ckaihatsu wrote:You're missing the point, as usual, by conflating the *labor* commodity with any given *non-living* good or service (*also* commodities) -- by valuating only the *market value* / exchange-value aspect of labor-power.
No, YOU are missing the point -- quite deliberately and disingenuously -- by
refusing to know the fact that consensual exchange does not violate anyone's rights or deprive anyone of anything they would otherwise have, whether the exchange is for physical goods or services.
That exchange-value yardstick you've chosen doesn't reflect expropriated *surplus labor value*, the appropriation of which happens in the regular course of employing labor for a wage.
No, the metric of exchange value doesn't reflect expropriated surplus labor value because that is not only silly Marxist gibberish (SMG) but non-existent. Employing labor for a wage does not appropriate or expropriate anything. It is a consensual exchange.
(Recall that 'surplus labor value' is a percentage *above* 'socially necessary labor value', or the constant-vector of total active labor value -- work -- taking place at any given moment, self-sustainably, indefinitely.)
SMG. If that sentence meant anything (it doesn't), it would be wrong. It's just a bunch of made-up concepts with invalid definitions designed to prevent people from understanding the relevant economic relationships. But I am here to expose such deceitful tripe.
Also, on the *capitalism* / management side of things, the figure of 'price' (of any given commodity) is forced to do *double duty* -- it initially reflects the *production cost* of the commodity (from capital + labor),
No it doesn't. Your claims are just bald falsehoods with no basis in economics, fact, or logic.
but then it takes on the additional task of finding the median between economic *demand*, and material-economic *supply* -- this *secondary-market* speculative pricing activity / fluctuations, has no bearing whatsoever on the initial, preceding economic *inputs* / costs, yet this potentially inflationary or deflationary 'price' number-value is socially accepted under capitalism to be *appropriate*, somehow, just by-default.
No, it is accepted because it balances supply and demand: if the price is high, production is profitable and increases; if it is low, production is unprofitable and decreases.
Again, the biggest overall travesty is this *commodification* of living people's own lives -- 'labor' -- that's simply part-of-the-system.
Again, labor is not a living person's own life -- though their liberty rights to use land are close.
It wreaks havoc in people's lives being under such physical / existential *duress* just for the basic necessities of life -- Squid Game comes to mind here.
GARBAGE. Scarcity is the natural condition of all living organisms. It is the natural condition of a human being to labor to sustain himself. The Marxist just seeks to evade the responsibility of sustaining himself -- the responsibility of living -- by stealing from those who have
not evaded that responsibility.
You're only describing how it looks *on paper* -- which, has been, admittedly, *unavoidable*, for past historical reasons of historical *necessity* (for bourgeois administration, etc.),
No, I am identifying the relevant indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
but society has been capable of 'modern' 'socialism', for lack of a better term, since the Industrial Revolution.
Right. And modern socialism has been tried, and the result has always been tyranny, poverty, stagnation, and mass murder because the alternative to consensual exchange is
force.
Wilde actually has a pretty-good treatment of it:
No, Wilde was an economic ignoramus who understood economics as little as you do:
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery,
Idiocy. It is landowners and other privilege holders who own people's rights to liberty, not machines.
and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.
Idiocy. Landowners have never needed machines to starve the landless to death.
This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition.
No, it's the result of our system of property in
land, which forcibly strips the landless of their rights to liberty, thus their options, and thus their bargaining power.
One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment,
No they aren't. They are freed to do easier, more human jobs that machines can't do.
and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving.
Idiocy. What stops them from working on their own account? The only way they can have no work to do is if they can't afford to pay a landowner full market value just for
permission to work. But that is not the fault of the machine's owner. It is the fault of the landowner.
The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it,
No he doesn't. He has to give most of it to the landowner just for
permission to use the location the machine occupies.
and has five hundred times as much as he should have,
No he doesn't. By the machine
he provided, he has fantastically increased production, of which he gets to keep only a small portion (if any), while the landowner gets most of it for doing and contributing exactly nothing.
and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.
Wilde was an economic ignoramus (like some other people I could name). The Law of Rent shows why the landowner gets the additional production, not the machine owner.
Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it.
No they wouldn't. Only the landowner would benefit. Wilde was an economic ignoramus, like every Marxist.
It would be an immense advantage to the community.
Nope. Only to the landowner.
All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery.
But the people who invent, create, produce, invest in and contribute that machinery to the production process must be robbed of it, and their contributions relentlessly lied about and made to vanish from people's minds?
That's how you are going to get that machinery???
Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.
WHO IS GOING TO PROVIDE THAT MACHINERY, HMMMMMMMMMMM?At present machinery competes against man.
Only to an economic ignoramus who thinks the first stone hand axe and sharpened stick were competing against man.
Under proper conditions machinery will serve man.
The proper conditions being when Marxist know-nothings find a willingness to know self-evident and indisputable facts of objective physical reality.
Disagree-to-disagree, I think.
Because I am objectively correct and you are objectively wrong.
Again, consider the *premium* made from the employment of wage labor -- that's the sound of the worker getting *cut-out* of their own provisioning of work-product, however you'd like to slice that.
They aren't "cut out" of the provisioning of their own work product. They are paid wages for it.
The only sound I hear is the landowner laughing at you because you
refuse to know the fact that he charges the laborer full market value for
permission to live close enough to the factory to work there, and then turns around and also charges the factory owner full market value for
permission to hire the laborers that live near his factory! By refusing to know facts, you contrive to blame the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker, and thus enable the landowner to keep robbing the worker. The worker's straitened circumstances are therefore
YOUR FAULT.
YOU ARE THEREFORE TO BLAME for every worker who can't afford a decent place to live, every worker who can't afford medical care for his family, every worker who can't afford education for his kids, and every worker who drowns his shame in drink or commits suicide in despair.
YOU. Not the factory owner.
YOU.All that accumulated 'dead labor' adds-up immensely over time, while the worker themselves is saddled with the everyday expenses of *employment*, and living, etc., that are necessarily paid-for out of wages *only*, and not from the gains of ownership of capital / dead-labor.
There is no such accumulation. Wealth accumulates around
privilege, not machinery, as I have already proved.
Capital / surplus ownership means having no material-economic necessity to perform labor for the sake of one's own life and living.
GARBAGE. Machinery loses you money if you can't use it productively. But land yields income even if you are comatose. You just refuse to know such facts, and that makes you as guilty of the robbery and murder of workers as any landowner.