A question for our Marxists - Page 9 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15171733
Unthinking Majority wrote:It's not a moralistic claim in any way, it's a logical claim.


It is entirely moralistic to claim that someone has a moral obligation to show a cost benefit analysis before creating social change.

Any reasonable person is aware of the many problems caused by capitalism, but we haven't discovered a better system yet unfortunately. Marxism has pointed out exploitation in capitalism, which is fine, but it has yet to create a system to solve that problem that's better than capitalism. The best there is so far is social democracy, which is a mix of capitalism with socialism, a kind of compromise taking the best of both.


Again, it is impossible for you to have made this comparison for the historical reasons I have already outlined.

You also ignore the fact that no one has ever held capitalism to this standard. In both the country of my birth and where I live now, capitalism was imposed at gunpoint.
#15171734
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Interest rates are set by the feds based on market conditions. Interest rates are so low because we're in a global pandemic and the feds want to encourage borrowing and spending to stimulate the economy.



Incorrect. Interest rates were *already* at historic lows, well before the onset of the pandemic:


Image


Unthinking Majority wrote:
In the 70's/80's the feds raised interest rates to curb fast-rising inflation from rising oil prices due to the situations in the middle-east, plus rising wages domestically. If you make interest rates 20% people won't borrow and spend, and they'll put their money in the bank or buy bonds rather than invest/spend in the marketplace.



Okay, then my point stands that interest rates continue to be at historic lows, and that any expressed anxiety about imminent hyperinflation is woefully misplaced.
#15171735
ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, so you *are* admitting that the rate of profit declines -- it's no good for capitalists and savers, but it's good for equity capital investors in that face-values tend to get cheap (cheap government capital), to use for investments, though good luck finding anything worth investing in, since so much cheap capital is chasing after relatively low rates of profit / returns.


If all prices decrease by 5% and my profits decrease by 5% too, am I worse off, better off or the same?

ckaihatsu wrote:Correct -- tell that to the MMTers since they're doing their Chicken Little routine about how '70s-style hyperinflation is right around the corner, despite interest rates remaining stubbornly low.


Wait what? :eh:

ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah, I basically *am* denying that there are different interpretations of Marx, primarily because his political-economy is *not* religion. He's scientifically accurate in his assessment of class conflict and how bourgeois economics operates. Anyone who has differences with Marx is basically going to be *non-Marxian* because of how precise he is with his descriptions, and also how well they jibe to objective social reality.


Weird, because I thought there are different interpretations of him even among Marxists. It seems you are being the religious guy here when pretending to know what did he really mean, when there is no consensus about it.

ckaihatsu wrote:Actually, if you read back over the last few exchanges you'll see that you've been tacitly *accepting* the facts around the declining rate of profit, like overproduction and falling prices.


Only if you don't understand the difference between real and nominal variables.

ckaihatsu wrote:Anyone, like yourself, who only looks at the market pricing of a commodity *after* it's been produced is tacitly ignoring the *cost* of producing that commodity in the first place, including the cost of *labor* inputs, for its production. Ignoring the economics of the *production* of a commodity is ignoring the workers' essential *role* in conferring exchange value (prices) onto the commodity by bringing it into existence so that it can be sold.


What makes you believe that cost isn't included in the price?

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, if the cost of the *workers' production* of a commodity is ignored then you're dependent on a valuation of the commodity based on market pricing only, and that fallacy has already been addressed here on this thread.


In what way is that a fallacy?

ckaihatsu wrote:Correct, because you obviously are under no duress to rent it out at all. You'd more-accurately be described as an incompetent capitalist here.

The wherewithal required to produce machinery in the first place, for oneself, is basically *free time* without having to work for a wage for the procurement of socially necessary commodities.

Worrkers generally *have no* machinery to rent out for income, or at least not enough of it to become petty bourgeois themselves, per your scenario.

Without such capital to leverage, workers *must* sell their labor-power to a capitalist employer, for the sake of a wage, for the sake of life-necessary commodities, for modern life and living. It's a material situation of *duress*, or *compulsion* -- and if it's not to one particular employer, then it's to another, regardless.


If so, then what do you have to comment about the second example?

@Wellsy thanks for your response, but your distinction is fairly arbitrary. Why is an investment in human capital all that different from investment in physical capital? In both cases, you are seeking to maximize your return - regardless of whether you use a Marxian definition of profit or not.

I think the idea of exploitation might have made sense back in Marx's time, since even illiterate people could work in a factory because their work wasn't all that different from plowing the land as far as educational requirements were concerned: Workers were relatively easy to interchange and there were many poor peasants that were becoming industrial workers. However, nowadays there is a much stronger case for the existence of labor augmenting through human capital, since your skills may actually determine what kind of machinery you can use and how well you use it. And as far as human relations are concerned, I also think the gig economy undermines that idea as well since there is an ever growing number of industry where freelancing is becoming the norm.

As for the difference in programming languages, actually the language you use can affect your productivity in at least 3 ways:

1) Some languages are actually faster than others, so the same task could be performed more quickly depending on the language you use

2) Some languages are clearer to read, and debug, than others so debugging could be done more quickly in some languages than in others

3) Some languages allow you to do more things than others

There are also some trade-offs between these things, e.g. an assembly language (which is pretty much the fastest thing you can use) can be both hard to read and only allow you to use them on very specific hardware.

As far as government is concerned, I would say governments do generate value by providing some services that are necessary to have even a minimally functioning society. Although the Marxian paradigm also seems to have trouble with explaining the production of services too - even though nowadays around 2/3 of the labor force works in trade and services.

At last, I'm also thinking about a second scenario regarding exploitation: Let's say there is a cooperative where all workers are paid the same, but not all workers contribute equally into production (there could be differences in productivity owing to talent or levels of human capital, particularly once allowing for labor augmenting). Are less productive workers exploiting the more productive ones?
#15171737
Pants-of-dog wrote:You also ignore the fact that no one has ever held capitalism to this standard. In both the country of my birth and where I live now, capitalism was imposed at gunpoint.

What does this have to do with today? I never claimed I supported such impositions, nor is it relevant. If someone in 2021 wants to go to Cuba and tear up communism and replace it with capitalism then yes they should make the same cost/benefit analysis.

Are you willing to change your country from capitalist to Marxist? Why? I assume it's because you have reason and evidence that Marxism will be better than capitalism for you and most people in your country?

If you or anyone else wants to tear up a system and replace with a new one it might be a good idea to have high confidence the new system will be better than the old. This is simple logic.

ckaihatsu wrote:Incorrect. Interest rates were *already* at historic lows, well before the onset of the pandemic:

Yes because of the 2008 recession. COVID made them drop further.

There's been little price inflation on goods, only massive inflation on housing prices, which nobody seems to care about in government.
#15171739
Unthinking Majority wrote:What does this have to do with today? I never claimed I supported such impositions, nor is it relevant. If someone in 2021 wants to go to Cuba and tear up communism and replace it with capitalism then yes they should make the same cost/benefit analysis.


What does your moralistic claim have to do with today? Nothing.

And we both know that the US is not consulting with Cubans about their future.

Are you willing to change your country from capitalist to Marxist? Why? I assume it's because you have reason and evidence that Marxism will be better than capitalism for you and most people in your country?

If you or anyone else wants to tear up a system and replace with a new one it might be a good idea to have high confidence the new system will be better than the old. This is simple logic.


Again, this moralistic claim has been addressed.
#15171740
What is even the country where capitalism can be imposed by force? Socialism can be, but reverting socialism back to capitalism is reverting, not imposing. Maybe feudalism/slavery -> capitalism? But where exactly there was feudalism relatively recently?
#15171742
wat0n wrote:@Wellsy thanks for your response, but your distinction is fairly arbitrary. Why is an investment in human capital all that different from investment in physical capital? In both cases, you are seeking to maximize your return - regardless of whether you use a Marxian definition of profit or not.

I think the idea of exploitation might have made sense back in Marx's time, since even illiterate people could work in a factory because their work wasn't all that different from plowing the land as far as educational requirements were concerned: Workers were relatively easy to interchange and there were many poor peasants that were becoming industrial workers. However, nowadays there is a much stronger case for the existence of labor augmenting through human capital, since your skills may actually determine what kind of machinery you can use and how well you use it. And as far as human relations are concerned, I also think the gig economy undermines that idea as well since there is an ever growing number of industry where freelancing is becoming the norm.

As for the difference in programming languages, actually the language you use can affect your productivity in at least 3 ways:

1) Some languages are actually faster than others, so the same task could be performed more quickly depending on the language you use

2) Some languages are clearer to read, and debug, than others so debugging could be done more quickly in some languages than in others

3) Some languages allow you to do more things than others

There are also some trade-offs between these things, e.g. an assembly language (which is pretty much the fastest thing you can use) can be both hard to read and only allow you to use them on very specific hardware.

As far as government is concerned, I would say governments do generate value by providing some services that are necessary to have even a minimally functioning society. Although the Marxian paradigm also seems to have trouble with explaining the production of services too - even though nowadays around 2/3 of the labor force works in trade and services.

At last, I'm also thinking about a second scenario regarding exploitation: Let's say there is a cooperative where all workers are paid the same, but not all workers contribute equally into production (there could be differences in productivity owing to talent or levels of human capital, particularly once allowing for labor augmenting). Are less productive workers exploiting the more productive ones?

The problem as I see it as you're trying to frame economic terms as similarly applicable in the same way to a worker as it is to a capitalist which I speculate is a tendency in some economics which doesn't take the class distinction to be meaningful and largely ignores essential differences between the two in the notion that it is approaching economics in a formalized and neutral technical way.

FOr example, your talk of human capital and it is dubious if even such a thing as anything more than a metaphor and doesn't actually represent capital as Marx conceives it which I think is relevant in the distinction that you as a worker most certainly are not investing money as capital because it is not to make a profit but a wage and these are qualitatively different things. You are enhancing you possible labour-power, how much which you can earn, this is not capital however and the tendency to ignore distinctions of the sort is problematic. It's not arbitrary but identifying essential differences, it is only arbitrary once one ignores the distinctions to solely emphasize the manner in which they become vaguely analogous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_(economics)#:~:text=For%20Marx%2C%20capital%20only%20exists,the%20economic%20system%20of%20capitalism.
In Marxian economics,[2] capital is money used to buy something only in order to sell it again to realize a profit. For Marx, capital only exists within the process of the economic circuit (represented by M-C-M')—it is wealth that grows out of the process of circulation itself, and for Marx it formed the basis of the economic system of capitalism.

Spoiler: show
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/social.pdf
c. Natural, human, political and social capital
I don’t like the term “political capital” and I never use it, but I think it is just a metaphor; noone seems to propose that gains in political assets is something which can be usefully
conceived as a form of capital, only that “political capital” is an accumulation of political
assets which, like capital, can be cashed in in the form of political profit. I have no problems
with this kind of metaphor. What troubles me is the industry based on the creation of
confusing oxymorons like human capital, natural capital and social capital.

Even though capital is a form of value, and as such, an abstraction from a specific form of
human relationship, it is the idea of capital that capital, like any value, can be embodied in
different forms. That is to say, capital can be a factory, a patent or copyright, a brand name,
land, stocks of a product, etc., etc., provided only that these forms have the potential to be
transformed into money and enter the process of circulation and return with a profit. Once we
admit of the idea that capital can have different forms, the way is open, and quite rightly
open, to the consideration of capital of different types according to the momentary form in
which it waits for the opportunity to convert itself to money and return again to the same
form in expanded magnitude. Thus we have finance capital, manufacturing, the service
industry, landed property, the share market and so on. These different forms of capital
correspond to different sections of the capitalist class, once we abstract from their
overlappings and interconnections. Capital itself, by its nature, is capable of freely
transforming itself into and out of any of its “forms,” as the power relations between different
sections of the bourgeoisie ebb and flow in accord with the changing patterns of the
organisation of labour.

In so far as adjectives are applied to capital to designate in this way forms of capital,
corresponding to sections of the bourgeoisie and productive activity subsumed under capital,
then we can have no argument.
...
Human Capital
Human capital is another fad term which, while describing human beings as a form of money,
aims to encourage companies to enhance the quality of their labour force and governments to
take action to improve the quality of the available pool of labour. Slave-owners doubtless
well understood that their slaves were human capital and in their case the observation would
have been true, since slaves were owned as private property, used in the expansion of capital
and bought and sold on the market. What precise benefit is supposed to follow from
encouraging modern capitalists to adopt this attitude escapes me.

But although there is such a thing which we could legitimately call “human capital” it is not
this which is usually referred to as “human capital.” When directed at employers, “human
capital” is taken to mean the skills and knowledge of their employees. But this is not capital;
this is the property of the employees.
To suggest that it is capital, and that employees are not
entitled to take it with them when they go, and offer it for hire to another capitalist is both
deceptive in relation to the employer and naïve in relation to the employees. The employer
has use of the human energies belonging to the employee for the term of the wage contract in
the same way that the employer has use of land belonging to the landlord for the period of the
lease, but the employer does not own the land, it is not part of their capital. The skills and
knowledge of employees is part of labour-power.


Now what is part of capital are the various relationships within a firm which are not portable
for the employees individually when they leave. The most significant of this human capital is
the specific weight of skill, knowledge, reputation and loyalty which adheres to a company
and survives the departure of any and even all of their employees. This is an asset, owned by
capital, generally-speaking associated if tenuously with their brand name, and which can be
bought and sold. But although attached to a brand name it resides only in the mass of
employees, that is, it belongs to the subject, the company.

Even in this usage the term remains a semantic paradox, but if we allow latitude for the idea
of a type of capital referring to the form in which capital is temporarily invested which is
capable of being put back into circulation, in contrast to finance capital, industrial capital and
so on, then this is a legitimate usage of the term “human capital.”

Now, when the term is used in addressing governments, this becomes an absurdity.
Improving the health and education of the residents of a locale is supposed to increase the
“human capital” of the locale. It does increase the quantity of labour-power available for sale,
but labour-power is a different kind of commodity. Why is it necessary to describe saleable
skills as “capital” when they are the property of a person whose means of production is the
private property of some company? Like nature, a skilled, loyal and healthy workforce may be a precondition for the accumulation of capital, but it is not capital. Many other conditions
are necessary for the accumulation of capital. For example, should we count as human capital
the low standard of living of a neighbourhood which will provide employees at low wages,
the presence of gangs of racist thugs that can be used to intimidate workers, perhaps the
defeat of a recent strike creates “human capital” by creating a tendency towards compliance
in the labour force? Well obviously yes; these are human capital in exactly the same way as
trade qualifications and supportive families, in fact ignorance may be a human trait more
conducive to the accumulation of capital than trade skills.

If people want to say to the government: “As well as providing good infrastructure, tax-cuts,
anti-union laws, and lucrative government contracts, you ought to be providing a compliant
and skilled workforce for business to employ,” then say so.

One of the trends in the “knowledge management” industry, an off-shoot of the “human
capital” industry, actually proposes that the appropriate metaphor for “knowledge
management” is mining, that is, that employees should be treated like dirt. [source] One of
the things that all these trends have in common is that they address themselves to companies
and governments, that is, people dedicated to serving capital, and say “Look, this is a form of
capital, too; you should care about this!” while people know perfectly well that they are
human beings not capital, are perfectly sick of being treated as commodities by their bosses,
and do not need to have their bosses given any encouragement in that regard. And yet these
trends all think that they are doing something very progressive. But Dracula is already in
charge of the blood bank and telling Dracula that the air and water and human life are also
forms of blood does not help.


In fact profit is clearly distinguished in the costs of production as the capitalist makes an investment in not only the tools and means of production, but in wages for employees. The difference between the input and output within a cycle of production expressing the profit or perhaps the loss.
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/r/a.htm#rate-profit
Surplus Value and Profit

If a certain quantity of constant and variable capital are invested in a productive process, then at the end of a cycle of reproduction these values will have renewed themselves, but in addition, if the labour power of the employees has used to at least the social average of usefulness, there will a surplus-value.

Marx expresses this symbolically: c + v -> c + v + s, where c is the constant capital, v the variable capital (wages) and s is the surplus value, and the value of every product can be seen as composed of these parts.

On the basis of this conception, the rate of profit for the individual capitalist who got into the game of profiteering by investing (c + v) at the beginning of the cycle of reproduction, makes a ‘profit’ of s and therefore the rate of profit is s/(c + v). The individual capitalist is unlikely to see this surplus value in its entirety however, for the landlord, the state, the bank and everyone else will all demand a cut of this surplus: the productive worker must maintain not only “their own” capitalist, but all manner of hangers-on as well.

This rate of profit, s/(c + v), which is the ratio which affects the individual unit of capital, is different from the rate of surplus value, s/v.

The rate of surplus value expresses the proportion of unpaid labour that workers donate to the capitalist (s) over to the necessary labour time, v, that the workers spend reproducing their own needs, and is paid as wages, or variable capital.

Unless you want to somehow say that wages are profit, I think you're muddying the waters with the terms as if they're synonymous.

I don't think Marx's ideas have lost their relevance at all, I don't agree with the sentiment that things have become obsolete in part because he identified essential aspects of Capital and its relations and we still live in a global capitalist economy than not. There are additions and elaborations that have had to be made in the same vein as Marx's work, but these are compliments rather than a point of obsoletion.

While freelancing might be increasing, it's not something that has displaced the dominant mode of production and everything which flows from it. They still operate within a capitalist economy
https://books.google.com/books?id=tDsui1AA7mIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA180&hl=en#v=onepage&q&f=false
One of the greatest misconceptions about capitalism is the notion that these tendencies flow from the motivations of a class of private owners of the means of production. Yet the reality is quite different: the drive to accumulate by means of exploitation is inherent in the generalization of the commodity form. An economy based on that form, in which economic reproduction occurs by means of exchange according to market criteria (socially necessary labor-time), will inevitably produce all of its basic relations, irrespective of the precise form of ownership.

Basically, regardless of ownership, while capital dominates the mode of production, even if all workers are owners in some sort of co-opt, they're still subject to the competitiveness of the market, the law of value still forces workers to press efficiency in decreasing the SNLT, increase reinvestment of capital, decrease their own wages. The idea being that it's not the case that Marx is singling out capitalist's as the origins of problems of the system, rather they come to personifiy tendencies inherent within it which no individual capitalists controls themselves but merely responds to. So even without the capitalists', if you haven't changed the manner of production, people will still be alienated and this is a big point in Marx's criticism, his critique isn't simply give workers their full labor, his point is about the harm it has upon humanity's being, it is actually a lot radical than a Ricardian Socialist want of full labor payment under the emotion that the equality of exchange is contradicted where as Marx shows that its maintained but labour isn't paid for, labour power is.
http://libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdf
For Marx capitalism creates the means and possibility of liberating humanity
from the rule of natural necessity, while making humanity the slave to a social
necessity imposed through the alienated form of the rule of the commodity.
...
The
attraction of the labour theory of value for Marx was not that it ‘proved’ that the
labourer was exploited under capitalism, which it did not and could not do, but
that it connected labour with its alienated forms.
...
Far from adopting the labour theory of value to ‘prove’ the exploitation of the working class, Marx’s critique of Ricardo undermines any such proof, both philosophically, in undermining the liberal theory of property which sees labour as the basis of proprietorial rights, and theoretically, in removing the immediate connection between the expenditure of individual labour and the value of the commodity, so that the relationship between ‘effort’ and ‘reward’ can only be constituted socially. Thus Marx was harshly critical of ‘Ricardian socialism’ which proclaimed labour’s entitlement to its product, arguing that such a ‘right’ was only a bourgeois right, expressing bourgeois property relations.4 For Marx what was at issue was not ethical proofs of exploitation, whose existence requires no such proof since it is manifested daily in the contradiction between the growing wealth created by social labour and the relative impoverishment of the working population, but ‘to prove concretely how in present capitalist society the material, etc., conditions have at last been created which enable and compel the workers to lift this social curse’ (Marx, SW, p. 317).

http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
Man's loss of control over the product of his work Marx now calls exploitation; a term which does not mean that Marx thinks the capitalist is getting too much—more than is 'reasonable', but which underlines his insistence that what belongs to one man, or to men in general, is being appropriated by others, or by some men in particular. Exploitation is made possible by the creation of surplus value; but its basic ground for Marx remains the alienation of man from his labour power, the fact that man's activity becomes a commodity. I

Thought this might interest you as Marx isn't calling for a kind of equality, he wants a change in production. His criticism undermines this because he maintains that the equality of exchange is not violated in the exploitation of labor by paying only for labour power.
Man is no more liberated as long as his labor is still expressed in a commodity form, as he is still subject to the alienating forces of the market.

Thank you for sharing the details on the productivity implications of types of programming languages.
I did have the impression that some were limited in what they were useful or worked best in doing and other implications that could make it that no particular language reigns supreme in all cases perhaps but a preferce for what works best for the job's requirements.

But does the government make a profit off of their worker's, do they invest capital into people in that cyclical relation of costs of production, and then come out with a surplus. They may well do such a thing, I don't see why a government couldn't do so, but then they would act just as the capitalist does.
However, the government tends to step in where private enterprise cannot yet yield a profit. And while it might help maintain or even create the preconditions for the accumulation of capital, such preconditions such as enhancing workers education nd thus labour power/wages, doesn't constitute it as capital. I mean, raising children is a necessary task that takes a lot of work and is a precondition to the functioning of society and the accumulation of capital, but such work although useful doesn't yield a profit. But where the aim is the making of something useful, it need not yield a profit.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/help/value.htm
In Chapter One of Capital, Marx points out that (exchange-)value has no connection with the physical properties of a commodity, and value is "the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance". The most important commodity of all, labour-power, is a "service" not a good. In the Grundrisse, Marx deals with a wood-cutter, a porter and a wandering tailor, all of whom are stated not to create value, because, as self-employed contractors, they sell not labour power but the product.
...
"On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus value. The labourer produces, not for themself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that they should simply produce. They must produce surplus-value.
"That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolteacher is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of their scholars, they work like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out their capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." [Capital Volume I, Part V, emphasis added]

Thus makes it abundantly clear that it is not the material (or immaterial) form of the product, but the prodcution relations within which it is produced that invest a commodity with value.

This is part of Marx's distinction between labor and labor power, labor is universal to all of human history, but labour power is a distinct commodity under capitalist mode of production.

In a commune, it is difficult for me to see the possible distinction of a worker selling their labour-power and thus producing a profit and surplus based on it's difference with the amount of labor performed.
As such it is hard for me to even necessarily see how capitalist relations necessary exist within a commune and where there isn't such a relation of production the idea of exploitation as Marx denotes it under capitalism likely doesn't exist.
However, in the general meaning of the term and colloquially I would say that they are taking advantage of other peoples work i.e. exploiting the advantages or work of others.
I would like to reference a piece from James Connolly to kind of reflect on the conditions of 'wages' within a commune.
Spoiler: show
https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/chap11.htm
PRODUCTION
We engage that whatever talents we may individually possess, whether mental or muscular, agricultural, manufacturing, or scientific, shall be directed to the benefit of all, as well by their immediate exercise in all necessary occupations as by communicating our knowledge to each other, and particularly to the young.

That, as far as can be reduced to practice, each individual shall assist in agricultural operations, particularly in harvest, it being fully understood that no individual is to act as steward, but all are to work.

That all the youth, male or female, do engage to learn some useful trade, together with agriculture and gardening, between the ages of nine and seventeen years.

That the committee meet every evening to arrange the business for the following day.

That the hours of labour be from six in the morning till six in the evening in summer, and from daybreak till dusk in winter, with the intermission of one hour for dinner.

That each agricultural labouring man shall receive eightpence, and every woman fivepence per day for their labour (these were the ordinary wages of the country, the secretary, storekeeper, smiths, joiners, and a few others received something more; the excess being borne by the proprietor) which it is expected will be paid out at the store in provisions, or any other article the society may produce or keep there; any other articles may be purchased elsewhere.

That no member be expected to perform any service or work but such as is agreeable to his or her feelings, or they are able to perform; but if any member thinks that any other member is not usefully employing his or her time, it is his or her duty to report it to the committee, whose duty it will be to bring that member’s conduct before a general meeting, who shall have power, if necessary, to expel that useless member.


DISTRIBUTION AND DOMESTIC ECONOMY
That all the services usually performed by servants be performed by the youth of both sexes under the age of seventeen years, either by rotation or choice.

That the expenses of the children’s food, clothing, washing, lodging, and education be paid out of the common funds of the society, from the time they are weaned till they arrive at the age of seventeen, when they shall be eligible to become members.

That a charge be made for the food and clothing, &c., of those children trained by their parents, and residing in their dwelling houses.

That each person occupying a house, or cooking and consuming their victuals therein, must pay for the fuel used.

That no charge be made for fuel used in the public room.

That it shall be a special object for the sub-committee of domestic economy, or the superintendent of that department, to ascertain and put in practice the best and most economical methods of preparing and cooking the food.

That all the washing be done together in the public washhouse; the expenses of soap, labour, fuel, &c., to be equally borne by all the adult members.

That each member pay the sum of one half-penny out of every shilling received as wages to form a fund to be placed in the hands of the committee, who shall pay the wages out of this fund of any member who may fall sick or meet with an accident.

Any damage done by a member to the stock, implements, or any other property belonging to the society to be made good out of the wages of the individual, unless the damage is satisfactorily accounted for to the committee.
...
The colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, but instead adopted a ‘Labour Note’ system of payment, all workers being paid in notes according to the number of hours worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff cardboard about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equivalent of a whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of a day’s labour. There were also special notes printed in red ink representing respectively the labours of a day and a half, and two days. In his account of the colony published under the title of History of Ralahine, by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig says: – “The labour was recorded daily on a ‘Labour Sheet’, which was exposed to view during the following week. The members could work or not at their own discretion. If no work, no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically the arrangement was of great use. There were no idlers”. Further on he comments: –

The advantages of the labour notes were soon evident in the saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employment, wages, or the price of provisions. Each could partake of as much vegetable food as he or she could desire. The expenses of the children from infancy, for food or education, were provided for out of the common fund.

Now what I wonder here with the labour note is whether it is the equivalent to ones full hours of labor and is not conditioned by the SNLT of a market.
To help explain...
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/02/indirectly-social-labor/
Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11

Careful readers may ask how such a society would determine the labor-content of consumption goods (the ‘prices’ at which workers ‘buy’ them with their labor-certificates) in the absence of socially necessary labor time. This calculation would be based on the average social labor-time that it took to make a commodity. The calculation could be done simply by adding up all of the concrete labor times that go into making widgets and dividing this by the number of widgets. Such a calculation would allow society to continue to make production plans and to ‘price’ commodities. But the compensation of laborers would not be done through such a process of averaging. So such a system would not eliminate the role of average labor time as an accounting unit. What it would eliminate is the role of average time in the compensation of workers.12

Earlier we used a similar example of a Wallmart executive finding the average cost of of producing a commodity to set the price of the commodity. This example demonstrated how this process of averaging, which determines the socially necessary labor time, erases all particularity of workers, treating individuals only as units of average labor time, as abstract labor. Here, in our example of a communist society with directly social labor, we also see an example of the ‘prices’ of goods being calculated through a similar calculation of average labor time. What is the difference between these two examples? The difference is that Wallmart pays the same price for all of the commodities it buys from suppliers and those suppliers in turn only pay workers to the extent that they can produce at the social average. Any wasted time is not compensated. This creates an incentive for speed-up, exploitation, and the domination of machines over humans in production. In our communist society workers are compensated for the actual amount of time they labor, not just the part that achieves the average. This means that their labor is directly social. The immediate practical implications of this are that there is not an incentive for speed-up and so machines do not loom over production demanding more and more life from the worker.

To execute such an organization of labor it would be necessary for production to be owned and planned by society and not by individual capitals competing in the market. A society of directly social labor would entail different property relations and a different organization of production. In such a system labor-certificates would not circulate independently as money nor would alternative monies emerge spontaneously. This elimination of money would not be the result of political fiat. It would be a result of the organization of the mode of production. Directly social labor has no need for money. Money does not have a role in measuring socially necessary labor time. There is no need for a money commodity to measure the abstract labor content of commodities. The products of labor do not function as commodities with values. Without money and commodities there is no capital.


So what happens here is that those who are better able to work or work more are properly compenstated for such, and those who work less or unable may not be paid or based on the community a fund may be raised collectively such in the case of when a tragedies befalls someone and they're unable to work.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
In spite of this advance, this equal right is still constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation. The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.

But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.

But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.

So there is a similar accounting of labor, but labor isn't compensated based on the social average but in full. This is seen as the first step in breaking the law of value I believe.
So it actually undoes somewhat the tendency for someone to still receive their wage while working less than others because they will not be compensated as much in this scenario, they haven't worked. Here the idea would be the capitalist wouldn't exist or survive because he can't exploit the surplus labor to profit individually, each individual must work. As such, the idea is to undo the very basis of a class distinction.

Elsewhere had a good yarn about how the Amish do not represent communism and how they in fat are increasingly being drawn into the capitalist economy because they aren't entirely self-sufficient communities but are reliant on tourism and paid work outside of their communities.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=175024
Which I think points to the difficulty in how tenable preconfigurative politics is, as it seeks to simply act as one's ideal and collapses the means into the end as opposed to delinating the means to the broader end of how to change production overall and not in one's small 'island'.
Last edited by Wellsy on 10 May 2021 21:00, edited 1 time in total.
#15171743
Ganeshas Rat wrote:What is even the country where capitalism can be imposed by force? Socialism can be, but reverting socialism back to capitalism is reverting, not imposing. Maybe feudalism/slavery -> capitalism? But where exactly there was feudalism relatively recently?


Every single country in the Americas.
#15171773
Ganeshas Rat wrote: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).

Bill Gates came from an affluent family, but that doesn't explain the growth of Microsoft.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: 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 certainly wouldn't qualify as either a monopoly at that time or an exclusive provider. DOS was based on Digital Research's CP/M operating system. Actually, IBM approached Bill Gates about CP/M, because he had built a Z-80 softcard that could run CP/M on an Apple II, which became the most popular CP/M platform and Microsoft's #1 product. Gates didn't own CP/M. Digital Research did. When IBM approached Digital Research, they wanted a royalty for using CP/M rather than a license that IBM wanted. So negotiations broke down. Microsoft bought 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products (developed by Tim Patterson), who probably didn't know that IBM was looking for an OS for its new PC. IBM gave users a choice to install MS-DOS or CP/M-86, the latter costing $200 more than MS-DOS. Not all IBM-compatible computers were compatible. So Microsoft only sold MS-DOS as an OEM product, because some vendors would need to modify IO.SYS to address their compatibility issues. By the 1990s, most PCs were compatible and IBM finally began selling DOS to the general public.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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.

It was not a monopoly. People had a choice, and Microsoft was cheaper. PCs were cheaper than Apples. That's why PCs won. To this day, there are lots of people who prefer to spend much more money on technology than they need to, because for some reason they love Apple products. Microsoft had developed products before MS-DOS. So this myth of how Microsoft started frankly isn't true. IBM would never have given Microsoft anything if they weren't already well established.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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).

Do you know when they stopped prosecuting monopolies? During the Clinton administration. Microsoft didn't face suit until it bundled Internet Explorer with Windows, and gave it away for free to destroy Netscape.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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.

People have a choice. I have two Windows PCs, one Linux laptop and three servers all of which run Linux. Linux is free, and pretty much runs everything. People still use Windows and MacOS, but there is no need to be tied to it.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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?

Even that's not quite true. Apple was always a vendor lock-in shop. Remember AppleTalk? Apple's cabling was never compatible with the PC world, which is why they lost the personal computer market. However, the Mac was the first mover in graphical user interfaces, and their relationship with Adobe Systems made Mac the default for anything to do with desktop publishing, graphics design and photo editing for quite a long time.

Download a Linux distribution and see for yourself. https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop or https://getfedora.org/ (what Linus Torvalds uses). They come bundled with LibreOffice for free. What's missing on Linux are Adobe's apps. You don't need Microsoft Office.

Got an Android phone? What's the OS? Linux. Got a smart TV? What's the OS? Linux. Damn near every server out there on the internet runs Linux, and it's free.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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.

Bezos wasn't a book store owner that did well. He graduated Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering and computer science. He mostly worked on Wall Street initially. It was always an online bookstore. However, Bezos was one of the early dotcom people who really understood the need for a strong logistics back end, compared to companies that were putting up their dogfood.com sites. Bezos' parents invested $300k in Amazon. Bezos expanded into music and video. Amazon almost went bankrupt in the dotcom collapse. Amazon survived and grew. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to begin automating his warehouses. He was a visionary at that sort of thing. As he began allowing people to set up their own stores on Amazon, he ended up building AWS and pioneered cloud computing.

Ganeshas Rat wrote: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?

But that isn't the full story. You can use the Windows clone ReactOS these days if you want to. Brand loyalty is a thing.

Julian658 wrote:Nevertheless, I am afraid they will become self destructive.

This frequently happens to people who win the lottery.

ckaihatsu wrote: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.

What do you mean by centralization? I've spoken frequently about all of them. I think nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake. I think Obama's embrace of the doctrine of pre-emption but trying to make it look like a democratic uprising was both absurd and horribly destructive. There are few things I liked about Obama.

ckaihatsu wrote: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.

Ok. Whatever? I guess I love being exploited, even though I work in open source software, which is free.

ckaihatsu wrote: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 -- ?

Socialism and extreme violence go hand in hand. The mythical utopia never happens, because it never can happen. People keep believing in the fairy tale. Economics teaches you that there are no free lunches.

ckaihatsu wrote:'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.

Crimes against the person aren't about private property. If I murder you, what does punishing me under a statute for murder have to do with private property?

ckaihatsu wrote: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.

This is a fairy tale. A simple natural disaster would create conflicting material interests almost instantly.

ckaihatsu wrote: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.

So it's not a universal philosophy. I work in software. The means of production is computer and my internet connection. I am already in possession of the means of production.

ckaihatsu wrote:And where do you stand on the festering issue of government-backed, qualified-immunity killer cops?

I think police labor unions should be abolished. I think internal affairs controlling all investigations of criminal behavior committed by police should be abolished. I think we should probably have a separate prosecuting officer for prosecuting public officials.
#15171798
Wellsy wrote:How is labour power not a commodity?
Just because a labourer can in the abstract seek out alternative work under another capitalist, this doesn't somehow make labour power not a commodity.


It is not a commodity in the sense that it is not produced and sold competitively. Unlike a machine the labour power is not owned by the capitalist, hence he has no (individual) interest in investing in it. The worker owns his labour power, hence if anything the worker would act as a capitalist in this case, but he doesn't own his offspring, thus when it comes to reproduction that's not a good analogy either. You could imagine a society where the worker owns his offspring or his entire dynasty. In this case, if the worker is only motivated by money in reproduction, i.e. he reproduces to exploit his offspring, the labour power would become a commodity. The workers would produce and edcuate as many children as possible, which would drive down the price (wage) to where it can be explaind by the labour theory of value, i.e. the labour necessary for the reproduction and education of the worker.

Wellsy wrote:Well this is what I think reproductivity of the working class in a sense constitutes, not only their overall existence and propagation but even the level of having them show up to work. And workers do need to work to survive because they don't have a means of subsistence and thus need money to survive so they must sell what they have, their labour-power.
So the individual capitalist is interested in getting workers to do the work and will pay as low as they can to achieve that. While the worker may try to bargain as high as they can but they are often at a disadvantage time wise in trying to bargain individually unless they are exceptionally trained/skilled such that they can really press the necessity of their labor. Which is just on the individual scale what a workers strike does in emphasizing the capitalist's dependence on the labor of workers.

I don't see us disagreeing that a capitalist has to pay a worker to the extent that they're willing to show up to work and people can be quite desperate in some cases and not necessarily with other opportunities to leverage their wage as they're uneducated or there isn't must alternative options in work and so on.
The capitalist can live longer without the individual worker than the individual worker can live without working for a capitalist. Think of the precariousness of anyone who has only a modest sum saved up and fears being fired.

Yes, in some industries there is competition over hiring certain workers because of their skills. This may not be as much the case in less skilled and lower paid work where replacing the worker is much more accessible.
And thinking of the precariousness of many workers, its difficult to imagine how they would be able to assert themselves to not work enough until they got a yacht unless they already had their needs satisfied and such it would indeed break the needs of a capitalist economy because that's the disciplining factor for the working class in large part, work, or you won't be paid and if you don't get paid, good luck paying your rent, for your car maintenance and fuel, your food for you and your family and everything that a person needs to buy to live among that particular society. Of which many people as individuals do not meet such a level.


Note we're looking at this in the context of competitive markets, i.e. an ideal form of capitalism. Nobody has any market power, but is simply a price taker. The worker has an infinite (or at least very large) number of capitalists to work at at the given wage and the capitalist has an infinite (very large) number of workers to choose from. There are no oligopolies or monopolies. Subsistence puts a lower limit on wages, because below that the labour power would simply cease to exist. But even then, if the worker could change capitalists from one minute to the next, there would be no subistence wage and the workers would starve. There must be the possibility of a contract in the form of "I give you food for a day, and you work for me for a day" for a subsistence wage to exist.
#15171838
Rugoz wrote:It is not a commodity in the sense that it is not produced and sold competitively. Unlike a machine the labour power is not owned by the capitalist, hence he has no (individual) interest in investing in it. The worker owns his labour power, hence if anything the worker would act as a capitalist in this case, but he doesn't own his offspring, thus when it comes to reproduction that's not a good analogy either. You could imagine a society where the worker owns his offspring or his entire dynasty. In this case, if the worker is only motivated by money in reproduction, i.e. he reproduces to exploit his offspring, the labour power would become a commodity. The workers would produce and edcuate as many children as possible, which would drive down the price (wage) to where it can be explaind by the labour theory of value, i.e. the labour necessary for the reproduction and education of the worker.

Indeed, it is not like other commodities in regard to it being the property of the worker.
Also can see that capitalists aren't interested individually in investing in training and such, but still expect to have educated workers and as such see a lot of economic influence reverting back onto ideas of the education system as the modern workplace increasingly demands creative problem solving and not habitual/repetitive motion. So I can see that a lot of companies are indeed not interested in investing in "human capital" and is why people are often having to fork out money independently of work to enhance their labor-power.
The level of abstration I'm trying to jump between is indeed that of the individual capitalist paying for something which he can only temporarily acquire and not own, but for the larger capitalist production a lot of things are necessary to make labour productive and possible even while it doesn't yield a profit such as a lot of infrastructure.

But even though the capitalist does not invest in training and educating the individual worker, they do want the worker's labour power. As such, they are interested in paying a minimally as possible in order to get the quality of worker that they need while remaining profitable for them.
From the perspective of the worker and their ability to negotiate their compensation or wages for their capacity to work for a set time for the capitalist, they are clearly interested in sustaining their lives and that of their family. Having dependents such as kids, I may be more motivated in acquiring work that can properly accommodate the costs of raising them, providing them with clothes, food, decent education and entertainment.

So I think I agree that the individual capitalist isn't approaching the worker with the perspective of reproducing the whole working class, but they do need to offer a wage that at least is enough to compel them to work which is underpinned by at minimum subsistance. However to the disadvantage of many workers, they may not have many options or means of leverage in negotiating their wage and such may work for lower wages than they actually need or makes things extremely tight. Hence the point that many workers may live in abject poverty, because a capitalist isn't interested beyond just getting them to work and the rate at which many people will work can be very low depending on many things that compel them to do so, such as having no means of subsistence themselves other than to sell their labor power.
Wages could be even lower without say things like minimum wage being enforced in some degree and which raises to are often stidently opposed by some.
On the other hand, if the capitalist's point is that they need to pay a worker just enough that they will work, then for many they will simply not work for subsistence wages, because they have some means of resisting such pressures and can hold out for a better wage. So the idea is that there can be the tendency or pressure for wages to reach subsistence, but are of course countervailed by other tendencies clearly as many workers do get paid much higher that they live comfortably.

Note we're looking at this in the context of competitive markets, i.e. an ideal form of capitalism. Nobody has any market power, but is simply a price taker. The worker has an infinite (or at least very large) number of capitalists to work at at the given wage and the capitalist has an infinite (very large) number of workers to choose from. There are no oligopolies or monopolies. Subsistence puts a lower limit on wages, because below that the labour power would simply cease to exist. But even then, if the worker could change capitalists from one minute to the next, there would be no subistence wage and the workers would starve. There must be the possibility of a contract in the form of "I give you food for a day, and you work for me for a day" for a subsistence wage to exist.

Well yes it is the case that there isn't a direct exchange in terms of I'll give you this much food or whatever as long as you work for this long. In part because capitalist economy is the highest form of commodity exchange with money as the universal mediator of such exchanges rather than one commodity for another and with the worker in need of money to acquire commodities.
So yeah the wage need not be a direct kind of subsistence wage, but the wages of a people can be determined by that level because there surely is a limit at which a worker is willing to work if it's absolute pennies and they're wasting their time getting nothing.

Imagine someone might work for food or something if say in the times of the depression, workers were offering themselves to even families to help them out with something if they gave them a place to stay the night and a warm meal. I know my great grandfather was able to lend some support to a lot of jobless travellers and they would leave stones on fence posts to signify to other travellers that they were good folks who would help out.
But that is of course not the situation when one is looking to work for the capitalist who may have an industry which doesn't satisfy the workers needs such as food like a fast food chain. They have money to give which works plenty good in acquiring the means of life and clearly more exchangeable as its universal.

It is in fact the point of depriving workers of a means of subsistence that they exist as workers, they must work to live.
https://www.politicsforum.org/forum/posting.php?mode=edit&f=12&p=15171838
Marx’s critique of political economy reveals the socio-historical content of the formal abstractions of political economy by revealing the socio-historical foundation of bourgeois property in alienated labour. Bourgeois property rests on the co-ordination of social production not through the self-conscious organisation of production on the basis of human need, but through the exchange of the products of private producers in the form of commodities. The commodity is thus a specific social form of the product of labour. Similarly wage-labour is a particular form of labour which corresponds to the dispossession of the labourer that forces her to work for another, who has appropriated the necessary means of production and subsistence in the form of capital. Thus wage-labour and capital are the complementary aspects of a particular social relation of production. It is only within this social relation that capitalist and wage-labourer relate to one another as independent commodity owners, and it is only within this social relation that the labourer is compelled to alienate her productive powers in exchange for a wage. It is only within this social relation of production that property based on labour is transformed into its opposite, the appropriation of the product of labour by the non-labourer

This much was proved in the work of E. G. Wakefield in his efforts to theorize systematic colonialism where there was an abundance of land and scarce labor so they wouldn't work for money because they could just work land for themselves. There also was little value in money because there simply wasn't an infrastructure that established it's value. Because the cost of getting raw materials alone was significant.
If there was no separation, many people simply wouldn't work for a capitalist, what would be the point?
#15171851
wat0n wrote:
Weird, because I thought there are different interpretations of him even among Marxists. It seems you are being the religious guy here when pretending to know what did he really mean, when there is no consensus about it.



(Note that I haven't said anything religious here.)

Marx's meaning is far from *ambiguous*, contrary to your characterization.


wat0n wrote:
Only if you don't understand the difference between real and nominal variables.



Buzzwords -- you'll need to elaborate on your meaning here.


---


wat0n wrote:
What does that have to do with class?



ckaihatsu wrote:
Anyone, like yourself, who only looks at the market pricing of a commodity *after* it's been produced is tacitly ignoring the *cost* of producing that commodity in the first place, including the cost of *labor* inputs, for its production. Ignoring the economics of the *production* of a commodity is ignoring the workers' essential *role* in conferring exchange value (prices) onto the commodity by bringing it into existence so that it can be sold.



wat0n wrote:
What makes you believe that cost isn't included in the price?



It's not a matter of *belief*, contrary to your imputation -- 'value' is based on the cost of production of the commodity in the first place.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, if the cost of the *workers' production* of a commodity is ignored then you're dependent on a valuation of the commodity based on market pricing only, and that fallacy has already been addressed here on this thread.



wat0n wrote:
In what way is that a fallacy?



By ignoring the cost of production one may only value a commodity according to its market pricing, subject to the balance of supply and demand, and subject to speculative *bubbles* in pricing, as with the price of lumber today.


wat0n wrote:
If so, then what do you have to comment about the second example?



I *don't* usually have a comment, *at all* -- I'm simply clarifying the basics, while you go off on tangents.


wat0n wrote:
At last, I'm also thinking about a second scenario regarding exploitation: Let's say there is a cooperative where all workers are paid the same, but not all workers contribute equally into production (there could be differences in productivity owing to talent or levels of human capital, particularly once allowing for labor augmenting). Are less productive workers exploiting the more productive ones?



Workers *can't* exploit other workers because workers don't enjoy the use of capital *ownership* in the production process, as for compelling other workers to work for them, for wages.

If there are differences in individual rates of productivity among various workers, it doesn't matter anyway because all workers are *alienated* from the products of their work, by the capitalist ownership that *appropriates* those products of labor, and workers are alienated from *each other*, by being individually commodified according to their labor power.

Even in a supposedly / nominally 'egalitarian' cooperative, as you're outlining, the workers *still* don't have any relationship, or dynamics, with *each other*, within the context of capitalist commodity production. They are *still* commodified by labor power since the products of their labor goes to the 'cooperative', which is subject to capital ownership, the economic interests of such, and to the 'communal' *management* of the collective, in the interests of capital ownership.

All workers being paid the same speaks more to a *management* paradigm, rather than to a proletarian *empowerment*, because someone ultimately has to have private ownership of the land that the cooperative is located on, etc.
#15171854
ckaihatsu wrote:(Note that I haven't said anything religious here.)

Marx's meaning is far from *ambiguous*, contrary to your characterization.


Really? So why are there different Marxian interpretations of his writings?

ckaihatsu wrote:Buzzwords -- you'll need to elaborate on your meaning here.


Pick up an introductory economics book.

ckaihatsu wrote:It's not a matter of *belief*, contrary to your imputation -- 'value' is based on the cost of production of the commodity in the first place.


So?

ckaihatsu wrote:By ignoring the cost of production one may only value a commodity according to its market pricing, subject to the balance of supply and demand, and subject to speculative *bubbles* in pricing, as with the price of lumber today.


You can also value production at cost if you want, but it's a fairly useless measure.

ckaihatsu wrote:I *don't* usually have a comment, *at all* -- I'm simply clarifying the basics, while you go off on tangents.


I don't see why would they be tangents. It's putting Roemer's point in perspective.

ckaihatsu wrote:Workers *can't* exploit other workers because workers don't enjoy the use of capital *ownership* in the production process, as for compelling other workers to work for them, for wages.

If there are differences in individual rates of productivity among various workers, it doesn't matter anyway because all workers are *alienated* from the products of their work, by the capitalist ownership that *appropriates* those products of labor, and workers are alienated from *each other*, by being individually commodified according to their labor power.

Even in a supposedly / nominally 'egalitarian' cooperative, as you're outlining, the workers *still* don't have any relationship, or dynamics, with *each other*, within the context of capitalist commodity production. They are *still* commodified by labor power since the products of their labor goes to the 'cooperative', which is subject to capital ownership, the economic interests of such, and to the 'communal' *management* of the collective, in the interests of capital ownership.

All workers being paid the same speaks more to a *management* paradigm, rather than to a proletarian *empowerment*, because someone ultimately has to have private ownership of the land that the cooperative is located on, etc.


In this cooperative example, workers collectively own all capital and are therefore capitalist-workers.

@Wellsy I'll give you a proper answer later this week, when I have more free time.
#15171867
Wellsy wrote:



Marx lays out, briefly, a way to make labor directly social, breaking with capitalist value production, in his Critique of the Gotha program. In Marx’s concept of directly social labor he advocates a system which breaks with the disciplining of production by socially necessary labor time. Producers in this post-capitalist society will not be compensated according to the social average but instead compensated directly for the actual amount of labor time they expend in production. If I spend 2 hours making a widget I get a labor-certificate entitling me to purchase consumption goods equal to two hours of labor. If you spend 3 hours making the same widget you get a certificate entitling you to 3 hours of consumption goods. Regardless of productivity our labors are directly social because they are compensated in full, considered part of the total labor of society, no matter what.11



Good, and the averaging of socially necessary labor time, into an index, is new to me.

Unfortunately this approach still winds up *commodifying* labor / labor-power, since all laborers are still effectively pitted against each other, with individual material incentives to work *slower* than the average rate, so as to accumulate more labor notes for the same productivity as the lesser-time social average -- time is an insufficient baseline / key-index unit of measurement since per-hour rates of *productivity*, per labor-role, will vary, depending on local work conditions / infrastructure, and individual rates of productivity will vary against the average, as just stated.



To execute such an organization of labor it would be necessary for production to be owned and planned by society and not by individual capitals competing in the market.



Agreed politically, but then the actual work for collectivized society would be composed of *individual* workers, incentivized *individually* with labor notes, for *personal* consumption (as is objectively empirically necessary) -- this is a *mismatch* of collective political planning, to execution / logistics.


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image



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Wellsy wrote:
So what happens here is that those who are better able to work or work more are properly compenstated for such, and those who work less or unable may not be paid or based on the community a fund may be raised collectively such in the case of when a tragedies befalls someone and they're unable to work.



Sure, I think this *would* be the default social ethos in a post-capitalist collectivized society -- as the ethos of much discretionary charity is today, even under capitalism's private-aggrandizement ethos -- but, strictly *economically* speaking, there would be no *collective* material incentive for individual-labor-for-the-common-good when individuals could instead work for the sake of *labor notes* for themselves, for their own *personal* consumption, just as currently, under *capitalism's* commodification of labor-power.


Wellsy wrote:



But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement.



I *agree* with this detailing of empirical material factors / variables of work, but the supplied proposal doesn't actually *follow-through* in resolving the individual-scale *personal consumption interests*, with the larger-scale societal interest of egalitarian indexed standards for productive work *inputs*. In other words, there's no universal neutral baseline indexed standard provided, unfortunately.


The following major components of social production would have to be 'balanced-out', basically:


Components of Social Production

Spoiler: show
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Wellsy wrote:
but labor [post-capitalism] isn't compensated based on the social average but in full


Wellsy wrote:
So it actually undoes somewhat the tendency for someone to still receive their wage while working less than others because they will not be compensated as much in this scenario, they haven't worked.



But the premise is that individually-varying *rates* of individual productivity will vary in relation to the *average* socially-necessary labor time for any given work role -- some people work faster than others, for example, at any given work role. Since the rate of labor notes per hour, per work role, is arbitrarily standardized to *time*, irrespective of individual rates of *productivity* per unit of time, there would be a material incentive for the individual worker to be *less* productive, so as to use a greater amount of time / more hours for the same productivity as the average / standard, so as to accumulate more labor notes for more hours of arbitrarily-productive labor-power.


Pies Must Line Up

Spoiler: show
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I'll add that I created and developed a 'labor credits' vehicle, specifically to address this hole in theory, which is here:


labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show
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https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338
#15171899
blackjack21 wrote:
It [Microsoft's MS-DOS] certainly wouldn't qualify as either a monopoly at that time or an exclusive provider.



While corporations rarely have the kind of monolithic monopolies that the *railroads* of the 19th century did, what corporations *do* have today is virtual brand dominance over certain sectors of the economy, as with your mention of Adobe regarding desktop publishing.

It's enough that the purportedly bottom-up market decision-making according to disposable income is *mitigated* by top-down industry standards and the pre-existing competitive landscape of major players, for any given industry / sector.

There's marketing / advertising networks, and brand market dominance, and the prevailing culture of critical-mass acceptance / standardization for any given industry practice, such as that for editing photos digitally.


blackjack21 wrote:
What's missing on Linux are Adobe's apps.



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

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

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


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ckaihatsu wrote:
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:
What do you mean by centralization? I've spoken frequently about all of them. I think nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan was a mistake. I think Obama's embrace of the doctrine of pre-emption but trying to make it look like a democratic uprising was both absurd and horribly destructive. There are few things I liked about Obama.



I mean to point out the double standards displayed by politicization, left-wing versus right-wing -- many will hypocritically decry 'big government' but not when 'big government' exercises top-down authority over the worldwide deployment of militaristic force, through use of arms.

I don't see *nearly* enough anti-war positioning from the nominally left-nationalist 'libertarian' camp these days, though I saw *some* in the early years of the war on Iraq.


---

ckaihatsu wrote:
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.



blackjack21 wrote:
Ok. Whatever? I guess I love being exploited, even though I work in open source software, which is free.



Okay, let's talk about *you*, BJ -- you provide a professional *service*, presumably through an employer, so, yes, you *are* both exploited and personally masochistic, since *someone* is making money off of your surplus labor value.

Back to my comparison -- in *general*, we see the absurdities of private-property ownership, which arrogates the political legal 'right' to exclusively monetarily benefit from the 'copy' function of any given software / OS, to make innumerable retail copies of software or media for sale from the one-time efforts of white-collar labor.

It's akin to hiring someone to set up an entire SimCity city on a computer, which then magically becomes a real-world company-town metropolis, all ready for inhabitation and operation, while the one company which paid the wage owns and controls everything within that real-world city, all due to 'private property'.


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late wrote:
Marxism has never happened.



blackjack21 wrote:
That's what makes it more of a religion than anything else.



ckaihatsu wrote:
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:
Socialism and extreme violence go hand in hand. The mythical utopia never happens, because it never can happen. People keep believing in the fairy tale. Economics teaches you that there are no free lunches.



Looks like I hit a nerve -- you're twisting and writhing, making up shit and using stereotypes, all in efforts to deny the agency of the world's working class, which is numerically *superior* to the defenders of private property and militarism.

All the working class needs is to retain its own labor efforts, and the 'ownership' class is *done for*, with no material leverage left over *billions* of people worldwide.


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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.



ckaihatsu wrote:
'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.



blackjack21 wrote:
Crimes against the person aren't about private property. If I murder you, what does punishing me under a statute for murder have to do with private property?



Exactly -- it's apples-and-oranges, all in your continued *avoidance* tactics to sidestep the *politics* at-hand, here on a political forum.

You're implying that the world *needs* bourgeois law and private-property boundaries, when in fact such formal partitioning just *divides* people from each other artificially / politically, as with Trump's enhanced U.S.-Mexico border.

You'd rather sow *anxiety* that people can't work together for *common goals* -- displacing the capitalist norm of hyper-abstracted private-property accumulation and aggrandizement.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
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:
This is a fairy tale. A simple natural disaster would create conflicting material interests almost instantly.



No, I can't agree -- you think that social differences are based on *geography* -- ?

Yet countries came together during WWII to repel and defeat the *Nazis*, which could not be left unchecked.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
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:
So it's not a universal philosophy. I work in software. The means of production is computer and my internet connection. I am already in possession of the means of production.



No, you provide a *service*. At most you're *petty bourgeois*, using your own tools, but who, may I ask, provides the *computers* -- ? That's where the money and power is, arguably, though others would say that it's now in U.S. marketing and branding channels, like Apple, leveraging hyper-exploited Chinese labor for actual physical production of the tools you professionally benefit from.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
And where do you stand on the festering issue of government-backed, qualified-immunity killer cops?



blackjack21 wrote:
I think police labor unions should be abolished. I think internal affairs controlling all investigations of criminal behavior committed by police should be abolished. I think we should probably have a separate prosecuting officer for prosecuting public officials.



How exactly, by what decree, would labor unions be abolished?

Who would provide routine oversight of police personnel, if not by Internal Affairs?

Would you support the ending of 'qualified immunity' protections for police officers, then?
#15171908
ckaihatsu wrote:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMP

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

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

Hmm... Didn't know about Scribus. I've never been a fan of GIMP's UI, and I've found Inkscape buggy in the past. I imagine they have gotten a bit better. However, I do think Adobe creates superior user interfaces. Kdenlive was fairly buggy early on, but I've heard that's got quite a bit better too.

ckaihatsu wrote:Looks like I hit a nerve -- you're twisting and writhing, making up shit and using stereotypes, all in efforts to deny the agency of the world's working class, which is numerically *superior* to the defenders of private property and militarism.

Yeah, and could throw this system off in a heartbeat if they wanted to. But they don't. Isn't that what gets Marxists so upset?

ckaihatsu wrote:You'd rather sow *anxiety* that people can't work together for *common goals* -- displacing the capitalist norm of hyper-abstracted private-property accumulation and aggrandizement.

Dude, I work in open source software! I'm actually living that life right now, and it's not a traditional capitalist thing at all. There are a number of companies that do this now. Automattic (WordPress), Canonical (Ubuntu), Chef, CloudBees (Jenkins), Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Docker, Elastic, MongoDB, Nginx, NPM, Puppet, Red Hat, Redis Labs, SUSE, etc.

ckaihatsu wrote:No, I can't agree -- you think that social differences are based on *geography* -- ?

Look at what's happening on the East Coast with Colonial Pipeline. Suddenly, you have people with no gasoline. Inequality. Instantly.

ckaihatsu wrote:How exactly, by what decree, would labor unions be abolished?

Who would provide routine oversight of police personnel, if not by Internal Affairs?

Would you support the ending of 'qualified immunity' protections for police officers, then?

Just pass a law.

Citizen oversight and prosecution.

It depends on the context.
#15171911
ckaihatsu wrote:Good, and the averaging of socially necessary labor time, into an index, is new to me.

Unfortunately this approach still winds up *commodifying* labor / labor-power, since all laborers are still effectively pitted against each other, with individual material incentives to work *slower* than the average rate, so as to accumulate more labor notes for the same productivity as the lesser-time social average -- time is an insufficient baseline / key-index unit of measurement since per-hour rates of *productivity*, per labor-role, will vary, depending on local work conditions / infrastructure, and individual rates of productivity will vary against the average, as just stated.

My impression is that their proposal isn't to abolish the commodification instantaneously as much as to undermine the law of value in how it pushes workers to be more and more efficient.
I do how ever share the same concern in their proposal of how one maintains some standard of production though.
It seems that they seek to differentiate their proposal perhaps from the likes of John Gray in which it is simply another form of money in emphasizing that it's labor for labor in full rather than based on the average.
http://www.marxisthumanistinitiative.org/philosophy-organization/marx-proudhon-and-alternatives-to-capital.html
Marx develops the concept of “directly social labor” or “immediately social labor” in critical dialogue with the work of Proudhon, the Ricardian socialists and later with the followers of Ferdinand Lassalle. In endeavoring an equalitarian application of Ricardo’s theory, Proudhon and left Ricardian thinkers like John Gray, advocated what we would today call monetary reform: they sought to replace money with “time chits” or “labor money.” These “time chits” were designed to directly reflect labor time. In other words, in exchange for a commodity that took, say, 12 hours to produce, the producer would receive a certificate from a bank entitling her to any other commodity that took 12 hours to produce. Proudhon and Gray wanted every commodity to be directly social, directly exchangeable, with every other commodity in the same way that money is directly social. Proudhon and the other “time-chitters,” as Marx calls them in the Grundrisse, thought the mediation of money stood in the way. (4)
...
[T]he individual producer receives back from society…exactly what he gives to it…He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor…and with this certificate he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor costs. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

This sounds very much like the proposals of Proudhon and other “time-chitters” that were the subject of decades of invective from Marx. There is, however, a real difference between what Marx is suggesting and the formulations of Proudhon-if we can get at this difference, we will have understood not only Marx’s critique of Proudhon but also have discovered one of the real clues that Marx has left us for figuring out how to transcend capital.

The difference is that, here, labor is “directly” or “immediately” social. Unlike in the formulations of Proudhon and unlike in our own commodity-producing society, where the exchange of equivalents exists only in the average, here there would actually be an exchange of equivalents in the individual case. “[N]ow,” as Marx notes, “in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor.” So here, right from the beginning, Marx is telling us that the law of value will not hold. The labor, Marx says, employed in the production of products will no longer take the form of a material quality possessed by them; the products of our own hands will no longer have control over us.

I also am unsure about the remaining emphasis on time but it's perhaps not entirely implausible as a reasonable proxy.
Consider this example which was utopian in it's aims to be maintained amidst class enemies.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly/1910/lih/chap11.htm
he colony did not use the ordinary currency of the country, but instead adopted a ‘Labour Note’ system of payment, all workers being paid in notes according to the number of hours worked, and being able to exchange the notes in the store for all the necessities of life. The notes were printed on stiff cardboard about the size of a visiting card, and represented the equivalent of a whole, a half, a quarter, an eighth, and a sixteenth of a day’s labour. There were also special notes printed in red ink representing respectively the labours of a day and a half, and two days. In his account of the colony published under the title of History of Ralahine, by Heywood & Sons, Manchester (a book we earnestly recommend to all our readers), Mr. Craig says: – “The labour was recorded daily on a ‘Labour Sheet’, which was exposed to view during the following week. The members could work or not at their own discretion. If no work, no record, and, therefore, no pay. Practically the arrangement was of great use. There were no idlers”. Further on he comments: –

“The advantages of the labour notes were soon evident in the saving of members. They had no anxiety as to employment, wages, or the price of provisions. Each could partake of as much vegetable food as he or she could desire. The expenses of the children from infancy, for food or education, were provided for out of the common fund.

My impression is that there must still remain some sort of pressure on the base limits of how much work one puts into things, and it seems here it is in the form of those who do not work do not eat.
And to which the difference in people's ability to work seems in part to reflect a necessary inequality int he compensation as noted in Marx's critique of the gotha programme, but such a step is considered necessary to dissolve class relations in production.


Agreed politically, but then the actual work for collectivized society would be composed of *individual* workers, incentivized *individually* with labor notes, for *personal* consumption (as is objectively empirically necessary) -- this is a *mismatch* of collective political planning, to execution / logistics


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image

---

I don't quite follow what mismatch you're stating here in your emphasis on the compensation being based on the work of individuals.


Sure, I think this *would* be the default social ethos in a post-capitalist collectivized society -- as the ethos of much discretionary charity is today, even under capitalism's private-aggrandizement ethos -- but, strictly *economically* speaking, there would be no *collective* material incentive for individual-labor-for-the-common-good when individuals could instead work for the sake of *labor notes* for themselves, for their own *personal* consumption, just as currently, under *capitalism's* commodification of labor-power.

Is your point here in the vein that those who can laborer more productively and be compensated as such could amass their labor notes in such a way that it'd result in a problematic level of inequality that would undermine the system?
What would you consider the example of a collective material incentive? Something in the vein of pooling resources to make things accessible like with universal healthcare but as applied to all sorts of services?


I *agree* with this detailing of empirical material factors / variables of work, but the supplied proposal doesn't actually *follow-through* in resolving the individual-scale *personal consumption interests*, with the larger-scale societal interest of egalitarian indexed standards for productive work *inputs*. In other words, there's no universal neutral baseline indexed standard provided, unfortunately.



Are you saying that while it may serve a small community well enough, it is insufficient for a larger society because it wouldn't provide some sort of baseline productivity index? Because it would be difficult to compare labor on such a scale within this framework?


Are you saying that it is unable to deal with actual productivity because it is focused on time which can be considered independently of how much one produces and thus some will be incentivized to be lazy and be rewarded the same amount of labor notes for less production?

I can't access that RevLeft content, its as if the site is somewhat down or inaccessible for some reason so I can't see what you shared there.

In taking brief excurisons into the issue, it seems a big part of the article is focused on the notion of making labor directly social such that there is an awareness of labor-time as being the scarce resource that underpins the value of things.
WIthin such a framework, the labor certificates do not denote a kind of money or a maintenance of exchange-value between commodities as there seems to be also an emphasis on the common product being available to all from which people individually draw from.

https://www.workerscontrol.net/theorists/marx%E2%80%99s-critique-socialist-labor-money-schemes-and-myth-council-communism%E2%80%99s-proudhonism#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9Ctime%2Dchitters%E2%80%9D%20erroneously,silver%E2%80%94that%20in%20so%20doing
As we have seen, for Marx, money is not simply a unit of measure, but presupposes private commodity owners confronting each other on the market. Its social function is the mediation of the private labors of commodity producers. Given the premise of directly social labor—and this is the basis for Marx’s first phase of communism—this social function of money is no longer necessary. The labor certificates have a different function, that of facilitating a conscious allocation of goods. Marx makes this distinction in a pertinent digression (in a footnote) on the socialist Robert Owen in Volume I of Capital:

. . . Owen’s ‘labour money,’ for instance, is no more ‘money’ than a theatre ticket is. Owen presupposes directly socialized labour, a form of production diametrically opposed to the production of commodities. The certificate of labour is merely evidence of the part taken by the individual in the common labour, and of his claim to a certain portion of the common product which has been set aside for consumption. But Owen never made the mistake of presupposing the production of commodities, while, at the same time, by juggling with money, trying to circumvent the necessary conditions of that form of production.52

We have already seen what Marx had in mind when he refers to “juggling with money.”

In the above passage we see that Marx makes a clear distinction between the idea of a labor certificate functioning within the context of “directly socialized labor,” and the labor-money of his theoretical adversaries. It is on the basis of this distinction that we can confidently say that Marx was not advocating the rule of value in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, nor was he departing from his critique of utopian socialism. Further support for this position is provided by Marx’s discussion in Capital of a self-sufficient, isolated producer: Robinson Crusoe. Marx writes that Robinson Crusoe, “soon begins, like a good Englishman, to keep a set of books. His stock-book contains a catalogue of the various objects he possesses, of the various operations necessary for their production, and finally, of the labour-time that specific quantities of these products have on average cost him. All the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth are here so simple and transparent that even Mr Sedley Taylor could understand them.”53 Significant here is the notion of a simplicity and transparency lacking in capitalist relations, where the law of value functions behind the backs of the producers. As Marx put it in Capital, Volume III, the law of value operates as “a blind natural force vis-à-vis the individual agents [of capital].”54 This is precisely why the law of value would not be operative in the “system of planned use-value production” advocated by the council communists.

What Marx then goes on to do in Capital, Volume I, is imagine production in a communist society as a sort of contrast to capitalism, utilizing the example of Robinson Crusoe. This discussion in particular parallels Marx’s remarks about the first phase of communism in the Critique of the Gotha Programme. Marx writes,

Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force. All the characteristics of Robinson’s are repeated here, but with the difference that they are social instead of individual. All Robinson’s products were exclusively the result of his own personal labour and they were therefore directly objects of utility for him personally. The total product of our imagined association is a social product. One part of this product serves as fresh means of production and remains social. But another part is consumed by the members of the association as means of subsistence. This part must therefore be divided amongst them. The way this division is made will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers. We shall assume, but only for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time. Labour-time would in that case play a double part. Its apportionment in accordance with a definite social plan maintains the correct proportion between the different functions of labour and the various needs of the associations. On the other hand, labour-time also serves as a measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labour, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for individual consumption. The social relations of the individual producers, both towards their labour and the products of their labour, are here transparent in their simplicity, in production as well as in distribution.55

Here Marx draws a parallel between the transparency of Robinson’s relations with his products and the transparency of the social relations of communism. Marx in no way identifies the idea of labor certificates and labor-time accounting being used in a communist society with the law of value.56

Far from identifying labor-time accounting with the law of value, Marx argued in the Grundrisse that such “economy of time” increases in importance with the passage to communal production:

On the basis of communal production, the determination of time remains, of course, essential. The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity. Thus, economy of time, along with the planned distribution of labour time among the various branches of production, remains the first economic law on the basis of communal production. It becomes law, there, to an even higher degree. However, this is essentially different from a measurement of exchange values (labour or products) by labour time.57

Marx did not see this “economy of time” as identical with the law of value, because the law of value most definitely does not represent any conscious measuring. This is the fundamental error in Dauvé’s characterization of the GIC as advocating the rule of value.
#15171943
wat0n wrote:
Really? So why are there different Marxian interpretations of his writings?



Like what, for instance?


wat0n wrote:
Pick up an introductory economics book.



Why don't you *tell* me about it, since you're invoking it.


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ckaihatsu wrote:
It's not a matter of *belief*, contrary to your imputation -- 'value' is based on the cost of production of the commodity in the first place.



wat0n wrote:
So?



So it's crucial to have a definition of 'value', regarding political economy / economics.


wat0n wrote:
You can also value production at cost if you want, but it's a fairly useless measure.



Thanks, I'm gonna just go ahead and do that, and all day tomorrow, too, despite your opinion of it. (grin)


wat0n wrote:
I don't see why would they be tangents. It's putting Roemer's point in perspective.



You *do* tend to go off on tangents, instead of sticking to the topic of each given discussion segment -- you invoked Roemer earlier to state your thesis that:


wat0n wrote:
Roemer's claim [is] that labor value is unnecessary for determining prices but not the other way around



So you see 'value' as being determined entirely by the balance of supply and demand, while discounting labor value entirely.


In this, your latest post, though, you're not contending *my* Marxist position on labor value:


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's not a matter of *belief*, contrary to your imputation -- 'value' is based on the cost of production of the commodity in the first place.



wat0n wrote:
So?



---


wat0n wrote:
In this cooperative example, workers collectively own all capital and are therefore capitalist-workers.



Okay, then, in that case, the capitalist-workers would *still* be operating within the larger sea of capitalism, and would have to put their own, proletarian interests *behind* that of the enterprise itself, the same as any other capitalist owner or manager.

Profits would have to be reinvested instead of benefitting themselves, more surplus labor value would have to be extracted from their own labor, for the sake of the enterprise, versus all competitors in the marketplace, etc. So it's actually an *undesirable* situation for the workers to be in, having to collectively self-exploit their own labor-power after having plowed so much capital into acquiring the business to begin with.
#15171944
blackjack21 wrote:
Hmm... Didn't know about Scribus. I've never been a fan of GIMP's UI, and I've found Inkscape buggy in the past. I imagine they have gotten a bit better. However, I do think Adobe creates superior user interfaces. Kdenlive was fairly buggy early on, but I've heard that's got quite a bit better too.



Yeah, I made the switch from Mac to Linux in 2010 -- I used CrossFont to get all my fonts over, which worked fine. Sure, I'll readily agree that the Adobe suite has always been better, more user-friendly, and professional, but I was experiencing increasing issues with the Mac OS's glitchiness at the time (on a G3 and then G4 laptop).

From that desktop publishing background, to what I do today, 3D -- everything's readily *doable* on the Linux platform, and everything's on the net these days anyway, of course.


Photoillustrations, Political Diagrams by Chris Kaihatsu

[url]postimage.org/ckaihatsu[/url]


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Looks like I hit a nerve -- you're twisting and writhing, making up shit and using stereotypes, all in efforts to deny the agency of the world's working class, which is numerically *superior* to the defenders of private property and militarism.



blackjack21 wrote:
Yeah, and could throw this system off in a heartbeat if they wanted to. But they don't. Isn't that what gets Marxists so upset?



Well, the social *backdrop* is daily bourgeois repression and dispossession, so the doing of outdoing that is... *tricky*, to put it delicately.


blackjack21 wrote:
Dude, I work in open source software! I'm actually living that life right now, and it's not a traditional capitalist thing at all. There are a number of companies that do this now. Automattic (WordPress), Canonical (Ubuntu), Chef, CloudBees (Jenkins), Cloudera, Confluent, Databricks, DataStax, Docker, Elastic, MongoDB, Nginx, NPM, Puppet, Red Hat, Redis Labs, SUSE, etc.



We were talking about (bourgeois) *law* (and private property) a moment ago -- it seems you're *not* a ruling-class-warrior, which is a *good* thing, so maybe please just explain your reservations about proletarian revolution and stop the Stalinism-minded red-baiting, if you please.


blackjack21 wrote:
Look at what's happening on the East Coast with Colonial Pipeline. Suddenly, you have people with no gasoline. Inequality. Instantly.



Okay, point taken, and Hurricane Katrina comes to mind, too, but I'd say that you're *overgeneralizing* from capitalism-based hyper-balkanized private property interests, by geography, to all-of *human nature*, *entirely*, which is *not automatically synonymous* with the capitalist-ethos paradigm that we all currently live in.


blackjack21 wrote:
Just pass a law.

Citizen oversight and prosecution.

It depends on the context.



Okay, so you support 'community control' of police personnel -- I do, too, incidentally. Good to hear.
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