed that they would go their separate ways, with Zhu De joining Zhang.[136] Mao's forces proceeded north, through hundreds of kilometres of Grasslands, an area of quagmire where they were attacked by Manchu tribesman and where many soldiers succumbed to famine and disease.[137][138] Finally reaching Shaanxi, they fought off both the KMT and an Islamic cavalry militia before crossing the Min Mountains and Mount Liupan and reaching the Shenshi Soviet; only 7,000–8000 had survived.[138][139] The Long March cemented Mao's status as the dominant figure in the party. In November 1935, he was named chairman of the Military Commission. From this point onward, Mao was the Communist Party's undisputed leader, even though he would not become party chairman until 1943.[140]

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday offered an alternative account on many events during this period in their book Mao: The Unknown Story.[141] For example, there was no battle at Luding and the CPC crossed the bridge unopposed, the Long March was not a strategy of the CPC but devised by Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao and other top CPC leaders did not walk the Long March but were carried on litters.[142] However, although well received in the popular press, Chang and Halliday's work has been highly criticized by professional historians.[143]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedon ... %80%931935



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ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, the landowner and the factory owner are both *ownership*, obviously, but the difference between the two is a matter of rentier capital versus *equity* capital, respectively.



Truth To Power wrote:
Equity just means ownership. Equity is a portion of ownership, especially as represented by corporate shareholding. It is completely irrelevant to the difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



Since equity is a portion of ownership it makes more sense to refer to *shareholders* in the modern era, rather than a singular, fictional individual 'factory owner'.

This is the problem with capitalism -- those who need to consume from society's commodity production (food, housing, etc.) are only measured economically in terms of *wealth* / currency. Since private ownership of society's means of mass industrial production is the prevailing norm, it has no interests in people's own humane needs for the goods from society's mass production, it's only interested in the middle 'exchange values' realm, for squeezing-out profits from those who can *afford* to buy the things they need.

Equity / shareholding ownership needs to be *de-privatized* / collectivized, so that the social production process can be in the hands of *workers*, to produce for themselves, primarily, and for greater human needs, rather than the rewards from labor being systematically *expropriated* by private concerns.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital),



Truth To Power wrote:
You are blathering incoherently again. An asset is simply something that is owned and can be liquidated. Land and factories are therefore both assets. You just can't tell the difference between them because you are a socialist (capitalists can't either).



I'm not 'blathering' -- I'm *delineating*.

Land ownership *is* asset ownership. You're even saying it yourself by stating that 'Land and factories are both assets' -- I've already *explained* the difference, that necessarily-equity-capital-based factories manufacture commodity *goods*, while land / rentier assets *don't*, and are therefore a *drain* / draw on any kind of funds, whether proletarian or bourgeois -- this is very *backwards*, *feudal-like* economic activity, in particular.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
which confers the reward of *interest* and *rent collection* for such asset-holding,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Land yields a return called rent, whose defining characteristic is that it is obtained by depriving others of something that would otherwise have been available. Interest is a return proportional to time and amount that is given in return for temporary use of purchasing power.



I *just said* 'rent' -- what do you think you're disagreeing with -- ?

Yes, the purchasing power of borrowed capital ('loan') is a commodity itself, too, under capitalism, that must be rewarded with interest.

Capitalism *as a whole* is artificial-scarcity-based, because private interests are *inherently* for monopolization / oligopolization, to corner-the-market, fix prices, thereby depriving all of those potential consumers who simply can't afford the inflated command prices for whatever. This is yet another problem with the capitalist method, that it tends towards overproduction but can't distribute commodities appropriately, preferring an economic environment of *scarcity*, even if that means the *destruction* of economic capacity, as ultimately through inter-imperialist *warfare*.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
which is a *drain* / cost to funds required to *pay* such interest and rents to the asset-holder.



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Rent is paid for land, which would otherwise have been available, and is therefore a spurious cost imposed in return for no contribution from the owner. Interest is paid for use of purchasing power which would NOT otherwise have been available: its owner had to provide it.



Your overall politics have been unclear in the past on this point, and are unclear now -- there's nothing 'spurious' about the cost of having to pay rent to one-landowner-or-another.

And, yes, capital loans are financial commodities and are rewarded with interest payments for the use of that capital's purchasing power.

You *seem* to be disdaining private land ownership, in favor of a more-'commons' approach, but you never explicitly make that argument -- in the past you've even *defended* the capitalist economic practice of private land ownership.

You may want to take a political stand at this point, and clarify your politics around rentier-vs.-equity-capital-ownership.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Also note that the (land) asset itself is economically *non-productive*,



Truth To Power wrote:
That is just nonsense. The land user gains the advantage of the desirable services and infrastructure government provides, the opportunities and amenities the community provides, and the physical qualities nature provides at that location. It is the land OWNER that is economically non-productive, not the land.



No, I'm saying that the land itself is not economically productive in the way that equity-capital-enabled factory *commodity* production is. Food is a biological requirement for *everyone*, so farm production should be seen more akin to *profiteering*, inherently, rather than the making of modern tangible commodity items that enable modern life and living in various ways.

There *is* a difference between what the factory produces, and what the land produces, if anything.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
even if farming is done on it, because people need to eat food, regardless, so that they can work modern jobs that *are* productive to the economy.



Truth To Power wrote:
You are blathering incoherently again. Land, labor, and producer goods like factories all contribute to production whether they are modern or not. The worker provides labor that would not otherwise be available, so he earns wages; the owner of producer goods provides the tools, buildings, etc. that make labor far more productive and would not otherwise be available, so he earns the market return to his contribution; but the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from its owner or any previous owner, so the landowner does NOT make any contribution to production to earn his rent return. He is simply legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide.



You're simply describing capitalism here -- and, you're constantly *vacillating* on the status of private land ownership. Is it *valid*, or isn't it? (You seem to be siding with bourgeois norms on the *legality* of land ownership to collect economic rents, and even possibly interest.)


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ckaihatsu wrote:
On the other hand, *equity* capital *can* contribute to social production since it uses speculative investments (part of capitalism) to exploit labor,



Truth To Power wrote:
No, you are again just objectively wrong. Speculation seeks to obtain a return by anticipating changes in price. Contribution of producer goods seeks a return by increasing the efficiency of production and making labor more productive. One cannot exploit labor simply by offering the worker access to opportunities to be more productive that he would not otherwise have had, and that is all the owner of producer goods has the power to do.



I mean 'speculative' in the sense that the owners of productive goods (factories) don't know exactly what the sales results will be beforehand -- in this way, even equity capital investments are 'speculative', along with more-purely-speculative goals around prices, as you've mentioned.

The exploitation of labor takes place systematically, every hour of every day because the *products* of labor are sold by ownership on the market for *more* than is paid to the workers in the form of a wage.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
to produce commodities for consumption, unlike land's feudal-like parasitism in the economy.



Truth To Power wrote:
The contribution of the owner of producer goods is to make labor more productive, whether that labor is producing consumer goods, producer goods, or services.



Okay, if you want to empirically value the inclusion of private ownership's *management* tasks, over production, then that's fair, but I have to point out that, within capitalism, this / these roles, including all of capitalist government, are *internal* to private interests themselves -- greater-productivity workers do not enjoy any benefits themselves from being more-productive, as such increased revenue goes to *ownership*, and not to increase the wages for workers.


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Truth To Power wrote:
Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Your conflating of socialists with capitalists is erroneous



Truth To Power wrote:
I didn't conflate them. I simply identified the fact that they are both making the same error, though for opposite reasons: the socialist pretends producer goods are land to justify stealing producer goods; the capitalist pretends land is producer goods to justify stealing land.



So we just differ on collectivization by one increment -- you're more progressive than an *aristocratic*-type claim to land, but *not* regarding producer goods, while I think *both* land ownership *and* factory ownership should be handed over to the working class as a whole, the *maximum* amount of collectivization that can be potentially, realistically accomplished.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
since socialists look- and struggle-for the *overthrow* of commodity-based social relations (as over commodity production), to a worker-*collectivist* social order, post-capitalism.



Truth To Power wrote:
Uninformative blather.



Just sayin'.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
And I just explained the objective economic difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



Truth To Power wrote:
No you didn't. You got it completely wrong, demonstrating that you haven't a clue what the difference is. I explained the actual objective difference. See above.



You're disagreements with me on the empirical facts of capitalist political economy are *baseless*. I've shown that we tend to *agree* on the objective definitions, but *differ* on extent-of-collectivization.


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Truth To Power wrote:
Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're barely even a libertarian with this line of yours, and you sound much more like a feudalist-reactionary instead, maybe of the kind of Nepal or Tibet.



Truth To Power wrote:
Blather unrelated to anything I said.



Look at how feudalistic and reactionary (non-industrial) the nation-states of Nepal and Tibet have been:



Jung Bahadur Kunwar emerged victorious and founded the Rana dynasty, later known as Jung Bahadur Rana. The king was made a titular figure, and the post of Prime Minister was made powerful and hereditary. The Ranas were staunchly pro-British and assisted them during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 (and later in both World Wars). Some parts of the Terai region populated with non-Nepali peoples were gifted to Nepal by the British as a friendly gesture because of her military help to sustain British control in India during the rebellion. In 1923, the United Kingdom and Nepal formally signed an agreement of friendship that superseded the Sugauli Treaty of 1816.[42]

Legalized slavery was abolished in Nepal in 1924.[43] Rana rule was marked by tyranny, debauchery, economic exploitation and religious persecution.[44][45]

Democratic Nepal

In the late 1940s, newly emerging pro-democracy movements and political parties in Nepal were critical of the Rana autocracy. Meanwhile, with the invasion of Tibet by China in the 1950s, India sought to counterbalance the perceived military threat from its northern neighbour by taking pre-emptive steps to assert more influence in Nepal. India sponsored both King Tribhuvan (ruled 1911–55) as Nepal's new ruler in 1951 and a new government, mostly comprising the Nepali Congress, thus terminating Rana hegemony in the kingdom.[42]

After years of power wrangling between the king and the government, King Mahendra (ruled 1955–72) scrapped the democratic experiment in 1959, and a "partyless" Panchayat system was made to govern Nepal until 1989, when the "Jan Andolan" (People's Movement) forced King Birendra (ruled 1972–2001) to accept constitutional reforms and to establish a multiparty parliament that took seat in May 1991.[46] In 1991–92, Bhutan expelled roughly 100,000 Bhutanese citizens of Nepali descent, most of whom have been living in seven refugee camps in eastern Nepal ever since.[47]

In 1996, the Communist Party of Nepal started a violent bid to replace the royal parliamentary system with a people's republic. This led to the long Nepali Civil War and more than 12,000 deaths. On 1 June 2001, there was a massacre in the royal palace. King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya and seven other members of the royal family were killed. The alleged perpetrator Crown Prince Dipendra, who allegedly committed suicide shortly thereafter, was briefly declared king for three days while he was in coma. Following the carnage, King Birendra's brother Gyanendra inherited the throne. On 1 February 2005, King Gyanendra dismissed the elected government and legislature,assuming full executive powers to quash the violent Maoist movement.[46] But this initiative was unsuccessful because a stalemate had developed in which the Maoists were firmly entrenched in large expanses of countryside but could not yet dislodge the military from numerous towns and the largest cities. In September 2005, the Maoists declared a three-month unilateral ceasefire to negotiate.




In western Tibet, however, the Chinese Communists opted not to make social reform an immediate priority. On the contrary, from 1951 to 1959, traditional Tibetan society with its lords and manorial estates continued to function unchanged and were subsidized by the central government.[15] Despite the presence of twenty thousand PLA troops in Central Tibet, the Dalai Lama's government was permitted to maintain important symbols from its de facto independence period.[15] The first national census in all of the People's Republic of China was held in 1954, counting 2,770,000 ethnic Tibetans in China, including 1,270,000 in the Tibet Autonomous Region.[16] The Chinese built highways that reached Lhasa, and then extended them to the Indian, Nepalese and Pakistani borders.

Tibetan areas in Qinghai, which were outside the authority of the Dalai Lama's government, did not enjoy this same autonomy and had land redistribution implemented in full. Most lands were taken away from noblemen and monasteries and re-distributed to serfs. The Tibetan region of Eastern Kham, previously Xikang province, was incorporated into the province of Sichuan. Western Kham was put under the Chamdo Military Committee. In these areas, land reform was implemented. This involved communist agitators designating "landlords"—sometimes arbitrarily chosen—for public humiliation in so-called "struggle sessions",[17] torture, maiming, and even death.[18][19] It was only after 1959 that China brought the same practices to Central Tibet.[20][21]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... %93present)#1950%E2%80%931955:_Traditional_systems
#15030052
ckaihatsu wrote:You were trying to *dismiss* the Marxist theory of labor value, so instead of engaging with the *content* of Marxist labor theory

One can't engage with arrant nonsense unrelated to reality.
you're instead just presenting a false dichotomy, that between factory ownership and the ownership of the underlying land.

It's not a dichotomy -- in a capitalist system, people also own other things that yield a return taken out of production -- and it's not false. Ownership of a factory and ownership of land are entirely different.
I've already delineated how the two are similar (capital ownership),

They are similar in that both are legal assets that are scarce and needed for production, and consequently yield a return from production.
and how they're different (equity vs. rentier capital), in my previous post.

But you got that wrong. The factory owner provides something that would not otherwise have been available; the landowner just exercises a legal privilege of depriving everyone else of access to the resource that was already available, ready to use, with no help from him or any previous owner.
To be clear, what I'm saying is that you're incorrectly trying to blame only *land ownership* when factory ownership is just a different form of capital.

Land and factory are both "capital" in the accounting sense -- assets devoted to obtaining income --but not in the classical economic sense. That is the knowledge Marx removed from classical economics, and neoclassical apologists for capitalism gleefully went along with it. A capitalist owning a factory does not deprive any worker of any opportunity he would otherwise have because the factory would not be there but for the initial capitalist's investment. Owning land DOES deprive the worker of access to economic opportunity he would otherwise have because the land was already there anyway, with no help from the landowner or any previous owner.
Both non-productive (rentier-type) *and* productive (equity-type) kinds of capital ownership exploit workers, who only have a wage to cover all of life's expenses, both for rent *and* for the purchase of life-critical commodities, for consumption.

No, ownership of producer goods cannot exploit workers, because it does not deprive them of anything they would otherwise have. They therefore CANNOT be made worse off by it.
Okay, so we *agree* then on the empirical basics.

No, you refuse to know the empirical fact that the factory owner qua factory owner has no power to make workers worse off than they would have been had he never existed.
My point, though, goes *further*, to identify the factory owner(s) / controller(s)-of-producer-goods, as *exploiting* (stealing-from) what the products of workers' labor value are worth on the market, to the owner / exploiter of that labor value.

But you are just objectively wrong, because the workers can always just choose not to deal with the factory owner and keep the full value of their own labor. It is the LANDOWNER they can't choose not to deal with because they need to use land to exist, and he owns their right to access it.
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Garbage, sorry. Profits are just revenue less expenses, and dividends are just the portion of profits distributed to shareholders. They are accounting concepts that have no economic meaning.
Okay, this part does help to clarify the dichotomy that you're asserting -- what you're *missing*, though, is that *both* are needed, the commodity-producing factory *and* the land it sits on, correct?

I'm not missing anything. Both are needed, but THE LAND IS ALREADY THERE ANYWAY, the factory is not. That is what YOU are missing.
Without the factory and its equipment, society can't get modern commodities like medicine, transportation, computers, etc.,

Right.
and without the designations of land parcels, through capitalist private property ownership, society wouldn't necessarily have a way of parcelling out land for this-or-that.

Garbage. Although secure, exclusive tenure is necessary to productive use of land in an economy above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic-herding stages because we need a way to secure rightful property in fixed improvements, private ownership of land is just a quick and dirty way to solve that problem, much as slavery was a quick and dirty way to solve the problem of ensuring that defeated captives don't attack you again, without wasting the labor resources they represent by killing them. Today we know better ways to solve those problems.
But all of this is within the context of *capitalism* -- socialism *can* work on a large-scale, instead of capitalism,

False dichotomy fallacy. Socialism and capitalism are not the only alternatives, however stridently socialists and capitalists insist they are.
because the existence of producer goods / factories doesn't *require* the institution of private property ownership.

But will be less efficient without it because the incentives will be wrong. That is why socialist economies can never compete with capitalist ones.
Those goods, both producer-type and consumer-type, *already* exist due to the efforts of commodified human labor power,

No. Producer goods exist due to the decision and initiative of their creators/initial owners to take the risk of devoting their purchasing power to their creation, thus adding to productive capacity, rather than saving it or devoting it to consumption.
and so we have factories and developed land,

The dishonest term, "developed land" is an attempt by you to evade the fact that all the land was already there, before any development or factories, and had to exist already before anyone could possibly develop it or build a factory on it. You are trying to contrive a way to prevent yourself from knowing the fact that the landowner is superfluous to production, but the factory owner is not.
and produced goods in the world today.

The existence of land is not the result of anyone's labor or investment. The existence of factories is.
Once workers *organize* and lay-claim to all of the stuff that they've / we've produced,

It was the capitalist, not the workers, who produced the factory, by bringing together all the production factors needed for its design and construction.
the workers of the world can simply *take-back* that which they've produced and were ripped-off for,

Garbage. The workers needed the capitalist to initiate and organize the building of the factory. They did not and could not do it without his contributions of purchasing power, risk tolerance, and the decision to build it. By contrast, they really WERE ripped off for the land, which would have been available to them if the landowner did not forcibly deprive them of it. You know this. Why pretend you don't?
to run such factories and equipment in their / our *own* best interests, without needing the system of private capital ownership to *distribute* such producer goods, etc.

Private ownership CREATED the producer goods. That is why the workers didn't build a factory without the capitalist's contributions.
Capitalism's 'invisible hand' can be replaced by liberated-workers' own collective *self-determination*, with explicitly *pre-planned* channeling of this-for-that, especially given today's computational prowess ('Big Data'), for mass-consciously *planning* how social production gets done, without capital ownership anywhere.

No, that's just anti-economic garbage because the purpose of production is to enable consumption, not to provide a livelihood for workers. Would the workers ever vote to replace themselves with machines? Of course not, so production would remain at a primitive level permanently. The capitalist, by contrast, is trying to serve consumers, not workers, so he replaces the workers with machinery and advances the condition of the whole society.
Remember, *nothing* gets done without human labor, so there's no 'stealing' involved -- it's simply labor, collectively, taking-back what they / we ourselves produced in the first place, while repressing all private claims to the same.

The workers did not produce the factory. The capitalist who brought together all the factors needed for its design and construction did. The workers were just additional production factors the capitalist brought to bear on the project by his decision and initiative.
Amazing -- you're obviously attempting to indict socialism on the basis of its ideology itself, *in a vacuum*.

No, in the context of economic fact.
I'll remind that the most populous country in the world inherently has a *global* impact, and that the international context for China at that time was this:

Irrelevant.
Since equity is a portion of ownership it makes more sense to refer to *shareholders* in the modern era, rather than a singular, fictional individual 'factory owner'.

No. It doesn't matter if the factory owner is an individual, a group, or a corporation. Your term, "equity ownership" is a red herring, because the point is not who the owner is, but what is owned. Shareholders own shares in a company, not a factory. A company can own many things in addition to factories: land, money, IP monopolies, licenses, debt instruments, etc., etc. To understand the economic relationships, we have to separate ownership of all those disparate factors conceptually. We can't understand the character of ownership if we consider ownership of a chicken the same as ownership of a slave.
This is the problem with capitalism -- those who need to consume from society's commodity production (food, housing, etc.) are only measured economically in terms of *wealth* / currency.

No, that is not the problem with capitalism. It's not who has how much purchasing power, but HOW THEY GET IT.
Since private ownership of society's means of mass industrial production is the prevailing norm, it has no interests in people's own humane needs for the goods from society's mass production, it's only interested in the middle 'exchange values' realm, for squeezing-out profits from those who can *afford* to buy the things they need.

Wrong. It wouldn't matter if everyone could afford the things they need -- as they actually can in most advanced countries. The problem is not that capitalists obtain profits by relieving consumer scarcity through production and exchange, but that they obtain profits by inflicting artificial scarcity on both consumers and producers in order to obtain profits WITHOUT relieving scarcity.
Equity / shareholding ownership needs to be *de-privatized* / collectivized, so that the social production process can be in the hands of *workers*, to produce for themselves, primarily,

Workers as owners will be like any other owners, and put their interests as owners ahead of those of consumers. But consumption is the ultimate purpose of all economic activity, so economic reason requires that the interests of consumers supersede those of either workers or owners. The advantage of capitalism is that factory owners have to serve consumers. The disadvantage is that landowners can legally charge them full market value just for permission to do so.
and for greater human needs, rather than the rewards from labor being systematically *expropriated* by private concerns.

The factory owner cannot expropriate wages. He has no power to deprive the worker of anything.
I'm not 'blathering' -- I'm *delineating*.

You are blathering.
Land ownership *is* asset ownership.

So is ownership of a chicken, a slave, a bond, a bank account, a share of stock, a box of apples, etc. Being asset ownership tells you nothing about the economic relationships. WHAT is owned tells you something. But to learn what, you have to find a willingness to know the fact that owning a slave and owning a chicken are two very different things.
You're even saying it yourself by stating that 'Land and factories are both assets' --

Yes, and you don't understand what that means economically: nothing. "Asset" is an accounting concept, not an economic one.
I've already *explained* the difference,

You only explained that you don't know the difference.
that necessarily-equity-capital-based factories manufacture commodity *goods*, while land / rentier assets *don't*,

Wrong. Both land and producer goods are needed for production (other rentier assets like patents aren't). The difference is that a factory has to be contributed by its owner to be available for production, while land's owner just deprives everyone else of the productive resource they would otherwise have been at liberty to use unless they meet his extortion demand.
and are therefore a *drain* / draw on any kind of funds, whether proletarian or bourgeois -- this is very *backwards*, *feudal-like* economic activity, in particular.

Is that your way of saying you understand that the factory owner contributes to production and the landowner doesn't?
I *just said* 'rent' -- what do you think you're disagreeing with -- ?

Your conflation of rent with interest.
Yes, the purchasing power of borrowed capital ('loan') is a commodity itself, too, under capitalism, that must be rewarded with interest.

Which is not rent.
Capitalism *as a whole* is artificial-scarcity-based, because private interests are *inherently* for monopolization / oligopolization, to corner-the-market, fix prices, thereby depriving all of those potential consumers who simply can't afford the inflated command prices for whatever.

Monopoly is a temptation under capitalism but not an inevitability. Landowning is part of capitalism by definition.
This is yet another problem with the capitalist method, that it tends towards overproduction but can't distribute commodities appropriately, preferring an economic environment of *scarcity*, even if that means the *destruction* of economic capacity, as ultimately through inter-imperialist *warfare*.

It's true that capitalists understand that abundance and low prices are their enemy, and scarcity and high prices their friend, which sets them in opposition to society's interests. But only the landowner inherently has the power to inflict scarcity on others. The factory owner only gets that power if government gives it to him. It's not an inherent part of capitalism.
Your overall politics have been unclear in the past on this point, and are unclear now --
I try to be clear. What is unclear about my politics?
there's nothing 'spurious' about the cost of having to pay rent to one-landowner-or-another.

There is if the recipient of the rent (land can be administered without being owned) is anyone other than the government and community that give the land its value.
You *seem* to be disdaining private land ownership, in favor of a more-'commons' approach, but you never explicitly make that argument --

My position is that everyone should have free secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land to have access to economy opportunity, and those who want to exclude others from more than that should pay the difference to the community of those they exclude.
in the past you've even *defended* the capitalist economic practice of private land ownership.

Where? You must have misunderstood me.
You may want to take a political stand at this point, and clarify your politics around rentier-vs.-equity-capital-ownership.

I've been clear about it all along: the owner of producer goods such as factories, land improvements, vehicles, etc. that aid production contributes to production and earns the market return of his contribution; the owner of land and other natural resources contributes nothing to production, and earns nothing because he only deprives others of those things unless they meet his extortion demands; the owner of patents, copyrights, and other privileges actually reduces production, and harms the economy and consumers.
No, I'm saying that the land itself is not economically productive in the way that equity-capital-enabled factory *commodity* production is.

But you are just wrong. The advantages of a given location are just as much an aid to production there as a factory.
Food is a biological requirement for *everyone*, so farm production should be seen more akin to *profiteering*, inherently, rather than the making of modern tangible commodity items that enable modern life and living in various ways.

What nonsense. The fact that everyone needs food does not make those who produce it into "profiteers." They are the ones making sure the rest of us don't starve! It is the landowner who profits without lifting a productive finger, not the farmer. Give your head a shake.
There *is* a difference between what the factory produces, and what the land produces, if anything.

They are both factors of production, not producers. The difference is not in what they add to production (there is often a degree of substitutability between them), but how they come to be available for production.
You're simply describing capitalism here

Only assuming private ownership of land. I don't make that assumption.
-- and, you're constantly *vacillating* on the status of private land ownership.

No I'm not. Land cannot rightly be owned, and I have not claimed otherwise.
Is it *valid*, or isn't it?

No.
(You seem to be siding with bourgeois norms on the *legality* of land ownership to collect economic rents, and even possibly interest.)

It is legal in the same sense that owning slaves was once legal. Interest is a more complicated case because there is a difference between privately saved purchasing power and privately issued purchasing power.
I mean 'speculative' in the sense that the owners of productive goods (factories) don't know exactly what the sales results will be beforehand -- in this way, even equity capital investments are 'speculative', along with more-purely-speculative goals around prices, as you've mentioned.

You are Marxishly misusing the term. Investment in enhancing production is risky, but it is not speculation.
The exploitation of labor takes place systematically, every hour of every day because the *products* of labor are sold by ownership on the market for *more* than is paid to the workers in the form of a wage.

Nonsense. We've established that the workers are not the only ones contributing to production, so why would they get all the value of production, leaving other contributors with nothing to show for their contributions?
Okay, if you want to empirically value the inclusion of private ownership's *management* tasks, over production, then that's fair,

All labor consists of making and carrying out decisions, and there is always an element of risk therein. The capital owner's managerial decision to devote his purchasing power to the aid of production is itself labor, and the element of risk in that decision is normally even greater than for the worker.
but I have to point out that, within capitalism, this / these roles, including all of capitalist government, are *internal* to private interests themselves -- greater-productivity workers do not enjoy any benefits themselves from being more-productive, as such increased revenue goes to *ownership*, and not to increase the wages for workers.

Not quite. The treadmill runner who outstrips his fellows may get ahead of them and achieve greater rewards; but if the bulk of the runners run faster, the treadmill just goes faster.
So we just differ on collectivization by one increment -- you're more progressive than an *aristocratic*-type claim to land, but *not* regarding producer goods, while I think *both* land ownership *and* factory ownership should be handed over to the working class as a whole, the *maximum* amount of collectivization that can be potentially, realistically accomplished.

I don't regard "collectivization" -- I prefer to speak of democratically accountable administration -- as an end in itself, but merely a means to be used when it is efficient and appropriate, mainly for natural resources and natural monopolies.
You're disagreements with me on the empirical facts of capitalist political economy are *baseless*. I've shown that we tend to *agree* on the objective definitions, but *differ* on extent-of-collectivization.

Your use of evasive terms like "developed land" and "exploitation" tells me we do not agree on the objective definitions.
Look at how feudalistic and reactionary (non-industrial) the nation-states of Nepal and Tibet have been:

I can't imagine how that is relevant.
#15030526
ckaihatsu wrote:
You were trying to *dismiss* the Marxist theory of labor value, so instead of engaging with the *content* of Marxist labor theory



Truth To Power wrote:
One can't engage with arrant nonsense unrelated to reality.



The Marxist Labor Theory of Value is *not* errant nonsense -- here's the intro from the Wikipedia entry:



The labor theory of value (LTV) is a heterodox theory of value that argues that the economic value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of "socially necessary labor" required to produce it.

LTV is usually associated with Marxian economics, though it also appears in the theories of earlier classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo and later also in anarchist economics. Smith saw the price of a commodity in terms of the labor that the purchaser must expend to buy it, which embodies the concept of how much labor a commodity, a tool for example, can save the purchaser. The LTV is central to Marxist theory, which holds that the working class is exploited under capitalism, and dissociates price and value. Marx did not refer to his own theory of value as a "labour theory of value".[1] Mainstream neoclassical economics tends to reject the need for a LTV, concentrating instead on a theory of price determined by supply and demand.[2][3]



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



You're obviously not addressing *any* aspect of it, but rather dismissing it entirely with a lordly wave of your hand, which doesn't help discussion here whatsoever.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
you're instead just presenting a false dichotomy, that between factory ownership and the ownership of the underlying land.



Truth To Power wrote:
It's not a dichotomy -- in a capitalist system, people also own other things that yield a return taken out of production -- and it's not false. Ownership of a factory and ownership of land are entirely different.



You're not realizing that you're *in agreement* with me -- a 'false dichotomy' (my claim) means that there's *no dichotomy* since both types of ownership (equity and rentier) are still ownership of private property within the context of capitalist political economy, and which both exploit the working class (through rents and exploitation of workers' labor-power, respectively).


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ckaihatsu wrote:
I've already delineated how the two are similar (capital ownership),



Truth To Power wrote:
They are similar in that both are legal assets that are scarce and needed for production, and consequently yield a return from production.



No, the underlying land (rentier capital) is not really a part of production -- yes, it underlies the factory and its industrial production, but the land itself does not produce manufactured goods, by exploiting labor, the way that equity capital (the factory) does. And, as I've already mentioned, farming is not really materially *productive* because it's exactly like housing in that everyone needs food and housing for personal consumption, so that they / we can exist and work modern jobs that *do* produce commodities.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and how they're different (equity vs. rentier capital), in my previous post.



Truth To Power wrote:
But you got that wrong. The factory owner provides something that would not otherwise have been available; the landowner just exercises a legal privilege of depriving everyone else of access to the resource that was already available, ready to use, with no help from him or any previous owner.



It's good that you're mentioning the 'legal' aspect, since both equity *and* rentier capital exist and function due to *legal*-based (bourgeois) social conventions. Just because *physical land* exists and may be *physically* accessible to some (those nearby), doesn't mean that it is accessible *legally*. Since it's commodified under capitalist practice the only ones who *can* access legal land (private property, not public property) are those who can *afford* to buy or rent it, as a commodity.

Likewise those who want to profit from equity values have to *buy* such, as shareholder stocks that represent partial ownership of private property.

What I mean to indicate is that *both* of these kinds of capital must be *purchased*, while not everyone can afford such speculation into and around private property. Those who are dependent on selling their own labor power at the workplace for a wage have far less economic power / potential to buy private property of *any* kind, compared to those who already are owners of capital (surplus above one's own needs for personal social existence).


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
To be clear, what I'm saying is that you're incorrectly trying to blame only *land ownership* when factory ownership is just a different form of capital.



Truth To Power wrote:
Land and factory are both "capital" in the accounting sense -- assets devoted to obtaining income --but not in the classical economic sense. That is the knowledge Marx removed from classical economics, and neoclassical apologists for capitalism gleefully went along with it. A capitalist owning a factory does not deprive any worker of any opportunity he would otherwise have because the factory would not be there but for the initial capitalist's investment. Owning land DOES deprive the worker of access to economic opportunity he would otherwise have because the land was already there anyway, with no help from the landowner or any previous owner.



But you're almost making my argument *for* me -- both the land owner and the factory owner *can* deny access to anyone not deemed 'worthy' of access, for whatever reason, because *both* types of private property are just that -- *private* ownership, meaning that leasing or employment is basically at the whim and behest of the owners, respectively.

You're trying to make it sound as though employment is *automatic* for anyone and everyone, due to the mere existence of the factory itself, when that's *not* the case. Yes, there are some legal protections for labor around the process of employment, and of being-employed, but the *enforcement* of labor laws by the capitalist state is *very* weak compared to the enforcement of *private property ownership* laws. This amounts to clear favoritism by the state according to wealth ownership -- a *plutocracy*, in short.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Both non-productive (rentier-type) *and* productive (equity-type) kinds of capital ownership exploit workers, who only have a wage to cover all of life's expenses, both for rent *and* for the purchase of life-critical commodities, for consumption.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, ownership of producer goods cannot exploit workers, because it does not deprive them of anything they would otherwise have. They therefore CANNOT be made worse off by it.



Yes, equity ownership (the factory) *does* exploit workers, every hour of every day, because the products of wage-paid labor-power are sold for *more* on the market than is passed along to those workers in the form of a wage.



Karl Marx, who is considered the most classical and influential theorist of exploitation, did not share the same traditional account of exploitation. Marx's theory explicitly rejects the moral framing characteristic of the notion of exploitation and restricts the concept to the field of labour relations. In analyzing exploitation, many political economists are often stuck between the explanation of the exploitation of labour given by Marx and Adam Smith.[2]



Capitalists are able to purchase labour power from the workers, who can only bring their own labour power in the market. Once capitalists are able to pay the worker less than the value produced by their labour, surplus labour forms and this results in the capitalists' profits. This is what Marx meant by "surplus value", which he saw as "an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist".[9]



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



Also:


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

Spoiler: show
Image



And:


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, so we *agree* then on the empirical basics.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, you refuse to know the empirical fact that the factory owner qua factory owner has no power to make workers worse off than they would have been had he never existed.



So, again, you're saying that land owners somehow have more social power in comparison to factory owners because land owners can deny access to their landed private properties, while the factory owners "cannot" -- ?

All an employer / manager has to do to skirt employment law is to claim that an employee wasn't performing appropriately, with whatever formal pretext. If the individual worker is isolated then they're *powerless* with regards to their own employment because the employer's position / pretext will be favored by the capitalist courts.



Labor laws differ greatly from country to country in both level and type of regulations in respect to their protection of unions, their organizing activities, as well as other aspects. These laws can affect topics such as posting notices, organizing on or off employer property, solicitations, card signing, union dues, picketing, work stoppages, striking and strikebreaking, lockouts, termination of employment, permanent replacements, automatic recognition, derecognition, ballot elections, and employer-controlled trade unions.[1]



Legal actions

Labor consultants, union organizers, and attorneys use rules and regulations to gain control of organizing drives. Most employers oppose union plans for card check elections and employ tactics to insure secret ballot elections instead.[44] If the union focuses on one division of the company, employment lawyers may disrupt such plans and dilute the vote by petitioning the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to include other divisions. If the union seeks to include foreman or "junior supervisor" positions in a bargaining unit to increase membership, the definition of what constitutes a supervisor under the NLRA [45] will often be challenged by employment. Even the jurisdiction of the NLRB to oversee an organizing drive may be challenged. Delays can turn an organizing campaign into a protracted struggle, and according to Martin J. Levitt such battles are almost always won by management.[46]

Many of the methods for defeating unions have been practiced for a very long time. Harry Wellington Laidler wrote a book in 1913 which reported the use of delaying tactics and provocation by an undercover operative of one of the largest known agencies of the time called Corporations Auxiliary Company. They would tell prospective employers,

Once the union is in the field its members can keep it from growing if they know how, and our man knows how. Meetings can be set far apart. A contract can at once be entered into with the employer, covering a long period, and made very easy in its terms. However, these tactics may not be good, and the union spirit may be so strong that a big organization cannot be prevented. In this case our man turns extremely radical. He asks for unreasonable things and keeps the union embroiled in trouble. If a strike comes, he will be the loudest man in the bunch, and will counsel violence and get somebody in trouble. The result will be that the union will be broken up."[47]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_bus ... al_actions



So, to address your point, there's *no difference* to the landless worker as to whether they're being kicked-off of *landed* private property, or fired and expelled from a *workplace* of private property. In both cases it's the *owner* who has (almost unquestionable) discretion in who can be on that private property, and who cannot. Capitalist governments will uphold that private power of decision-making.

The landless worker *is* worse-off in either case from being expelled from private property, whether that's *rentier*-capital-based (the land-commodity), or *equity*-capital-based (a factory / workplace).

Your politics are lacking because you think that most land would be unclaimed and available as 'the commons' if only it weren't for people making private claims to such, and barring others. Capitalism, and even its predecessor, feudalism, would be *impossible* without the social practice of private-property ownership of land parcels.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
My point, though, goes *further*, to identify the factory owner(s) / controller(s)-of-producer-goods, as *exploiting* (stealing-from) what the products of workers' labor value are worth on the market, to the owner / exploiter of that labor value.



Truth To Power wrote:
But you are just objectively wrong, because the workers can always just choose not to deal with the factory owner and keep the full value of their own labor.



There's no basis for this claim of yours -- those with no capital and/or assets cannot simply choose to not-work, because the goods necessary for life and living (food, housing, etc.) cost *money*, and money can only be had from *wages*, from employment.

And those who *are* employed are ripped-off of their labor value every hour of every day that they work since the products of their labor, whether goods and/or services, are sold on the market by the employer for much more than is paid back to them in the form of a wage.

But I'll entertain your fantasy for the moment -- please let your readers know how they can allegedly keep the full value of their own labor, while not-possessing any capital of their own.


Truth To Power wrote:
It is the LANDOWNER they can't choose not to deal with because they need to use land to exist, and he owns their right to access it.



Collectively the economically dispossessed need both land (a 'place') *and* money, for the necessities of life and living (food, housing, etc.). This means that they / we need *a job*, so as to receive wages / money, to pay for rent (land), and to pay for for life-necessary commodities (food, housing, etc.).

The problem is that there's *no social guarantee* to the worker of retaining a job, for wages, for the purchase of the essentials of modern life and living. Again, you're making a false dichotomy in regards to ownership of private property, in an attempt to *scapegoat* the landowner (rentier capital), while excusing the *equity* owner's exploitation of labor-value (the production process), through their particular type of capital ownership.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage, sorry. Profits are just revenue less expenses, and dividends are just the portion of profits distributed to shareholders. They are accounting concepts that have no economic meaning.



See -- your whole line *depends on* the purported validity of *exchange values*, as though money / currency accurately reflects value (as from labor inputs, etc.). If profits are 'just revenue less expenses', then you're implicitly making the claim that such exchange values (profits) *are* valid. You're unable to discredit or disprove *my* line that labor, commodified, inherently and systematically *exploits* workers of their / our labor-value.

Yes, all of this *is* economic, because it deals with *material quantities* (of labor, capital, goods, etc.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, this part does help to clarify the dichotomy that you're asserting -- what you're *missing*, though, is that *both* are needed, the commodity-producing factory *and* the land it sits on, correct?



Truth To Power wrote:
I'm not missing anything. Both are needed, but THE LAND IS ALREADY THERE ANYWAY, the factory is not. That is what YOU are missing.



Okay -- what *you're* missing is that the land has been *commodified*. It's no-longer 'raw' land, from nature, because it has been claimed by someone as 'private property' and this social quality / distinction / legality has been *upheld* by the larger, dominant bourgeois ruling class.

I *agree* that the land was there, physically, but that's not what's at-issue -- what's at-issue is how the land is treated *socially*. It's made into *private property* -- which you *can't* deny -- by bourgeois legal norms, and upheld with the threat of violence from the capitalist state.

You have the typical libertarian stance of *wanting* no state to exist, yet your line / politics is *dependent* on a capitalist state of some sort in order for land to be parcelled-out among various owners, with this private-property ownership status *upheld* by the threat of violence from the nation-state.

In this way there is *no distinction / dichotomy* between these two forms of legalized private property -- both are upheld as *privately owned*. If I were to go on *either* type of private property without permission from the owners, I would be subject to the violence of the capitalist state -- arrest, imprisonment, fines, whatever.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Without the factory and its equipment, society can't get modern commodities like medicine, transportation, computers, etc.,



Truth To Power wrote:
Right.



Okay. I appreciate your honesty here, unlike all of the previous points you've responded to.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and without the designations of land parcels, through capitalist private property ownership, society wouldn't necessarily have a way of parcelling out land for this-or-that.



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. Although secure, exclusive tenure is necessary to productive use of land in an economy above the hunter-gatherer and nomadic-herding stages because we need a way to secure rightful property in fixed improvements, private ownership of land is just a quick and dirty way to solve that problem, much as slavery was a quick and dirty way to solve the problem of ensuring that defeated captives don't attack you again, without wasting the labor resources they represent by killing them. Today we know better ways to solve those problems.



Let me put it this way -- do you recognize that land parcels are a type of *private property*?

(My next point is that both rentier-type private property -- land -- *and* equity-type private property -- ownership of the means of mass industrial production -- are *commodities* under capitalism.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
But all of this is within the context of *capitalism* -- socialism *can* work on a large-scale, instead of capitalism,



Truth To Power wrote:
False dichotomy fallacy. Socialism and capitalism are not the only alternatives, however stridently socialists and capitalists insist they are.



Okay, I'll bite -- what are the alleged alternatives to capitalism and socialism?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
because the existence of producer goods / factories doesn't *require* the institution of private property ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
But will be less efficient without it because the incentives will be wrong. That is why socialist economies can never compete with capitalist ones.



We're *never* going to agree on a single definition of 'efficient' -- *your* definition is based on the alleged / purported validity of *exchange values* (as the fundamental economic unit of formal social value), while the *socialist* definition of 'efficient' is in terms of *use-values* -- what real-world physical *utility* is conferred by whatever tangible objects / tools, for the fulfillment of unmet human *need*.

You're unintentionally correct about the latter statement, though -- socialism, to whatever degree, cannot compete with capitalism, because there's *no point*. It *has* to be one-or-the-other because the two social systems are fundamentally *incompatible* and *clashing*.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Those goods, both producer-type and consumer-type, *already* exist due to the efforts of commodified human labor power,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Producer goods exist due to the decision and initiative of their creators/initial owners to take the risk of devoting their purchasing power to their creation, thus adding to productive capacity, rather than saving it or devoting it to consumption.



Ah -- so all you see regarding production are the *managerial* tasks. Let's use an example here, if you're willing: What about the *equipment* that is used within factories -- how was that equipment *created*, as from metals? Did some workers have to guide the liquified metal into *forms*, to produce those producer goods, while undertaking the risk of *being injured* by that molten metal in the process?

You place so much importance on the managerial 'we-need-x-equipment-here' decisions, but those decisions alone *do not* make equipment appear. That requires *labor*.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and so we have factories and developed land,



Truth To Power wrote:
The dishonest term, "developed land" is an attempt by you to evade the fact that all the land was already there, before any development or factories, and had to exist already before anyone could possibly develop it or build a factory on it. You are trying to contrive a way to prevent yourself from knowing the fact that the landowner is superfluous to production, but the factory owner is not.



It's not a dishonest terming -- it's an *honest* term.

I'm not going to *defend* the landowner, but I will put this to you -- consider the fires going on in the Amazon. How did those fires *start*? It was due to those who see / need the Amazon rainforest to be 'raw land' (and it is). You're making it sound as though nature's land is good-to-go for human usage, as-is, when that's *not* the case. Those encroaching on the Amazon rainforest must first *get rid of natural species*, both flora and fauna, and they do it by *burning* what exists there. Bolsonaro has been proactively *encouraging* small landowners to do this, even.

My point is that the burning-off of trees / plants, and the killing-off of animals there is *labor* -- the land has to be *prepared* for human usage, such as farming, since natural land *isn't* automatically ready for human economic purposes. (That labor involved would technically be a 'service', economically speaking.)


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ckaihatsu wrote:
and produced goods in the world today.



Truth To Power wrote:
The existence of land is not the result of anyone's labor or investment. The existence of factories is.



(See my previous point about the human labor necessary to convert the natural land into a *commodity*.)


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Once workers *organize* and lay-claim to all of the stuff that they've / we've produced,



Truth To Power wrote:
It was the capitalist, not the workers, who produced the factory, by bringing together all the production factors needed for its design and construction.



You're only talking about *social organization* -- yes, that's how it's done under *capitalism*, but socialism has a *different* way, namely the communistic gift economy. (And *I* have a way within that context: https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions)

Recall that the managerial decision-making required, done by the managerial staff, is all based in *thought*, correct? Not a single physical object is lifted or moved by *thought* alone, right? So after this managerial thought, someone has to handle the actual *physical* tasks of construction / fabrication, and it's these *physical* tasks that are the *work* of the production itself, managerial / ownership concerns aside.


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Truth To Power wrote:
[Socialism] can't work on a large scale because it considers the provider of producer goods to be as superfluous to production as the owner of land, and that is just factually incorrect. Without the factory owner, there is no factory for the socialist to steal. But without the landowner, the land is still there, and available for productive use.



ckaihatsu wrote:
the workers of the world can simply *take-back* that which they've produced and were ripped-off for,



Truth To Power wrote:
Garbage. The workers needed the capitalist to initiate and organize the building of the factory. They did not and could not do it without his contributions of purchasing power, risk tolerance, and the decision to build it. By contrast, they really WERE ripped off for the land, which would have been available to them if the landowner did not forcibly deprive them of it. You know this. Why pretend you don't?



I'm not pretending *shit* -- I just outlined that as long as land is a *commodity* (can be bought and sold) under capitalism, which it inevitably *has* to be, it *will* be a commodity.

You again think that raw natural land is immediately ready for human-economic purposes, when it's *not* -- labor is required to transform the natural land into a *commodity*, so as to perform economically.

Yes, under capitalism managerial-type social organization is required, but here's the thing: That managerial labor -- wait for it -- is *non-productive* because it's all *internal* to that capitalist social organization itself, meaning the business-entity itself. So no matter how much the managers think and handle financial matters of purchasing power, risk tolerance, and decision-making, not a thing is actually produced in the process. It's all *overhead* to the capitalist enterprise. The company has to hire *labor*, and its those *workers* who actually make the stuff, whatever it may happen to be, that then rolls off the assembly line. You're welcome.

I just noticed that I didn't address your prior point, that 'Socialism can't work on a large scale because it considers the provider of producer goods to be as superfluous to production as the owner of land, and that is just factually incorrect.'

First you're confusing historical-state-capitalist-Stalinist "socialism" for the original politics of the Communist-Manifesto socialism -- be warned, all of that historical nation-state, capital-S "Socialism" is *revisionist* and is not genuine socialism or communism as described in the 19th century.

Second, you have *no credentials* to speak on behalf of *any* 'socialism' -- you're a staunch defender of capitalist exploitation of labor.

Third, the provider of producer goods [factories] under a genuine workers state (socialism) would *not* be a single person as you're erroneously contending. The original formulation that was a brand-new form of social organization over production in 1917 was the 'soviet', or workers-council, and was *not* the authoritarianism of Stalin, riding-in on the aftermath of Western invasions against these workers councils.

In other words *both* the land *and* the factories / equipment (producer goods) would be *collectivized* by the active, on-the-ground workers themselves, with the scaled-up / generalized coordination / administration of the party, like the Bolsheviks in 1917.


Spoiler: show
The situation climaxed with the October Revolution, a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection by workers and soldiers in Petrograd that successfully overthrew the Provisional Government, transferring all its authority to the Soviets with the capital being relocated to Moscow shortly thereafter. The Bolsheviks had secured a strong base of support within the Soviets and, as the now supreme governing party, established a federal government dedicated to reorganizing the former empire into the world's first socialist state, practicing Soviet democracy on a national and international scale. The promise to end Russia's participation in the First World War was honored promptly with the Bolshevik leaders signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany in March 1918. To further secure the new state, the Cheka was established which functioned as a revolutionary security service that sought to weed out and punish those considered to be "enemies of the people" in campaigns consciously modeled on similar events during the French Revolution.

Soon after, civil war erupted among the "Reds" (Bolsheviks), the "Whites" (counter-revolutionaries), the independence movements and other socialist factions opposed to the Bolsheviks. It continued for several years, during which the Bolsheviks defeated both the Whites and all rival socialists and thereafter reconstituted themselves as the Communist Party. Soviet power was established in the newly independent republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Ukraine which led to their unification into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. While many notable historical events occurred in Moscow and Petrograd, there was also a visible movement in cities throughout the state, among national minorities throughout the empire and in the rural areas, where peasants took over and redistributed land.

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



And:


Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
to run such factories and equipment in their / our *own* best interests, without needing the system of private capital ownership to *distribute* such producer goods, etc.



Truth To Power wrote:
Private ownership CREATED the producer goods.



Nope -- see above. You keep referring to managerial executive functions which themselves *are not* materially productive.


Truth To Power wrote:
That is why the workers didn't build a factory without the capitalist's contributions.



Nope, as I mentioned earlier in this post you can't ignore the necessity of the capitalist / bourgeois state, for private property -- the state, like you, would consider any encroachment on private property, of any kind, to be "illegal", and would prevent any local group of workers from seizing control of an existing factory (necessarily built by workers), *or* from building a new one on land that they couldn't afford to buy themselves.

The point for workers *isn't* to become capitalists by playing the capitalist game in whatever form -- it's to *revolutionize* the way social production is done by collectively *controlling* their / our own labor, and by *overthrowing* the existing capitalist bourgeois nation-state system, worldwide.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Capitalism's 'invisible hand' can be replaced by liberated-workers' own collective *self-determination*, with explicitly *pre-planned* channeling of this-for-that, especially given today's computational prowess ('Big Data'), for mass-consciously *planning* how social production gets done, without capital ownership anywhere.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just anti-economic garbage because the purpose of production is to enable consumption, not to provide a livelihood for workers. Would the workers ever vote to replace themselves with machines? Of course not, so production would remain at a primitive level permanently. The capitalist, by contrast, is trying to serve consumers, not workers, so he replaces the workers with machinery and advances the condition of the whole society.



Sorry, but this is a *misnomer*, that workers wouldn't decide to replace themselves with machines.

Once in control of society's production the liberated workers would have an *objective* interest in replacing themselves with machinery -- fully automated luxury communism -- because no one would have any individual personal incentive to do work without being individually personally rewarded for such, which wouldn't really happen (in the later stages of the proletarian revolution, post-money).

So, collectively, there *would* be *collective* incentive to replace *all* liberated-labor with machinery, to the extent that everything else socially remaining would be strictly *socio-political*. As long as collective *social organization* over production could be agreed-upon, it would be the *machines* that do the actual work. All social-productive roles would be mass-inter-managerial, over productive assets and resources, with the benefits of fully automated production going to all of society, collectively, and *not* benefitting any *private-separatist* concerns. (Again see my 'labor credits FAQ' framework model for this.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Remember, *nothing* gets done without human labor, so there's no 'stealing' involved -- it's simply labor, collectively, taking-back what they / we ourselves produced in the first place, while repressing all private claims to the same.



Truth To Power wrote:
The workers did not produce the factory.



Yes, they did -- no executives rolled up their sleeves and put mortar on bricks to build any building.


Truth To Power wrote:
The capitalist who brought together all the factors needed for its design and construction did. The workers were just additional production factors the capitalist brought to bear on the project by his decision and initiative.



Okay, go ahead and take an informal survey -- ask a few dozen workers, wherever you can find them, if they consider themselves and the work they did, to be 'just additional production factors', as you call it.

Capitalists enjoy the privilege of calling the shots over how design and construction gets done due to their current ruling-class control over socially productive organization, because they have their own state, including bureaucracies, military, and police.

Once workers have their / our own *workers state*, there's the possibility of usurping the bourgeoisie's power.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Amazing -- you're obviously attempting to indict socialism on the basis of its ideology itself, *in a vacuum*.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, in the context of economic fact.



But there's *no context* to point-to -- the workers of the world *have no* power *anywhere* today, except for the potential of collectively withholding their / our own collective labor-power -- striking -- so as to 'flex' working-class 'muscle' over social production.


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Truth To Power wrote:
Mao was a socialist who killed tens of millions of people by attempting to implement socialism.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I'll remind that the most populous country in the world inherently has a *global* impact, and that the international context for China at that time was this:



Truth To Power wrote:
Irrelevant.



Okay, I just provided a *refutation* of your glib, simplistic treatment of China's political history -- there were *external* factors involved, which you're *ignoring*.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Since equity is a portion of ownership it makes more sense to refer to *shareholders* in the modern era, rather than a singular, fictional individual 'factory owner'.



Truth To Power wrote:
No. It doesn't matter if the factory owner is an individual, a group, or a corporation. Your term, "equity ownership" is a red herring, because the point is not who the owner is, but what is owned. Shareholders own shares in a company, not a factory. A company can own many things in addition to factories: land, money, IP monopolies, licenses, debt instruments, etc., etc. To understand the economic relationships, we have to separate ownership of all those disparate factors conceptually. We can't understand the character of ownership if we consider ownership of a chicken the same as ownership of a slave.



There's no empirical disagreement here, and I'm not invoking a red herring with my use of the valid term 'equity ownership'.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
This is the problem with capitalism -- those who need to consume from society's commodity production (food, housing, etc.) are only measured economically in terms of *wealth* / currency.



Truth To Power wrote:
No, that is not the problem with capitalism. It's not who has how much purchasing power, but HOW THEY GET IT.



Nice. I'm going to hold you to this statement in the future.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
Since private ownership of society's means of mass industrial production is the prevailing norm, it has no interests in people's own humane needs for the goods from society's mass production, it's only interested in the middle 'exchange values' realm, for squeezing-out profits from those who can *afford* to buy the things they need.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong. It wouldn't matter if everyone could afford the things they need -- as they actually can in most advanced countries. The problem is not that capitalists obtain profits by relieving consumer scarcity through production and exchange, but that they obtain profits by inflicting artificial scarcity on both consumers and producers in order to obtain profits WITHOUT relieving scarcity.



Okay, another one for the archives.

I would make the same point myself, that capitalism can only appropriately function in an economic environment of *scarcity* -- which was good for emerging from past *feudal* social relations -- but once it's flooded the markets with mass production it has to *create artificial scarcity*, as through warfare, to keep functioning. That's an *anti-capitalist* statement, in case you haven't already noticed.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Equity / shareholding ownership needs to be *de-privatized* / collectivized, so that the social production process can be in the hands of *workers*, to produce for themselves, primarily,



Truth To Power wrote:
Workers as owners will be like any other owners, and put their interests as owners ahead of those of consumers.



Yes, and it would be warranted, but here's the thing: *Anyone* could be a liberated-worker, especially since everything work-related would be *collectivized*, worldwide (similar to the way the Internet functions, but over all non-digital / physical aspects of society as well).

People could freely not-work and legitimately just *consume*, but it would be the liberated-workers who would always have first-dibs over their own production.


Truth To Power wrote:
But consumption is the ultimate purpose of all economic activity, so economic reason requires that the interests of consumers supersede those of either workers or owners. The advantage of capitalism is that factory owners have to serve consumers.



I actually do appreciate this rundown -- I happen to *agree* that there would continue to be 'inherent material-factional roles', but the difference would be that people could readily *circulate* through these various social roles, freely. Here's how I described it in my model:



In this way the labor credits framework has a dynamic of checks-and-balances among the three 'realms' of inherently different objective interests in a post-capitalist socio-political-material environment -- that of [1] liberated labor for more control, and even hegemony, over the social productive process, that of [2] mass consumption for easy / free access to satisfy any and all personal needs imaginable, and [3] administrative interests in institutionally overseeing all aspects of the material-economic world, as over all production and consumption, liberated-labor and all implements of mass production.

Here's an excerpt from the 'introduction' blog entry:


If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.



https://tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq



viewtopic.php?p=14997061#p14997061



Truth To Power wrote:
The disadvantage is that landowners can legally charge them full market value just for permission to do so.



Again, both land (rentier-type), *and* productive (equity-type) ownerships are *both* commodities and can be bought-up with private membership denied to anyone else by the owner. Land ownership is not exclusively elitist, as you're attempting to make it sound.


---


Okay, gotta run -- I'll finish up as soon as I can.
#15030678
ckaihatsu wrote:
Equity / shareholding ownership needs to be *de-privatized* / collectivized, so that the social production process can be in the hands of *workers*, to produce for themselves, primarily,


ckaihatsu wrote:
and for greater human needs, rather than the rewards from labor being systematically *expropriated* by private concerns.



Truth To Power wrote:
The factory owner cannot expropriate wages. He has no power to deprive the worker of anything.



To clarify, by 'rewards from labor', I'm referring to the *commodities* produced by labor, and not the lesser-value amount, in wages, that workers receive for their labor-efforts that *produced* those commodities.

Surplus labor value -- that beyond which is necessary for the personal maintenance of those workers, and for reproducing the same amount of labor-power into the future -- *is* expropriated by capitalist ownership in the form of revenue-minus-wages.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I'm not 'blathering' -- I'm *delineating*.



Truth To Power wrote:
You are blathering.



Nope. You're blatantly ignoring the *content* of what I'm saying, to carelessly be *dismissive* with the term 'blathering'. What I *said* was:


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Truth To Power wrote:
Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital),



Truth To Power wrote:
You are blathering incoherently again. An asset is simply something that is owned and can be liquidated. Land and factories are therefore both assets. You just can't tell the difference between them because you are a socialist (capitalists can't either).



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Land ownership *is* asset ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
So is ownership of a chicken, a slave, a bond, a bank account, a share of stock, a box of apples, etc. Being asset ownership tells you nothing about the economic relationships. WHAT is owned tells you something. But to learn what, you have to find a willingness to know the fact that owning a slave and owning a chicken are two very different things.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're even saying it yourself by stating that 'Land and factories are both assets' --



Truth To Power wrote:
Yes, and you don't understand what that means economically: nothing. "Asset" is an accounting concept, not an economic one.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I've already *explained* the difference,



Truth To Power wrote:
You only explained that you don't know the difference.



ckaihatsu wrote:
that necessarily-equity-capital-based factories manufacture commodity *goods*, while land / rentier assets *don't*,



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong. Both land and producer goods are needed for production (other rentier assets like patents aren't). The difference is that a factory has to be contributed by its owner to be available for production, while land's owner just deprives everyone else of the productive resource they would otherwise have been at liberty to use unless they meet his extortion demand.



The reason I don't consider land to be 'a productive resource' is because it *doesn't* produce final, modern commodities the way a factory's assembly line does. Here's from Wikipedia:



Marxism

Marx considered the "elementary factors of the labor-process" or "productive forces" to be:

• Labor

• Subject of labor (objects transformed by labor)

• Instruments of labor (or means of labor).[7]

The "subject of labor" refers to natural resources and raw materials, including land. The "instruments of labor" are tools, in the broadest sense. They include factory buildings, infrastructure, and other human-made objects that facilitate labor's production of goods and services.

This view seems similar to the classical perspective described above. But unlike the classical school and many economists today, Marx made a clear distinction between labor actually done and an individual's "labor power" or ability to work. Labor done is often referred to nowadays as "effort" or "labor services." Labor-power might be seen as a stock which can produce a flow of labor.

Labor, not labor power, is the key factor of production for Marx and the basis for Marx's labor theory of value. The hiring of labor power only results in the production of goods or services ("use-values") when organized and regulated (often by the "management"). How much labor is actually done depends on the importance of conflict or tensions within the labor process.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_o ... on#Marxism



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
and are therefore a *drain* / draw on any kind of funds, whether proletarian or bourgeois -- this is very *backwards*, *feudal-like* economic activity, in particular.



Truth To Power wrote:
Is that your way of saying you understand that the factory owner contributes to production and the landowner doesn't?



Exactly. Now you get it.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I *just said* 'rent' -- what do you think you're disagreeing with -- ?



Truth To Power wrote:
Your conflation of rent with interest.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Yes, the purchasing power of borrowed capital ('loan') is a commodity itself, too, under capitalism, that must be rewarded with interest.



Truth To Power wrote:
Which is not rent.



We've covered this ground already, at a different thread. Here's how it went:


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
We're back to the faux-infighting-schism ruse of good-capital-(equities)-versus-bad-capital-(rentier capital), as if the system of capitalism could somehow favor one form over the other, when in fact both types operate cohesively to exploit wage-labor of its labor-value -- class warfare.



Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong again. Equities are just ownership shares. They can be ownership of capital goods, production systems, rent collection privileges, or any combination thereof.



Truth To Power wrote:
The term, "rentier capital" indicates a refusal to know the difference between capital goods and rent collection privileges.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Just because you frame the ownership of assets as being 'rent collection privileges' doesn't *change* its nature -- it's still ownership of rentier capital, which means that, economically, it receives interest and/or rent payments just because it exists. 'Equities' more-regularly refers to ownership of a share of capital that's actively used in the production of commodities, for capital gains, by exploiting labor-power.




http://ftp.politicsforum.org/forum/view ... #p14996472



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Capitalism *as a whole* is artificial-scarcity-based, because private interests are *inherently* for monopolization / oligopolization, to corner-the-market, fix prices, thereby depriving all of those potential consumers who simply can't afford the inflated command prices for whatever.



Truth To Power wrote:
Monopoly is a temptation under capitalism but not an inevitability. Landowning is part of capitalism by definition.



Yes, monopoly *is* an inevitability under capitalism because bigger companies buy-out smaller companies and accumulate greater-and-greater collections of assets.

From the following list can you name *any* industry that's unaffected by mergers-and-acquisitions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... by_revenue


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is yet another problem with the capitalist method, that it tends towards overproduction but can't distribute commodities appropriately, preferring an economic environment of *scarcity*, even if that means the *destruction* of economic capacity, as ultimately through inter-imperialist *warfare*.



Truth To Power wrote:
It's true that capitalists understand that abundance and low prices are their enemy, and scarcity and high prices their friend, which sets them in opposition to society's interests. But only the landowner inherently has the power to inflict scarcity on others. The factory owner only gets that power if government gives it to him. It's not an inherent part of capitalism.



You're *contradicting* yourself with this statement, because you just said that 'capitalists understand that abundance and low prices are their enemy, and scarcity and high prices their friend'.

So which *is* it -- is artificial scarcity part of capitalism itself, or is it a government policy imposed from without? You're continuing to play good-capitalist, bad-capitalist, which is a false dichotomy since both types (rentier and equity) are still endemic to capitalism as a whole.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital), which confers the reward of *interest* and *rent collection* for such asset-holding,



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Land yields a return called rent, whose defining characteristic is that it is obtained by depriving others of something that would otherwise have been available. Interest is a return proportional to time and amount that is given in return for temporary use of purchasing power.



ckaihatsu wrote:
which is a *drain* / cost to funds required to *pay* such interest and rents to the asset-holder.



Truth To Power wrote:
No. Rent is paid for land, which would otherwise have been available, and is therefore a spurious cost imposed in return for no contribution from the owner. Interest is paid for use of purchasing power which would NOT otherwise have been available: its owner had to provide it.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Your overall politics have been unclear in the past on this point, and are unclear now --



Truth To Power wrote:
I try to be clear. What is unclear about my politics?



You're correctly giving definitions for 'interest' and 'rent', but you're not recognizing that the corresponding assets are *rentier*-type, and do *not* play a role in any kind of production. I noted that such rentier-type economic activity is a *drain* / cost to funds -- because no commodity production takes place commensurately -- and all you said was 'no' without making any supporting counter-argument.

What about *my* statement / description here are you *objecting* to, exactly?


---


Truth To Power wrote:
No. Rent is paid for land, which would otherwise have been available, and is therefore a spurious cost imposed in return for no contribution from the owner. Interest is paid for use of purchasing power which would NOT otherwise have been available: its owner had to provide it.



ckaihatsu wrote:
there's nothing 'spurious' about the cost of having to pay rent to one-landowner-or-another.



Truth To Power wrote:
There is if the recipient of the rent (land can be administered without being owned) is anyone other than the government and community that give the land its value.



You're saying that rent is 'spurious' if the corresponding asset is being managed in *private* hands (the private sector), rather than administered publicly, as from the public sector.

I'll acknowledge the distinction you're making here between 'private sector' and 'public sector', and will also agree -- as I've already said -- that payments for rentier-type 'services', like housing and land, are a non-productive *drain* / cost on funds. You're not-acknowledging that rentier-type assets are *non-productive*.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You *seem* to be disdaining private land ownership, in favor of a more-'commons' approach, but you never explicitly make that argument --



Truth To Power wrote:
My position is that everyone should have free secure, exclusive tenure on enough of the available advantageous land to have access to economy opportunity, and those who want to exclude others from more than that should pay the difference to the community of those they exclude.



Well, that's *nice*, but it's also *idealistic* because there has to be a specialized *institution*, like a state, or definitely a state, to *enforce* such a framework.

The state will be mostly *separate* from the greater society due to its specialization, and will have its own collective, institutional *interests* for itself and its self-survival, going-forward. This institutional bureaucracy will be *non-productive* because its work is *internal* to the functioning of that society. All other employees will receive *wages* -- not salaries -- for their work-inputs and the work they do will actually produce goods and services for the economy, 'productive' work, that is.

This is *liberalism*, in brief, coming from you, and it's inherently *unrealistic* because it can't be sustained. Just like the capitalist power structure of today, there exists differing, inherently-antagonistic class interests between the ruling bourgeoisie / bureaucracy / government, and the subordinated working class. Fine / enlightened frameworks may be more-desirable on-paper, but they're still *unrealistic* in the real world as long as the class division continues to exist.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
in the past you've even *defended* the capitalist economic practice of private land ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
Where? You must have misunderstood me.



I don't think so -- you're *pro-capitalism*, and I have evidence from you, at a different thread:


Truth To Power wrote:
Workers can't collectivize or coordinate all productive implements, which ARE capital.


Truth To Power wrote:
[W]ithout the capital goods’ owner's contribution, the workers can't produce more than a minuscule fraction of what they produce with the capital owner's help.


Truth To Power wrote:
Marxist nonsense


Truth To Power wrote:
Ownership of capital does not confer any right or power to exploit labor because the capital owner only OFFERS the worker access to opportunity he would not otherwise have.


Truth To Power wrote:
I don’t propose eliminating all regulation, just privilege and the regulations, such as minimum wages, that futilely attempt to reverse its harmful effects.



viewtopic.php?p=15000685#p15000685



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You may want to take a political stand at this point, and clarify your politics around rentier-vs.-equity-capital-ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
I've been clear about it all along: the owner of producer goods such as factories, land improvements, vehicles, etc. that aid production contributes to production and earns the market return of his contribution; the owner of land and other natural resources contributes nothing to production, and earns nothing because he only deprives others of those things unless they meet his extortion demands; the owner of patents, copyrights, and other privileges actually reduces production, and harms the economy and consumers.



Actually, natural resources *do* contribute to production since they're used / used-up in the production process.

Here's that excerpt again:



Marxism

Marx considered the "elementary factors of the labor-process" or "productive forces" to be:

• Labor

• Subject of labor (objects transformed by labor)

• Instruments of labor (or means of labor).[7]

The "subject of labor" refers to natural resources and raw materials, including land. The "instruments of labor" are tools, in the broadest sense. They include factory buildings, infrastructure, and other human-made objects that facilitate labor's production of goods and services.

This view seems similar to the classical perspective described above. But unlike the classical school and many economists today, Marx made a clear distinction between labor actually done and an individual's "labor power" or ability to work. Labor done is often referred to nowadays as "effort" or "labor services." Labor-power might be seen as a stock which can produce a flow of labor.

Labor, not labor power, is the key factor of production for Marx and the basis for Marx's labor theory of value. The hiring of labor power only results in the production of goods or services ("use-values") when organized and regulated (often by the "management"). How much labor is actually done depends on the importance of conflict or tensions within the labor process.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factors_o ... on#Marxism



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
No, I'm saying that the land itself is not economically productive in the way that equity-capital-enabled factory *commodity* production is.



Truth To Power wrote:
But you are just wrong. The advantages of a given location are just as much an aid to production there as a factory.



I'll gladly clarify -- *agricultural* land (necessarily for food production) is not to be considered as 'productive' because everyone needs food (etc.) in order to live. It should be seen as a necessary input to work that produces modern commodities, 'productivity'.

Yes, even that Marxist definition above sees land as being part of production, so I'll concur, as long as that land is part of a *productive* business entity -- but the land *itself* is non-productive.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Food is a biological requirement for *everyone*, so farm production should be seen more akin to *profiteering*, inherently, rather than the making of modern tangible commodity items that enable modern life and living in various ways.



Truth To Power wrote:
What nonsense. The fact that everyone needs food does not make those who produce it into "profiteers." They are the ones making sure the rest of us don't starve! It is the landowner who profits without lifting a productive finger, not the farmer. Give your head a shake.



*Yes* -- you *are* agreeing that rentier-type assets, like land, are non-productive, because the landowner is able to profit from it without lifting a finger (not contributing to any kind of conceivable 'production'). (The landowner is both non-productive *and* an exploiter of labor.) (The land itself isn't producing commodities the way a factory does.)

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your spin -- yes, the laborers themselves are providing food to the rest of us, but it's at a *price*, with the profits going to the owners of the farming business. This makes them profiteers because all people have *no choice* but to buy food, to satisfy that material requirement for ongoing life and living.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
There *is* a difference between what the factory produces, and what the land produces, if anything.



Truth To Power wrote:
They are both factors of production, not producers. The difference is not in what they add to production (there is often a degree of substitutability between them), but how they come to be available for production.



Well, the Marxist definition considers land to be a natural resource, so I'll concur with that -- the land *itself*, though, is non-productive.


---


Truth To Power wrote:
Land, labor, and producer goods like factories all contribute to production whether they are modern or not. The worker provides labor that would not otherwise be available, so he earns wages; the owner of producer goods provides the tools, buildings, etc. that make labor far more productive and would not otherwise be available, so he earns the market return to his contribution; but the land was already there, ready to use, with no help from its owner or any previous owner, so the landowner does NOT make any contribution to production to earn his rent return. He is simply legally entitled to charge others for what government, the community and nature provide.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're simply describing capitalism here



Truth To Power wrote:
Only assuming private ownership of land. I don't make that assumption.



So you're indicating that you'd rather have a *public sector* administration of the land natural-resource itself. Again, it's liberalism, because this kind of government policy would be resisted by the *private* sector which would want to *privatize* all land (etc.) as rentier-type capital assets, and would not want to pay to support this kind of government that works against their private interests. That's capitalism for ya.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
-- and, you're constantly *vacillating* on the status of private land ownership.



Truth To Power wrote:
No I'm not. Land cannot rightly be owned, and I have not claimed otherwise.



Okay, noted. (But it's the governmental *administration* of land that would be an inherently contradictory act since the system *would* continue to have private property -- from what I can tell -- so people would then argue 'Why not land, too?'. Your favored policy regarding land is *arbitrary* and can't be objectively defended.)


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Is it *valid*, or isn't it?



Truth To Power wrote:
No.



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
(You seem to be siding with bourgeois norms on the *legality* of land ownership to collect economic rents, and even possibly interest.)



Truth To Power wrote:
It is legal in the same sense that owning slaves was once legal. Interest is a more complicated case because there is a difference between privately saved purchasing power and privately issued purchasing power.



So then -- your personal opinions aside -- as long as land can continue to be in *private* hands it will function as rentier-type assets, and will continue to be able to collect interest and/or rent payments (non-productive, and a draw on funds).

If you're saying that *all* land should be administered by the government, then that's something different. So would land be allowed in private hands at all, or not?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, the landowner and the factory owner are both *ownership*, obviously, but the difference between the two is a matter of rentier capital versus *equity* capital, respectively.

Land owning is equivalent to *asset* ownership (rentier capital), which confers the reward of *interest* and *rent collection* for such asset-holding, which is a *drain* / cost to funds required to *pay* such interest and rents to the asset-holder. Also note that the (land) asset itself is economically *non-productive*, even if farming is done on it, because people need to eat food, regardless, so that they can work modern jobs that *are* productive to the economy.


ckaihatsu wrote:
On the other hand, *equity* capital *can* contribute to social production since it uses speculative investments (part of capitalism) to exploit labor,



Truth To Power wrote:
No, you are again just objectively wrong. Speculation seeks to obtain a return by anticipating changes in price. Contribution of producer goods seeks a return by increasing the efficiency of production and making labor more productive. One cannot exploit labor simply by offering the worker access to opportunities to be more productive that he would not otherwise have had, and that is all the owner of producer goods has the power to do.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I mean 'speculative' in the sense that the owners of productive goods (factories) don't know exactly what the sales results will be beforehand -- in this way, even equity capital investments are 'speculative', along with more-purely-speculative goals around prices, as you've mentioned.



Truth To Power wrote:
You are Marxishly misusing the term. Investment in enhancing production is risky, but it is not speculation.



I'll rephrase -- since detailed information about who's buying what, per company, isn't usually available upfront (unless there's pre-ordering going on), each company has to make a *guess* about how many units of whatever, to produce. Let's call it a 'guesstimation'.

This guesstimation may *approximate* the real-world empirical facts of the markets, but the information gleaned from pre-sales market research is nowhere near exact, and isn't suitable for precise planning of how much stuff should be produced in order to satisfy market demand, month-by-month, say.

So even equity-based, labor-exploiting production *is* 'speculative' to a degree because companies have historically *gone bankrupt* by mis-guesstimating what market demand really is, with subsequent additional costs for producing superfluous production that simply can't be absorbed by actual market demand. This, too, is capitalism.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The exploitation of labor takes place systematically, every hour of every day because the *products* of labor are sold by ownership on the market for *more* than is paid to the workers in the form of a wage.



Truth To Power wrote:
Nonsense. We've established that the workers are not the only ones contributing to production, so why would they get all the value of production, leaving other contributors with nothing to show for their contributions?



Here's the funny part: Yes, workers *are* the only ones contributing to production, because all the 'stuff' that's ever been made has been made by workers (buildings, factories, equipment, all goods and services).

This, though, depends on the active working definition of 'work' -- I'll gladly allow for 'work' to include a managerial-type *social organization* (of the business, labor, etc.), but what's usually missed in discussions like these is that there's a *political* aspect as well, namely how each party (ownership, workers) is *rewarded*. Ownership itself is nothing but accumulated wealth, so it's *furthest* from the actual making of stuff, which is what the *workers* do. Managerial-type work is internal to the private enterprise and is still disproportionately rewarded compared to the actual work of the workers, and managerial-type work is *non-productive*, though still essential to operations.

The revolutionary position, by the way, is that workers can collectively *self-manage* production once they've / we've *de-privatized* the assets and raw materials, since it's workers who have produced all of that, anyway, over the centuries and millenia.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, if you want to empirically value the inclusion of private ownership's *management* tasks, over production, then that's fair,



Truth To Power wrote:
All labor consists of making and carrying out decisions,



No, this *isn't* a good definition of 'labor', because who makes the actual stuff, and provides the services?


Truth To Power wrote:
and there is always an element of risk therein. The capital owner's managerial decision to devote his purchasing power to the aid of production is itself labor,



No, decision-making over owned capital *isn't* labor because its only concern is with *making more money*, the M-C-M' cycle.


Truth To Power wrote:
and the element of risk in that decision is normally even greater than for the worker.



Untrue. The risks that workers take are over their *very lives*, often, and thousands of workers die every year in the workplace. That's a *much greater* risk than capital-investment decisions.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
but I have to point out that, within capitalism, this / these roles, including all of capitalist government, are *internal* to private interests themselves -- greater-productivity workers do not enjoy any benefits themselves from being more-productive, as such increased revenue goes to *ownership*, and not to increase the wages for workers.



Truth To Power wrote:
Not quite. The treadmill runner who outstrips his fellows may get ahead of them and achieve greater rewards; but if the bulk of the runners run faster, the treadmill just goes faster.



This is not clear at all -- you're making my argument *for* me, from what I can tell, because you seem to be saying that as worker productivity increases overall the standard expectations for worker *output* per hour rise as well, negating any possible gain in wages from that increased productivity. This happens to be empirically *factual*, as well:

Image


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
So we just differ on collectivization by one increment -- you're more progressive than an *aristocratic*-type claim to land, but *not* regarding producer goods, while I think *both* land ownership *and* factory ownership should be handed over to the working class as a whole, the *maximum* amount of collectivization that can be potentially, realistically accomplished.



Truth To Power wrote:
I don't regard "collectivization" -- I prefer to speak of democratically accountable administration -- as an end in itself, but merely a means to be used when it is efficient and appropriate, mainly for natural resources and natural monopolies.



Hmmmm, then how do you know when to draw-the-line? When should enterprises be private-sector, and when should they become departments in a public-sector bureaucracy?


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're disagreements with me on the empirical facts of capitalist political economy are *baseless*. I've shown that we tend to *agree* on the objective definitions, but *differ* on extent-of-collectivization.



Truth To Power wrote:
Your use of evasive terms like "developed land" and "exploitation" tells me we do not agree on the objective definitions.



Well land *isn't* developed for being used as a commodity from its natural state -- it takes *labor* to transform natural land into an economic commodity, for human usage.

And exploitation of labor *is* a reality -- here's this again:



Capitalists are able to purchase labour power from the workers, who can only bring their own labour power in the market. Once capitalists are able to pay the worker less than the value produced by their labour, surplus labour forms and this results in the capitalists' profits. This is what Marx meant by "surplus value", which he saw as "an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labor-power by capital, or of the laborer by the capitalist".[9] This profit is used to pay for overhead and personal consumption by the capitalist, but was most importantly used to accelerate growth and thus promote a greater system of exploitation.[8]



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



---


Truth To Power wrote:
Aided by socialists and capitalists pushing their false dichotomy, and clinging to their common error: that there is no significant difference between the landowner and the factory owner.



ckaihatsu wrote:
You're barely even a libertarian with this line of yours, and you sound much more like a feudalist-reactionary instead, maybe of the kind of Nepal or Tibet.



Truth To Power wrote:
Blather unrelated to anything I said.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Look at how feudalistic and reactionary (non-industrial) the nation-states of Nepal and Tibet have been:



Truth To Power wrote:
I can't imagine how that is relevant.



Due to historical development, the factory owner is relatively more economically progressive than the landowner because at least *production* is taking-place through equity investments, to exploit labor, in the production of socially-necessary goods and services.

The same cannot be said for simple rentier-type *asset ownership*, which is *non-productive*, though it benefits from the collection of rent and/or interest, which is relatively more-*backwards*, and feudal-like.

Nepal and Tibet have traditionally been *non-industrial*, or non-productive in modern economic terms. *This* is the difference between the landowner and the factory owner.
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