Origina of Value - Page 8 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
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User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326721
wat0n wrote:Can you elaborate on this?

Well labor has always existed as long as there are humans. Marx presupposes that humans do not exist independent of a natural reality which they shape in meeting their needs, and thus in changing the world change themselves.
Early humans lived in groups marked by material necessity, they survive how they could. But as humans develop tools, technology, and effective practices, we get better at meeting those needs and eventually are able to create a surplus.
With the creation of a surplus of goods, class division can emerge because not everyone is within a division of labor just to survive.
So humans make basis tools for basic needs, but with a more complex society we develop entirely new needs.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm
In line with this distinction between a general human nature and the specific expression of human nature in each culture, Marx distinguishes, as we have already mentioned above, two types of human drives and appetites: the constant or fixed ones, such as hunger and the sexual urge, which are an integral part of human nature, and which can be changed only in their form and the direction they take in various cultures, and the "relative" appetites, which are not an integral part of human nature but which "owe their origin to certain social structures and certain conditions of production and communication." [24]
Marx gives as an example the needs produced by the capitalistic structure of society. "The need for money," he wrote in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, "is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates.... This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and of needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites." [25]

Man's potential, for Marx, is a given potential; man is, as it were, the human raw material which, as such, cannot be changed, just as the brain structure has remained the same since the dawn of history. Yet, man does change in the course of history; he develops himself; he transforms himself, he is the product of history; since he makes his history, he is his own product. History is the history of man's self-realization; it is nothing but the self-creation of man through the process of his work and his production: "the whole of what is called world history is nothing but the creation of man by human labor, and the emergence of nature for man; he therefore has the evident and irrefutable proof of his self-creation, of his own origins."

There is no sensible way in which to argue that money is some natural need because it didn't exist for much of human history and humans simply labored to directly produce for themselves and others. But it is definitely a need once there is generalized mass production of commodities as it presupposes that one's work is dependent on the work of others in order to meet many other needs. And with the mass of commodities we have a great many wants, needs, and desires to survive on the daily.

Everything about my life as a person in a modern industrialized nation is not of bare biological necessity but of more refined and cultural wants and needs. Each item in my possession, and each service I acquire isn't simply excessive because it exceeds the technological and material needs of a person in a primitive tribe. Because then we should argue against against any development of human needs, not jus tin the consumption of commodities, but even the developing of the senses for art, for fine cuisine, to want to drink from a glass, to use utensils. Humans are no different materially/biologically than humans of many generations ago except for how we are adapted to our modern social conditions.
https://www.kafu-academic-journal.info/journal/6/164/
The historical materialism of Marx, as Ilyenkov stated, differs from other forms of materialism by the idea that all abilities of an individual, including the five main senses, are understood as a product of history, not as a gift from Mother Nature. Thus human eyesight and hearing differ from the eyesight and hearing of animals, and they do so because they are formed on the basis of communication with things made by a man for a man.

But a man differs from an animal above all by the presence of spiritual senses to which artistic taste and moral sense (conscience), the sense of the sublime, pride and love in its human spiritual meaning pertain. On the other hand, from the point of view of historical materialism, the highest spiritual senses do not presuppose additional physical organs, but rather transform and instill the highest ideal meaning into the activity of the natural senses, all the vital functions of a human organism.

The basis of vexation of mind is nothing but pain. Its essence differs, however, from a sudden heart attack. Thirst for justice differs from mere physical thirst. Someone who listens to symphonic music hears it with his ears, but he does not hear just a collection of sounds. Human senses are physically always the same. This means that the highest spiritual qualities do not presuppose different organs but different abilities of an individual which form a richer content of human life and behaviour.


So one could catalogue the many different use-values of commodities that exist today if one wanted, but it is simply the means in which we meet different wants and needs. While one can say that there is an industry in developing fine paints and brushes to make money, they have emerged because many people who are interested in the arts have a great desire to benefit from their specific qualities to achieve their artistic ends.
So you can spend hundreds of dollars on a single paint brush because of the fine materials and design of it that help it perform specific functions better than a basic brush within a specific painting medium such as water color painting.

The reason I emphasize the socially developed quality of human senses, desires, needs, is that a biological reduction would see us too crudely in our actual human nature and is more often a justification for poverty, but often only for some rather than an advocate for the increased development of everyone.

I would also emphasize that some services aren't tangible commodities but do have material effects. When I get a hair cut to look good in some modern style or to what ever tastes I have, it's not a tangible thing except for it's effect.
So the use-values of things arises because humans in what ever practice have developed some want of a specific thing and it's a part of some way of life/practice/activity. I have a nice telecaster precisely because of the long journey other humans have undertaken in playing music, and the incorporation of modern technology to make it accessible. I couldn't just wake up without it's prior history in want of it. And wants often arise from creativity to present day problems which we can't predict the solutions for or how they will spread until it is actuality.
I don't know the needs of humans many generations from now or their way of life. But we can perhaps predict based on current means what sort of things may change like whether 3D printers may become more affordable and change a lot about what things people create readily for their own use.
By wat0n
#15326722
Wellsy wrote:Well labor has always existed as long as there are humans. Marx presupposes that humans do not exist independent of a natural reality which they shape in meeting their needs, and thus in changing the world change themselves.
Early humans lived in groups marked by material necessity, they survive how they could. But as humans develop tools, technology, and effective practices, we get better at meeting those needs and eventually are able to create a surplus.
With the creation of a surplus of goods, class division can emerge because not everyone is within a division of labor just to survive.
So humans make basis tools for basic needs, but with a more complex society we develop entirely new needs.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch04.htm

There is no sensible way in which to argue that money is some natural need because it didn't exist for much of human history and humans simply labored to directly produce for themselves and others. But it is definitely a need once there is generalized mass production of commodities as it presupposes that one's work is dependent on the work of others in order to meet many other needs. And with the mass of commodities we have a great many wants, needs, and desires to survive on the daily.

Everything about my life as a person in a modern industrialized nation is not of bare biological necessity but of more refined and cultural wants and needs. Each item in my possession, and each service I acquire isn't simply excessive because it exceeds the technological and material needs of a person in a primitive tribe. Because then we should argue against against any development of human needs, not jus tin the consumption of commodities, but even the developing of the senses for art, for fine cuisine, to want to drink from a glass, to use utensils. Humans are no different materially/biologically than humans of many generations ago except for how we are adapted to our modern social conditions.
https://www.kafu-academic-journal.info/journal/6/164/


So one could catalogue the many different use-values of commodities that exist today if one wanted, but it is simply the means in which we meet different wants and needs. While one can say that there is an industry in developing fine paints and brushes to make money, they have emerged because many people who are interested in the arts have a great desire to benefit from their specific qualities to achieve their artistic ends.
So you can spend hundreds of dollars on a single paint brush because of the fine materials and design of it that help it perform specific functions better than a basic brush within a specific painting medium such as water color painting.

The reason I emphasize the socially developed quality of human senses, desires, needs, is that a biological reduction would see us too crudely in our actual human nature and is more often a justification for poverty, but often only for some rather than an advocate for the increased development of everyone.

I would also emphasize that some services aren't tangible commodities but do have material effects. When I get a hair cut to look good in some modern style or to what ever tastes I have, it's not a tangible thing except for it's effect.
So the use-values of things arises because humans in what ever practice have developed some want of a specific thing and it's a part of some way of life/practice/activity. I have a nice telecaster precisely because of the long journey other humans have undertaken in playing music, and the incorporation of modern technology to make it accessible. I couldn't just wake up without it's prior history in want of it. And wants often arise from creativity to present day problems which we can't predict the solutions for or how they will spread until it is actuality.
I don't know the needs of humans many generations from now or their way of life. But we can perhaps predict based on current means what sort of things may change like whether 3D printers may become more affordable and change a lot about what things people create readily for their own use.


Ok, but what's the distinction between "psychological satisfaction" and "actually satisfying a human being"?

In the subjective interpretation, utility is just a rule to order preferences. It can be interpreted as "psychological satisfaction" or "whatever actually satisfies a human being" if you want but, regardless of that interpretation, in its most basic essence is to just being a rule to order preferences between pairs of goods x1,...,xn.

Is value of use just another way to say the same?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326727
wat0n wrote:Ok, but what's the distinction between "psychological satisfaction" and "actually satisfying a human being"?

In the subjective interpretation, utility is just a rule to order preferences. It can be interpreted as "psychological satisfaction" or "whatever actually satisfies a human being" if you want but, regardless of that interpretation, in its most basic essence is to just being a rule to order preferences between pairs of goods x1,...,xn.

Is value of use just another way to say the same?

I think the purpose of emphasizing the material quality of a use value as compared to the psychological satisfaction is due to the purpose of each.
In Marx’s first chapter of Capital Vol I, he emphasizes use value’s materiality and qualitative nature in contrast to exchange which is quantitative and isn’t treated a product of it’s material qualities.

Where if I am looking to create ordinal rankings to build a model approximating how some people may act in a market, the outline of the array of human wants and desires in consumption makes sense.



I could mention it again, but it may be a detour to what you are curious to discuss but this emphasis between the incommensurability of use values and exchange values quantitative nature is part of Marx’s argument on how one can discern commodities have value due to having many exchange values due to some cardinal measurability which I see readers of Marx summarize as abstract labor time, labor treated with indifference to its specific qualities other than being labor.

The unusual point of this is to emphasize a something as objective as if among lions, antelopes, warthogs, and so on there was another thing called animal along side them. Somehow a real but more abstract thing.
#15326768
ingliz wrote:Industrialisation.

No, that's just an absurd and disingenuous attempt on your part to evade the truth: legal rights conferred by governments are only an approximation of the natural individual rights that existed before any government. The individual rights to life and property in the fruits of one's labor are commonplace in pre-governmental human societies, but do not exist in subhuman social animals.
Wage slavery is a more economically efficient way to manage labour.

But it still depends on legal removal of the individual right to liberty, just by landowners rather than slave owners, as the sad tale of poor old Thomas Peel showed.
The workers keep and clothe themselves, you can hire and fire at will, and wages are kept low in a competitive labour market.

None of that has anything to do with industrialization. It's the same in an agrarian economy. And it is not a competitive labor market that keeps wages low, it is the removal of workers' options by landowning:


The Slaver

Suppose I am the owner of an estate and 100 slaves, all the land about being held in the same way by people of the same class as myself. It is a profitable business, but there are many expenses and annoyances attached to it. I must keep up my supply of slaves either by buying or breeding them. I must pay an overseer to keep them continually to their work with a lash. I must keep them in a state of brutish ignorance. And the slaves have all the vices and defects that slavery engenders; they have no self-respect or moral sense; they lie, they steal, they are lazy, shirking work whenever they dare; they do not care what mischief their carelessness occasions me so long as it is not found out; their labour is obtained by force, and given grudgingly; they have no heart in it.

Flash!
Suddenly a brilliant idea strikes me. I reflect that there is no unoccupied land in the neighbourhood, so that if my labourers were free they would still have to look to me for work somehow. So one day I announce to them that they are all free, intimating at the same time I will be ready to employ as many as I may require on such terms as we may mutually and independently agree. What could be fairer? They are overjoyed, and falling on their knees, bless me as their benefactor. Then they go away and have a jollification, and next day come back to me to arrange the new terms.

They believe …
Most of them think they would like to have a piece of land and work it for themselves, and be their own masters. All they want is a few tools they have been accustomed to use, and some seed, and these they are ready to buy from me, undertaking to pay me with reasonable interest when the first crop comes in, offering the crop as security.

Hold on, now!
“But,” softly I observe, “you are going too fast. Your proposals about the tools and seed and your maintenance are all right enough, but the land, you remember, belongs to me. You cannot expect me to give you your liberty and my own land for nothing. That would not be reasonable, would it?” They agree it would not, and begin to propose terms. A fancies this bit of land, and B that. But it soon appears that I want this bit of land for my next year’s clearing, and that for my cows, and another is too close to my house and would interfere with my privacy, and another is thick forest or swamps, and would require too long and costly preparation for me who must have quick returns in order to live, and in short that there is no land suitable that I care to part with.

The benefactor
Still I am ready to do what I promised – “to employ as many as I may require, on such terms as we may mutually and independently agree.” But as I have now got to pay them wages instead of getting their work for nothing, I cannot of course employ so many of them. I can find work for 90 of them, however, and with these I am prepared to discuss terms.

At once a number volunteer their services at such wages as their imagination had been picturing to them. I tell the 90 whose demands are most reasonable to stand on one side. The remaining 10 look blank, and seeing that since I won’t let them have any of the land, it is a question of hired employment or starvation, they offer to come for a little less than the others. I tell these now to stand aside, and 10 others to stand out instead. These look blank now, and offer to work for less still, and so the “mutual and voluntary” settlement of terms proceeds.

But, meanwhile, I have been making a little calculation in my head, and have reckoned up what the cost of keeping a slave, with his food and clothes, and a trifle over to keep him contented, would come to, and I offer that. They won’t hear of it, but as I know they can’t help themselves, I say nothing, and presently first one and then another gives in, till I have got my 90, and still there are 10 left out, and very blank indeed they look. Whereupon, the terms being settled, I graciously announce that though I don’t really want any more men, still I am willing, in my benevolence, to take the 10, too, on the same terms, which they promptly accept, and again hail me as their benefactor, only not quite so rapturously as before.

Wage slaves?
So they all set to at the old work at the old place, and on the old terms, only a little differently administered; that is, that whereas I formerly supplied them with food, clothes, etc., direct from my stores, I now give them a weekly wage representing the value of those articles, which they will henceforth have to buy for themselves.

There is a difference, too, in some other respects, indicating a moral improvement in our relations. I can no longer curse and flog them. But then I don’t want to; it’s no longer necessary; the threat of dismissal is quite as effective, even more so; and much more pleasant for me.

I can no longer separate husband from wife, parent from child. But then again, I don’t want to. There would be no profit in it; leaving them their wives and children has the double advantage of making them more contented with their lot, and giving me greater power over them, for they have now got to keep these wives and children out of their own earnings.

My men are now as eager to come to me to work as they formerly were to run away from work. I have neither to buy or breed them; and if any suddenly leave me, instead of letting loose the bloodhounds, I have merely to hold up a finger or advertise, and I have plenty of others offering to take their place. When a man is worn out with long service I can turn him out with a clear business conscience, knowing that the State will see that he does not starve.

I am capital and I employ people!
But I gain in other ways besides pecuniary benefit. I have lost the stigma of being a slave driver, and have acquired instead the character of a man of energy and enterprise, of justice and benevolence. I am a “large employer of labour,” to whom the whole country, and the labourer especially, is greatly indebted, and people say, “See the power of capital! These poor labourers, having no capital, could not use the land if they had it, so this great and far-seeing man wisely refuses to let them have it, and keeps it all for himself, but by providing them with employment his capital saves them from pauperism, and enables him to build up the wealth of the country, and his own fortune together.”

Whereas it is not my capital that does any of these things. It is not my capital but the labourer’s toil that builds up my fortune and the wealth of the country. It is not my employment that keeps him from pauperism, but my monopoly of the land forcing him into my employment that keeps him on the brink of it. It is not want of capital that keeps the labourer from using the land, but my refusing him the use of the land that prevents him from acquiring capital. All the capital he wants to begin with is an axe and a spade, which a week’s earnings would buy him, and for his maintenance during the first year, and at any subsequent time, he could work for me or for others, turnabout, with his work on his own land. Henceforth with every year his capital would grow of itself, and his independence with it, and that this is no fancy sketch, anyone can see for himself by taking a trip into the country, where he will find well-to-do farmers who began with nothing but a spade and an axe (so to speak) and worked their way up in the manner described.

All my capital is set free for investment elsewhere, and I am freed from the odium of a slave owner, notwithstanding that the men still toil for my enrichment as when they were slaves, and that I get more out of them than ever. If I wax rich while they toil from hand to mouth, and in depressed seasons find it hard to get work at all; it is not, to all appearances, my doing, but merely the force of circumstances, the law of nature, the state of the labour market – fine sounding names that hide the ugly reality.

So kind is Providence, my daily bread (well buttered) comes to me of itself. Nay, people bid against each other for the privilege of finding it for me; and no one seems to realise that the comfortable income that falls to me like the refreshing dew is dew indeed; but it is the dew of sweat wrung from the labourers’ toil. It is the fruit of their labour which they ought to have; which they would have if I did not take it from them.


So you are just wrong.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326780
Truth To Power wrote:it is the removal of workers' options by landowning

Workers had the option to own land in America.

The Homestead Acts—a series of federal laws passed between 1862 and 1916—granted 160-acre sections of public land, called homesteads, to Americans at very little cost. These acts were designed to provide incentives for Americans to move west. Citizens from all backgrounds, including immigrants, farmers without their own land, women, and former slaves, could apply. Successful applicants received the deed to land in exchange for spending five years farming and improving it. Approximately 270 million acres were claimed and farmed under the Homestead Act.

— Created by Hillary Brady, Digital Public Library of America


:)
By wat0n
#15326783
Wellsy wrote:I think the purpose of emphasizing the material quality of a use value as compared to the psychological satisfaction is due to the purpose of each.
In Marx’s first chapter of Capital Vol I, he emphasizes use value’s materiality and qualitative nature in contrast to exchange which is quantitative and isn’t treated a product of it’s material qualities.

Where if I am looking to create ordinal rankings to build a model approximating how some people may act in a market, the outline of the array of human wants and desires in consumption makes sense.



I could mention it again, but it may be a detour to what you are curious to discuss but this emphasis between the incommensurability of use values and exchange values quantitative nature is part of Marx’s argument on how one can discern commodities have value due to having many exchange values due to some cardinal measurability which I see readers of Marx summarize as abstract labor time, labor treated with indifference to its specific qualities other than being labor.

The unusual point of this is to emphasize a something as objective as if among lions, antelopes, warthogs, and so on there was another thing called animal along side them. Somehow a real but more abstract thing.


If I take two different goods, how can I tell which one has a greater use value?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326796
wat0n wrote:If I take two different goods, how can I tell which one has a greater use value?

I don’t know one can decide for another what ranks higher and the ordinial ranking allows for some order to desires and wants, but use values are unable to be compared, or at least I don’t see how they can be compared.
I can articulate from the perspective of some human project a prescribed ranking of what desires are better than others, what it considers good, but whether one cultivates and internalizes such values is another matter and I would argue capitalism cultivates primarily one of consumption itself.
I reject utilitarianisms flattening out of human experience as I don’t think it reflects human nature in how we experience life.


https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/4.+Macintyre.pdf
John Stuart Mill was right of course in his contention that the Benthamite conception of happiness stood in need of enlargement; in Utilitarianism he attempted to make a key distinction between 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures and in On Liberty and elsewhere he connects increase in human happiness with the extension of human creative powers. But the effect of these emendations is to suggest-what is correct, but what no Benthamite no matter how far reformed could concede-that the notion of human happiness is not a unitary, simple notion and cannot provide us with a criterion for making our key choices.

If someone suggests to us, in the spirit of Bentham and Mill. that we should guide our own choices by the prospects of our own future pleasure or happiness, the appropriate retort is to enquire: 'But which pleasure, which happiness ought to guide me?' For there are too many different kinds of enjoyable activity, too many different modes in which happiness is achieved.

And pleasure or happiness are not states of mind for the production of which these activities and modes are merely alternative means.

The pleasure-of-drinking-Guinness is not the pleasure-of-swimming-at-Crane's-Beach, and the swimming and the drinking are not two different means for providing the same end-state. The happiness which belongs peculiarly to the way of life of the cloister is not the same happiness as that which belongs peculiarly to the military life. For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier.

To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for the reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.



[url]d-scholarship.pitt.edu/10867/1/VWills_ETD_2011.pdf#page111[/url]
Marx's criticisms of Utilitarianism are twofold. On the one hand, he charges that Utilitarianism is incapable of accommodating human individuality in all its concrete aspects, instead grasping the human only in one narrow aspect: as a source or beneficiary of utility.

I will do my best to motivate the first question, which more bluntly stated, is this: What is so good, anyway, about satisfying human needs and developing human capacities? Why should that be the basis of our moral theory? Why not maximizing happiness? Or instantiating the virtues? Or following divine commands, for that matter? The answer, though some will find it unsatisfying, is that we should care about the full flourishing of human beings because they're us. And we are more than just happinessexperiencing blobs; we are capable of a vast array of activities and experiences and it is only through the full exploration of these that we can realize our human essence as social individuals in a productive engagement with the world around us.

Of course, in suggesting that in the absence of a greatly disturbed relationship to the human species and to the natural world, there can be no doubt that human flourishing as Marx describes it is the highest goal for human beings, I have relied heavily on a conception of just what human beings are, exactly. As I have alluded to above, species of Utilitarianism fail as moral theories because they construe human beings too narrowly. 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.



https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf
The overriding good of liberalism is no more and no less than the continued sustenance of the liberal social and political order”. (p. 345)

In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.

Even with ordinal ranking it is only the ranking of an individual and can’t even be judged as right or wrong compared to anothers ranking, that’s outside the purview of economics.
It’s all subjective desires that are taken as given, as is the naturalized and even often idealized economic and social relations that situate such a person and their desires.
By wat0n
#15326798
So in the end, value is indeed subjective after all? Or at least use values are?

I mean, what are use values good for from the perspective of understanding human behavior if one just ignores how agents use them to make decisions?
#15326799
ingliz wrote:Workers had the option to own land in America.

That is just more fatuous and disingenuous garbage from you.
The Homestead Acts—a series of federal laws passed between 1862 and 1916—granted 160-acre sections of public land, called homesteads, to Americans at very little cost. These acts were designed to provide incentives for Americans to move west. Citizens from all backgrounds, including immigrants, farmers without their own land, women, and former slaves, could apply. Successful applicants received the deed to land [i]in exchange for spending five years farming and improving it. Approximately 270 million acres were claimed and farmed under the Homestead Act.[/i]

— Created by Hillary Brady, Digital Public Library of America

Ahem. In all but a handful of cases, there was a substantial up-front purchase price to be met,
most commonly $2.50/acre -- at a time when base wages were about that much a week. In addition, the "worker" applying for the land had to have enough capital to travel -- often with their family -- hundreds or thousands of miles to the unclaimed land, equip himself with the tools, livestock, building supplies, etc. needed to turn virgin wilderness into a viable farmstead, and to support himself and his family until the first harvest came in, typically half a year or more. For the vast majority of landless workers, this capital requirement was an insuperable barrier, which is why the majority of "workers" who took advantage of this "option" were in fact already landowners: they sold their land in the eastern states to get the capital needed to qualify for "free" land in the West.

That's aside from the fact that indigenous workers, from whom the land had been taken, were explicitly excluded from homesteading because they were not, and could not become, US citizens.

So it's time for you to fantasize about working me to death in your gulag again.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15326809
Truth To Power wrote:In all but a handful of cases, there was a substantial up-front purchase price to be met

Bollocks!

Passed on May 20, 1862, the Homestead Act accelerated the settlement of the western territory by granting adult heads of families 160 acres of surveyed public land for a minimal filing fee and five years of continuous residence on that land.

— National Archives


:)
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326815
wat0n wrote:So in the end, value is indeed subjective after all? Or at least use values are?

I mean, what are use values good for from the perspective of understanding human behavior if one just ignores how agents use them to make decisions?

The desire for things is subjective although there are of course social and environmental constraints that make one desire things in a particular way. But that is the desire for use values.

Marx has a different idea for what he calls value as opposed to use and exchange that he developed very late into his work of capital that came out most explicitly in his criticism of Samuel Bailey saying there is only exchange value.

And i’ve seen debates about whether value exists across all historical epochs and seen the distinctions that Marx makes for the basis of balue can be said to have always existed but that under capitalism, abstract labor becomes a real social force that allows the equality and comparison of commodities on the whole.

And I think that Marx emphasizes that value is transformed across production and distribution, and that while supply and demand exists it is constrained by value because it is determined by it not in an exact sense (that they are identical). Value is immanent to commodities, abstract labor time is the immanent measure while money/exchange value is the external measure.

See figure 3 on page 75 for a visual model summarizing such a relationship amidst differences between value and price.
Neo-Ricardian Economics: A wealth of algebra, a poverty of theory
[url]digamo.free.fr/shaikh82.pdf#page111[/url]
#15326841
ingliz wrote:Passed on May 20, 1862, the Homestead Act accelerated the settlement of the western territory by granting adult heads of families 160 acres of surveyed public land for a minimal filing fee and five years of continuous residence on that land.

— National Archives

OK, I must have misread my other source, which I now can't find. This is probably what it referred to:

"Title could also be acquired after a 6-month residency and trivial improvements, provided the claimant paid the government $1.25 per acre."

https://www.archives.gov/education/less ... estead-act

The fact remains that acquiring ownership of land under the Homestead Act was effectively out of financial reach for the great majority of landless workers, as already explained. It was also a window of opportunity that was only open for a limited time:

"The Land Ordinance of 1785 finally implemented a standardized system of Federal land surveys that eased boundary conflicts... Sale of public land was viewed as a means to generate revenue for the Government rather than as a way to encourage settlement. Initially, an individual was required to purchase a full section of land at the cost of $1 per acre for 640 acres. The investment needed to purchase these large plots and the massive amount of physical labor required to clear the land for agriculture were often insurmountable obstacles.

By 1800, the minimum lot was halved to 320 acres, and settlers were allowed to pay in 4 installments, but prices remained fixed at $1.25 an acre until 1854... But basically, national public-land-use policy made land ownership financially unattainable for most would-be homesteaders."


The claim that the Homestead Act meant wages were being held down by competition between workers rather than landowner privilege is therefore seen to be absurd, disingenuous and ahistorical. The factory owners themselves knew, as you evidently do not, that depriving workers of access to land was the crucial means of keeping wages down:

"Northern factory owners feared a mass departure of their cheap labor force and Southern states worried that rapid settlement of western territories would give rise to new states populated by small farmers opposed to slavery. Preemption became national policy in spite of these sectional concerns, but supporting legislation was stymied. Three times—in 1852, 1854, and 1859—the House of Representatives passed homestead legislation, but on each occasion, the Senate defeated the measure. In 1860, a homestead bill providing Federal land grants to western settlers was passed by Congress only to be vetoed by President Buchanan."

Difficult as it was to clear the economic hurdles to homesteading, the era of the Homestead Act in the USA, 1862-1934, was one of the few periods in history that landless workers could get their own access to land as an alternative to wage labor (or slavery) without meeting the extortion demands of landowners.

Clear?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326864
Here is an intuitive view that the value created in production is the same as after it is sold and that exchange is mediated through price which doesn't typically match the immanent value of commodities themselves but approximates them. This pushes against the idea that value is only real once sold. Of course the retort then is that value only exists once it is recognized in exchange as socially necessary, but the value has to exist for it to be socially recognized if one even wishes to claim it as only potential value.
http://gesd.free.fr/shaikh77.pdf
The circulation process is the process whereby commodities change hands, where their titles of ownership are transferred. As such, no commodities and hence no Value- is created in the circulation process. 22 If anything, part of the previously produced mass of commodities (and hence the Value previously created in production) may be used up just in the struggle over its distribution.

One immediate implication of this is that the categories of circulation are thereby limited by those of production. • Value is created in production, materialized in commodities; regardless of the actual money prices at which these commodities are sold, only the same mass of commodities (and hence the same amount of Value) exists after the sales as before. Differen t price relations will therefore give rise to different distributions of the total commodity-product, and of the total sum of Values, but they cannot by themselves change these totals. lt is on this basis that Marx argues:

If commodities are sold at their values, then the magnitude of value in the hands of the buyer and seller remains unchanged. Only the form of existence of value is changed. If the commodities are not sold at their values, then the sum of converted values remains unchanged; the plus on one side is a minus on the other. (Marx, Capitnl, Volume ll, Ch. VI, Section 1.1, p. 129)
#15326895
Wellsy wrote:Here is an intuitive view that the value created in production is the same as after it is sold and that exchange is mediated through price which doesn't typically match the immanent value of commodities themselves but approximates them.

Value and price are usually close, but they are not the same thing. Value is what something would trade for. Price is what it did trade for.

How many times do I have to repeat it before you will get it through your head?? Any talk about value or price that is not based on those correct definitions is just ridiculous, disingenuous, anti-economic garbage.
This pushes against the idea that value is only real once sold.

The absurd notion that value is only real once sold is conclusively refuted by the CORRECT ECONOMIC DEFINITION of value, above.
Of course the retort then is that value only exists once it is recognized in exchange as socially necessary, but the value has to exist for it to be socially recognized if one even wishes to claim it as only potential value.

Value comes from utility (demand) and scarcity (supply). Utility is private and subjective. Scarcity is an objective physical fact. There is no such thing as inherent or intrinsic value because value only exists at all for a particular market at a particular time.

Learn it, or continue to talk nonsense on the subject permanently.

Karl Marx, the Anti-Economist, wrote nothing but stupid garbage on this subject, and his followers are little better. For example:
One immediate implication of this is that the categories of circulation are thereby limited by those of production.

False. Though very rare, it is possible for natural resources to be traded with no production having occurred.
Value is created in production, materialized in commodities;

False. Natural resources have value without being produced.
regardless of the actual money prices at which these commodities are sold, only the same mass of commodities (and hence the same amount of Value) exists after the sales as before.

False. Value is what something would trade for: essentially, what the person who wants the item most would have to pay to buy it from the person who wants it second most. The fact that trade has occurred indicates that the items are now held by people for whom they have greater utility. That implies that a higher price would have to be paid to buy them. Value has been increased by the act of trade.
Different price relations will therefore give rise to different distributions of the total commodity-product, and of the total sum of Values, but they cannot by themselves change these totals. lt is on this basis that Marx argues:

If commodities are sold at their values, then the magnitude of value in the hands of the buyer and seller remains unchanged.

Refuted above. The increase in utility attendant on trade normally implies an increase in value: one would have to pay more to acquire an item when it is held by the person who wants it most.
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326902
@Truth To Power

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Wrong again! It is the opportunity provided by producers by providing access to materials and resources that produces goods for consumption. They help produce value in society unlike landowners who mere exploit producers through the law of rent.

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False. Marx's idea of value is an anti-economic concept that means nothing and only confuses the matter and bedazzles the confused, you should know this because I have said it is false many times already. I don't understand why you haven't accepted what value really is. You need to stop reading that evil garbage and listen to me.
#15326910
Wellsy wrote:@Truth To Power

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Wrong again! It is the opportunity provided by producers by providing access to materials and resources that produces goods for consumption. They help produce value in society unlike landowners who mere exploit producers through the law of rent.


False. Marx's idea of value is an anti-economic concept that means nothing and only confuses the matter and bedazzles the confused, you should know this because I have said it is false many times already. I don't understand why you haven't accepted what value really is. You need to stop reading that evil garbage and listen to me.

<yawn> Does that sort of puerile strawman tripe really help you to avoid knowing the facts that prove your beliefs are false and evil? Refusal to know facts is not an argument, sorry.

I have stated many times that landowning is not the only privilege that enables exploitation of workers and consumers, just by far the most important one, and the one that is part of the definition of capitalism. Other important ones are IP monopolies, bank licenses (in a fractional reserve debt-money system), limited corporate liability, oil and mineral rights, and broadcast spectrum allocations. The former three are characteristic of finance capitalism, but are not part of the definition of capitalism simpliciter.

Clear? Can you find a willingness to be honest about what I have actually written in clear, simple, grammatical English?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326914
Truth To Power wrote:<yawn> Does that sort of puerile strawman tripe really help you to avoid knowing the facts that prove your beliefs are false and evil? Refusal to know facts is not an argument, sorry.

Sorry Philosopher King TtP, I didn't comprehend the strength of your argument in slamming together concepts like a child smashing toy cars together. I will now reflect on your comments further and be compelled by comprehension to the truth.

I have stated many times that landowning is not the only privilege that enables exploitation of workers and consumers, just by far the most important one, and the one that is part of the definition of capitalism. Other important ones are IP monopolies, bank licenses (in a fractional reserve debt-money system), limited corporate liability, oil and mineral rights, and broadcast spectrum allocations. The former three are characteristic of finance capitalism, but are not part of the definition of capitalism simpliciter.

Clear? Can you find a willingness to be honest about what I have actually written in clear, simple, grammatical English?

Ah yes, Landowners et al. exploit producers. Thank you for clarifying.

Now, back to the show...
http://gesd.free.fr/shaikh77.pdf
Now of course it was known well before Marx's time that supply and demand were the immediate determinants of actual market phenomena. But even classical political economy was aware that over the course of time the ceaselessly fluctuating interplay of supply and demand was itself regulated by a much more fundamental principle: the Law of Equal Profitability.

For instance, if as a result of m3;rket conditions a particular sector's rate of profit rose above the average rate, then the flow of capital would tend to be biased towards that sector, causing it to grow more rapidly than demand, and driving down its market price to a level consistent with average profitability. Conversely, the sectors with low profitability would tend to grow less rapidly than demand, causing their prices and profitability to rise.

The classical economists were thus able to demonstrate that behind the continuously varying constellation of market prices there lay another set of prices, acting as "centers of gravity" of market prices and embodying more or less equal rates of profit. The name given to these regulating prices in classical political economy was natural prices; Marx calls them prices of production. Their discovery was the first great law of prices.

By David Ricardo's time, the problem had moved on to a higher level. What Ricardo sought to do, for instance, was to go one step further and look behind prices of production themselves, to discover their "centers of gravity." That is, just as the market price of a commodity was shown robe regulated by its price of production, Ricardo sought to show that this regulating price was itself subject to a hidden regulator- the total quantity of labor time required to produce the commodity, both in its direct production and in the production of its means of production.

...The total quantity of labor time was the center of gravity of the commodity's price of production, just as this price of production was itself the center of gravity of its market price. This was Ricardo's attempt to formulate a second great law of prices.

What Ricardo perceived was that there was an intrinsic connection between the "quantitative worth," the exchange-value, of commodities, and the total lab or-rime required for their production. 24 This, according to Marx, was RJcardo's great scientit1c merit?5 But at the same time Ricardo was rrapped by the conceptual framework of bourgeois political economy, which saw all production as being alike. He was consequently unable to distinguish concrete labor, an aspect of all social production, from abstract labor, an aspect which only commodity producing labor takes on. Ricardo therefore misses the difference between Value and the form of Value. Instead of recognizing price as the manner in which the exchange process reflects Value, and developing the various intermediary links between the two, he attempts instead to fuse them together through his law of prices. His failure to adequately distinguish between Value and price is, according to Marx, the first great source of error in his analysis. 26

In addition to that, however, there is another problem. How can Ricardo attempt to analyze the effects of a uniform rate of profit on prices, asks Marx, when he nowhere discusses what determines the level of this rate of profit? And this in turn leads to an even more basic question . A uniform rate of profit is simply a way of saying that profits on different capitals are proportional to the size of these capitals: that is, each capital gets a share of total profit in proportion to its own size. But Ricardo nowhere discusses what determines aggregate profit in the first place. How then can he attempt to isolate the factors which regulate the movements of prices of production when he is missing a crucial ingredient- profit?

lt is therefore apparent to Marx, that even given the relation between Value and money price which he himself derives, 27 the specific manner in which Value regulates price cannot be developed without first showing how profit arises. And this, as we shall see next, leads Marx to the concept of surplus-Value.

https://critiqueofcrisistheory.wordpress.com/responses-to-readers-austrian-economics-versus-marxism/value-theory-the-transformation-problem-and-crisis-theory/
If you attempt to analyze the origins of surplus value—profit and rent—in terms of prices of production, it will appear that dead labor—constant capital produces surplus value. We already saw this in looking at the problem of fine wine aged in old oak chests. When we use production prices, it appears that the aging wine and old oak chests are producing considerable quantities of surplus value. But Marx already realized that this was an illusion. This is why Marx did not use prices of production to analyze the origins and nature of surplus value. Indeed, production prices hide the real nature of surplus value.

By Rugoz
#15326916
Wellsy wrote:And I think that Marx emphasizes that value is transformed across production and distribution, and that while supply and demand exists it is constrained by value because it is determined by it not in an exact sense (that they are identical). Value is immanent to commodities, abstract labor time is the immanent measure while money/exchange value is the external measure.


I don't see the point of this value debate. It basically boils down to "everything is man-made". How trivial, and useless. Abstract labor time (which doesn't exist) cannot explain prices, so what can it explain?
User avatar
By Wellsy
#15326919
Rugoz wrote:I don't see the point of this value debate. It basically boils down to "everything is man-made". How trivial, and useless. Abstract labor time (which doesn't exist) cannot explain prices, so what can it explain?

Except it isn't trivial when some economists still generalize commodity production and specifics of capitalism onto history itself and dismiss Marx's idea of value and labor power.
I think Marx has a solid but not air tight basis for determining his idea of abstract labor as existing as a social process and thus having objectivity not just as some mere belief but governing how people behave. It also gives a good case for the basis of why exchange value makes any sense and that if it's not an illusion, and there truly is cardinal measurability of commodities, then it is of something. But I think it is easy to just gloss over it and not concern ones self with what such quantities reflect. There is readily a shift from subjective desire for a things use-value to price and just the benign point that prices will rise when more people purchase something.

With a concept of Value, Marx is able to produce a very different set of ideas for the dynamics of capitalism, explain the origins of surplus value and profit, theorize essential class difference as objective and not deploy a an abstract methodological individualism that often presents us as all equals in the market place. It also raises concerns of whether there is a tendency for the profit rate to fall and implications there of that emerged since Adam Smith. I also think it helps some theorists look at how connected seemingly fragmented parts of modern life are as they are implicated within capitalist production.
http://digamo.free.fr/elson79-.pdf
The political problem is to bring together these private, concrete and social aspects of labour without the mediation of the value forms, so as to create particular, conscious collective activity directed against exploitation. Marx's theory of value has, built into it, this possibility.

This may be seen as a weakness, as bias, for those that may wish to imagine themselves neutral purveyors of science, but I have always found such a ideological objectivism distasteful even while I hold that there is truth and not merely a clash of opinions.

In modern economics a lot of questions do not even arise or may be posed problematically, or cannot be answered adequately. Because there are idealized assumptions, not merely the result of theoretical considerations of abstracting the essential but philosophical problems baked in.
Many recognize that models are models, but this is somehow seen as a defense of the basis of how one conceptualizes ones models and what assumptions are deployed.

We are not of a like mind and that is fine, but I am curious for those who have tread further than myself on Marx's work to provide feedback but in starting this thread I really made a poor choice as not many Marxists are on this website, have the time nor interest to go into such topics at length.
#15326937
Rugoz wrote:I don't see the point of this value debate. It basically boils down to "everything is man-made".

Natural resources -- ~99.99999999999999999999% of the universe -- are not, repeat, NOT man-made, and their value proves the Labor Theory of Value is objectively false.
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