Saeko wrote:Every concept of "value" I've ever come across in any economic theory turned out to be nothing but hot air. I am a value atheist. I don't believe in economic value.
tl;dr Emphasis on subjectivity independent it's concodrance with reality results in the same thing as saying I don't know because it has nothing to say and I am suspicious of the skepticism towards understanding essentials of how we meet our needs and shape ourselves due to a modernist prejudice that the world is knowable and skepticism serves a status quo that obscures knowledge as an ideological maneuver even in those who are interested in the truth and reality because they are not provided with the best means to question and analyze their own conceptual tools and reality. So even doubts about what one is taught are constrained and one ends up only with reforms of bad abstractions and assumptions that inherently constrain one's ability to learn and thus have different implications for what is possible. As such I look to those with more knowledge than myself to help discern specifics of how and what value is in it's content/substance, and social form.
So I have no bullet proof argument, except my own biases and inclinations that can't honestly tolerate what feels like the denial of any prospect of analysis and to know.
I admit have have a philosophical prejudice towards the idea of things merely being subjective or entirely independent of reality. Naturally, I can have thoughts that are fantasy and unreal, but quite often I find unacceptable the idea that we are so thoroughly independent of reality to have little sense of it. Even with the likes of Kant, we merely have empty schemes from which to project onto reality, it seems a kind of skepticism that denies the ability to have substantial knowledge and I find often supports a status quo. However, many who claim to be objective do so in a narrow way that entirely denies humans place in coming to know reality if even in an incomplete and imperfect manner.
The retreat into the subjective is basically to give up on problems as having no reality because it's all just a matter of opinion but even intuitive conclusions become untenable when one makes such a thing absolute and without relation to reality. We are all individuals abstracted of any social upbringing and reality shaped by humans with human meanings that have a reality beyond mere belief in their functions within activities, yet we are still presented as if we act as sovereign subjects who are free of such influences.
To many all thought is reduced to fantasy and there is no distinction in regards to how what I think pertains to reality.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259742845_Reality_of_the_IdealIt is certainly not allowed to include in the category of the ideal just any subjective perceptions, conceiving only external features of things or the ‘eeting mental states of an individual, completely personal, not possessing any universal meaning for another individual’, as Ilyenkov insists. In classical phi-losophy, since Socrates and Plato, it is the adequate and universally valid forms of thought that are called ‘ideas’
However, later (and exactly in line with one-sided empiricism – Locke, Berkeley, Hume and their successors) the word ‘idea’ and its derivative, the adjective ‘ideal’, once again became a simple collective term for any mental phenomena, for even a fleeting, mental state of an individual ‘self’, and this usage also obtained enough power to maintain quite a stable tradition, which has survived, as we can see, to this day.18
Destroying the watershed between ideas and sensual images, empiricists lose the ability not only to solve but even to pose correctly the problem of the ideal. In his day, Hegel spoke ironically that Englishmen ‘call a simple image – of a dog, for example – an idea’. By doing so, they could hardly deny the presence of ideas in the head of this very dog. The order and connection of ‘ideas’ like that certainly have nothing in common with the order and connection of things, including that real social tie which Plato called ‘politeia’. The former tie is an associative relationship, the ‘passive order of perceptions’ (Hegel); while the lat-ter one is a logical, active, cause-effect relationship.
THe idea being that we can only be sure of what is sensous, then of course we have Berkley to say that the distinction between primary and secondary sensous attributes is arbitrary and that it's all subjective perception and reality is only guaranteed by a God that is always witnessing reality. In such a tradition there is an idea that what I can sense is what is real, as if ideas that approximate the relationships and infer how things work beyond what I directly sense lacks reality, such is the narrow scope of empiricism which has its strength in emphasizing the material world but struggles to develop concepts critically appropriate to it except unconsciously/haphazardly.
But there are supersensous things that have an objective reality in the material world and the acitvity of humans and cannot be reduced to the whims of an individual consciousness. To explain how money can come to represent the potential of every other commodity is not something that is created out of fantasy but clearly out of the organization of human production the world over. Money does not become money because I wish it and it isn't simply the additive belief of each individual although an individual consciousness is required to be able to use money.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/ideal/ideal.htm#:~On the other hand, the “material” element of cognition is achieved by sensations, which assure us of the existence (and only that!) of things outside consciousness. Thus, all we know about “things in themselves” is that they “exist”. The ideal is what exists exclusively in the consciousness and thanks to the activity of the consciousness. And conversely, that which exists only in consciousness is characterised as the “ideal”. All clear and simple. A perfectly popular distinction. And what it amounts to is that none of the facts we know and are aware of in things – their colour, geometrical form, taste, causal interdependence – may be attributed to the things themselves. All these are merely attributes provided by our own organisation, and not those of the things. In other words, the “ideal” is everything that we know about the world except the bare fact of its “existence”, its “being outside consciousness”. The latter is non-ideal and, therefore, inaccessible to consciousness and knowledge, transcendental, alien, and awareness of the fact that things, apart from anything else, also “exist” (outside the consciousness) adds nothing whatever to our knowledge of them. And it is this interpretation that Kant illustrates with his famous example of the talers. It is one thing, he writes, to have a hundred talers in one’s pocket, and quite another thing to have them only in one’s consciousness, only in imagination, only in dreams (i.e., from the standpoint of popular usage, only “ideal” talers).
In Kant’s philosophy this example plays an extremely important role as one of the arguments against the so-called “ontological proof of the existence of God”. His argument runs as follows. It cannot be inferred from the existence of an object in the consciousness that the object exists outside the consciousness. God exists in people’s consciousness but it does not follow from this that God exists “in fact”, outside consciousness. After all, there are all kinds of things in people’s consciousness! Centaurs, witches, ghosts, dragons with seven heads ...
With this example, however, Kant gets himself into a very difficult position. In fact, in a neighbouring country where the currency was not talers but rubles or francs it would have been simply explained to him that he had in his pocket not “real talers” but only pieces of paper with symbols carrying an obligation only for Prussian subjects. ... However, if one acknowledges as “real” only what is authorised by the decrees of the Prussian king and affirmed by his signature and seal, Kant’s example proves what Kant wanted it to prove. If, on the other hand, one has a somewhat wider notion of the “real” and the “ideal”, his example proves just the opposite. Far from refuting, it actually affirms that very “ontological proof” which Kant declared to be a typical example of the erroneous inferring of the existence of a prototype outside the consciousness from the existence of the type in the consciousness.
“The contrary is true. Kant’s example might have enforced the ontological proof,” wrote Marx, who held a far more radical atheistic position than Kant in relation to “God”. And he went on: “Real talers have the same existence that the imagined gods have. Has a real taler any existence except in the imagination, if only in the general or rather common imagination of man? Bring paper money into a country where this use of paper is unknown, and everyone will laugh at your subjective imagination.”
The reproach aimed at Kant does not, of course, derive from a desire to change the meaning of the terms “ideal” and “real” after the Hegelian fashion. Marx bases his argument on realisation of the fact that a philosophical system which denotes as “real” everything that man perceives as a thing existing outside his own consciousness, and “ideal” everything that is not perceived in the form of such a thing, cannot draw critical distinctions between the most fundamental illusions and errors of the human race.
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But here we are immediately confronted with the trickiness of this distinction, which is fully provided for by the Hegelian school and its conception of the “materialisation”, the “alienation”, the “reification” of universal notions. As a result of this process which takes place “behind the back of the individual consciousness”, the individual is confronted in the form of an “external thing” with people’s general (i.e., collectively acknowledged) representation, which has absolutely nothing in common with the sensuously perceived bodily form in which it is “represented”.
For example, the name “Peter” is in its sensuously perceived bodily form absolutely unlike the real Peter, the person it designates, or the sensuously represented image of Peter which other people have of him. The relationship is the same between the gold coin and the goods that can be bought with it, goods (commodities), whose universal representative is the coin or (later) the banknote. The coin represents not itself but “another” in the very sense in which a diplomat represents not his own person but his country, which has authorised him to do so. The same may be said of the word, the verbal symbol or sign, or any combination of such signs and the syntactical pattern of this combination.
This relationship of representation is a relationship in which one sensuously perceived thing performs the role or function of representative of quite another thing, and, to be even more precise, the universal nature of that other thing, that is, something “other” which in sensuous, bodily terms is quite unlike it, and it was this relationship that in the Hegelian terminological tradition acquired the title of “ideality”.
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What is this “other”, this difference, which is expressed or represented here? People’s consciousness? Their will? By no means. On the contrary, both will and consciousness are determined by this objective ideal form, and the thing that it expresses, “represents” is a definite social relationship between people which in their eyes assumes the fantastic form of a relationship between things.
In other words, what is “represented” here as a thing is the form of people’s activity, the form of life activity which they perform together, which has taken shape “behind the back of consciousness” and is materially established in the form of the relationship between things described above. This and only this creates the ideality of such a “thing”, its sensuous-supersensuous character. Here ideal form actually does stand in opposition to individual consciousness and individual will as the form of the external thing (remember Kant’s talers) and is necessarily perceived precisely as the form of the external thing, not its palpable form, but as the form of another equally palpable thing that it represents, expresses, embodies, differing, however, from the palpable corporeality of both things and having nothing in common with their sensuously perceptible physical nature.
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The mysteriousness of this category of “things”, the secret of their “ideality”, their sensuous-supersensuous character was first revealed by Marx in the course of his analysis of the commodity (value) form of the product.
Marx characterises the commodity form as an IDEAL form, i.e., as a form that has absolutely nothing in common with the real palpable form of the body in which it is represented (i.e., expressed, materialised, reified, alienated, realised), and by means of which it “exists”, possesses “present being”.
It is “ideal” because it does not include a single atom of the substance of the body in which it is represented, because it is the form of quite another body. And this other body is present here not bodily, materially (“bodily” it is at quite a different point in space), but only once again “ideally”, and here there is not a single atom of its substance. Chemical analysis of a gold coin will not reveal a single molecule of boot-polish, and vice versa. Nevertheless, a gold coin represents (expresses) the value of a hundred tins of boot-polish precisely by its weight and gleam. And, of course, this act of representation is performed not in the consciousness of the seller of boot-polish, but outside his consciousness in any “sense” of this word, outside his head, in the space of the market, and without his having even the slightest suspicion of the mysterious nature of the money form and the essence of the price of boot-polish.... Everyone can spend money without knowing what money is.
For this very reason the person who confidently uses his native language to express the most subtle and complex circumstances of life finds himself in a very difficult position if he takes it into his head to acquire consciousness of the relationship between the “sign” and the “meaning”. The consciousness which he may derive from linguistic studies in the present state of the science of linguistics is more likely to place him in the position of the centipede who was unwise enough to ask himself which foot he steps off on. And the whole difficulty which has caused so much bother to philosophy as well lies in the fact that “ideal forms”, like the value-form, the form of thought or syntactical form, have always arisen, taken shape and developed, turned into something objective, completely independent of anyone’s consciousness, in the course of processes that occur not at all in the “head”, but most definitely outside it – although not without its participation.
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The existence of this specifically human object – the world of things created by man for man, and, therefore, things whose forms are reified forms of human activity (labour), and certainly not the forms naturally inherent in them – is the condition for the existence of consciousness and will. And certainly not the reverse, it is not consciousness and will that are the condition and prerequisite for the existence of this unique object, let alone its “cause”.
The consciousness and will that arise in the mind of the human individual are the direct consequence of the fact that what he is confronted by as the object of his life activity is not nature as such, but nature that has been transformed by the labour of previous generations, shaped by human labour, nature in the forms of human life activity.
Consciousness and will become necessary forms of mental activity only where the individual is compelled to control his own organic body in answer not to the organic (natural) demands of this body but to demands presented from outside, by the “rules” accepted in the society in which he was born. It is only in these conditions that the individual is compelled to distinguish himself from his own organic body. These rules are not passed on to him by birth, through his “genes”, but are imposed upon him from outside, dictated by culture, and not by nature.
Basically the above is to just emphasize that things represent philosophically material (that is things that exist independent of any individual consciousness) relations in a human world, but aren't directly sensuously perceived but represent other things within a system of activity governed by humans.
And so when it comes to asserting that humans have always laboured to meet their needs, and that born from a natural reality but increasingly shaped by social relations and norms, humans have created systems of activity adn meaning within them that are grander than any mere belief but exist because people act in a way that gives them reality. Science isn't some sensous object in the world but it most certainly exists as a practice, with individuals who are scientists, who exist within particular scientific institutions in particular fields (biology, astronomy, chemistry) and act to varying degrees to the universal concept of science.
But in every society we must meet our basic needs and have always laboured, and created new needs out of how we've shaped the world and this reality must always take some particular form. But to many there is nothing objective except appearances. Only price has a reality because quantity is objective and without subjectivity and provides an easy and narrow means of measuring dynamics against idealized but essential models.
But science isn't but appearences, the truth of things is not self-evident but always a a system of concepts developed out of many facts and information, sifting through for what is essential to the nature of things within their relations.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11-abs.htmThe vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value. The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all?
But the matter has also another background. Once the interconnection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice. Here, therefore, it is absolutely in the interest of the ruling classes to perpetuate a senseless confusion. And for what other purpose are the sycophantic babblers paid, who have no other scientific trump to play save that in political economy one should not think at all?
I do not grasp Marx, but I think there is merit in his work that cannot be dismissed as a delusion of mere subjectivity and that the material foundations of our existence has sense to it, has logical self-regulating dynamics that can be comprehended when related to one another and not abstracted from one another, and that as complex as the economy is, the task isn't a matter of some perfect measurement for significant predictive power, but to understand the dynamics and thus see it's constraints/limitations, it's essential qualities and their implications.
Desire cannot be quantified and can even be infinite as many say when proclaiming economics the science of scarcity. Indeed, the want of things is subjective, but even desires are not independent a social reality and are given form and potential from one's place within human life.
Instead of the individual person with an array of desires posited next to another, we have a working class deprived of subsistence that must enter into a system of wage labor (may choose an employer but cannot on the whole choose to not be of the class) and they act within those constraints.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/09/30/marginal-futility-reflections-on-simon-clarkes-marx-marginalism-and-modern-sociology/I like the way Clarke develop his proof this problem: Commodity exchange presupposes individuals with different needs and different resources because if everyone had the same stuff there would be no reason for exchange. Thus exchange presupposes differences. If exchange is systematic these differences must also be systematic. Thus the formal equality and freedom of exchange is founded on different resource endowments. This means that the content of exchange can’t be reduced to its form (free, juridically equal relations between people) but must be found outside of exchange in the realm of production and property.
Scarcity relates to the application of labor to produce for need. The basis of exchange is the sale of the products of this labor. Thus the need for a theory of value based on human labor, not subjective whims.
Different types of exchange presuppose different production and property relations. The simple commodity exchange (independent producers exchanging the product of their labor in the market) is a popular image in marginalist accounts of exchange (as well as market-anarchism fantasies) yet such a system of exchange has only existed within larger societies dominated by other social relations (ie feudalism, capitalism, state-capitalism/20th century communism). Capitalist exchange presupposes social relations between two social classes, one owning the means of production, the other nothing. As we’ve seen, Marginalism tries to treat all factors of production with the same theoretical tools of subjective preference theory. But the division of the social product into rent, profit and wages actually presupposes antagonistic social relations between classes and thus requires different theoretical ideas.
Marginalists would like to treat the unequal resource endowments of individuals as due to extra-economic factors, consigning these concerns to the fields of history and sociology. But these inequalities don’t just proceed exchange historically. They are actually reproduced by exchange. Capitalism generates a world in which individuals must maintain a certain standard of living in order to survive (try paying the bills without a phone, house, car, work clothes, haircuts, health-care, etc.) and must engage in wage-labor. And wage-labor actively reproduced the two social classes of capitalist and worker and their violently divergent relationships to the means of production. Without scarcity we couldn’t have wage labor. There would be no reason to work. Thus capitalism must constantly reproduce scarcity.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227361760_Still_Dead_After_All_These_Years_Interpreting_the_Failure_of_General_Equilibrium_TheoryThere are two separate points here: one involves the methodology ofaggregation, and the other concerns the behavioural model of the individual .Both are basic causes of the instability of general equilibrium.
Instability arises in part because aggregate demand is not as well behavedas individual demand. If the aggregate demand function looked like anindividual demand function ± that is, if the popular theoretical ®ction of a`representative individual’ could be used to represent marke t behaviour ± thenthere would be no problem. Unfortunately , though, the aggregation problemis intrinsic and inescapable. There is no representative individual whosedemand function generates the instability found in the SMD theorem(Kirman 1992). Groups of people display patterns and structure s of beha-viour that are not present in the behaviour of the individual members; this is amathematical truth with obvious importance throughou t the social sciences.For contemporary economics, this suggests that the pursuit of micro-foundations for macroeconomics is futile. Even if individual behaviour wereperfectly understood , it would be impossi bl e to draw useful conclusion s aboutmacroeconomics directly from that understanding, due to the aggregationproblem (Rizvi 1994, Martel 1996). This fact is re¯ected in Arrow’s one-sentence summary of the SMD result, quoted at the beginning of this section.
The microeconomic model of behaviour contributes to instability becauseit says too little about what individuals want or do. From a mathematica lstandpoint, as Saari suggests, there are too many dimensions of possiblevariation, too many degrees of freedom, to allow results at a useful level of speci®city. The consumer is free to roam over the vast expanse of availablecommodities, subject only to a budget constraint and the thinnest possibleconception of rationality: anythin g you can a ord is acceptable, so long asyou avoid blatant inconsistency in your preferences . he assumed independence of individuals from each other, emphasized byKirman, is an important part but not the whole of the problem. A reasonabl emodel of social behaviour should recognize the manner in which individual sare interdependent; the standard economic theory of consumptio n fails toacknowledge any forms of interdependence, except throug h market transac-tions. However, merely amending the theory to allow more varied socialinteractions will not produce a simpler or more stable model. Indeed, ifindividuals are modelled as following or conforming to the behaviour ofothers, the interactions will create positive feedback loops in the model,increasing the opportunity for unstable responses to small ¯uctuations (seeSection 5).
I do not know that Marx is right, but I speculate there is more to him than what is presented in subjectivists (no-value) theories that see only price and do not explain it, or things that simply ignore the social and emphasize only physical production.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff4.htmFirst, capital is equated with ‘efficient machinery’ and the ‘application of science to industry’. Capital is simply, for Joan Robinson as for all political economists, ‘stored up labour’. On this view, as Marx long ago indicated, the first capital was the first stone picked up by the first savage. Second – and this is a reflection of the first error – capital and land are lumped together. A social relation is joined up with the basic prerequisite for the production of wealth in all societies. Third, the point about the productivity of capital is completely misunderstood. We have already tried to explain the sense in which Marx saw labour as the ‘creator’ of value. Abstract labour creates value: that is a definite social form of labour produces and reproduces definite social relations of production. But this does not mean that the ‘objective factors of production’ are to be denied any form of ‘productivity’. On the contrary, to the extent that these factors raise the level of production they are certainly productive, but productive of use-values (a category which Joan Robinson continually confuses with value).
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Capital is, however, productive in a quite different sense. It is productive as the dominant social relation of modern society. For Marx capital was productive because it was able to ‘enforce surplus labour’ on a scale far surpassing any previous social relation. It is not, therefore, a question of obliterating the distinction between capital and labour. As Rosdolsky has said in exposing Joan Robinson’s confusion, labour is the horse producing surplus value, capital is the whip across its back. Hence for Marx productive labour is labour which when exchanging against capital produces surplus value. Here ‘productive’ has an entirely social meaning – concerned with man’s relationship to man – and is not to be confused with the material relation of man to nature.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Tainari88
- By Hakeer
- By Truth To Power
- By litwin