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User avatar
By Wellsy
#15325908
@Truth To Power
What do you make where people do want something, the demand is there, but they aren’t sold because it isn’t profitable?

The way you describe things, the value is entirely in peoples desire for use values. But you just ignore the mediation of exchange through money, because apparently exchange is just at arms length, one step removed from barter I guess.

You make it sound like it’s all about satisfying peoples desire for something. Of course you may go into effective demand, but the whole issue of profitability shows that while production may coincide with human desires, it is primarily driven by the pursuit of value not as human desire for things but the expansion of capital, through commodities into money that our production os centered.

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/crisis-theories-underconsumption/
The underconsumptionists point out, correctly, that if capitalist production was production for the needs of the workers, there would not be any crises of overproduction. Capitalist overproduction is overproduction of exchange values, not overproduction of use values. A crisis of overproduction of exchange values breaks out when there is still very much an underproduction of use values, especially use values that the workers themselves need.

This very example shows where there is a hige gap between demand and supply and not due to natural or production constraints because the destruction of produce because its not worth selling them isn’t a lack.

If only value really did just coincide with human needs.
#15325916
Wellsy wrote:@Truth To Power
What do you make where people do want something, the demand is there, but they aren’t sold because it isn’t profitable?

Assuming you are talking about a free market, and not a case where production is blocked by monopoly privilege, etc., the product's utility is insufficient to justify its production cost.
The way you describe things, the value is entirely in peoples desire for use values.

No, I have stated many times, in clear, simple, grammatical English, that BOTH scarcity and utility are needed to create value.
But you just ignore the mediation of exchange through money,

No I don't. Money is what is generally accepted in exchange, and it has its own economics depending on the kind of money involved.
because apparently exchange is just at arms length, one step removed from barter I guess.

Barter can also be at arm's length. Arm's length just means there is no relationship between the parties other than the exchange.
You make it sound like it’s all about satisfying peoples desire for something. Of course you may go into effective demand, but the whole issue of profitability shows that while production may coincide with human desires, it is primarily driven by the pursuit of value not as human desire for things but the expansion of capital, through commodities into money that our production os centered.

No; in a free market, profit (revenue less expenses) just measures how much more value the product yields than the value consumed in the production -- the net value the producer has added to the wealth of the community over and above consumer surplus.
The underconsumptionists point out, correctly, that if capitalist production was production for the needs of the workers, there would not be any crises of overproduction.

Capitalist production is not for the needs of the workers, it is to satisfy the desires of consumers. And "crises of overproduction" are a Marxist figment; they simply do not correspond to anything in an actual capitalist economy.
Capitalist overproduction is overproduction of exchange values, not overproduction of use values.

No, it's the opposite: the surfeit of utility that occurs when a given product is in oversupply cannot be converted into sufficient exchange value because supply is too great, reducing price to less than production cost.
A crisis of overproduction of exchange values breaks out when there is still very much an underproduction of use values, especially use values that the workers themselves need.

Refuted above. Production is for consumers, not workers, and desire is not need.
This very example shows where there is a hige gap between demand and supply and not due to natural or production constraints because the destruction of produce because its not worth selling them isn’t a lack.

Destruction of products to maintain price is quite a rare and idiosyncratic event, not a generalized "crisis."
If only value really did just coincide with human needs.

Desire is not need, and value also requires scarcity.

How many times do I have to repeat it?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15325932
Truth To Power wrote:Assuming you are talking about a free market, and not a case where production is blocked by monopoly privilege, etc., the product's utility is insufficient to justify its production cost.

No, I have stated many times, in clear, simple, grammatical English, that BOTH scarcity and utility are needed to create value.

No I don't. Money is what is generally accepted in exchange, and it has its own economics depending on the kind of money involved.

Barter can also be at arm's length. Arm's length just means there is no relationship between the parties other than the exchange.

No; in a free market, profit (revenue less expenses) just measures how much more value the product yields than the value consumed in the production -- the net value the producer has added to the wealth of the community over and above consumer surplus.

Capitalist production is not for the needs of the workers, it is to satisfy the desires of consumers. And "crises of overproduction" are a Marxist figment; they simply do not correspond to anything in an actual capitalist economy.

No, it's the opposite: the surfeit of utility that occurs when a given product is in oversupply cannot be converted into sufficient exchange value because supply is too great, reducing price to less than production cost.

Refuted above. Production is for consumers, not workers, and desire is not need.

Destruction of products to maintain price is quite a rare and idiosyncratic event, not a generalized "crisis."

Desire is not need, and value also requires scarcity.

How many times do I have to repeat it?

Yes, you repeat yourself endlessly but don't really question the very concepts that you splash against the wall constantly, taking them as a given.
Yes, you have said value = utility (subjective satisfaction) + scarcity (supply).

And I have just explained that even in an interaction between individuals, their behavior is mediated by things that are inherently social and not created de novo in that interaction. Money isn't something that exists strictly between two individuals but is dependent on an objective system of relations and gains it's value not by mere belief.
I also have been imploring you to reflect on the relationship between price and how a quantiative aspect intersects with what is individual subjectivity and somehow this is meant to constitute a science but this assumes that utility is quantiative and price corresponds to such a quantiative utility, except of course in it's subjectivity you mention how it's not even comparable, yet prices being a quantiative thing are comparable. Exchange sounds arbitrary yet to claim as such a conclusion is denied because prices aren't arbitrary but do follow trends in supply and demand, which itself feedsback onto production.

I never said the capitalist economy is for the needs of the workers, but I emphasize that you frame capitalism as meeting the needs of consumers, as if capitalists are motivated out of benevolence to provide for people's needs rather than trying to achieve a profit. But apparently economic crises are fictional and general gluts are impossible because in your conception of the economy, the economy is ones of purely meeting human needs and there isn't a profit motive and the expansion of value. You readily shift from physical properties to social ones, from use-value to exchange value without any sense of incoherence in what such an unconscious shifting shows.
I don't know how you feel so settled going from a concept of utility that is so thoroughly subjective that one can't even compare the satisfaction of individuals, only rank the static preferences of an individual to prices which sound arbitrary but you and I agree aren't, where one goes from essentially quality to quantity. It's like saying the deliciousness of an apple is 85% quanteals, just nonsense because the pleasure derived from such isn't quantifiable, between people and certainly not between different commodities. There is even the problem where people try to look at real wages to avoid inflation, but how does one compare the real wages for commodities that are no longer in mass production in the past with new technological commodities like an iPhone that didn't previously exist.
Do you even question the nature of humans and the concept of utility being a legitimate abstraction?
https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
In the place of the real human being himself, stands the human being's capacity to experience happiness, to avoid suffering, etc., abstracted away from the real human being. We are promised a theory about human beings, and instead we get a theory about sensitive blobs—and worse yet, blobs that are sensitive to only one type of experience, of happiness, or of suffering. A wide range of human social relations are reduced to just one relation of usefulness.

Abstractions are inevitable, but to abstract the inessential and miss essential parts leads to error and the very idea of consumption merely being a singular experience amidst the array of commodities is nonsensical as is the notion of creating a generalizable science based largely on such a narrowly individual subjectivity.


I would assert that that not selling of one's product where demand exist doesn't strictly occur when one can't meet productions costs, because that would be breaking even. It can occur where profitability is so diminished that it's not worth it. Yes, destruction in some specific industry isn't a generalized crises. Though in a generalized crises, the problem isn't demand but of exchange value and it's dominance leading to unprofitability such that material things very much in need become unused. But the idea of value as utility and mere scarcity simply doesn't provide a notion of value, it leads to the idea of value only being relative and like Samuel Bailey, that there exists only the exchange ratios which reflect nothing but some ratio between things.
And I still find the framing of of the producer i.e. capitalist as the one who single handedly enhances the value of a commodities and thus creates more value as nonsensical. It's not clear if you imagine we are all independent producers which is just nonsense in the modern industrialized economy the world over where production is socialized and everyone works for a wage.

Again, by treating individual people only as real, you foreclose concepts that reflect essential characteristics in reality, and even a notion of what is social and objective. This is where your abstractions are what I described earlier as atomistic, because so thoroughly abstracted are individuals in marginalism that it's social content is largely an assumption of capitalist relations within the isolated individual, but things abstracted from their social relations and thus real world influences do not exist.
https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf
Abstract unqualified objects cannot exist because they cannot affect matter, and thereby cannot bring about the expression of their essences. It is for this reason that Marx says “abstract individuality is freedom from being, not freedom in being” (Doctoral Dissertation on Epicurus, MECW 1:62). Moreover, Marx argued, reasoning based on contemplation of such abstract objects will necessarily lapse into methodological idealism, eschewing material determinations as mere appearances that distract from a proper appreciation of the nature of reality, rather than being the absolute starting place for a proper understanding of reality.

Even attempts to reform some models by introducing the social is often absurd like a father whose utility preferences are somehow independent of those of the other members of his family.

The only manner in which utility tracks as a concept is the intuition that people to get some satisfaction from the consumption of commodities and the expectation of that satisfaction drives them to purchase things. But trying to formalize this, doesn't allow one to jump to an explanation of prices even while people in reality do consider the sticker price of things they wish to buy with what money they do have and do have to evaluate the constraints of their effective demand with their wants. But this doesn't explain how the difference between peoples want for a use-value within a system of mass anarchistic production of commodities with it's representation in quantitative terms which creates a gap because not every exchange is synonymous with direct satisfaction as in barter but is open ended with the meditation of money which reflects value universally and not any one particular exchange.
Yes supply and demand is real, but you explain nothing to state the mere appearence that when supply and demand change, it feedsback onto production, and prices change. And consumption itself is determined by the prices of things as that's part of how people determine what to spend their money on, and then this determines supply and demand.
You just describe the cyclical relationship but not in any detail beyond what is observed as if a science like physics is the practice of meter reading.

https://files.libcom.org/files/marx,%20marginalism%20and%20modern%20sociology%20-%20clarke.pdf
The abandonment of the labour theory of value was not a result of its technical deficiencies, but of its ideological weakness. It was perfectly rational for Ricardo to adhere to the labour theory of value, and to seek to accommodate it to the reality of price formation through secondary adjustments, for the alternative was to return to the indeterminacy of the theories of Smith or of Say according to which prices are determined by supply and demand, which in turn depend on prices. On the other hand, such indeterminacy could prove very attractive to those who found the Ricardian conclusions unpalatable. Thus the fate of the labour theory of value was not determined by the internal logic of the Ricardian system, but by the ideological demands that were made on it.

The essential ideological weakness of the Ricardian system was that it did not provide a satisfactory basis on which to defend profit. Although Ricardo made vague reference to profit as the reward for ‘waiting’, the essence of his theory is to determine profit as a deduction from the product of labour, while its proportionality to capital is a contingent empirical characteristic of profit that conflicts with its essential relationship to labour. The ideological defence of profit, however, required that the proportionality of profit to capital, and so to the magnitude of the capitalist’s contribution, was not simply a contingent empirical phenomenon, but was rather its essential characteristic; it could hardly be claimed convincingly that profit was some kind of reward for capital if the size of the profit did not correspond in its essence to the size of the capital.
...
The abandonment of the labour theory of value meant that the rate of profit became indeterminate, and so the impact on profit of an increase in wages or in rent could not be rigorously explored, but the cost of production theory of value did give the system the appearance of rigour and coherence and so served to renew the scientific authority of classical political economy.
...
The rationality of the elementary exchange relation is intuitively obvious. Each party to the exchange has full knowledge of the opportunities available to her, which comprise the goods in her possession and those offered by the other party to the exchange. Each party can then offer to trade, on the basis of their subjective evaluations of the relative utilities of the goods in play, and can choose to exchange to the extent, and only to the extent, that such exchanges increase utility. Thus the rationality of exchange is constrained only by the physical resources in the possession of the individual, and the subjective judgements of the parties to exchange, so that prices express nothing but individual assessments of the relative utility of things. The generalisation of this result from the elementary exchange to a system of exchange, composed of a multiplicity of elementary exchanges, would seem to be a formality. The generalisation of the commodity form, as more and more things become the objects of exchange, merely expands the opportunities for increasing utility through exchange, without imposing any additional constraints on the individual, so long as that individual is always free to choose not to exchange.

This generalisation is illegitimate, for as I have argued in Chapter Four, it conceals a change in the form of the exchange relation which is of fundamental significance. In the immediate exchange relation things were exchanged as objects of direct utility. However, a system of exchange does not consist in a multiplicity of such immediate and symmetrical exchanges, but comprises mediated exchange relations, in which each exchange is asymmetrical, no longer involving the direct exchange of use-values for one another, but the exchange of use-values for values. As a use-value a commodity is a mere thing, but as a value the commodity is necessarily a socially determined thing, so that exchange can only be analysed as a socially determined relation, the rationality of each individual exchange depending on the rationality of the system of which it is necessarily a part.
...
The neo-Austrian model is vastly superior to the Walrasian model, in regarding the operation of the market as a dynamic process, and in taking seriously the problem of disequilibrium. However, in attempting to make the model more realistic, the neo-Austrians have to abandon the rigour of the Walrasian system, with the result that they have no rational way of establishing their fundamental proposition of the beneficence of the market, which rests on nothing more than faith. In recognising that the market can never achieve equilibrium, the neoAustrians abandon the possibility of demonstrating the rationality of a market solution since, even if the market process is an expression of the interaction of individual preferences, there is no way of showing that the market outcome is in any sense a realisation of those preferences. In particular, because the neo-Austrians have no way of conceptualising the formal properties of their model, they have no way of establishing the supposedly stabilising character of entrepreneurial activity, and so the socially beneficial character of entrepreneurial freedom. In short, the neo-Austrians offer a more realistic model of exchange, but the conclusions they draw from it have no rational foundation. This is why in practice the neo-Austrian defence of the market rests primarily on their critique of the bureaucratic irrationality of the state, and above all of state socialism, and on the associated claim that the freedom of the market is the necessary and sufficient condition for political freedom and democratic participation.
...
The theory of profit is undoubtedly the weakest internal link in the marginalist attempt to demonstrate the rationality of capitalism, because it proves impossible to reduce the social relations of capitalist production to any natural or technological foundation. This not only means that capitalist social relations cannot be attributed any independent rationality, but it also means that, within those social relations, the rate of profit has no substantive significance, corresponding neither to any ‘productive contribution’ of capital, nor to any subjective assessment of utility, but only to the appropriation of a portion of the social product without equivalent.
#15325969
Wellsy wrote:Yes, you repeat yourself endlessly

Because the facts of objective physical reality that prove me right are the same.
but don't really question the very concepts that you splash against the wall constantly, taking them as a given.

I have questioned them and found them natural and valid, unlike Marxist anti-concepts.
And I have just explained that even in an interaction between individuals, their behavior is mediated by things that are inherently social and not created de novo in that interaction.

So what?
Money isn't something that exists strictly between two individuals but is dependent on an objective system of relations and gains it's value not by mere belief.

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.
I also have been imploring you to reflect on the relationship between price and how a quantiative aspect intersects with what is individual subjectivity and somehow this is meant to constitute a science but this assumes that utility is quantiative and price corresponds to such a quantiative utility, except of course in it's subjectivity you mention how it's not even comparable, yet prices being a quantiative thing are comparable.

Value happens when people relate their subjective opinions of utility to the objective fact of scarcity.
Exchange sounds arbitrary yet to claim as such a conclusion is denied because prices aren't arbitrary but do follow trends in supply and demand, which itself feedsback onto production.

Yes, that's why a market economy is better than a command or tradition economy.
I never said the capitalist economy is for the needs of the workers, but I emphasize that you frame capitalism as meeting the needs of consumers,

No; their desires, not their needs. Try to remember.
as if capitalists are motivated out of benevolence to provide for people's needs rather than trying to achieve a profit.

Huh?? You are aware, I assume, of Smith's metaphor of the Invisible Hand?
But apparently economic crises are fictional

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.
and general gluts are impossible because in your conception of the economy, the economy is ones of purely meeting human needs

Desires. Try to remember.
and there isn't a profit motive and the expansion of value.

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.
You readily shift from physical properties to social ones, from use-value to exchange value without any sense of incoherence in what such an unconscious shifting shows.

Because I use valid natural concepts, and refuse to accept invalid artificial ones.
I don't know how you feel so settled going from a concept of utility that is so thoroughly subjective that one can't even compare the satisfaction of individuals, only rank the static preferences of an individual to prices which sound arbitrary but you and I agree aren't, where one goes from essentially quality to quantity.

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.
It's like saying the deliciousness of an apple is 85% quanteals,

No it isn't.
just nonsense because the pleasure derived from such isn't quantifiable, between people and certainly not between different commodities.

Value and utility are quite different things, as I have explained.
There is even the problem where people try to look at real wages to avoid inflation, but how does one compare the real wages for commodities that are no longer in mass production in the past with new technological commodities like an iPhone that didn't previously exist.

I agree that measuring inflation by a consumer price index is invalid. It should be measured by a commodity price index weighted by value of final deliveries.
Do you even question the nature of humans

Yes, especially when seemingly rational people embrace stupid, evil garbage like Marxism, Islam, the CO2 climate narrative, or Trump.
and the concept of utility being a legitimate abstraction?

No. The capacity to satisfy human desires is a natural and useful concept, unlike Marxist anti-concepts.
Abstractions are inevitable, but to abstract the inessential and miss essential parts leads to error and the very idea of consumption merely being a singular experience amidst the array of commodities is nonsensical as is the notion of creating a generalizable science based largely on such a narrowly individual subjectivity.

I have no idea what you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about.
I would assert that that not selling of one's product where demand exist doesn't strictly occur when one can't meet productions costs, because that would be breaking even.

No, it would be taking a loss.
It can occur where profitability is so diminished that it's not worth it.

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.
Yes, destruction in some specific industry isn't a generalized crises. Though in a generalized crises, the problem isn't demand but of exchange value and it's dominance leading to unprofitability such that material things very much in need become unused.

Right: the problem is with the money, not over-production.
But the idea of value as utility and mere scarcity simply doesn't provide a notion of value, it leads to the idea of value only being relative and like Samuel Bailey, that there exists only the exchange ratios which reflect nothing but some ratio between things.

That's what value is: what something would exchange for, almost always expressed in money because money is what is generally accepted in exchange.
And I still find the framing of of the producer i.e. capitalist as the one who single handedly enhances the value of a commodities and thus creates more value as nonsensical.

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.
It's not clear if you imagine we are all independent producers which is just nonsense in the modern industrialized economy the world over where production is socialized and everyone works for a wage.

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.
Again, by treating individual people only as real,

You made that up.
you foreclose concepts that reflect essential characteristics in reality,

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.
and even a notion of what is social and objective.

I have stated that price is an objective fact created by the social relation of exchange.
This is where your abstractions are what I described earlier as atomistic, because so thoroughly abstracted are individuals in marginalism that it's social content is largely an assumption of capitalist relations within the isolated individual, but things abstracted from their social relations and thus real world influences do not exist.

Sure they do. An apple exists without any social relations. You are just spewing silly Marxist rot.
Even attempts to reform some models by introducing the social is often absurd like a father whose utility preferences are somehow independent of those of the other members of his family.

Are you perhaps unaware that there are fathers who choose to drink when their children are hungry?
The only manner in which utility tracks as a concept is the intuition that people to get some satisfaction from the consumption of commodities and the expectation of that satisfaction drives them to purchase things.

Yes, that's called, "objective reality."
But trying to formalize this, doesn't allow one to jump to an explanation of prices

I have already stipulated that supply and demand explain value, not prices, because exchange is not always at arm's length.
even while people in reality do consider the sticker price of things they wish to buy with what money they do have and do have to evaluate the constraints of their effective demand with their wants. But this doesn't explain how the difference between peoples want for a use-value within a system of mass anarchistic production of commodities with it's representation in quantitative terms which creates a gap because not every exchange is synonymous with direct satisfaction as in barter but is open ended with the meditation of money which reflects value universally and not any one particular exchange.

What would that say if it had been written in English?
Yes supply and demand is real, but you explain nothing to state the mere appearence that when supply and demand change, it feedsback onto production, and prices change.

OTC, it explains things pretty well.
And consumption itself is determined by the prices of things as that's part of how people determine what to spend their money on, and then this determines supply and demand.
You just describe the cyclical relationship but not in any detail beyond what is observed as if a science like physics is the practice of meter reading.

No idea what you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about.
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326096
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-animal
In 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.htm
Feuerbach’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/23408453
As 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.htm
Fictitious 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-.pdf
Rather 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_ss918ko8g
The 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-180220
You 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.
#15326202
Wellsy wrote:Reality doesn't just give itself to proving anything, it has to be acted upon and abstracted from.

Concepts are abstractions from reality. Anti-concepts are fabrications deployed to prevent apprehension of reality.
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.

The concepts of value, utility, and price are the same under any system of market exchange, not just capitalism. Capitalism is defined by ownership, not exchange.
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.

"Commodity fetishism" is a Marxist anti-concept. It is just name-calling that does not refer to anything in reality.
That you call them natural is interesting and reeks of an ideological position

Right. My ideological position is that the truth is true, and natural concepts help us understand objective physical reality.
as there isn't anything natural about production

Of course there is. Production is how people have satisfied their material desires for millions of years.
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.

Gibberish.
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.

I realize that Marxism is based on refusal to make relevant distinctions.
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.

That's why valid definitions are crucial to any genuine empirical science.
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-animal
In 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.htm

If you want me to respond to something from another source, put it in quotation marks, not a quoted block. I waste enough time on you without going back and copy-pasting absurd and disingenuous nonsense you think is profound.
But where does money gain it's value if it's merely collective belief.

The facts of objective physical reality those beliefs are based on.
Does it really not exchange for material things and services?

I have stated that it does. It is what is generally accepted in exchange.
It has an existence independent any individual consciousness.

Correct.
Money has the same existence as ancient gods,

Silliness.
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.

Unlike gods, money is not a figment of imagination at all.
I take it we have far different epistemologies and ideas about reality also.

Because you think Marx was talking about reality.
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.

It's a quantity of purchasing power.
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, the advantage of markets is that through consensual exchange, they reconcile everyone's conflicting desires while preventing destructive violence, and thus get the incentives right.
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,

Huh? A market is the opposite of a predator-prey relation.
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.

The beneficial outcome is of self-interest, not greed. Two different things. Self-interest is trying to get more. Greed is trying to get more than you deserve.

The market does not distinguish between production, which makes the community richer by giving producers the wealth they deserve, and privilege, which makes it poorer by giving the privileged wealth that they do not deserve. Smith was trying to explain that difference, but he was not able to make it plain for pragmatic reasons: because his patron was a greedy, privileged, parasitic landowner. Hence the "contradictions."
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.

Modern finance capitalism is based on the debt money system, but it is only a subset of capitalism, which requires only that natural resources and producer goods be privately owned, and products exchanged in a market. I don't know if capitalism is possible without money; but although it might be horribly inefficient, maybe a sufficiently advanced data processing technology could handle all the necessary transactions without resort to money.
How do you conceive of capital and profit seeking independent of money?

Consider sharecropping in a pre-monetary society. In Heian-era Japan, wealth was measured in rice, and certain feudal obligations were discharged by transfers of rice, but rice was not generally used in exchange: it's too inconvenient. There was very little in the way of market exchange. Now, that was not capitalism, but there was certainly capital (i.e., producer goods) and profit seeking.
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.

There are at least four different kinds of money, which all have different economic properties. Modern finance capitalism uses debt money, but monetary economics is a little tangential to this thread.
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.

No, capital "expands" in that sense through the value of the product exceeding the value of what is consumed in its production.
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?

A concept is a mental representation of a class of particulars in terms of its essential characteristics. Valid concepts correspond to classes that are functionally equivalent for some real-world purpose. Invalid concepts aggregate particulars that are not functionally equivalent in reality.
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.

Utility is not cardinal because of declining marginal utility: the second hamburger has less utility than the first, and by the time you get to the fourth, it may have negative utility.
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.

You mean value? Price is just what something traded for.
The objective reality of price doesn't in itself reflect anything objective when it comes to utils or utility as it exists in marginalism.

Utility is subjective. Value reconciles the subjective opinion of utility with the objective fact of scarcity.
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.

Utility and value are two entirely different things. Marx confused himself by talking about use value and exchange value as if they were two different types of value and one would expect them to be commensurable.
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.

People can certainly ask themselves how much they would be willing to pay for various things that have utility for them and are available for purchase, thus making that person's utilities commensurable over that range of items. We all do it all the time.
That people can use money doesn't in itself provide a comprehension of why or how it exists.

It exists to make exchange easier and more efficient.
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.

Hardly surprising, as labor is defined as human effort devoted to relief of scarcity.
Maybe get into philosophy and thinking about how you think and what makes a concept a concept.

I hold a degree in philosophy, with honors, from an internationally respected university.
Yes, a loss in profit which is inexecusable within capitalist production.

"Inexcusable" is a silly word to describe business losses within any kind of production. Every business person knows that undertaking production carries the possibility of loss.
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.

But in fact, people did exchange things by barter when there was no common money between them -- often even no common language -- or no money at all.
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.

Commodity money like cowrie shells does not require any monetary authority. Other kinds of money do.
Ok Samuel Bailey, there is only exchange.

Without exchange, value has no meaning.
Marx also doesn't claim capitalists don't pay laborers the value of their labour power but emphasizes that labor isn't labour power.

Labor power is a Marxist anti-concept.
And you are so adverse to class that I can't imagine your idea of production beyond simple commodity production.

I merely know that class is based on possession of privilege, not ownership of the fruits of one's labor or their devotion to production.
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.

"Socialized" does not mean, "not atomistic."
Do you acknowledge factories exist?

More than that, I know why.
What about capitalist and worker as class. DO these not exist for you?

No, because deploying the fruits of one's labor to aid production does not make one a member of a distinct class, any more than working for one's sustenance does. Having -- or being the victim of -- a privilege that entitles its holder to take their sustenance from others without contributing anything in return does make one a member of a distinct class.
We're just individuals working away.

No, we exist in an institutional environment that privileges some and exploits the rest.
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 explained why reality is the way it is, and why the good is good and the bad bad.
I am not denying the existence of price but asking what you think it reflects. What does it as a quantity reflect?

Do you mean value? Price is just what something traded for, and doesn't reflect anything but that trade. It is usually close to value, but it is not the same thing.
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.

Sometimes an apple is just an apple.
You capacity to access apples is entirely dependent on social relations and not entirely on yourself.

No, just yesterday I was walking past an area of uncultivated land, saw a volunteer apple tree, and picked a few.
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.

I can easily grow an apple tree with no help from anyone else.
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.

No, I merely refuted your attempted gotcha.
Yes, there is an objective reality but what you believe isn't automatically objective reality

But I am conscientiously trying to know and understand reality, not obscure and misconstrue it.
Yes quite the analysis you have provided in your repeted assertions. Please continue to bang your head on the wall.

I'm used to it.
Something that is incomprehensible to your manner of thought it seems.

I hope so.
Must be comfortable then to not have to question it. Rock solid.

That's probably why you can't refute any of it.
Basically the issue that prices are not explained and are just taken as a given.

A price is a given: what something traded for.
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.

A sticker price is just an offer to sell for a particular price. It is not a price unless the item actually sells for that amount.
Content yourself with your fetishism.

Content yourself with Marxist anti-concepts.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326207
Truth To Power wrote:I can easily grow an apple tree with no help from anyone else.

But not one whose fruit you could eat straight off the tree without gagging. The apples nature created were hardly fit to eat, small and bitter. The reason modern 'sweet' apples are bigger, less acidic and bitter, and stay fresh longer than their wild ancestors is domestication and breeding.

So yes, you could plant an apple tree. But without the labour of others over thousands of years, you'd only produce fruit fit for a half-starved caveman.


:lol:
#15326242
ingliz wrote:But not one whose fruit you could eat straight off the tree without gagging. The apples nature created were hardly fit to eat, small and bitter. The reason modern 'sweet' apples are bigger, less acidic and bitter, and stay fresh longer than their wild ancestors is domestication and breeding.

So yes, you could plant an apple tree. But without the labour of others over thousands of years, you'd only produce fruit fit for a half-starved caveman.

<yawn> When speaking of production, we do not include as others' labor the contributions that have long since entered the public domain, like language, Newtonian mechanics, and the genetic attributes of domesticated species that have gone feral. We don't -- if we are honest -- class composition of a concerto as a group effort just because someone invented the 12-tone scale centuries ago. We don't -- if we are honest -- tell a novelist that their work is a collaborative effort because many people contributed to the creation of written language.

But that's just people who are honest.

:lol:
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15326283
Truth To Power wrote:<yawn> When speaking of production, we do not include as others' labor the contributions that have long since entered the public domain, like language, Newtonian mechanics, and the genetic attributes of domesticated species that have gone feral. We don't -- if we are honest -- class composition of a concerto as a group effort just because someone invented the 12-tone scale centuries ago. We don't -- if we are honest -- tell a novelist that their work is a collaborative effort because many people contributed to the creation of written language.

But that's just people who are honest.

:lol:

“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” - Isaac Newton.

All creation is ultimately social creation, all production is ultimately social production.
#15326290
Potemkin wrote:“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” - Isaac Newton.

All creation is ultimately social creation, all production is ultimately social production.

Oh, garbage. Next you'll be claiming that because we all have a long list of ancestors behind us, nothing we do is actually our own effort. It's just absurd and disingenuous tripe.

But like I said: the truth is for honest people.
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326390
Truth To Power wrote:Oh, garbage. Next you'll be claiming that because we all have a long list of ancestors behind us, nothing we do is actually our own effort. It's just absurd and disingenuous tripe.

But like I said: the truth is for honest people.

You are ascribing a conclusion that no one is drawing to denigrate how ridiculous it is, but it is your own assertion so that you can knock it down.
The emphasis is to push back against the individualistic solipsism that so thoroughly emphasizes the individual as if a up and running normative culture with a material foundation didn't pre-exist an individual and that they somehow mobilize everything de novo.
You cannot exist as you do presently purely of your own actions.
Now I don't believe you would think that you created the entire world of technology and production, that would be absurd.
But there is an inability to consider the social basis of one's ability to act in a certain way when one engages in a methodological individualism where two individuals barter, and act as within capitalist relations while abstracted those relations of production.

It's the sort of thinking that creates the very issue of Mr. Peel who took with him "£50,000. ... 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children." but “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” because the material basis of capitalism is insufficient without set property and social relations that excludes said workers from finding an alternative subsistence to wages.
The emphasis is that some abstractions are illegitimate precisely because they are a product of certain preconditions and to consider them as existent outside those relations naturalizes them as inherent to humans independent those relations, which is false and ideological.

It's a bit like Marx's point that a black person is a black person but only within certain conditions is he perceived as a slave. To be unable to distinguish that there is both a material and social reality that exists and is not dependent on any individual consciousness.
#15326402
Wellsy wrote:You are ascribing a conclusion that no one is drawing to denigrate how ridiculous it is, but it is your own assertion so that you can knock it down.

That is what you are doing:
The emphasis is to push back against the individualistic solipsism that so thoroughly emphasizes the individual as if a up and running normative culture with a material foundation didn't pre-exist an individual and that they somehow mobilize everything de novo.

See? No one has made any such claim. Those who are willing to know facts (might not include you) understand that while we have all grown up in roughly the same culture, have access to roughly the same food, the same media, the same public education, etc., some of us choose to study medicine and become doctors, while others choose to watch football and drink beer. Those are individual choices, not social or cultural constants.
You cannot exist as you do presently purely of your own actions.

So what? There are lots of pianos around, but very few people learn to play one. Those who do have made an individual choice to do so, to put the time and effort into practicing, etc. That choice is not somehow rendered a social outcome because a pianist needs other people to have written the piano music, built the pianos, etc.
Now I don't believe you would think that you created the entire world of technology and production, that would be absurd.

More relevantly, it would be irrelevant. We all live in the same world, and everyone in a given country lives with the same laws, institutions, etc. But some of them choose to put in the effort to improve their lives, while others choose to watch football and drink beer -- while still others choose to take advantage of unjust institutions to legally rob and oppress everyone else, whom they consider losers and suckers.
But there is an inability to consider the social basis of one's ability to act in a certain way when one engages in a methodological individualism where two individuals barter, and act as within capitalist relations while abstracted those relations of production.

I'm the one here who has identified the central fact of capitalist "relations of production": that while "relations of production" are the same for everyone, people do not all have equal access to economic opportunity because the privileged, especially landowners, own their liberty rights to access opportunity. But even among those who have roughly the same access to opportunity -- whether the landless poor or the landed rich -- some choose to participate in the "relations of production" and make a contribution, while others choose not to. That choice is an individual choice, not a socially determined fate.
It's the sort of thinking that creates the very issue of Mr. Peel who took with him "£50,000. ... 300 persons of the working class, men, women, and children." but “Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.” because the material basis of capitalism is insufficient without set property and social relations that excludes said workers from finding an alternative subsistence to wages.

Bingo. Peel did not understand that it was owning the land that no labor can create that would enable him to compel everyone else to work for him, not owning the tools, buildings, etc. that working people who have their rights to liberty can produce for themselves.
The emphasis is that some abstractions are illegitimate precisely because they are a product of certain preconditions and to consider them as existent outside those relations naturalizes them as inherent to humans independent those relations, which is false and ideological.

You are just makin' $#!+ up again. I haven't claimed that the institutions of privilege, especially property in land, are inherent to humans, just the opposite.
It's a bit like Marx's point that a black person is a black person but only within certain conditions is he perceived as a slave.

Same with white people. Duh. And the condition that enables both whites and blacks, slave and otherwise, to be treated like slaves is the institution of private property in land:

"During the war I served in a Kentucky regiment in the Federal army. When the war broke out, my father owned sixty slaves. I had not been back to my old Kentucky home for years until a short time ago, when I was met by one of my father's old negroes, who said to me: "Master George, you say you set us free; but before God, I'm worse off than when I belonged to your father." The planters, on the other hand, are contented with the change. They say: "How foolish it was in us to go to war for slavery. We get labor cheaper now than when we owned the slaves." How do they get it cheaper? Why, in the shape of rents they take more of the labor of the negro than they could under slavery, for then they were compelled to return him sufficient food, clothing and medical attendance to keep him well, and were compelled by conscience and public opinion, as well as by law, to keep him when he could no longer work. Now their interest and responsibility cease when they have got all the work out of him they can."
-- From a letter by George M. Jackson, St. Louis, under date of August 15, 1883, as reprinted in Henry George's Social Problems

NOT private property in the products of labor.

Clear?
To be unable to distinguish that there is both a material and social reality that exists and is not dependent on any individual consciousness.

It's not reality that is dependent on individual consciousness, it's the decision to cause something to exist that would not otherwise exist.
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326510
To again describe the outlines of the issue of the oroginal topic.
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21137_marxs-theory-of-value-in-chapter-1-of-capital-a-critique-of-heinrichs-value-form-interpretation-by-fred-moseley-reviewed-by-peter-green/
In an ‘Addendum’ by Heinrich on the next page we also find:

Marxists hotly debate whether individual producers ‘create’ value in production, independent of exchange, or whether value only exists as a result of the reduction that occurs in the exchange of labor products, that is, as a result of production and exchange. Our arguments so far support the second interpretation. (Heinrich 2021: 67)

The implication, that value cannot exist as a property of commodities prior to their exchange for money, has led some critics of Heinrich in the German debates, such as Robert Kurz, to accuse him of collapsing value into exchange-value. Moseley’s critique is not so blunt but, in the course of a forensic analysis, makes the three accurate claims about what Marx actually wrote.

The first concerns abstract labour as the substance of value counterposed to concrete labour as the producer of use-values. Marx is not distinguishing between two types of labour but referring to what all the different types of concrete labour have in common – the expenditure of energy over time. Moseley cites Rubin on how this ‘physiological equalisation’ is a presupposition of Marx’s analysis of abstract labour. He highlights, in a distinctive contribution to often arcane debates, that Marx refers to abstract labour as having two distinct states: the fluid state in which that labour is actually expended, and the ‘coagulated state’ in which value is objectified as a property of individual commodities (13 and 137). My own view is that Marx’s multiple metaphors, such as coagulation, crystallisation, embodiment, etc., refer to value in both its two primary forms, commodities and money – but Heinrich downplays the metaphors and, whilst emphasising the ‘money form’ as the expression of value, denies that value as a social relation can be a property of individual commodities. We should regard value as a ‘relational property’ shared by all commodities produced by human labour although there can be commodities such as land which are not produced and have no intrinsic value.


One possible objection is that Moseley gives insufficient weight to the necessity of exchange for private producers within such a society. Heinrich’s suggestion that both production and exchange are ‘involved’ in the creation of value is a variant of what another more Hegelian value-form theorist, Patrick Murray, has labelled a ‘co-constitution theory’ (Murray 2016). But this merely evades the challenge of Marx’s complex conceptual structure. The differentiation between the production of value and its ‘realization’ in exchange is essential in this respect. Yet Heinrich objects that this presumes we can measure value independently of the exchange process (cf. Heinrich 2021: 240). Rubin, invoked by both Heinrich and Moseley as an authority, wrote, in response to critics who accused him of overemphasising ‘exchange’, the following:

The problem is that in treating the question of the relation between exchange and production two concepts of exchange are not adequately distinguished. We must distinguish exchange as a social form of the process of reproduction from exchange as a particular phase of this process of reproduction, alternating with the phase of direct production. (Rubin 1972: 149)


A concern with Heinrich’s interpretation is that he concludes that there is no tendency for the profit rate to fall and some Marxists thoroughly rest their analysis on such a tendency even though the ability to measure such is virtually impossible in practice.
Heinrich seeks to distinguish himself from a tradition kf Marxism that he sees as to reflective of Ricardo’s theory of value and naturalizes value as embodied labor. This has a strong point as many interpret Marx as a Ricardian with minor differences and has less radical conclusions like that fundamentally accepts capitalist production but thinks it steals from workers.
The whole property rights argument of labor to own the fruits of their labor.
But at the extreme some characterize Heinrich as being like Bailey and in making value only existent upon exchange are in effect saying value = exchange-value.

But Diane Elson articulates how Marx clearly had a concept of Value late in his work which appears in revisions, and especially in his criticism of Samuel Bailey.
So the idea of value having to be embodied like Ricardo may not be the case even while everyone agrees that value has to be realized in exchange.

I like Kliman’s argument that value is intrinsic because commodities ‘have’ many exchange values. That this having is likely a property of a commodity like a singers ability to sing as oppose to the singer having fans, something external to them.
But such value which isn’t some independent variable according to Elson, but something that changes through forms (perhaps coincides with aggregate issues of capital).

But Marx describes it as having a sort of spectral and faint objectivity. That it exists and regulates the form of things, but it is complicated how this immanent measure of value is exactly created from the process of abstracting labor which isn’t a single individuals thought but is an objective social process in capitalist production that becomes dominant.
So abstract labor may exist prior to capitalist production, but it wasn’t the dominant form, just like how commodity exchange was accidental or peripheral until it became universal.
Existing prior in time doesn’t mark what is essential.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm
The real case-history of economic (market) relations testifies, however, in favor of Marx who shows that the “form of value in general” has not at all times been the universal form of the organization of production. Historically, and for a rather long time, it remained a particular relation of people and things in production although occurring haphazardly. It was not until capitalism and the “free enterprise society” came into being that value (i.e., the market form of the product) became the general form of inter-relationships among the component parts of production.

Similar transitions, of the “individual and accidental” into the universal is not a rarity, but rather a rule in history. In history – yet not exclusively the history of humanity with its culture – it always so happens that a phenomenon which later becomes universal, is at first emergent precisely as a solitary exception “from the rule,” as an anomaly, as something particular and partial. Otherwise, hardly anything could ever be expected to turn up. History would have a rather mystical appearance, if all that is new in it emerged at once, as something “common” to all without exception, as an abruptly embodied “idea.”
It is in this light that one should approach the reconsideration by Marx and Lenin of the Hegelian dialectical conception of the universal. While highly esteeming the dialectical tendencies in Hegel’s thought, Marxism furthers his conception in depth and in breadth, and thus, turns the category of the “universal” into the foremost category of the logic governing the investigation of concrete and historically evolving phenomena.

In the context of the materialistic conception of the dialectics of history and of thinking, the Hegelian formulas have different significance than in the language of their originator, being shorn of the slightest sign of mystical coloring. The “universal” comprises and embodies in itself “the entire treasure of particulars” not as an “Idea,” but as a totally real, special phenomenon which tends to become universal and which develops “out of itself,” by force of its intrinsic contradictions new but no less real, phenomena, other “particular” forms of actual progress. Hence, the “genuine universal” is not any particular form found in each and every member of a class but the particular which is driven on to emerge by its very “particularity,” and precisely by this “particularity” to become the “genuine universal.”


And it seems that in crisis theory however that profitability isn’t synonymous with crisis theory or the task of identifying the profit rate tentatively, although as Simon Clarke notes, the difference between use value and exchange value presupposes the money relation that can become fictitious or too independent of use values on the whole snd create a crisis that snaps back to value.
The question becomes what are the limits at which money can go beyond use value and the reproduction of value breaks down.

And against a kind of Keynesian reformist approach, such crises cannot be seen simply as an underconsumption issue, the contradiction of a need for surplus value by suppressing wages producing less effective demand in the working population.
[url]gesd.free.fr/carchedi9.pdf[/url]
See Carchedi’s concluding paragraph summarizing the difference between Keynesianism and Marx. Though also note how its based on the tendency for the profit rate to fall.
And there are criticisms to be made of Heinrich’s interpretation that is somewhat strained based on a view of Engels as a degenerator of the great thinker Marx in his editting of Volume III and an obscure quote.
[url]gesd.free.fr/samh13.pdf[/url]
What Heinrich forgets is that in formulating his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, Marx had in mind the organic composition of the total social capital, not separate competing capitals. In the passage under consideration, Marx had in mind two different organic compositions of two different individual capitals operating in the same branch of industry.


This does not mean, however, that if the higher composition of capital becomes generalized throughout the branch of industry in which our capitalists are working—which under the pressure of competition will indeed be the case sooner or later—the rate of profit throughout capitalist industry will rise, which is Heinrich’s implicit assumption here.

Remember, thanks to competition the rate of profit will tend to be equalized not only within the branch of industry in which our two capitalists are working but between that branch of industry and all other branches of industry.

Therefore, as soon as the superior method of production employed first by capitalist number two becomes generalized, the higher rate of surplus value enjoyed by the second capitalist will disappear. Our second capitalist will then be obliged under the pressure of competition to lower the price of his commodities to their individual values. The temporary super-profit he enjoyed will disappear and he will only realize the average rate of profit. Not only that but if we assume the average rate of surplus value remains unchanged, this new general rate of profit will now be lower than before. Our second capitalist will have lost in two ways. The super-profit that he realized above and beyond the average rate of profit will have vanished, and the average rate of profit will be lower than it was before.

Therefore, contrary to Heinrich, Marx’s note in fact gives no support whatsoever to the theory that Marx had abandoned his theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. In the future, Heinrich would be well advised to drop this argument.

Sam Williams summarizes Heinrich as confusing a temporary advantage of an individual capital achieving super profits by lowering cost production through constant capital/more efficient machines and technology with an overall trend while such a temporary occasion will lead to more efficient production in an industry and lower the rate of profit as the commodities now command a lower price due to competition.

To continue the criticism that Heinrich downplays the role of constant/fixed capital on the whole of production…
Not surprisingly, Heinrich is eager to choose examples that draw attention away from the huge growth in the quantity of fixed capital that marks the real-world history of the capitalist mode of production. He prefers to calculate the rate of profit by the “flow” method that divides the surplus value by the capital that is used up instead of dividing the surplus value by the total mass of accumulated productive capital.

An example of Heinrich playing down the role of fixed capital, and indeed constant capital in general, is provided by the following quote from his “Introduction”:

“At the beginning of this chapter,” Heinrich writes, “it was pointed out the rate of profit can be raised through the economization of constant or through the acceleration of capital turnover….” (p. 150) Heinrich leaves out the fact that the rate of profit can be raised only by an acceleration of the turnover of variable capital.

There is nothing very original in Heinrich’s critique of Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. These arguments have been repeated by many academic Marxists and other Marx critics for decades. Indeed, Paul Sweezy made the same basic arguments in his “Theory of Capitalist Development,” published in 1942.
#15326522
Wellsy wrote:To again describe the outlines of the issue of the oroginal topic.
https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21137_marxs-theory-of-value-in-chapter-1-of-capital-a-critique-of-heinrichs-value-form-interpretation-by-fred-moseley-reviewed-by-peter-green/

Why do you waste your time on such stupid, dishonest tripe? Just reread all my posts, but this time find a willingness to know facts. Problem solved!
A concern with Heinrich’s interpretation is that he concludes that there is no tendency for the profit rate to fall and some Marxists thoroughly rest their analysis on such a tendency even though the ability to measure such is virtually impossible in practice.

Not only is there no tendency for the rate of profit to fall -- Marx was (surprise!) objectively wrong about that -- there is no such thing as "the rate of profit" at all, other than as a meaningless statistic one could calculate, like the size of dinosaurs.
Heinrich seeks to distinguish himself from a tradition kf Marxism that he sees as to reflective of Ricardo’s theory of value and naturalizes value as embodied labor. This has a strong point as many interpret Marx as a Ricardian with minor differences and has less radical conclusions like that fundamentally accepts capitalist production but thinks it steals from workers.

I have already proved that it is landowning that steals from workers, whether production is capitalist or not. Marxism-socialism merely consists in blaming the factory owner for what the landowner does to the worker.
The whole property rights argument of labor to own the fruits of their labor.

Which they sell for wages.
But at the extreme some characterize Heinrich as being like Bailey and in making value only existent upon exchange are in effect saying value = exchange-value.

Value is exchange value -- what something would exchange for (try to find a willingness to know that fact) -- but it is price that is only existent upon exchange. If the person who wants an item most already has it, there is no exchange, but it still has value: what they would have had to pay the person who wants it second most to buy it from them.
So the idea of value having to be embodied like Ricardo may not be the case even while everyone agrees that value has to be realized in exchange.

See above. Everyone who agrees that value has to be realized in exchange is objectively wrong. It is price that has to be realized in exchange.
I like Kliman’s argument that value is intrinsic because commodities ‘have’ many exchange values.

Yes, well, it is hardly surprising that you like stupid, irrational, dishonest garbage: you are a Marxist, after all. It is precisely the fact that things can have different values at different times and in different markets that proves there is no such thing as intrinsic value.
That this having is likely a property of a commodity like a singers ability to sing as oppose to the singer having fans, something external to them.

It would be difficult to contrive a more inept analogy.
But Marx describes it as having a sort of spectral and faint objectivity.

Because his goal -- in which he largely succeeded -- was to stop anyone from understanding economics:
That it exists and regulates the form of things, but it is complicated how this immanent measure of value is exactly created from the process of abstracting labor which isn’t a single individuals thought but is an objective social process in capitalist production that becomes dominant.
So abstract labor may exist prior to capitalist production, but it wasn’t the dominant form, just like how commodity exchange was accidental or peripheral until it became universal.
Existing prior in time doesn’t mark what is essential.

See? Gibberish.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/universal.htm

More gibberish.
<gibberish snipped>
And against a kind of Keynesian reformist approach, such crises cannot be seen simply as an underconsumption issue, the contradiction of a need for surplus value by suppressing wages producing less effective demand in the working population.

Capitalist crises are caused by excessive debt, not excessive production. Marx understood absolutely nothing whatsoever about financial crises.
See Carchedi’s concluding paragraph summarizing the difference between Keynesianism and Marx. Though also note how its based on the tendency for the profit rate to fall.

Like the tendency of the size of dinosaurs to increase.
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326529
Yes everyone is wrong and you’re right @Truth To Power
:excited:
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326546
@Truth To Power

Overproduction

When capitalists stop investing and lay off workers, then incomes and consumption fall and there is overproduction. A slump is overproduction relative to effective demand but effective demand falls because of falling investment by capitalists due to falling profitability and profits.


:)
#15326557
ingliz wrote:@Truth To Power

Overproduction

When capitalists stop investing and lay off workers, then incomes and consumption fall and there is overproduction. A slump is overproduction relative to effective demand but effective demand falls because of falling investment by capitalists due to falling profitability and profits.

No, that's all just absurd Marxist twaddle with no basis in fact, logic, economics or history. Marx knew absolutely nothing about money and how the debt money system creates financial crises: through positive feedback.

The way the debt money system works, private commercial banks create money by lending it into existence, almost always for asset purchases. That addition to the money supply goes into asset markets, not consumption. The influx of money in asset markets increases asset prices. The increase in asset prices increases the return to asset ownership by adding capital gains on top of the assets' rent income. The capital gains expected on top of rent income make asset purchases more attractive, leading investors to borrow more from banks for asset purchases. This increase in borrowing increases the money supply going into asset markets, and the positive feedback is established. That is how the debt money system creates the boom phase of the "business" (actually asset price) cycle.

Some of the new money goes to asset sellers who do not put all the proceeds into more asset purchases, and spend it on consumption instead. That is how the newly created money enters the general economy, raising consumer prices.

At some point, asset prices have increased so much that even a minor economic shock or disappointment reduces their rent income to the point where it can't pay the interest on loans undertaken to buy the assets. Indebted owners who can't make the interest payments either default or sell the assets to get out from under their loan obligations. This causes asset prices to fall. As there is now a capital loss on assets rather than a capital gain, asset purchases become less attractive. Investors stop borrowing from banks to buy assets, and banks' creation of new money declines to less than the deletion of money by principal repayments on the loans undertaken during the boom. The money supply contracts, asset prices fall again, and the economy goes into a tailspin. Positive feedback thus also produces the bust phase of the cycle.

Effective demand and profits both fall because the money supply contracts. The money supply contracts when new bank lending declines to less than the money deleted by bank loan principal repayments. New bank lending declines when asset prices have risen to the point where their rents can't finance the interest payments on loans taken out to purchase them. That's when governments and central banks have to step in to prevent a deflationary collapse. It all happens because of the positive feedback effect of the debt money system. Nothing to do with any imaginary "overproduction."

Marx was the Anti-Economist. Try to remember.
#15326558
Wellsy wrote:Yes everyone is wrong and you’re right @Truth To Power
:excited:

No, only the people who disagree with me are wrong. That is why I am always able to prove them wrong.

How many more times, and in how many more different ways, would I have to prove you wrong before you would become willing to know the fact that you actually are wrong?
#15326559
Hakeer wrote:Not only that, but every sentence you write is wrong. Get used to it.

No, the sentences you write that I don't take issue with have some finite probability of being right. When I take issue with a sentence, I prove it is wrong, and that is why you can be sure it actually is wrong.
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