Truth To Power wrote:Because the facts of objective physical reality that prove me right are the same.
Reality doesn't just give itself to proving anything, it has to be acted upon and abstracted from.
And a big issue I sense between us is that social properties perceived upon things is seen as a natural process and thus loses sight of the historical specificity of capitalism. This is the commodity fetishism that Marx criticized in Ricardo where he took the concepts and appearance of political economy uncritically and did not investigate their origins and development.
I have questioned them and found them natural and valid, unlike Marxist anti-concepts.
That you call them natural is interesting and reeks of an ideological position as there isn't anything natural about production although it is very much based on a material basis as with any reproduction of human society, but so to does the particular form in which humans reproduce themselves change.
So what?
So what? That you don't even understand the implications of such a problematic manner of abstracting seems to be your limiting factor. To try and consider something entirely abstracted from the surrounding features that make it possible tend towards erroneous conclusions and forecloses real implications because one doesn't have a true concept of a thing.
An interaction of two people exchanging goods presupposes relations that make such a thing possible, and isn't to be considered as independent of everything else. One can of course abstract things so that other real world implications are not under consideration, but to lose sight of such a background suggests an unconscious mode of abstracting that isn't aware of the implications of what is cut off based off of what one abstracts and thus leaves in or out.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/abstraction-abstract-labor-and-ilyenkov/Concrete reality is composed of many interrelations, relations which form laws of motion. The goal of theory, or science, is to understand this concrete reality in all of its interrelations. A concrete concept is one that captures the real essence of these interrelations. The goal of thinking, of theory, is concrete concepts. However we cannot immediately see all of reality and understand all of the complex interrelations all at once. We can only see a bit at a time. We point our camera to the right, then to the left, then we zoom in, then we zoom out, etc. What is this process? It is the process of abstraction. Abstraction means to leave out some detail and focus in on certain aspects at the expense of others.
The goal of this abstraction is to eventually identify the essential connections between different abstract aspects, slowly piecing the pieces together to give us a concrete picture of the whole. However this can only happen if we abstract correctly. There are two senses in with Marx talks of abstractions, a good and a bad way of abstracting. When abstraction has gone bad Marx often refers to the abstraction as ‘one-sided’. This means that the abstraction views an aspect of reality in an incomplete, one-sided way. An essential aspect of the nature of the object has been left out. Often Marx critiques bourgeois economists for making one-sided abstractions that make it seem like capitalism is a universal, a-historical system by abstracting away all of the historically specific aspects of capital. For instance, if we say that capital is just tools used to make more tools we have performed a sloppy, 1-sided abstraction. We are viewing capital merely from the abstract general features that capital has of increasing physical quantities of things while abstracting away the historically specific value-relations that give capitalism its essential nature.
This shows that abstraction can be arbitrary. If we are free to select one general feature over another we can radically change the concept of capital. If we choose only the ahistorical features we can make capital seem eternal. If abstraction is just seen as the identification of general features then we have no choice but to be arbitrary in our abstractions. But if abstraction is seen differently, as identifying the essential nature of an object, as identifying the “relation within which this thing is this thing” as Ilenkov puts it, then we can be scientific about our abstractions.
When we make an abstraction we want to select that aspect of the object which identifies its essence. Since the essence of things is in their relation to other things, we want to identify the essential relations which govern the object, abstracting away other non-essential aspects.
Think of it being like an ecological approach, where to consider things properly within their context and to determine the relations that are crucial to the nature of the thing allows one to actually develop a concrete/truer concept of something as opposed to making something so abstract as to make it more fiction than fact.
https://www.natureinstitute.org/article/craig-holdrege/what-forms-an-animalIn the above link is a summary of how the massive differences in the skull of a captive lion and a wild lion reflects the context of it's life and how it exists.
The natural world isn't independent of human activity and one would make a mistake of objective reality to only consider it strictly as what one senses and lose sight of how it is shaped by humans.
While you accept that there is an objective reality, you perhaps still approach it too much in a contemplative manner. What seems natural is itself a human product much of the time.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htmFeuerbach’s conception of the sensuous world is confined on the one hand to mere contemplation of it, and on the other to mere feeling; he says “Man” instead of “real historical man.” “Man” is really “the German.” In the first case, the contemplation of the sensuous world, he necessarily lights on things which contradict his consciousness and feeling, which disturb the harmony he presupposes, the harmony of all parts of the sensuous world and especially of man and nature. To remove this disturbance, he must take refuge in a double perception, a profane one which only perceives the “flatly obvious” and a higher, philosophical, one which perceives the “true essence” of things. He does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; and, indeed, in the sense that it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each standing on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing its industry and its intercourse, modifying its social system according to the changed needs. Even the objects of the simplest “sensuous certainty” are only given him through social development, industry and commercial intercourse. The cherry-tree, like almost all fruit-trees, was, as is well known, only a few centuries ago transplanted by commerce into our zone, and therefore only by this action of a definite society in a definite age it has become “sensuous certainty” for Feuerbach.
Money (except commodity money) is one of the things whose value is most dependent on belief. Confederate money, for example, was fairly valuable as long as people believed in the Confederacy as a credible government. Once they didn't, the money became worthless.
But where does money gain it's value if it's merely collective belief. Does it really not exchange for material things and services? It has an existence independent any individual consciousness. Money has the same existence as ancient gods, they in a sense had a social reality but not one that is universal and non-ending like facts about the natural world. It's use and function is dependent on having a human consciousness, but the money in my account isn't a fiction of my imagination.
It's reality comes not from a mere belief but by it's place with in a system of production and exchange based in human institutions and activities that maintain it. Indeed, money and it's value may all disappear just as well as institutions also do, but human institutions have actuality and aren't mere fictions of collective belief. Human activity gives existence to many things and we may later consider some of the beliefs underpinning an activity as false like ancient Gods, but how humans acted was still material.
Value happens when people relate their subjective opinions of utility to the objective fact of scarcity.
I take it we have far different epistemologies and ideas about reality also. I guess one can conceive of money and prices as reflecting little more than a signal that blocks and gives access and isn't a quantity of anything but still serves a practical purpose of managing supply and demand.
Yes, that's why a market economy is better than a command or tradition economy.
Yes, I am aware of the Austrian rejection of equilibrium but emphasizing markets as the epitome of freedom for the individual and the most dynamic means of information exchange, but is only defended not on the rationality of such a system but by comparison to political concerns intervening terribly into the famines of the USSR and PRC.
No; their desires, not their needs. Try to remember.
Fine, desires, wants, although I am emphasizing that there is a gap due to effective demand as many people want things they also need in a modern society as human needs develop with the new needs provided by production. TO need money is a unnatural but necessary thing in modern life.
Huh?? You are aware, I assume, of Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand?
I am aware of Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand and think it's is intuitive in it's dynamic of markets being like predator and prey, but you miss my point. That the industrialization in England increasing the production of agriculture made the argument of how the self-interest for profit lead to the good for others who meets their wants through his own pursuit. But Smith in all his contradictions was also aware that such self-interest was did not automatically coincide with the interests of people and that the motivation for profit can diverge thoroughly from the interests of a nation and it's people. Many do terrible things due to the incentive structure for money or profit, it doesn't guarantee good motives and outcomes despite his quote emphasizing the benevolent outcome of greed.
No, that is just another strawman fallacy from you. What are fictional are Marxist crises of over-production. Economic crises are almost always financial, and caused by the debt-money system, not over-production.
Do you think yo can somehow have capitalism without money? This is a nonsensical fiction that somehow financial capital and the like aren't a necessary part of capitalism.
https://sussex.figshare.com/articles/report/Alain_de_Benoist_s_anti-political_philosophy_beyond_Left_and_Right_non-emancipatory_responses_to_globalisation_and_crisis/23408453As Werner Bonefeld has put it: “Marx’s critique of Fetishism supplied an uncompromising critique of this dualist conception by making clear that the two, use value and exchange value, industrial capital and money capital, do not exist independent from each other but are in fact each other’s mode of existence” (Bonefeld 2004: 319).
https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/f/i.htmFictitious capital is that proportion of capital which cannot be simultaneously converted into existing use-values. It is an invention which is absolutely necessary for the growth of real capital, it constitutes the symbol of confidence in the future. It is a necessary but costly fiction, and sooner or later it crashes to earth.
How do you conceive of capital and profit seeking independent of money? Finances simply smooths out the process and makes the reproduction of capital more efficient, but also creates the potential for money to not be realized in commodities with use-values and thus crash the entire circuit. This is a part of how it's fundamentally different from barter.
Desires. Try to remember.
Yes, desires.
There is definitely a profit motive. That's what gets producers to meet others' desires: Smith's Invisible Hand. Duh.
I'm not sure what you mean by "expansion" of value, but certainly we all benefit from increased investment in producer goods.
The expansion of money for the capitalist in profit. They invest their money and hope for a return that is greater, otherwise there would be no such thing as profit and no motive for the capitalist. To keep this process going and growing to get even more capital is a function of competition as smaller businesses cannot compete.
Because I use valid natural concepts, and refuse to accept invalid artificial ones.
Can you explain your own thinking as to what a concept of a concept is? What makes it's valid or invalid? How you judge/evaluate them?
Prices don't sound arbitrary to me. A price is what something traded for, an objective fact. I fail to see the problem with that.
Well for one utility isn't cardinal despite the naming of it as such because subjective desire for a thing which can reasonably be ranked in the same way I can rank how i feel about something on a Likert Scale doesn't explain how a number in price reflects an actual quantity besides of money itself.
But nothing about my satisfaction in the use-value of a think is commensurate with quantity in a cardinal way, which is why cardinal utility is largely replaced with just a focus on ordinal ranked preferences which at least makes some intuitive sense but even then doesn't explain what price is a reflection of. The objective reality of price doesn't in itself reflect anything objective when it comes to utils or utility as it exists in marginalism.
http://digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdfRather it is a matter of insisting that there are both realist and formalist aspects to cardinal measurability (i.e. measurability as absolute quantity, not simply as bigger or smaller). Things that are cardinally measurable can be added or subtracted to one another, not merely ranked in order of size, (ranking is ordinal measurability). A useful discussion of this issue is to be found in Georgescu Roegen, who emphasises that:
'Cardinal measurability, therefore, is not a measure just like any other, but it reflects a particular physical property of a category of things.' (Op. cit., p. 49.)
Only things with certain real properties can be cardinally measured. This is the point that Marx is making with his concept of Immanent' measure, and that he makes in the example, in Capital, I, of the measure of weight (p. 148-9). The external measure of weight is quantities of iron (and there is of course a conventional choice to be made about whether to calibrate them in ounces or grammes, or whether, indeed, to use iron, rather than, say, steel). But unless both the iron and whatever it is being used to weigh (in Marx's example, a sugar loaf) both have weight, iron cannot express the weight of the sugar loaf. Weight is the Immanent' measure. But it can only be actually measured in terms of a comparison between two objects, both of which have weight and one'of which is the 'external' measure, whose weight is pre-supposed.
Thus when Marx says that labour-time is the measure of value, he means that the value of a commodity is measurable as pure quantity because it is an objectification of abstract labour, i.e. of 'indifferent' labour-time, hours of which can be added to or subtracted from one another. As such, as an objectification of pure duration of labour, it has cardinal measurability. This would not be the case if the commodity were simply a product of labour, an objectification of labour in its concrete aspect. For concrete labour is not cardinally measurable as pure time. Hours spent on tailoring and hours spent on weaving are qualitatively different: they can no more be added or subtracted to one another than apples can be added to or subtracted from pears. We can rank concrete labour in terms of hours spent in each task, just as we can rank apples and pears, and say which we have more of. But we can't measure the total quantity of labour in terms of hours, for we have no reason for supposing that one hour of weaving contains as much labour as one hour of tailoring, since they are qualitatively different.
Thus far from entailing that the medium of measurement of value must be labour-time, the argument that labour-time is the (immanent) measure of value entails that labour-time cannot be the medium of measurement. For we cannot, in the actual labour-time we can observe, separate the abstract from the concrete aspect. The only way that labour-time can be posed as the medium of measurement is by making the arbitrary assumption that there is no qualitative difference between different kinds of labour, an assumption that Marx precisely refuses to make with his insistence on the importance of the form of labour.
e with his insistence on the importance of the form of labour. It is surprising that Cutler et al., 1977, who emphasise their critique of the supposed function of labour-time as a social standard of measurement in Capital, do not refer to Marx's distinction between 'immanent' and 'external' measure. Had they done so, they might have realised that it is money, and not labour-time, which functions as the social standard of measurement, in Marx's Capital, as in capitalist society itself. The reason that labour-time is stressed as the measure of value, is to argue that money in itself does not make the products of labour commensurable. They are only commensurable insofar as they are objectifications of the abstract aspect of labour.
None of these confusions are new. Unfortunately the following comment that Marx made on BoisguillebertS remains of relevance today:
'Boisguillebert's work proves that it is possible to regard labourtime as the measure of the value of commodities, while confusing the labour which is materialised in the exchange value of commodities and measured in time units with the direct physical activity of individuals.' (Critique of Political Economy, p. 55.)
One implication of this discussion of the measure of value which we should note is that the value-magnitude equations which Marx uses in Capital, do not refer to directly observable labour-time magnitudes (the direct physical activity of individuals), but are a way of indicating the intrinsic character, or substance, of the directly observable money magnitudes. Marx generally introduces these equations in their general form e.g. the value of a commodity = (C + V) + S; and then gives a specific example. These specific examples are always couched in money terms, never in terms of hours of labour-time. For example, the value of a commodity = (£410 constant + £90 variable) + £90 surplus (cf. Capital, I, p. 320). This does not mean that Marx is identifying values and prices; rather that he is indicating the inner value character of monetary magnitudes. The reason why Marx does not simply work at the level of money is that he wants to uncover social relations, such as the rate of surplus-value, which do not directly appear in money form.
Perhaps we can summarise this argument by saying that what Marx proposes is that in a capitalist economy (labour)-time becomes money in a more than purely metaphorical sense. Labour-time and money are not posed as discretely distinct variables which have to be brought into correspondence. Rather the relation between them is posed as one of both continuity and difference. Significantly the metaphors used to characterise this relation are not mechanical ('articulation'), nor mathematical/logical ('correspondence', 'approximation') but chemical and biological terms ('crystallisation', 'incarnation', 'embodiment', 'metabolism', 'metamorphosis'). The idea they carry is that of 'change of form'.
No it isn't.
Yes, because of the above point about cardinal measurability. To measure something, there must be some unit of the same kind. Marx in his first chapter of Capital I in his analysis of the commodity emphasizes that because commodities 'have' many exchange values, they 'have' something which is equal in magnitude and for it to be of equal magnitude, they must be of the same kind. I can't make an equality between weight and distance as they are two different things.
You of course don't have to accept Marx's arguments and just dismiss them as evil and all that, but incommeasurability is a clear problem with the idea of utility which assumes that one can reduce everything to an abstraction of common pleasure.
This isn't Marxist rambling, it's just a clear issue that is simply glossed over by some who don't think too hard about the implications of utility and jump to readily to other concepts.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231192828?fbclid=IwY2xjawFm3nJleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHSfnDG9eNvqJehCuEl8CHsmwDYiWbqByVTdKMdX3oq156QmqvdUM7NfcCA_aem_6cq3wqZU1f2C_ss918ko8gThe question of what makes it possible for commodities to be valued, compared, exchanged, and priced in a common currency has a long history in economics that both predates and informs current models of choice. Marx, for example, addresses this very problem in the introductory pages of Das Kapital. He, like Smith and Ricardo before him, distinguished between use values and exchange values (Marx, 1867/1976; Ricardo, 1817; Smith, 1776/1937). Marx assumed, as we will also assume here, that use values are not commensurable,2 or at least not commensurable in any sense adequate to underpin their exchange value. His theory of value posited instead that commodities are exchangeable at rates that are ultimately rooted in the amount of labor that goes into their production. But labor theories of value, whatever their merits and demerits, do not relate to the problem of how a chooser could compare the use values, for the chooser themselves, of different types of goods. Equally priced options may have different (actual or anticipated) consumption utilities, and these utilities may differ between individuals. One approach is therefore to distinguish between use values (properties of objects) and utilities (subjective or inferred quantities) and to assume that the latter can be compared even if the former cannot (see, e.g., Sinha, 2019). Whether or not this distinction is coherent (for it is difficult to make sense of an object’s use value independently of the utility the object’s possession might confer), Marx did not make use of it as a solution to incommensurability.
A very different approach arrived with the marginal revolution, dating from around the 1870s and associated with Jevons, Walras, and Menger. The labor theory of value was largely abandoned (at least as the foundation of a theory of price determination), and the focus switched to marginal utility as a form of common currency. This utility-based approach to the commensurability problem has survived in various forms until the present day (see Moscati, 2018). However, the move from the labor theory of value to marginal utility did not solve the problem of incommensurability, despite the fact that it has been implicitly assumed to do so both by neoclassical economic approaches and by modern psychological theories of choice. Rather, we suggest, Marx’s and others’ concern with the incommensurability of use values cannot be solved by replacing “use values” with “utilities” and hence remains unaddressed.3 Although difficulties with the idea of a single utility have been noted within economics (Georgescu-Roegen, 1954; Sen, 1980), these difficulties are not reflected in recent models of individual decision-making within either economics or psychology.
The very naming of utility as cardinal reflects an appeal to something that isn't true of utility or has not been established as true yet.
Value and utility are quite different things, as I have explained.
Except you move readily from people's desires for use-values as if in itself there is an automatic correspondence in quantitively form like money/price. That people can use money doesn't in itself provide a comprehension of why or how it exists.
No. The capacity to satisfy human desires is a natural and useful concept, unlike Marxist anti-concepts.
Indeed humans labor to meet their desires, an essential concept in Marx that humans on the whole are inseparable from their labor upon the world.
I have no idea what you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about.
Maybe get into philosophy and thinking about how you think and what makes a concept a concept.
No, it would be taking a loss.
Yes, a loss in profit which is inexecusable within capitalist production.
Typically, firms continue to produce if losses are not too great, because the cost of stopping production and then starting it up again later is much more than the losses incurred in the meantime. Of course, if too many firms do this, it can just prolong and deepen the losses.
Agreed.
Right: the problem is with the money, not over-production.
Money is inherently a developed result of simple commodity production and exchange. Those who think we can retain production based on the exchange of commodities but get rid of money are characteristic of thinkers who abstract things that are inherently related but who don't yet have a systematic concept of their relations.
That I can have a set of concepts doesn't in itself reveal understanding until they are properly related as not just things of one's mind but how they act in the real world and money isn't simply the creation of a state although ancient currencies that could engage in large trade within their empires often has currencies, the value of them isn't simply a rule of the authority as kinds of money even predate such large civilizations.
That's what value is: what something would exchange for, almost always expressed in money because money is what is generally accepted in exchange.
Ok Samuel Bailey, there is only exchange.
Who said single-handedly? The producer is just the person whose decision and initiative caused the product to exist rather than not exist. No one claims he was not paying anyone else full market value for their contributions.
Marx also doesn't claim capitalists don't pay laborers the value of their labour power but emphasizes that labor isn't labour power. And you are so adverse to class that I can't imagine your idea of production beyond simple commodity production.
Production is not socialized, it is always inherently private, though it may be paid for by a public agency. And not everyone works for a wage.
Socialized in that production isn't that of individual people working and selling their own produce, but corporations with a mass of workers, managers and the sort. Do you acknowledge factories exist?
You made that up.
No, abstract individualism and a tendency to abstract things entirely of their relations is very characteristic of many thinkers today. They seek abstract universals, that which is common to all so as to include things in a class, they treat things as fundamentally independent such that it's all independent variables and dependent effects.
I have never seen a Marxist anti-concept that reflected any essential characteristic of reality. Can you name one? "Abstract labor" certainly doesn't. "Surplus labor value" certainly doesn't. "The means of production" certainly doesn't. "Bourgeois" certainly doesn't.
What about capitalist and worker as class. DO these not exist for you? We're just individuals working away. But characteristic to you, assertions but not explanations to your judgement. DO you know why you believe anything or is it all defended by assertions of this is good, this is bad.
I have stated that price is an objective fact created by the social relation of exchange.
I am not denying the existence of price but asking what you think it reflects. What does it as a quantity reflect?
Sure they do. An apple exists without any social relations. You are just spewing silly Marxist rot.
No it doesn't exist independent of human relations except in some state of nature preceding human contact but this is difficult to conceive because even an apple today is radically different to what it was originally or develop from prior to human cultivation.
https://theconversation.com/apples-werent-always-big-juicy-and-sweet-ancient-ones-were-small-and-bitter-180220You capacity to access apples is entirely dependent on social relations and not entirely on yourself. Even your ability to access seeds to grow your own apple tree is not somehow asocial while it may in large part be a physical reality also.
Are you perhaps unaware that there are fathers who choose to drink when their children are hungry?
You miss my point. The inability to consider the social nature of a person within their family is standard. A neglectful parent is not the standard but in such models, they are no different. But instead of sensing that point you go for a gotcha that just affirms the problem of its asocial quality.
Yes, that's called, "objective reality."
Yes, there is an objective reality but what you believe isn't automatically objective reality
I have already stipulated that supply and demand explain value, not prices, because exchange is not always at arm's length.
Yes quite the analysis you have provided in your repeted assertions. Please continue to bang your head on the wall.
What would that say if it had been written in English?
Something that is incomprehensible to your manner of thought it seems.
OTC, it explains things pretty well.
Must be comfortable then to not have to question it. Rock solid.
No idea what you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about.
Basically the issue that prices are not explained and are just taken as a given. People judge things not just on their use value but their prices and prices aren't not commeasurable with the satisfaction of somethings use value. But people do judge the value of commodities in relation to their sticker price and make decisions base on this. But prices aren't explained they just exist, which no one denies.
Content yourself with your fetishism.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
- By Truth To Power
- By litwin