wat0n wrote:
Why is Okishio's Theorem one-sided and why doesn't it include the alleged dynamic of capitalist overproduction?
Ask Okishio.
wat0n wrote:
Overproduction with respect to what, exactly, when there is technical innovation?
Overproduction with respect to market demand for any given item / commodity.
wat0n wrote:
What does your argument have to do with Roemer's claim that labor value is unnecessary for determining prices but not the other way around?
Again, you're revealing your class bias -- you're only interested in post-production commodity *pricing*. Yes, such market pricing will become detached from prerequisite labor-value inputs, and will be subject to the fluctuating dynamic of market-based supply-and-demand. Such commodity-market pricing dynamics take place *after* the economics of producing the commodity in the first place take place.
Wellsy wrote:
One argument in this broader class of Analytical Marxist thinking advanced two claims, first, that any basic commodity can be used to construct a consistent theory of value, and second, that such a value theory will show that, in a capitalist economy, the basic commodity (which is the substance of value) is exploited (Gintis and Bowles, 1981; Roemer, 1982).
In this paper, I have argued that both claims are based on elementary conceptual flaws, and once those flaws are dealt with, the theory collapses. The conceptual flaws are: (a) the failure to distinguish labour and labourpower (which underpins the first claim); and (b) the inability to distinguish between the commodity labour-power and all other commodities (which underpins the second claim).
M-C-M' (money is used to buy a commodity which is resold to obtain a larger sum of money)[20]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_(Marxism)
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Unthinking Majority wrote:
An example within capitalist change is MMT. There's a bunch of people who seem confident in MMT and enthusiastically want our governments to borrow far more than they do now. People this confident scare me, how are they so sure? It's hardly been tried and could result in total economic ruin, so with MMT i'm open to the idea but the theory needs to be tested rigorously and we need to proceed with extreme caution.
Why are interest rates so stubbornly low, and even *negative* in some places?
If (financial) inflation is of such a pressing concern to some, akin to Chicken Little's 'The sky is falling, the sky is falling', then why haven't interest rates skyrocketed, as they did in the stagflation-ridden anxiety-causing 1970s when the U.S. deindustrialized and lost market share to international industrial competitors?
Is it maybe because Nixon and Mao worked out a deal so that the U.S. economy could recover on the backs of hyper-exploited Chinese labor from the '70s, up through today?
I'll remind that the MMTers inherent Keynesianism is correct in that national debt-to-GDP ratios all float, internationally, so the *opposite* would be additional austerity belt-tightening for the sake of nationalist currencies, and not for the *people* of those nations.
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Crantag wrote:
If you have a potato stand and people want potatoes, there's a market right there. Markets are what are the basis of capitalism.
*Or* society could simply be run according to organic *demand*. All that's needed is a way of aggregating everyone's 'to-do' lists, to greater scales of collective coordination and mass production.
Termux on Android, for a Linux command line on your smartphone, for a 'killer app' to-do list
A Few Tools for Your Computer
viewtopic.php?p=15161660#p15161660Emergent Central Planning
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wat0n wrote:
Roemer's point is that, since the economic mechanisms behind exploitation can be applied to any input, then why focus on labor specifically? It's an arbitrary distinction, although far from nonsensical since labor implies humans. To reach that sort of conclusion, however, you eventually have to apply a normative analysis and if you will do that then you'd better be clear about it.
As usual you're forgetting / are-oblivious-to the *subject matter* at hand, in this case the distinction between machines, versus *people*.
In other words even if machines are "exploited" -- and the economics show that they're not, as others here have delineated -- it wouldn't matter because machines aren't *conscious* and *alive* the way people are. And the economics of capitalism show that, objectively / empirically, workers *are* exploited of their surplus labor value, in the production process, by capital.
Imagine a worker who is hired for an hour and paid $10 per hour. Once in the capitalist's employ, the capitalist can have him operate a boot-making machine with which the worker produces $10 worth of work every 15 minutes. Every hour, the capitalist receives $40 worth of work and only pays the worker $10, capturing the remaining $30 as gross revenue. Once the capitalist has deducted fixed and variable operating costs of (say) $20 (leather, depreciation of the machine, etc.), he is left with $10. Thus, for an outlay of capital of $30, the capitalist obtains a surplus value of $10; his capital has not only been replaced by the operation, but also has increased by $10.
The worker cannot capture this benefit directly because he has no claim to the means of production (e.g. the boot-making machine) or to its products, and his capacity to bargain over wages is restricted by laws and the supply/demand for wage labour.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value#Theory
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Rugoz wrote:
I never said the labor theory of value is wrong per se, I said it's "crude to the point of being useless". What many people seem to miss is that most economists are into stuff that can be put into practice.
On the flipside, what about *market valuations* -- ?
The appetite for [market] risk had increased as the “meme stock” episode had demonstrated. This refers to the elevation of the share price earlier this year of the video games retailer GameStop, because of its promotion on Reddit and other social media platforms. This was despite the company’s business model experiencing significant difficulties.
Brainard said corporate bond markets were also seeing “elevated risk appetite” with the difference between the interest rates on lower quality speculative-grade bonds and that of Treasury bonds among the lowest ever seen.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... e-m08.html
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Rugoz wrote:
Are you denying that the price of a commodity is determined by suppy and demand, in a first instance at least? If not, the wage is determined by the supply of labor and the demand for it. Consequently if labor becomes scarce, the capitalist has to pay higher wages. The capitalist cannot simply produce more labor like any other commodity, because how many children a worker has is up to the worker and is motivated by a host of other factors than economics.
Capitalism, though, is subject to the regulations of the bourgeois state, such as the proscribing of *child labor*.
Rugoz wrote:
The surplus army of the unemployed doesn't really exist. The overwhelming majority of workers wouldn't work for a subsistence wage, even one that satsifies today's standards of subsistence (which is relative to the overall level of wages). Instead real wages have been rising and rising for ages. If the subsistence wage theory were true, wages would have remained at 19th century level, maybe with a small plus for better eduction and health care.
Now what about wages as a proportion of the whole economic *pie* -- ?
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Rugoz wrote:
If you mean that other inputs' producers cannot get paid more than the marginal cost to produce them,
What happened to supply-and-demand -- ?
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Rugoz wrote:
It has nothing to do with a "historical-moral component" or a class struggle. It's a competitive market outcome. If you have a fixed supply of a resource that is essential in production, the price of that resource will go up if production in increased, because the capitalists will need it and compete for it. Compare it to land. The land owner will extract a rent from the capitalist because its not a commodity that can be produced like any other (of course that rent is not socially necessary in production). As long as workers own their working time, they will extract a "rent".
Needless to say the labor share of total income has remained more or less constant for ages.
The 'historical-moral component' can be better-phrased as the pro-active class struggle of mass collective intention, or 'politics'.
History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle
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blackjack21 wrote:
Marxism does require extreme violence for even smaller scale projects in the absence of political agreement.
Untrue -- instances of working class solidarity take place *all the time*, if one simply takes the time to *look for them*:
May Day 2021 and the struggle for international socialism in Turkey
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/0 ... s-m06.html---
late wrote:
Marxism has never happened.
blackjack21 wrote:
That's what makes it more of a religion than anything else.
By *this* reasoning, the colonization of Mars, or any other novel scientific accomplishment, is *also* "religion".
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blackjack21 wrote:
Exactly. That's why it crops up in places like Venezuela from people on the outskirts who are poor and desperate. Yet, Marxism can take a resource rich country like Venezuela and make it poor.
Ignoring external imperialist factors in your approach to history, as usual:
On 30 April, during the Venezuelan presidential crisis, a group of several dozen military personnel[5] and civilians joined Juan Guaidó in his call for an uprising against Nicolás Maduro as part of what he labeled "Operation Freedom" (Spanish: Operación Libertad). Reuters reported an "uneasy peace" by the afternoon of 30 April.[5] During the uprising attempt, opposition leader Leopoldo López was freed from house arrest after being imprisoned for five years.[6] The head of the Bolivarian Intelligence Service, Manuel Cristopher Figuera denounced the Maduro government and was dismissed from his position[7] before going into hiding.[8] At least 25 military men who opposed Maduro sought asylum at the Brazilian embassy in Caracas.[9]
Maduro expelled 54 members from the military and the head of intelligence who publicly backed Guaidó.[10] Regional and international media concluded that the uprising had failed, with CNN reporting that it "faltered, having apparently failed to gain the support of senior members of the Venezuelan military".[11][12][13] Guaidó also acknowledged he had received insufficient military support[14] and stated that protests would be held every day until Maduro stepped down from power.[15] Guaidó called for his supporters and the country's armed forces to take to the streets again the following day.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Vene ... ng_attempt
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Heisenberg wrote:
Almost immediately after decolonisation, socialist nation-building projects in the Third World came under constant economic (and often military) attack from the First World powers.
blackjack21 wrote:
After "Marxism has never been tried", this is the other main excuse for the failure of Marxism.
The US Opium Wars: China, Burma and the CIA
The exiled Kuomintang (KMT) army of Li Mi was as much a proprietary of the Central Intelligence Agency as Civil Air Transport. Installed in Burma, this army was armed by the CIA, fed by the CIA, and paid by the CIA. In later operations in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam the CIA used it as a labor pool. Under this patronage and protection the KMT was able to build up its opium operations in the area of Southeast Asia known as the Golden Triangle.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/01 ... d-the-cia/
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Rich wrote:
This is important because Marxist's are constantly blaming every ill, real or imagined on capitalism. As if to reject Marxist terrorist rule we must take responsibly for the limitations of reality. Christians, Muslims and most recently Lockdown Liberals try to pull a similar trick. If you don't immediately give up every freedom, every liberty, every right and control over your own body, every ounce of power, every vestige of dignity you are responsible for every death, for every sickness in the world.
blackjack21 wrote:
This is why Marxism goes hand-in-hand with totalitarianism. It has to. It's embedded in the DNA of Marxism.
Your display of hypocrisy is *astounding* because there's not a peep from you when it comes to the centralization of the capitalist-imperialist *military*, and *its* (anti-democratic) authoritarianism, as in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
blackjack21 wrote:
Yet, we saw so many light rail systems in the US torn up, because of labor unions.
Most of the companies involved were convicted in 1949 of conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce in the sale of buses, fuel, and supplies to NCL subsidiaries, but were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the transit industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_M ... conspiracy
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blackjack21 wrote:
Yes, but this rings of "rich = exploiter = bad." How do you square that with someone like Bill Gates? Microsoft had to pay high wages. Programmers are not cheap, and generally are not poor. You make the assumption that being rich is necessarily about exploitation.
Making infinite copies of software for individual retail sales, from the efforts of white-collar labor, *is* exploitation, just the same as exploiting blue-collar laborers on the assembly line to make limitless numbers of any mass-produced product -- like Ford's Model-T automobile.
Microsoft's Altair BASIC was popular with computer hobbyists, but Gates discovered that a pre-market copy had leaked out and was being widely copied and distributed. In February 1976, he wrote an Open Letter to Hobbyists in the MITS newsletter in which he asserted that more than 90% of the users of Microsoft Altair BASIC had not paid Microsoft for it and the Altair "hobby market" was in danger of eliminating the incentive for any professional developers to produce, distribute, and maintain high-quality software.[56] This letter was unpopular with many computer hobbyists, but Gates persisted in his belief that software developers should be able to demand payment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#BASIC
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late wrote:
Lastly, mercantilism gave way to capitalism, which will one day give way to something else, hopefully better.
We're *back* to mercantilism, or monetarism, in the sense that the bourgeois state has now risen to exert such a monolithic deterministic force over the ostensibly 'market' economy, domestically. And, geopolitically, the same can be said to be true, as seen with U.S. imperialism over Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the 21st century. This could accurately be called 'neofeudalism', or 'global medievalism', as distinct from any *democratic* process for determining such domestic and/or foreign policies.
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Julian658 wrote:
IN any event, the end result of capitalism is socialism and that happens when we reach a point of redundant wealth. This will happen naturally and not by a revolution.
It's already here:
Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism ... r_the_poor---
blackjack21 wrote:
Back in the UK, you saw that in the Thatcher years with the coal miner strike bringing the entire country to its knees.
Potato, po-tah-to -- this could also be described as 'successful working class control'.
blackjack21 wrote:
They invariably do when the ravages of socialism hit them. We have lots of people in IT who used to live under Soviet communism. They have stories to tell.
Remember *this* -- ?
late wrote:
Marxism has never happened.
blackjack21 wrote:
That's what makes it more of a religion than anything else.
So which *is* it -- has Marxism never happened before, thereby making it more of a "religion", or will you continue to conflate imperialist-militarist-caused *Stalinism*, with Communist-Manifesto, workers-of-the-world socialism -- ?
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blackjack21 wrote:
Why do you think it would be bliss with socialist tax laws and codes? You can't run major societies without law.
'Law' implies 'private property' that needs protecting from those who are dispossessed of it, meaning the different competing interests of ruling-class, versus working-class.
A workers-of-the-world, post-class society wouldn't *have* conflicting material interests, so it wouldn't need to be 'run', as from above, as class-divided societies have been historically run.
blackjack21 wrote:
So you can't just say, "ownership by the workers" because the workers cannot afford to acquire all the resources they need to build a hospital for example.
Precisely. Frankfurt-School types seem to think that workers would take over the running of their local workplaces as a result of *charity*, or from their own wages, which are both preposterous formulations, of course, in those political efforts to sidestep the real-world reality that workers have to collectively *seize* control of the means of mass industrial production, because there is simply no other way, empirically / logistically.
blackjack21 wrote:
"woke" politics.
And where do you stand on the festering issue of government-backed, qualified-immunity killer cops?