A question for our Marxists - Page 7 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15171626
late wrote:Capitalism was making poverty worse before Biden.


Poverty continues to go down worldwide thanks to capitalism. This is the most prosperous era in world history and it will get better.
Image

I will assume there was a worldwide hiccup die to Covid, but once that is handled (thanks to capitalism) the downward trend will continue

The problem with you guys is that you measure relative poverty rather than absolute poverty. I make a very decent living, but If I compare myself to Jeff Bezos I am dirt poor.

Actually, it was corrupt and sleazy politics, and it could go back to getting worse as soon as Republicans can get back to being corrupt, sleazy, and in power.


Unemployment went to down to an all times low and the wages were rising before Covid. All of this despite Trump who was not a stellar president. BTW, any person that bases his or her hopes to make it on a political party is doomed to fail. What kind of goofy plan is that? My status in this nation has never depended on politicians.
Last edited by Julian658 on 09 May 2021 16:41, edited 1 time in total.
#15171627
late wrote:Hardly.

Dump your crazy in the trash, we know what works.

Authoritarian socialist nations did a great job with homelessness. They simply did not allow it.
#15171628
Unthinking Majority wrote:I stated social democracy (nordic countries etc) not democratic socialism.


Sure.

Getting back to my point about your comparison, though:

You cannot say that the Nordic countries have been more successful than democratic socialism since every movement towards democratic socialism has been attacked by capitalism.

——————-

@Julian658

Nice graph,

Note that poverty could have been entirely eradicated by now.
#15171635
Julian658 wrote:The left wingers and the socialists types such as POD, Tainari88, late, et al-------------see wealth as a pie with a finite number of slices.

In certain cases, that tends to be true. Raw land, for example. However, you can then argue that creating high rise buildings is in effect manufacturing real estate. The carpenter has a much harder time making as many copies of a table as Taylor Swift, JK Rowling, or Gates does selling the n-th copy of a work, because the raw material inputs and the labor for each unit is incremental. Mass production relies on high setup costs and lower per unit costs--cheaper by the dozen. With digital media, once the investment costs are recuperated, gross margins are like 90%. It's like a dream.

Julian658 wrote:If Gates and Bezos have too much money that means that they took very large slices from the available wealth of the world and hence the poor get less. This is how they think.

Yes. This is the problem, because they always see great wealth as the product of some criminal level of exploitation.

Julian658 wrote:This would be a natural if wealth is too abundant. The biggest socialist in the world is Bill Gates! He knows he cannot spend all the money he made so he gives it away.

Well, he's also one of the biggest capitalists in the world. That's why I say a distinction needs to be made in capital for consumption versus production. Bill Gates' marginal propensity to consume is perfectly inelastic at this point. No matter how much money he makes, his personal consumption more or less remains the same. His marginal propensity to invest is different.

I do not consider charity to be on par with socialism, because charities aren't concerned as such with the equal ownership of the means of production, and so forth. So Gates will do things like try to stamp out malaria, providing resources to fill in the gaps where poorer states cannot do it.

Julian658 wrote:Today homeless people have free cell phones. All of that in less than 40 years. If this trend continues the poor will have access to the same luxuries the rich have and it will be FREE!

Many poor people have a better physical standard of living than kings of 200 years ago, but none of the agency or esteem. That's why I say part of the problem is socialism's close alliance with materialism and atheism. They ignore spirituality, agency, self-esteem in any meaningful sense. So cultural marxism ends up becoming something of a freak show holding up the alienated feelings of the transgender person imploring you to use certain pronouns while ignoring the huge problem of homelessness comorbid with drug addiction and mental illness.

late wrote:You mean like a roof over their head?

Only if you support Progressives...

Progressives think it good to provide needles and methadone to opioid addicts. So many will refuse the roof over their head at homeless shelters that prohibit drug use. Hanging a label like "Progressives" and saying that "Progressives" are the only way, the truth and the light and the exclusive path to heaven runs you right back a sort of religious zealotry with your politics.

Tainari88 wrote:But a lot of Black Democrats think it might be a rigged system for discounting the Black vote in Georgia.

That's a media narrative put out by the Democratic party. In a fair vote, Georgia is a red state in a statewide contest and a city like Atlanta or Savannah is blue. Republicans, as I've explained before, do not suppress the black vote. Republicans actually rig congressional districts with Gerrymandering so that black candidates can win. Almost one quarter of the voting members of the House of Representatives are racial or ethnic minorities--reflecting the larger society. Republicans are more to thank for this than Democrats, who are known for drawing districts so that they are majority white to elect white candidates who represent minorities rather than having minorities actually in Congress.

Tainari88 wrote:Georgia is getting purple and as such the Red ones are upset and they want a bar code system that could be easy to hack.

What do you think is easy to hack about a bar code system? Bar codes are incredibly accurate.

Tainari88 wrote:I trust that opinion.

Yes. Going with your feelings rather than thoughts. Going with media narratives rather than empirical evidence. Keep in mind, my IT background has involved me in supply chain management. Do you know what human error is on data entry? About 1 in 300 keystrokes--when people are being honest, unlike the urban Democrat political machine. Do you know what it is for the most inaccurate bar codes like UPC? 1 in 394k. The worst bar code system is more than 1000k times more accurate than a human. Do you know what it is for modern bar codes with parity checks? Code 128 is a 1D barcode accurate to about 1 in 2.8M scans. Data Matrix is a 2D bar code accurate to about 1 in 10.5M scans. Humans do not even come close. Not even by many orders of magnitude.

Tainari88 wrote:For me the Republicans in Georgia are steaming mad at having Trump lose due to Georgia's Stacy Abrams getting active and pushing in that Ossoff guy and Warnock. But? I have zero trust in the two Republicans who were given millions for campaign funds and lost and cry all damn day about it.

Trump lost because of stuffing the ballot box in Atlanta. As I've said, there hasn't been a Republican mayor there since 1879. You think that is about political affinity in Atlanta, and I think there it is related to vote rigging. I don't think people maintain allegiance in one city for 142 years. I just don't.

Tainari88 wrote:I don't trust Democrats in general either, but Black people screaming about Georgian racist Republican tactics? I do trust.

Voter ID is something in all major democracies. Are they screaming about racism, or about the ballot stuffing scams of urban Democrat jurisdictions?

Tainari88 wrote:It is way too hard raising kids, going to work full time, trying to get advanced educations, cleaning and cooking and rat racing all day. I know BJ. I have been there and done that.

Oh I have no doubt. That's why I think trying to break up families and push women with small children into the workforce to promote an ever larger welfare state was yet another bad idea pushed by liberals.

Wat0n wrote:I'm asking because it seems part of the criticism is claiming there would be deflation, but without taking the consequences of it to its full extent.

This was my point earlier about open source and free software--it is inherently deflationary. You would be amazed about how much of modern systems rely on a free operating system (Linux), free application servers (JBoss), free cloud management systems (OpenStack, Kubernetes), free databases (MySQL, MongoDB, etc.).

Wat0n wrote:Think about AI advances in the last few years. Up to what extent can you automate processes so humans don't have to bother with them? Is it possible that an AI will allow us to automate more processes as to become able to produce more on its own? If a whole line becomes automated, what role is labor playing here?

Not just AI, either. I routinely write bash scripts to simply my workload. I can literally screw around talking to you guys half the day and still get more done than 5 other workers.

Wat0n wrote:Subjective, marginalist notions are probably the best example of such an alternative, and that one would also consider taking care of the basic physical needs of humans... And a lot more than that as well.

Some of the physical needs of humans aren't commodities. Humans are social animals. They need human connection. Isolation creates huge problems.

Wat0n wrote:I agree with you here. I hope you get more into math, and it's not just useful because it deals with quantities (it can deal with more abstract concepts than that too). The real usefulness is that it will discipline your thinking and reasoning.

I actually think many professions have students learning more math than they'll actually use because of the latter. Sometimes the way you think is more important than the technical skills you learn.

And formal logic too. If the contrapositive is false, so is the positive. It forces you to examine multiple points of view before you accept something as true.
#15171640
Pants-of-dog wrote:
@Julian658

Nice graph,

Note that poverty could have been entirely eradicated by now.

So far your system has failed to do so in Cuba and Venezuela.
#15171642
blackjack21 wrote:
So many will refuse the roof over their head at homeless shelters



A lot of people have problems with shelters, esp. parents.

Shelters are last millennium...

Over the long run, it's actually cheaper. Not that you will pick cost and effectiveness over vindictiveness...
#15171643
Julian658 wrote:
So far your system has failed to do so in Cuba and Venezuela.



Those are not developed countries. But they are countries we give a hard time.

You could have done an apples to apples comparison. Like Denmark, but that wouldn't serve your crazy.
#15171644
Julian658 wrote:
Authoritarian socialist nations did a great job with homelessness.



More Whataboutism???

We could do a lot better for the same money.

Oh yeah, dump your crazy in the trash, we don't need this place to be the town sewage treatment facility.
#15171645
late wrote:Those are not developed countries. But they are countries we give a hard time.

You could have done an apples to apples comparison. Like Denmark, but that wouldn't serve your crazy.

How many times do I have to tell you the Nordic nations have a capitalist economy. :knife: :knife: :knife: :knife:
#15171646
late wrote:Those are not developed countries. But they are countries we give a hard time.

You could have done an apples to apples comparison. Like Denmark, but that wouldn't serve your crazy.

Cuba was relatively well developed before Castro. Sure, it had poor peasants and had slavery for much longer than the USA. However, the middle class and above were doing ok. Cuba was the second nation on Earth to have color TV. When the cuban professional class came to Miami they did quite well. Thank you!
#15171648
late wrote:A lot of people have problems with shelters, esp. parents.

That's why they ban drug use. It's also why we need a system for sorting out the people who have fallen on hard times from people who are drug addicted, and from people who are mentally ill.

late wrote:Shelters are last millennium...

That's a specious argument. Shelter is essential.

late wrote:Over the long run, it's actually cheaper. Not that you will pick cost and effectiveness over vindictiveness...

Giving people methadone and needles is cheaper than housing them or putting them in treatment programs or mental hospitals? Is that what you're trying to say? Killing them is cheaper still.

Taking the homeless of the streets is not vindictive at all. Getting the drug addicted sober is not vindictive either, although many of them would disagree while going through withdrawals and into recovery.

late wrote:Those are not developed countries.

Venezuela is quite developed. It's government, however, did nothing to diversify the economy and relied entirely on oil exports. A better comparison isn't Denmark. It's Norway. Norway created a sovereign wealth fund with its oil revenues and diversified its economy, which makes the sovereign wealth funds returns independent of Norway's economy, while keeping Norway's economy less dependent on oil. Norway didn't join the EU, but does have some trade with the EU, forcing Norway to adjust for its comparative advantages. It's still highly protectionist, with a huge social safety net that seems to be admired by many. However, it does dramatically limit Norway's economic development. So Norway's economy remains highly dependent on oil compared to the economies of Sweden and Finland.
#15171650
Ok. Let me be the devil's advocate here. Never thought I'd be defending the teaching of the probably most stupid European philosopher ever, but harsh times require for harsh measures, I guess.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are literally the worst examples one can bring when defending capitalism. Both Bill and Jeff are genius businessmen who lack any other talents in any area of human expertise. What it was that made Bill Gates rich? Maybe he was a great programmer given how he leads a largest software company in the world? God, I remember when I started to learn programming, all these comparisons with this person, or when I just spend too much time behind the PC. "Even Bill Gates doesn't allow his children to use a computer more than one hour per day". Yeah, well, my parents both grew in a socialist atheist country and have vague impressions on American religious fundamentalism... Well, anyway, the secret way of Bill Gates to richness was that he was rich from the beginning, he was just born in a rich family (It often happens with ideal capitalistic self-made men that they are not exactly self-made). The success of Microsoft is MS-DOS. Bill Gates didn't write it. He just paid a few thousand dollars to the guy who was smart enough to quickly write an OS but not smart enough to capitalize on it. Or rather not being in the convenient position to do so. Bill was. His mother had influence on IBM politics and she pushed the contract. IBM (an old, transnational corporation of giant scale with only its OS department counting tens of thousands qualified employees) made Microsoft (a nobody newly registered firm of Bill and his cat) an exclusive provider of OS for their brand new line of IBM Personal Computers. This monopoly brought Microsoft millions of dollars that allowed it to bring its own specialists and start to develop its own products. It's all great, except nepotism is not the market mechanism. And signing contracts that steal a large chunk of your company's income to the incompetent contractor whose only advantage is it being head by someone you know is not exactly market too. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's illegal.

So, when Microsoft finally had the capital and resources and the unique non-market advantage of already providing its products to large share of world's population through IBM, what exactly it did with its new monopoly? It used its power to outright buy every and any potential competitor in the field, buying their intellectual property and using its own resources to turn it into yet another monopoly, contributing to technologies that cannot be bought to provide its own improved solutions and conquer the market to another monopoly to destroy the market itself (Microsoft's Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy), started companies of defamation against anyone it couldn't buy (I still remember this horde of evangelists explaining why UNIX OS are a bad solution for the servers' market) and actively used governmental relations, lobbyism etc to provide the contracts with world governments of the same kind it did with IBM earlier). While Microsoft turned into a large corporation in the end and Gates for some time was the richest man in the world which is good for them, Microsoft also left the scorched earth thousands of miles around itself. We don't know how richer we all as a society we could be with all the startups and technological companies choked and destroyed by Microsoft at birth. We don't know how much richer we would be if there was an actual competitive market of OS instead of Microsoft's monopoly. Each country including the US paid the tribute to the genius' pockets each year because having no choice: the required software working only with Microsoft OS because all potential customers use Microsoft OS because... The vendor-lock situation (once Microsoft and vendor-lock were synonyms, though of course nowadays Apple is the mr Vendorlock). Is it capitalism?

I actually know less about Jeff. So it seems, the guy owned a book store and then he started to sell things like bootlaces and apples and tennis racquets and used incomes to sell even more things. He ended with a giant that entirely monopolizes the delivery market of the US while having a big share of market in other countries, and again we see the Hiroshima landscape of choked companies, we see active GR (when it was, when governors had to compete for Jeff to build his logistics center in their state and not another one?), we see thousands of people working for minimal wage in inhumane conditions. I've once seen the video that deeply impressed me about the Chinese workers producing pots on the hydraulic press. Or rather in the hydraulic press because they were inside it during the production process, with special cavities for them to not be smashed during the press fall. Amazon workers from what I've heard have trackers on them to count piss time which is more or less the same working atmosphere as being chained inside the massive hydraulic press. All these people could actually have decent jobs... If their potential employers wouldn't be destroyed by Amazon. Hell, maybe they themselves could be employers now if not for Amazon's sucking markets dry through hypercentralization.

So, now Gates is actively spending large portion of his capital to finance charity, like vaccines for the third world countries or something. Good for him. And Bezos spends a little on toys like Blue Origin. Less good for him. Only why should we be dependent on their good will for anything given they made all of their capitals by emptying our own pockets through non-market mechanisms? Wouldn't it be better for example to break the Gates' jaw? Inserting a long metal pole through his anus, crashing his backbone? And after this to take all of his money and use it for third world vaccines or anything else? Of course it would discourage many from going his way, given how you work hard for years only for your capitals to be nationalized. And that's a good thing, because we actually don't need another Gates, we don't need yet another monopolist. What brings money to us the people is local entrepreneurs, local businesses, stores that bring value to their communities, not Bezos (or Wall-mart for that matter) shoesboxes for squeezing money to some invisible center. That's capitalism, and Gates, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, thousands of them, all are just faceless corrupt androids who introduce us to all flaws of socialism without any of its benefits.
#15171653
blackjack21 wrote:
BS.



"This week’s report by EU housing organisation Feantsa has found every country in the EU in the midst of a crisis of homelessness and housing exclusion – with one exception: Finland.

So how has the country done it? By giving homeless people permanent housing as soon as they become homeless

Since 2008 the national homelessness strategy in Finland has been based on the Housing First model, as a result of dedicated cooperation between the state, municipalities and NGOs.

Investments have been made to provide affordable housing and shelters have been converted into supported housing units. New services and methods of help have been developed to match the multiple needs of individual tenants.

Finland has all but eradicated rough sleeping and sustainably housed a significant number of long-term homeless people. Finland is the only country in Europe where the number of homeless people has declined in recent years."

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/mar/22/finland-solved-homelessness-eu-crisis-housing-first
#15171655
late wrote:"This week’s report by EU housing organisation Feantsa has found every country in the EU in the midst of a crisis of homelessness and housing exclusion – with one exception: Finland.

So how has the country done it? By giving homeless people permanent housing as soon as they become homeless

Since 2008 the national homelessness strategy in Finland has been based on the Housing First model, as a result of dedicated cooperation between the state, municipalities and NGOs.

Investments have been made to provide affordable housing and shelters have been converted into supported housing units. New services and methods of help have been developed to match the multiple needs of individual tenants.

Finland has all but eradicated rough sleeping and sustainably housed a significant number of long-term homeless people. Finland is the only country in Europe where the number of homeless people has declined in recent years."

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2017/mar/22/finland-solved-homelessness-eu-crisis-housing-first

Finland is tiny and very homogenous. So homogenous that they have a high incidence of illnesses related to inbreeding. In other words Finland is a big tribe where is everybody has kinship. Social programs among people with kinship tend to work better.

A large multicultural multiethnic nation is not the same as Finland. Nevertheless, I would think some of their methods could work in the USA. I would give homeless people a home as long a they are not drug addicts or mentally ill. Any homeless person that can maintain the home should get one. I guess this a little bit different than public housing which at one point was considered the final solution in the USA.

Giving a free home to an addict will not work. This would also require a maid service to clean the house, a cook, a visiting nurse, periodic handy man assistance, ongoing in home psych care, etc. A free home for a lunatic will solve nothing.
#15171656
Pants-of-dog wrote:Sure.

Getting back to my point about your comparison, though:

You cannot say that the Nordic countries have been more successful than democratic socialism since every movement towards democratic socialism has been attacked by capitalism.

This is true, but I never made this point. My point was that if someone proposes that Denmark switch from social democracy to democratic socialism they'll have to make a strong case that there is good likelihood that democratic socialism will be better than the status quo (social democracy). There will always be risk in trying a new system, but that risk needs to be low if the status quo is working well (though not perfect).
#15171657
Ganeshas Rat wrote:Ok. Let me be the devil's advocate here. Never thought I'd be defending the teaching of the probably most stupid European philosopher ever, but harsh times require for harsh measures, I guess.

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are literally the worst examples one can bring when defending capitalism. Both Bill and Jeff are genius businessmen who lack any other talents in any area of human expertise. What it was that made Bill Gates rich? Maybe he was a great programmer given how he leads a largest software company in the world? God, I remember when I started to learn programming, all these comparisons with this person, or when I just spend too much time behind the PC. "Even Bill Gates doesn't allow his children to use a computer more than one hour per day". Yeah, well, my parents both grew in a socialist atheist country and have vague impressions on American religious fundamentalism... Well, anyway, the secret way of Bill Gates to richness was that he was rich from the beginning, he was just born in a rich family (It often happens with ideal capitalistic self-made men that they are not exactly self-made). The success of Microsoft is MS-DOS. Bill Gates didn't write it. He just paid a few thousand dollars to the guy who was smart enough to quickly write an OS but not smart enough to capitalize on it. Or rather not being in the convenient position to do so. Bill was. His mother had influence on IBM politics and she pushed the contract. IBM (an old, transnational corporation of giant scale with only its OS department counting tens of thousands qualified employees) made Microsoft (a nobody newly registered firm of Bill and his cat) an exclusive provider of OS for their brand new line of IBM Personal Computers. This monopoly brought Microsoft millions of dollars that allowed it to bring its own specialists and start to develop its own products. It's all great, except nepotism is not the market mechanism. And signing contracts that steal a large chunk of your company's income to the incompetent contractor whose only advantage is it being head by someone you know is not exactly market too. Actually, I'm pretty sure it's illegal.

So, when Microsoft finally had the capital and resources and the unique non-market advantage of already providing its products to large share of world's population through IBM, what exactly it did with its new monopoly? It used its power to outright buy every and any potential competitor in the field, buying their intellectual property and using its own resources to turn it into yet another monopoly, contributing to technologies that cannot be bought to provide its own improved solutions and conquer the market to another monopoly to destroy the market itself (Microsoft's Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy), started companies of defamation against anyone it couldn't buy (I still remember this horde of evangelists explaining why UNIX OS are a bad solution for the servers' market) and actively used governmental relations, lobbyism etc to provide the contracts with world governments of the same kind it did with IBM earlier). While Microsoft turned into a large corporation in the end and Gates for some time was the richest man in the world which is good for them, Microsoft also left the scorched earth thousands of miles around itself. We don't know how richer we all as a society we could be with all the startups and technological companies choked and destroyed by Microsoft at birth. We don't know how much richer we would be if there was an actual competitive market of OS instead of Microsoft's monopoly. Each country including the US paid the tribute to the genius' pockets each year because having no choice: the required software working only with Microsoft OS because all potential customers use Microsoft OS because... The vendor-lock situation (once Microsoft and vendor-lock were synonyms, though of course nowadays Apple is the mr Vendorlock). Is it capitalism?

I actually know less about Jeff. So it seems, the guy owned a book store and then he started to sell things like bootlaces and apples and tennis racquets and used incomes to sell even more things. He ended with a giant that entirely monopolizes the delivery market of the US while having a big share of market in other countries, and again we see the Hiroshima landscape of choked companies, we see active GR (when it was, when governors had to compete for Jeff to build his logistics center in their state and not another one?), we see thousands of people working for minimal wage in inhumane conditions. I've once seen the video that deeply impressed me about the Chinese workers producing pots on the hydraulic press. Or rather in the hydraulic press because they were inside it during the production process, with special cavities for them to not be smashed during the press fall. Amazon workers from what I've heard have trackers on them to count piss time which is more or less the same working atmosphere as being chained inside the massive hydraulic press. All these people could actually have decent jobs... If their potential employers wouldn't be destroyed by Amazon. Hell, maybe they themselves could be employers now if not for Amazon's sucking markets dry through hypercentralization.

So, now Gates is actively spending large portion of his capital to finance charity, like vaccines for the third world countries or something. Good for him. And Bezos spends a little on toys like Blue Origin. Less good for him. Only why should we be dependent on their good will for anything given they made all of their capitals by emptying our own pockets through non-market mechanisms? Wouldn't it be better for example to break the Gates' jaw? Inserting a long metal pole through his anus, crashing his backbone? And after this to take all of his money and use it for third world vaccines or anything else? Of course it would discourage many from going his way, given how you work hard for years only for your capitals to be nationalized. And that's a good thing, because we actually don't need another Gates, we don't need yet another monopolist. What brings money to us the people is local entrepreneurs, local businesses, stores that bring value to their communities, not Bezos (or Wall-mart for that matter) shoesboxes for squeezing money to some invisible center. That's capitalism, and Gates, Bezos, Musk, Jobs, thousands of them, all are just faceless corrupt androids who introduce us to all flaws of socialism without any of its benefits.

In some ways capitalism is survival of the fittest. Some people are more creative than others.

I will say that thousands of people put food on the table and have a roof over their heads due to Bezos and Gates. The Amazon truck delivery system alone like employs millions. The idea that guys like these are all are just faceless corrupt androids is a bit silly. Perhaps these are the same type of guys that were high up in the politburo. Some people are just good at thriving no matter where you put them.

Self made billionaires add enormous wealth to the world. This is the wealth that will be needed to finance the utopia of the last stage of communism. The potential for wealth creation is infinite. When wealth becomes redundant the disenfranchised will get free cash. Nevertheless, I am afraid they will become self destructive.
#15171659
I love people who curse Jeff Bezos's name while continually buying things from his business lol. Not saying the man is faultless, but even if he were he'd still be one of the richest in the world and he should be. If everyone I know buys from your business you're going to be mega rich. If you have a corner store and only have 200 regular customers you're not going to make as much money as Jeff Bezos who has hundreds of millions of regular customers.
#15171661
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)



---


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.


---


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#p15161660


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show
Image



---


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



---


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



---


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* -- ?


Image


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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 -- ?


---


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

Spoiler: show
Image



---


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".


---


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



---


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



---


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.


---


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


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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 -- ?


---


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?
#15171663
Julian658 wrote:In some ways capitalism is survival of the fittest. Some people are more creative than others.

To be born out of a vagina of a top manager is not the most creative thing. It's actually pretty lame.

Julian658 wrote:I will say that thousands of people put food on the table and have a roof over their heads due to Bezos and Gates. The Amazon truck delivery system alone like employs millions.

No. Amazon created millions of workplaces by destroying millions of workplaces. If there would be no Amazon, there would still be demand for deliveries. Except it would be operated by a thousand of independent companies which would make the delivery system less effective and costly but simultaneously better for its employees. Because a small company by definition cannot allow to treat its employees the way Bezos does. It's capitalism versus socialism (The only difference between USSR and Amazon now is missing the territory and army).

Julian658 wrote:Self made billionaires add enormous wealth to the world.

No, they actually destroy wealth. In the same sense as ocean destroys phosphorus. We need phosphorus in small amounts for our well-being. Rivers pull a lot of microelements with it to the ocean. Some microelements return from there and can be used in the biosphere again or are present in pratically limitless quantities, but phosphorus isn't one of them. It just ends on the ocean bottom and we cannot do anything about it. We cannot stop the process, we cannot return it to the surface (without advanced technologies we don't have yet). It's buried. The same with the billionaires' wealth. I already talked about how self-made they are.

Unthinking Majority wrote:I love people who curse Jeff Bezos's name while continually buying things from his business lol.

I personally haven't bought anything from Amazon, but I don't mind people who do. It's not like there's a choice. If someone monopolizes all sources of fresh water on Earth people would still drink, even if the price of water is determined by personal flaws of one man. But it doesn't mean this person is a genius of marketing. It means they are a parasite who managed to break the system. The system whose purpose is to maximize everyone's wellbeing.

Unthinking Majority wrote:If you have a corner store and only have 200 regular customers you're not going to make as much money as Jeff Bezos who has hundreds of millions of regular customers.

I'd say if there's a million of corner stores with 200 customers it's a big win in comparison with the current situation. Just out of utilitarian hedonism: those store owners would get a lot of happiness from being able to pay for their kids' universities and housing. But Bezos will only be slightly happier after buying his millionth home and paying his millionth kid' education. Also the employees of these corner stores wouldn't need to be humiliated daily with Amazon Self-Confidence Chorus Song (or is it Wall-Mart? those monopolies all look the same, 'from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which').
#15171664
ckaihatsu wrote:Ask Okishio.


Too bad he's dead, although I doubt he'd agree with your characterization of his work.

ckaihatsu wrote:Overproduction with respect to market demand for any given item / commodity.


When that happens, prices tend to go down (keeping money supply constant). So what? Why would that necessarily be troublesome?

ckaihatsu wrote:Again, you're revealing your class bias -- you're only interested in post-production commodity *pricing*. Yes, such market pricing will become detached from prerequisite labor-value inputs, and will be subject to the fluctuating dynamic of market-based supply-and-demand. Such commodity-market pricing dynamics take place *after* the economics of producing the commodity in the first place take place.


How is that class bias?

ckaihatsu wrote:As usual you're forgetting / are-oblivious-to the *subject matter* at hand, in this case the distinction between machines, versus *people*.

In other words even if machines are "exploited" -- and the economics show that they're not, as others here have delineated -- it wouldn't matter because machines aren't *conscious* and *alive* the way people are. And the economics of capitalism show that, objectively / empirically, workers *are* exploited of their surplus labor value, in the production process, by capital.


Normative, not positive. If the machines are exploited, then quite evidently the owner is if the capitalist doesn't own the machines.
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