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).
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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.
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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
And:
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.)
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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?
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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.
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_RevolutionAnd:
Multi-Tiered System of Productive and Consumptive Zones for a Post-Capitalist Political Economy
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Okay, gotta run -- I'll finish up as soon as I can.