Why can't machines/technology create surplus value?

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Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:10:49 2020 No.17102359 [Reply] [Original]

Why can't machines/technology create surplus value?

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:12:56 2020 No.17102379 muh soul

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:16:27 2020 No.17102398 >>17102359 It will all take care of itself. Rock on OP.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:17:29 2020 No.17102407 NOOOOO NOT THE FREE MARKET I'M GOING INSANE

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:18:14 2020 No.17102413
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VALUE IS AN ABSTRACTION MADE BY MINDED, THINKING BEINGS. WITHOUT HUMANS, THERE IS NO SUCH A THING AS VALUE. HOW THE FUCK IS AN UNTHINKING, UNMINDED THING GOING TO CREATE VALUE WHEN VALUE IS CREATED BY MINDS????

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:20:21 2020 No.17102427 >>17102407 Kek

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:22:27 2020 No.17102442 >>17102413 What if a say car manufacturing place is fully automated and produces a car without human interference. Where does its value come from. I'm just smooth brained I am not being malicious

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:23:12 2020 No.17102444 >>17102413 Sure, but that is unrelated to Marx. Marx did not psychologize economics. He conceived value as an actual material property. There was natural wealth, but people added value to it by mixing their labor with it.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:23:23 2020 No.17102448 Everytime you make marx thread the realization of communism gets delayed by one month

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:24:34 2020 No.17102455

because when marx is talking about 'value' he is talking definitionally about the average amount of time it takes to make a commodity. he holds, as did Smith & Ricardo, that prices are proportional to the amount of labor time it takes to make them. if you had only machines creating a good, it would take no labor time and so the produced goods would basically be the same as goods in nature. the first guy who figured out fully automated cars or whatever would make money, but as the technology became widespread, the price of cars would drop to the input costs and profit would become impossible.

this being said I think that it also fails as an empirical theory for predicting prices because an analysis based on 'abstract labor' is actually premised on the idea that more and more types of labor will become basically analogous in terms of skill/scarcity, which has not happened. plus, time preference. I hear there is some answer to this in Vol 3 but I have never read it

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:24:54 2020 No.17102460 >>17102359 Machines do create surplus value, due to the infrastructure of the internet which is purpose built for the sharing of information, we derive surplus value by calling each other nigger on anonymous forums.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:25:06 2020 No.17102464 >>17102413 >2020 >not believing that all words correlate to a perfect, ideal form of which our world is only a shadow

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:29:13 2020 No.17102499

>>17102442
again, think about just what value is. It's a concept made by minded beings. What makes there be value in the world? Someone to invent the idea of value, and then think "this is valuable to me" about something in it. No matter how gigantic a pile of gold or oil or whatever is, if there is simply no one around to deem it valuable, then it is not valuable, because there is no one for it be valuable for.

Without a mind, thought, or consciousness, there is no such thing as value.

>>17102442
think, if there isn't anyone around to drive the cars, what value do cars have? They're a contraption of metal and glass that you can get inside and go places with. How is that valuable in any sense if there is no one around? What difference does a car on Earth or a lake of methane on Titan make to a dead, unthinking, unminded universe? Even given a God, what the fuck does God care for a car? He has literally infinite wisdom and is timeless, he does not give a fuck about shit like that.

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:30:35 2020 No.17102511

to add the "punchline" I forgot to the last post.

A machine produces something, yes, but you are the one that makes it value. You are the one who produces the value. No matter how much it looks like the machine did the production of value, if you are taken out of the equation, then there is no value. The value is dependent on the person, not the machine, therefore the person produces the value, not the machine.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 18:33:30 2020 No.17102529 >>17102511 >>17102499 thank u friend. i have been trick'd by fetishism, and still have some errors in my ways and conceptions. gradually getting there.

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:20:24 2020 No.17102856

Surplus value is unpaid labour time. A machine does not get paid, does not seek to recover its stolen profits like a worker would. it is inanimate, and thus cannot transmute any value beyond its cost, incrementally, to a commodity, unlike labour, which valorizes itself.

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:26:11 2020 No.17102892

>>17102359
It’s pretty simply just the fact that machines cost money and only last a finite amount of time before you have to replace it with a new one.

If you buy machines you can definitely make more money as a factory owner, but that’s because you are just producing overall more goods. It doesn’t change the rate at which *surplus value* is extracted.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:32:03 2020 No.17102928 >>17102359 Because they don't create value. Only labour does.

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:36:47 2020 No.17102968

>>17102442
The argument would be that the real value of the cars (not the price) would be reflected in the labour that occurs to make the production of the cars possible ie the maintenance of the robots or the extraction of the raw material to make them

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:38:42 2020 No.17102986 >>17102455 I don't think price is directly proportional to value according to Marx, just that it is corollary. The more manhours it takes to make a thing, generally speaking, the more expensive that thing is if it has a social use.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:39:11 2020 No.17102992 File: 136 KB, 2656x3044, 8e915db9f1ae1fb6a892a82f429445918d2ca62e.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] technology is a multiplier zero times something is zero

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:39:45 2020 No.17102996 >>17102413 Don't bother, Marxoids have spent more time reading dialectics than actually observing and thinking about things.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:41:53 2020 No.17103019 >>17102359 Because in that case workers would be rendered useless, and the whole theory would fall apart.

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:45:40 2020 No.17103043

>>17102442
>Where does its value come from.
From the people who want / use the cars. If this automated manufacturing plant was instead making something like, let's say, fleshlights that are specifically designed to rip your dick and balls off after one use, guess what? No one wants that shit, therefore it would have zero value.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:46:08 2020 No.17103047 >>17102444 >Marx did not psychologize economics Read Lacan you fucking pseud

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 19:50:01 2020 No.17103077 File: 523 KB, 478x598, the weak should fear the strong.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>17102359 Machines aren't autonomous and only do what they're designed to do by people who then make new ones which make the old ones useless

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 22:48:40 2020 No.17104027 how the hell are proles supposed to understand all this theory shit and read 1000 pages of das kapital

Anonymous Wed Dec 23 23:17:20 2020 No.17104173

Does Marx (or any Marxist) write any ideas along the lines of capital and technology being one in the same? From an economic perspective, it’s sort of accepted in a way but I’ve never heard it from a philosophical perspective. I’m curious how people are able to reconcile notions of tech-enabled communism considering, the way I see it, capital and technology are probably one in the same or at least go hand in hand. To perpetuate one is to perpetuate the other.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 23:18:30 2020 No.17104177 >>17102359 Machines organize in robo unions. They don't let the meatbag capitalists exploit them.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 23 23:19:08 2020 No.17104182 >>17102359 The value of something being traded is whatever the two parties in trade believe it to be worth. The market will most likely affect these prices. Everything else is cope.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 00:43:30 2020 No.17104638

>>17102359
Most posts ITT are wrong and are making recourse to some strange psychologistic misreading of Marx. Machines are congealed labor, produced from the intellectual labor of engineers and technicians, the manual labor of raw material extraction, the networks of transportation and infrastructure, and so forth. Automation is not some spontaneous, self forming phenomenon; it too is firmly enmeshed within the processes of capital. So, the value produced by these machines is in surplus of the abstract labor which fed into their creation.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 00:52:33 2020 No.17104684 >>17104638 >missing the point this hard the point of the thread is, how does marxist revolutionary theory deal with large scale automation of human labor which would remove the relevance of labor in the class struggle

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 00:55:40 2020 No.17104708 File: 192 KB, 1400x2132, bullshit-jobs-9781501143335_hr.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>17104684

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 00:57:00 2020 No.17104712 >>17104708 >david graeber: bull shit jobs

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 00:58:12 2020 No.17104717 >>17104712 >a theory

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:03:19 2020 No.17104734 >>17104684 Again, automation is not some magic thing which appears spontaneously. It necessarily depends on a substratum of human labor.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:05:24 2020 No.17104739 >>17104734 who cares? automation will end the proletarian-capitalist class struggle by literally ending the proletarian class. Labor will no longer be the crux of history.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:08:14 2020 No.17104751 >>17104739 see >>17104708

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:09:17 2020 No.17104754

>>17104739
>who cares? automation will end the proletarian-capitalist class struggle by literally ending the proletarian class.
pure ideology, friendo. where do you think the raw materials to fuel all of this automation will come from? so long as there is an exploitable class of slave-wage third world laborers at capital's disposal, human labor will not cease to be relevant.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:11:37 2020 No.17104760

>>17102359
This is stunningly dumb. The only thing that creates value is technology, or rather the interaction of humans and machines. Surplus value is defined only based on who owns the means of production. This is honestly so simple that I am in terror of someone who is so stupid as to be unable to understand this elementary concept.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:13:27 2020 No.17104767 >>17102359 Value arises from human activity

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:15:44 2020 No.17104774 >>17104767 not a great definition of value because there are tons of activities that are value neutral or value destroying

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:31:02 2020 No.17104823

Goddamnit why does every thread devolve into people totally misunderstanding the point based on using a random definition of 'value'? This is the eternal bullshit problem of every libertarian teenager take on Marx.

The word Marx used in German, translated into English as 'value', was 'wert'. Literally, you can tell by the word, it means "worth". Value in Marxism has nothing whatsoever to do with value in a subjective sense. This isn't value like "I like cherries and you don't like cherries so I value cherries but you value apples more". This isn't value like "I value a close family" or "I value nice clothes over a new phone".

A better translation, based on the idea of worth, might be "dearness" -- how dear is this, how cheap, hard easy or hard is it to get? This is why it's (erroneously!) called the labour theory of value -- Marx's notion of value rests on labour because labour is the ultimate determination of how hard something is to get.

Let's assume in the absence of prices, I'm something like a medieval lord and I have a certain number of serfs I can command to do my bidding. I want a steak, so I order my serfs to get me a steak. They have to spend hours of their time to raise the cow, butcher the cow, cook the cow, serve it to me, etc. -- this is the dearness, the effort involved in getting me the steak. This is the 'value' of a steak. 1/

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:35:10 2020 No.17104842 >>17102407 He supported the free market

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:36:02 2020 No.17104846

>>17104823
So if there's a fixed number of people at a given point in time and they're working a certain number of hours of their day/month/year/life, there is a fixed labour pool. So if I want steaks, those people can't be working to mine metal, or make cars, or grow grain, or make movies, or whatever other economic activity. The question about how much anyone 'values' (as in wants) those things is a separate question to the 'value', i.e. effort, required to produce any of those things.

This is why Marx always uses averages, under normal economic conditions, and all that stuff. He's interested in how much value a thing has based on how much effort, out of a fixed pool, it takes to make them. Marx was just trying to analyse capitalism, and barring some occasional strange conditions, Marx's theory is about _capitalism_, not some future communism.

Now if it takes me 100 hours of labour to raise that steak, and now I invent some invention (say an automatic cow feeder, better butchery tools, etc.) that lets me raise a steak in 50 hours of labour, it is now twice as easy to get a steak -- the steak is half as dear, it takes half as much effort -- and therefore the steak halves in value. 2/

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:36:59 2020 No.17104849 >>17104823 is it different if instead of a medieval lord asking you to make a steak it's the chairman of the communist party?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:45:07 2020 No.17104885 >>17102448 Good

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:46:43 2020 No.17104893

>>17104846
>Now if it takes me 100 hours of labour to raise that steak, and now I invent some invention (say an automatic cow feeder, better butchery tools, etc.) that lets me raise a steak in 50 hours of labour, it is now twice as easy to get a steak -- the steak is half as dear, it takes half as much effort -- and therefore the steak halves in value.
The desirability of the steak isn't halved though, and people still need to eat, and a nutritionally balanced diet should still be encouraged, so why should this dearness be relevant in economic planning?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:47:03 2020 No.17104895

>>17104846
Now in modern industry with normally operating competition, any improvement in technology by one actor (firm, company, tradesman, etc.) will be adopted by its competitor eventually, otherwise the competitor will need to spend more than average on labour, will have to sell their equivalent commodity product for more money, and therefore won't be bought and will go out of business.

Aside: this won't happen in conditions where cheap labour is cheaper than the initial investment in capital. This will incentivise capitalists to just keep finding cheaper and cheaper labour rather than investing in labour-saving technology, which to some extent has happened with outsourcing. Same effect occurs though: everyone needs to outsource, otherwise eventually the same price differential occurs and at best you need to refer to external concepts (e.g. "Made In The USA") apart from commodity price in order to influence customers.

So this is why machines can't create surplus value -- because they aren't the limiting factor, human labour is. Soon after the point at which we make a fully automated car factory, cars will be valueless because every company will be making cars automatically and will theoretically race eachother to the bottom (as long as we are assuming also: 'free' automated mining for raw materials, 'free' automated salesrobots, 'free' automated factory builders and so on -- until this was all automated it would still cost wages to do these things too).

>>17104849
Frankly, no it isn't. Still a fixed amount of labour being allocated according to someone's planning decisions, be that the Lord, the market, or the Great Helmsman Comrade Chairman. The Chinese government, and the USSR before it, manages to generate economic legitimacy by delivering the goods and raising standards of living, but that doesn't mean it is democratic or fun or good. Actually one big factor in the USSR's collapse was PRECISELY the problem of allocating labour to literally making steaks. Cockshott has a great youtube video about how the Soviets subsidised meat production to give people a little luxury, which is why meat was always in shortage (it was cheaper than its real 'value' as in effort to produce) and eventually it sucked so much 'free' unaccounted labour out of the economy that it contributed to the eventual collapse.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:47:43 2020 No.17104897 >>17104846 What if the steak goes cold

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:51:47 2020 No.17104916

>>17104893
Well it's utterly relevant in terms of how much stuff can we provide to people. If we can make 1/3rd of a steak per person per year, each person gets (even in IDEAL COMMUNISM) one steak every three years. If we can make three steaks per person per day, each person can eat three steak meals a day.

The Marxist theory is perfectly compatible with market theories about supply and demand -- the Marxist theory of value is basically just meant to answer the question "what determines supply?". I

This side of the the theory of value, the labour side, isn't talking about demand - Marx covers that elsewhere, and it's obviously a lot fuzzier topic (to use the classic Marxist example, the English worker demands beer while the Frenchman demands wine). For some reason, because mostly of bad faith master debaters, people love to get caught up in 'value' as in demand, desire, and want rather than value as in supplyability, dearness, effort to produce.

>>17104897
Then it would be a mis-steak.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:59:06 2020 No.17104945

>>17104916
>Well it's utterly relevant in terms of how much stuff can we provide to people. If we can make 1/3rd of a steak per person per year, each person gets (even in IDEAL COMMUNISM) one steak every three years. If we can make three steaks per person per day, each person can eat three steak meals a day.
But eating three steak meals a day is unhealthy, and this is well known, so the amount of steak that ends up getting made should be based on what people need, i.e. what is bought, not what we can produce, no?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 01:59:56 2020 No.17104949 >>17102448 You're not thinking very dialectically, anon

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 02:00:52 2020 No.17104953

>>17104945
Yeah of course, I'm not talking about the nutrition of steak here. I could be talking about cars, or smartphones, or beyblades, or linen coats here. I'm happy to keep talking but I can't quite figure out your angle. Of course when planning an economy you should take what people actually need into account. Are you trying to move to discussion about how we use a (L)TV for economic calculation?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 02:01:37 2020 No.17104957 >>17104949 I think the anon was making reference to 40k Squats.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 02:03:43 2020 No.17104965 >>17104957 What does this have to do with my daily exercise routine? (boom boom I'll be here all week, try the steak. Don't worry I know what a Squat is.)

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 06:16:46 2020 No.17105741 >>17102359 Machines can't be exploited.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 08:00:34 2020 No.17106105

>>17102499
Yeah it's like how a story has to say something or else it just ends up being a listing of events. It has to say something to the reader. It has to mean something to the reader. That's what a book orients around, besides the author's self reflective relationship with it.
The same goes for the manufacturing plant that produces cars without any human interaction. Did that plant pop into existence on its own, or was it created with a purpose by humans to create things which are valued by other humans? Humans create value, they are the locus of value.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 08:04:12 2020 No.17106118 >>17102359 But they can...

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 08:37:42 2020 No.17106224

>>17104846
>it is now twice as easy to get a steak -- the steak is half as dear, it takes half as much effort -- therefore the steak halves in value
Marx wasn't trying to explain basic supply and demand economics I'm pretty sure. That's definitely not the problem libertarians have understanding Marx either.

>>17104895
Human labor isn't the limiting factor. You just explained how automation refutes Marxian labor theory of value. Humans will always value cars. Most people would love to have 10 cars for cheap. Your argument boils down to "automation can't happen because then everything wouldn't cost money or be 'dear' anymore" which may actually be the case, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

>>17104916
There is an interplay between supply and demand. If there was no demand no supply would be produced, but demand can also be manufactured for something that never existed before. Ultimately demand is the thing that drives supply. If you imagine a useful new tool, you do that because you know you yourself would want it, and others would probably want it too. Necessity is the mother of invention (and production). Once you have covered the necessities and reduced the dearness required to produce them, luxuries are next in line to reallocate idle labor resources to. Necessities in some way become less valuable when their production becomes industrialized, but they are still necessary for survival so they can never lose all their value, but they may become less dear in terms of demand following the decrease in dearness incurred during production. Ultimately this process (capital I suppose) moves along as far as it can gobbling up all opportunities to cheapen any given thing's production process while arbitrating the temporary difference between lower dearness to produce/cheapness and inertia of societies valuation of the given item keeping the sale price high, until eventually the market becomes saturated and the price falls, leaving everything cheap/valueless/undear and society becomes decadent. At that point, demand dries up and production will have to die too because it can't be supported; there's no demand for it.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 08:52:13 2020 No.17106281 What do you manufacture when everything else is already ubiquitous and cheap to manufacture? Demand and consent.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 08:53:46 2020 No.17106285 >>17106224 What do you manufacture when everything else is already ubiquitous and cheap to manufacture? Demand and consent.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:03:17 2020 No.17106310 >>17103043 >fleshlights that are specifically designed to rip your dick and balls off after one use, guess what? No one wants that shit, therefore it would have zero value. I don’t know man, that honestly sounds like something /b/tards would love

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:14:57 2020 No.17106345

>>17104739
See:>>17104754
Also If we get to a point where Machine can magically end all human labor it would mean those machines have advanced to a point we’re humans are no longer need, at which point the technological singularity takes place and man’s intentions have become his god.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:16:57 2020 No.17106351

>>17102499
that still leaves you with the question of why certain objects and utilities have value for humans. it's clearly not arbitrary, but neither can it be reduced to some positive, objective quantity.
anyway, OPs point is more that Marx' understanding of value is retarded beyond belief and can't account for these kinds of problems in any capacity.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:19:43 2020 No.17106369

>>17106118
A tool only transfer it's own value to the fabricated good.
A hammer don't add value to the think it's building, but only transfer it's value through it's wearing process to the thing it is building.
As to why workers create value, it's because they are too stupid to notice they create more value than they are paid. They accept to give more than their salary.
An object can't give more than it's value. When it's worn out, it's value is finished, and has been transfered to the object it is building.
A human, on the other hand, can deliberately, even on a subconscious level, accept to give more than he receive/. i.e create more value than he is paid.
Only humans and nature can create a value. An inert tool cannot. An AI could, potentially, but we shouldn't go this way anyway.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:23:41 2020 No.17106393

>>17106369
>an object can't give more than it's value
yes it can you abolute living meme. that's the foundation of economics, not the exploitation of dumb workers but the creation of surplus value through the transformation of resources into more valuable resources. your menial labor isn't what transforms a bunch of materials into a computer, the knowledge of the people who tell you what to do is. you're not being exploited, you're profiting off their intelligence.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:44:00 2020 No.17106472 >>17104684 Automation makes a load of shitty cheap assembly jobs on the other side of the world. Capital relies on surplus value, automation is a spook designed to make labour movements compromise.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:45:13 2020 No.17106478 >>17104182 Idiot

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:46:59 2020 No.17106483 >>17106393 That's not surplus value in either Smith's sense, or Marx's. Srafa came to the conclusion as the above poster.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:52:07 2020 No.17106508 File: 85 KB, 305x374, Bohm.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Because Marx was dumb.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 09:56:14 2020 No.17106522 >>17106483 >that's not what Marx and Smith said yes and? where's the problem with the definition?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:00:45 2020 No.17106552 >>17104739 >Labor will no longer be the crux of history. Labor was never the crux of history. Recognition was.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:04:14 2020 No.17106567 >>17106552 so do you think the end of history will be a state of absolute unilateral recognition?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:08:30 2020 No.17106587

>>17102413
there’s always that one guy in Marx threads who, because he’s too stupid to have actually read and understood any Marx, just goes off on some banal tangent about how nothing matters anyway and that we’re all barking up the wrong tree - denying the very principles of the argument so that he doesn’t have to engage with the nitty-gritty. Undoubtedly, somebody will be offended by what I have just said, and likely call me a tranny or Marxist faggot (and they’ll even more likely reply with those now that I’ve said them), it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a brainless piece of human tephra, a smoking hole where a brain maybe once was but has been eaten away by the public education system, porn addiction and a predilection for ‘sweet treats’. I strongly advise you to kill yourself.

Yours,

Anon

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:09:47 2020 No.17106592 >>17106587 it's not like the nitty-gritty holds any water to begin with, marxist faggot

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:11:26 2020 No.17106598 >>17106592 You smell

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:12:41 2020 No.17106604

>>17106587
every marxist thread always has that one guy who thinks people that realize marx is wrong "just haven't read marx" because there is obviously no way someone could read an outdated economics polemic from 150 years ago and not totally agree with it. what? you noticed all these glaring flaws in marx's theory as well as the complete and total failure of communism? looks like you just haven't read marx!

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 10:14:16 2020 No.17106608 >>17106592 Based

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 11:39:55 2020 No.17107110 >>17106478 cope

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 11:51:40 2020 No.17107206 >>17106604 There’s a big difference between the hand-waving insubstantial ‘there’s no such thing as value!!!’ and a considered critique of Marx which actually engages and argues against his theory on its own terms, you troglodyte.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 15:08:02 2020 No.17108553

>>17106483
I think this >>17106224 is the problem with Smith's and Marx's definition of surplus value. Sometimes the tool wears so slowly, works so efficiently, and needs so little human interaction to maintain that it becomes a different type of tool. Even if it needs the same amount of humans as before to produce the product, it needs humans with a much different more complex skill set which prices most workers out. If the automated tools become more efficient from that point on, less humans are needed for work than before, meaning that surplus value can be siphoned indefinitely without the same amount of humans having to work, which is definitely a different ball game according to Marx's and Smith's definition as far as I can tell. If that's the case, the human shifts away from being the value producer. That's the entire point of industrialization and capital, to make machines an intermediary between humans and the product they create so that capital can own the machines and the profit the humans make by running the machines, while the machines are too expensive for the poor workers to buy themselves. The logical conclusion is to make the workers infinitely poor, i.e. to replace them with infinitely efficient machines

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 15:12:59 2020 No.17108592 >>17107206 dude there are so many wrong theories in world history, i don't see why marx should get special attention rather than say creationism or illness being caused by bad humors

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 16:22:53 2020 No.17109138

>>17108592
Can you refute the fantastic Cockshott video where he takes input tables and examines worth of outputs and finds a nearly 100% correlation for labour but not for other major inputs (electricity etc.)?

I will grant you that Marx could be wrong in details or particulars, but: if Marx is THOROUGHLY wrong, as wrong as humours or creationism, then why did mainstream economists lick Smith and Ricardo's dicks all day long right up until Marx slightly extended their theory and then the entire discipline had to do a backflip and re-invent itself on a new footing in order to ignore Marx's conclusions? And why do economists who start off with their own methods, like Piketty, keep finding trends that validate Marx's conclusions about the functioning of economies? (I'm not talking about his revolutionary theory here, just his analysis of capitalism as such)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emnYMfjYh1Q

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 16:30:59 2020 No.17109182

>>17102359
the only honest answer is that it's an arbitrary choice. If you substitute labour for capital as the only commodity that increaases the worth of a product, the whole thing comes out the same. The choice of labour as said commodity was just because 'well it makes sense'

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 16:37:56 2020 No.17109207

>>17106224
>>17108553
Why did you type long replies when you clearly read nothing in those posts? Why do you keep fixating on one English-language definition of 'value' as meaning 'subjective desirability'? The word in the original was 'wert', 'worth', like 'how much is that coat worth'? Marx's theory of value is not a theory of 'desirability' it is a theory of dearness, difficulty to get, effort to produce, hardness to acquire, which IS (quite trivially, provably) limited (in industrial commodity economies) by, and a function of, labour inputs. Why are you so clearly incapable of taking on any analysis or critique of the idea that isn't directly tied to a single dictionary definition of a word in a language Marx didn't write in?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 16:46:43 2020 No.17109257

>>17109207
If you want to use a weak version of LTV and simply say that it's a measure of 'dearness', then what does the theory actally tell us? if this 'dearness' doesnt actually (and it doesnt) correlate to anything in the subjective evaluation of consumers, then what exactly is this theory of wert, worth? Ff you incorrectly assert that labour is the only thing that can add value (assuming exchange value and use value depreciation of capital are one and the same) or, rather, create a 'surplus'. Then yes, this is clearly trivially true, so what's the point of it? You did admit it's pretty trivially related though, so wtv

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:11:42 2020 No.17109386 >>17104739 That's basically the fragment on machines thesis.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:16:32 2020 No.17109411

>>17109257
Well, it tells us an incredibly useful piece of information, which is the answer to the question it was originally formulated to answer: the primary determinant of the market exchange price of industrially produced commodity goods is determined by the amount of labour required to produce them (as taken in normal circumstances, on average, in the longer run, and outside of specific crises, shortages, and panics). This is actually very useful information! It answers questions that did infact puzzle classical economists.

You still hear many economically-trained people today (including >>17109182
this guy) talking about this idea of 'factors of production' determining costs, but it leads people to some very contorted questions like: why do goods get cheaper (over the long run) when more capital is invested in their production process, but dearer when more labour is required (e.g. when capital is destroyed in a war or catastrophically breaks down)? If capital and labour are just abstract 'factors of production', 'equal partners in production', etc., why does one price-relationship apply for capital and another for labour?

And finally: of course it correlates to something in the subjective evaluation of consumers, possibly the most important thing: price! exchange value! You hear it when customers say "that's too dear", "I can't afford those this week", "I wanted two but they're a bit pricey so I will only buy one". This is a very important subjective factor! Putting more labour into something doesn't make someone want the thing more-or-less but it strongly influences price of production and thereby influences the availability of that product to someone with finite wealth.

Nobody thinks these shoes took twice the amount of labour to make so I want them twice as much", but they do think "I want these shoes but sadly they cost twice as much as I can afford to spend" (or exactly as much, or half as much so I can also buy a coat, etc.). The point here is that for the most part, only useful, 'desirable', 'valuable' goods ever get produced in the first place, because nobody would buy something useless, and capitalists obviously want to produce things that sell so they can make a profit. So over the medium term, all the capitalists selling things nobody wants go out of business (say, Juicero), so by a kind of evolutionary or Lindy effect the market only makes available useful (again: necessary, wanted, pleasurable, valuable, desirable, etc.) things.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:20:01 2020 No.17109430 Communist scum always assuming someone capable of managing vast amounts of talent and capital are worth the same as the guy cleaning toilets. That the rich are all indolent rent collectors.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:29:21 2020 No.17109488

>>17109430
I don't think a lot of communists think that. I direct you to Lenin's remarks at the 11th Congress of the Communist Party, in 1921.

>We must concentrate all our attention on this, and not rest content with the fact that there are responsible and good Communists in all the state trusts and mixed companies. That is of no use, because these Communists do not know how to run the economy and, in that respect, are inferior to the ordinary capitalist businessmen, who have received their training in big factorics and big firms. But we refuse to admit this; in this field communist conceit still persists. The whole point is that the responsible Communists, even the best of them, who are unquestionably honest and loyal, who in the old days suffered penal servitude and did not fear death, do not know how to trade, because they are not businessmen, they have not learnt to trade, do not want to learn and do not understand that they must start learning from the beginning. Communists, revolutionaries who have accomplished the greatest revolution in the world, on whom the eyes of, if not forty pyramids, then, at all events, forty European countries are turned in the hope of emancipation from capitalism, must learn from ordinary clerks. But these ordinary clerks and businessmen have had ten years’ warehouse experience and know the business, whereas the responsible Communists and devoted revolutionaries do not know the business, and do not even realise that they do not know it.
>That is how the matter stands and that is the difficulty that confronts us. Any businessman trained in a large capitalist enterprise knows how to settle a matter like that; but ninety-nine responsible Communists out of a hundred do not. And they refuse to understand that they do not know how and that they must learn the ABC of this business. Unless we realise this, unless we sit down in the preparatory class again, we shall never be able to solve the economic problem that now lies at the basis of our entire policy.

Lenin is full of admiration, here, for the necessity of effective capitalist business administrators. The point is, however, that not every person who is rich is an effective administrator -- many are just rent seekers who got lucky, inherited wealth, and so on. And knock it off with the 'communist scum', this is a frenly thread.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:31:39 2020 No.17109504 File: 49 KB, 960x328, leftist memes.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>17109411

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:37:23 2020 No.17109542 >>17102359 Machines and technology are the product of labor. If they create surplus value, it was the labor that produced them that ultimately created the surplus value

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:38:53 2020 No.17109557

>>17109411
But the price of something bears almost no relation to the labour required to produce it? Prices are set solely by what the market will bear, nothing to do with how much it cost to produce. The thing you don't seem to understand is that in modernity, the price of production and the cultural value of the item have very little resemblance to each other.

There's two sticky points in your argument:

First, the assumption that cost-of-production correlates closely with final consumer cost. We can take the easy example of marketing to show this is not the case. Promo takes up a massive chunk of the budget of most commodity producers, would we consider this work of advertising as value adding work? Let's say we do. Then all we are really admitting is that the social perception of an item has (at least!) as much of an influence on the price of an item as the cost of production does. So if we admit marketing as value-adding-labour, we contradict our assumptions.

Secondly, you assert without backing that different relationships hold between labour and price and capital and price. Why is this? Capital is, in marx's view, considered to have an exchange value and use value that both depreciate, but bear no relation to each other. This is identical to the labour of a given person. The surplus created via labour is due to the mismatch between the value added by the labourer (transferred 'deprteciation' of the labourer) and the renumeration of said worker. It is only if you erroneously set the depreciation of use value and exchange value of capital to be the same that you get different relations.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:41:45 2020 No.17109586

>>17109430
>managing vast amounts of talent and capital
That's not as difficult as you think it is. Those people that accumulate Capital are not the smartest, but the most greedy.
Honestly, i don't consider mastering practical economy the most difficult thing.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:42:29 2020 No.17109594 Value is subjective.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:45:47 2020 No.17109616 >>17106393 Most factory workers with years of experience know more about how the factory work than the managers, or even the owner.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:47:20 2020 No.17109630 >>17109488 You need to seriously kill yourself retard commie

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:50:41 2020 No.17109639 >>17109586 >Those people that accumulate Capital are not the smartest, but the most greedy. What are you, a Christian? It has nothing to do with "greed."

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:54:31 2020 No.17109663

>>17109488
>Lenin is full of admiration, here, for the necessity of effective capitalist business administrators.
This would be a really bad defense of communism, or even Lenin, because they just admitted their utopianism. Communists are too incompetent to run an economy without markets; so they have to fall back on capitalists. What happened to all that theory?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 17:54:48 2020 No.17109666 >>17109586 If being Bezos, Gates, or Musk was not difficult. Then there would be more of them and they wouldn't be a rich individually.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:00:13 2020 No.17109702

What's the point even caring about this? This just seems like a bunch of scholasticism without any real application. Even if Marx's critiques about capitalism were true; his proposals have sufficiently failed. The Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe ended communism as an alternative to capitalism. I'm not sure why's so fetishized when his ideas only led to the misery of millions of people.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:03:05 2020 No.17109730 >>17104684 >marxist revolutionary theory deal with large scale automation of human labor Stupid like nationalization and work programs

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:05:44 2020 No.17109748 >>17102448 >delaying something that was cancelled 30 years ago

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:06:12 2020 No.17109752
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>>17109557
>the cultural value of the item
This is why I am talking about industrially produced commodities, not branded sneakers bought for fashion rather than to run, or Faberge eggs or prestige cars or works of art. Those are all methods precisely of differentiating the product, but they're not generalised commodity production (commodity MEANS interchangable, equivalent, undifferentiated). I am talking, and Marx was writing, about pencils, laundry detergent, toothbrushes, steel plate -- stuff that is basically identical and has firms competing against eachother to produce cheaply and undercut the competition. What do you think determines "what the market will bear"? -- in a functioning market, everyone constantly has an incentive to undercut the market, so I'm excluding the scenario of oligopolist collusion and price-fixing because that's Nod Real Gabidalism :^)

There's an academic debate about productive vs unproductive labour which I don't want to go into either way, but I agree that it is necessary to have marketing in order to 'realise' surplus value, i.e. to sell the stuff and get the money. The claim is not that labour input/labour value/etc. determines how much people WANT a commodity. Sensible capitalists will do their best to influence both sides of the supply-demand equation. They influence demand by marketing (which, by the way, as you note, requires labour because people are doing it, and those people cost money for wages) and they influence supply by their manufacturing supply chain.

Again, and I can't understand why I need to keep saying it, I am not saying labour value determines how much people WANT a thing (which of course has a bearing on how much they buy it), but how available the things are in a competitive commodity market. Marx has NO quarrel with the traditional market supply and demand mechanism being the determinant of prices -- he is constantly affirming it, through all 3 volumes of capital, as being the determiner of market prices.

For Marx, exchange value and use value bear no relationship to eachother because one is qualitative ("what can this thing do") and another is quantitative ("how much does it cost me to get one?"). Use value can't 'depreciate' quantitatively because it's not a quantitative measure -- it's like comparing the colour orange to the number 47.

The point about capital vs labour was that more capital makes stuff cheaper to produce (in the long run) and more labour makes it more expensive (because of more wages). If this was not true, nobody would ever invest in capital because then they'd have to jack up their prices for no reason, and get undercut by the competition. The reason you invest in capital is because it lets you make more things with less labour (more with equal labour, same with less labour, however you want to slice it), which ultimately ends up costing you less to produce, so you can match or undercut your own competitors.

>>17109594
fug u got me bruv

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:21:41 2020 No.17109874

>>17109702
Even assuming communism can't happen or is impossible, and we're stuck with capitalism for a long time, doesn't it then become even more important to really understand how it functions? Critique (of Political Economy) doesn't mean 'criticism' like "waah I don't like it this is mean", it means analysis, understanding, taking it apart so you can see how it works. All Marx was doing was taking the ideas and methods of the leading economists of his age and extending them a bit, and his conclusions were so shocking that post-1890 the entire field of economics shit its pants and had to rebuild from new directions just to avoid reaching Marxist conclusions about class struggle. The reason to read Marx and the Marxian (not MarxIST as in political parties) economic tradition is to understand capitalism. Mainstream economics doesn't have many answers to these kinds of questions, so it's worth shopping around.

Physics is dry scholasticism too until you need to fix a fallen bridge or rewire your kitchen.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 18:25:23 2020 No.17109896 >>17109752 >I am talking, and Marx was writing, about pencils https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 19:02:30 2020 No.17110123 >>17109666 >If being Bezos, Gates, or Musk Bezos got 245 573 dollars from his parents.. Gates is mommy's boy, who had mommy pull strings for him. Musk was born multimillionaire.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 19:29:25 2020 No.17110306 >>17104027 communist manifesto is enough for them to rebel

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 19:49:35 2020 No.17110467 >>17104027 It's not 1000 pages. It's 5000. Voi. 1,2,3,4, and you can add grundrisse, german ideology, That's the bare minimum to understand what Marx is about.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 19:53:17 2020 No.17110491 >>17109874 >we're stuck with capitalism for a long time We cannot be stuck with something that cannot reproduce itself anymore, due to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:12:52 2020 No.17110615

>>17110491
Mate I am the guy writing gigantic marxist effortposts, obviously I agree with this thesis, but I am saying even if we're wrong it's still good to study capitalism and Marx was one of the best analysts of Marxism.

>>17110467
This is very silly. The rudiments of Marxist economic understanding can be understood from two very short pamphlets, "Wage Labour and Capital" and "Value, Price and Profit". Read the Manifesto for a bit of historical method and you're well on your way. Grundrisse can't be essential to what Marx is about, because it wasn't even published until 1939. Anyhow, it's not some impossible feat to read Capital -- socialist history is full of miners, farm labourers and factory hands who read it by candlelight. I myself started reading deep Marx when I was in the military and kept reading after I left and became a wagie, I didn't read a single word of Marx in any college course (I studied CompSci and maths). You don't need to go to Yale or Cambridge to read and understand Marx.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:24:03 2020 No.17110681

>>17106587
>there's always that one guy in Marx threads who, because he's too smart to have actually wasted his life reading what is obviously dialectical drivel designed deliberately as a distraction as part of its inherent gravitation towards revolution, just points out how the words that Marx and his followers use carry a completely abnormal meaning not shared with common or educated use and how they all sound like massive retards or conniving scumbags as a result of this abuse of the language. Undoubtedly, someone will be amused by what I have just said, and rightly call me a tranny or Marxist faggot, it doesn't change the fact that I am in fact both these things. I strongly advise you to kill yourself because I am a passive aggressive dicklet. Yours, Seething Marxist Tranny Who Just Got BTFO by Superior Intellects #1,508,327,452

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:27:37 2020 No.17110704 >>17104965 Your entire cadence reeks of faggotry of the highest order, perchance only surpassed by OP.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:39:35 2020 No.17110782

>>17109752
>For Marx, exchange value and use value bear no relationship to eachother because one is qualitative ("what can this thing do") and another is quantitative ("how much does it cost me to get one?"). Use value can't 'depreciate' quantitatively because it's not a quantitative measure
Do you not understand that the exchange value is used as a proxy for the relative decline of a thing's use value, or am I completely misreading this?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:48:53 2020 No.17110850

>>17106351
>that still leaves you with the question of why certain objects and utilities have value for humans
sure, but that's not what OP asked. You're referring to the infamous "transformation problem."

The truth is, no one can answer the transformation problem, because that would be totally unconditioned knowledge. Unconditioned knowledge is impossible to know, because knowing is a condition. In the same sense, if you knew "exactly what" makes something valuable to someone, that would mean that you know everything about that person and could perfectly predict everything they are going to do, at every second. Again, this is impossible, because your own prediction would be inscribed within the world and effects it. If the person read the prediction of their actions, they would be effected by it, and do something contrary to the prediction.

Bourgeois economists just ignore this problem and say they've solved it be "letting the market decide" - but this is nothing more than a mystification. The market doesn't actually solve it, the problem still exists, and all we are left with is anarchism.

Marx is wise to this and the point of his project is to say. "Look. We are the ones that MAKE value at all. We also know that it is impossible to know exactly how we do it. So let's all agree that the problem is insoluble, therefore the market itself as an idea is necessarily impossible. So let's abolish markets."

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:50:53 2020 No.17110862

>>17110782
Are you talking bout the use value of capital (e.g. a lathe) or the use value of a consumer commodity (soap powder)? Use value doesn't decline relatively in the Marxian schema (or reality for the most part). Obviously consumed goods are consumed when used (their use value goes to zero), and capital depreciates in (exchange/market) value but the use value changes as a binary - either it functions or it doesn't. A lathe doesn't make progressively less useful products until it disappears, like some MMORPG game mechanic -- it goes on making things as normal until it finally breaks (or becomes obsolete, economically non-viable to run, etc.).

The more usual Marxian procedure for accounting depreciation is to work out how many periods 'n' of production (weeks, years, days, etc.) the capital is going to be in use for, and decpreciate the notional value of the capital by 1/nth of the original value, assuming it will be totally useless once n periods have elapsed. Apart from the fact that you've muddied the water and are using "thing" to mean either or both of "capital" and "consumed goods", there's no question of 'relative decline of a use value' because use value isn't relative and it doesn't decline in a gradual manner.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 20:51:39 2020 No.17110872
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>>17106587
that post is not anti-marixst, you moron. It's an apologetic to the "labour theory of value" - cappies reject this problem by saying "machines create value"

no. humans make the value for themselves. they are the creators. Being the creator is what liberates you. Trust me.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:01:43 2020 No.17110925 They do. You just can’t have it

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:07:19 2020 No.17110948 File: 26 KB, 480x480, socialism work.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:07:56 2020 No.17110955

>>17110862
>Are you talking bout the use value of capital (e.g. a lathe) or the use value of a consumer commodity (soap powder)?
Either or.

>Use value doesn't decline relatively in the Marxian schema
How the fuck does that work?
Take the above examples, lets say some new product is invented that makes a lathe an inferior option to the newly invented tool, or
what if soap is made irrelevant by some other form of disinfectant?
How does the use value not change relative to other products available?
Does a musket made today have the same use value as it did back in the 1700's?

>but the use value changes as a binary
So it's purely on a level of "it either works or it doesn't"? Are you serious?

> it goes on making things as normal until it finally breaks (or becomes obsolete, economically non-viable to run, etc.).
So it IS relative, how the hell do you type up the previous segments and then decide to go "but actually, if something comes out that makes it relatively worthless, it does have reduced/no use value".
What the fuck?

>The more usual Marxian procedure for accounting depreciation is to work out how many periods 'n' of production (weeks, years, days, etc.) the capital is going to be in use for, and decpreciate the notional value of the capital by 1/nth of the original value, assuming it will be totally useless once n periods have elapsed.
How do you determine the notional value?

>Apart from the fact that you've muddied the water and are using "thing" to mean either or both of "capital" and "consumed goods"
Because it's pertinent to both.

> there's no question of 'relative decline of a use value' because use value isn't relative and it doesn't decline in a gradual manner.
You literally just described in the previous sentence how Marxian economics accounts for the decline of a product.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:10:50 2020 No.17110965

So I've looked at the OP question and I want to know what people think "machines creating surplus value" would even look like. Surplus to what? A machine is paid no wage, doesn't reproduce itself (or a mode of life etc.). Taking a definition of surplus value as the difference between "what it costs to make an item" (labour cost + plant cost + materials) and what an item sells for in a normal market, how could machines ever create surplus value? The moment anyone produced a commodity without a labour cost, they would lower their prices in order to outcompete the others, who would quickly follow suit by adopting (over a month, a year, or a decade) the same technique of production (legally or illegally, by licencing or industrial espionage). End result (again in a functioning normal commodity market, soap powder not Rolls Royces or even Uber-style venture capital subsidies) would be products all selling at cost price and nobody making any profit, so it wouldn't be a worthwhile venture and they'd go out of business.

This leaves aside the actual, realistic condition which is what will actually happen -- in order to realise a profit, all big concentrations of capital will just seek to use their political and financial power to bust apart the actually functioning markets and form monopolies/oligopolies, and you'll just end up with rent-seeking monopoly behaviour rather than Real Gabidalism functioning competitively in a Free Market.

With human workers you can pay them less than the stuff they make will sell for, and you use that to make your profit, but you can't with machines because you'd end up selling everything at cost price. This is why machines can't produce surplus value -- there'd be nothing left to squeeze.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:12:10 2020 No.17110969

>>17110948
capitalism functions by dysfunction. It doesn't work by design so that it can never be judged to work or not. It doesn't matter how many lies a leader in a capitalist society will tell, how many wars will be started on false pretenses, how much crime, poverty, violence, injustice, sickness, degeneracy, pollution, sadness, etc. It doesn't matter how many things fail to function, how its always in crisis, or how many problems go unsolved. It will always be deemed "functional."

Capitalism's trick is that it has no condition for "not working", which is why you know it is a lie. The very fact that socialism can "fail" without turning into a suicide-genocide operation like fascism shows that it is the truth.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:14:29 2020 No.17110975
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>>17110969
>"fail" without turning into a suicide-genocide operation like fascism shows that it is the truth.
Leftism has never worked in the history of mankind. Every single time it has been tried it has ended up in mass death.

Capitalism has worked around the globe, it's a huge success.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:15:04 2020 No.17110980

>>17110969
>. It doesn't work by design so that it can never be judged to work or not. It doesn't matter how many lies a leader in a...society will tell, how many wars will be started on false pretenses, how much crime, poverty, violence, injustice, sickness, degeneracy, pollution, sadness, etc. It doesn't matter how many things fail to function, how its always in crisis, or how many problems go unsolved. It will always be deemed "functional."
Sorry all I'm hearing are the issues with Democracy and Republics.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:17:38 2020 No.17110992 >>17110969 Oh also >Capitalism's trick is that it has no condition for "not working" GDP no longer rebounds above its peak from the previous boom/bust cycle.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:17:45 2020 No.17110994

>>17110975
what would be a condition for its failure. How would we judge it to be failing? If the people starved? People starve all the time under capitalism, but you will just wash your hands of it and say "not capitalism's fault. im not responsible for those people" and that is exactly what capitalism is. Not taking responsibility for society. It is the most disharmonious society possible.

name the condition for its failure. If you can't name a condition for its failure, then that means it functions by dysfunction.

>>17110980
and this is exactly what will happen. Capitalism, in spite of being the system which governs all relations of work, the part of the world that we know as "the real world" - can NEVER be responsible for its own mistakes. "It wasnt real capitalism! you just didnt setup the government right!" Again. No failure condition.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:19:56 2020 No.17111003

>>17110955
here we go again, fixating on the definition of value like it's a shopkeeper's sale price in a shop in Morrowind.

>Exchange Value: how much a thing sells for in the market (quantitative)
>Value: dearness, attainability, effort required to produce etc. Maps closely to but not identical with Exchange Value, but strongly influences it. (qualitative, usually in hours of labour, but we won't fight about units now)
>Use Value: what a thing does for you.

Use value isn't a quantitative number, it's more like a description of what the item does for you. The 'use value' of a bottle of water isn't "about tree fiddy", it's "the ability to relieve thirst" or whatever. The use value of a box of soap powder doesn't change just because someone invents a new kind of detergent - it still has a use value of "cleans my clothes". (Maybe you can say, cleans them to X standard or cleans at Y shirts per tablespoon of powder, but that doesn't change instantly what it does just because something else exists).

>Does a musket made today have the same use value as it did back in the 1700's?
Exchange value? Absolutely not, of course. Use value? Sure, it still shoots a leaden ball a certain distance with a certain accuracy (although it also has other use values, like historical interest to a historian or decorative value on the wall to an old English squire).

>So it's purely on a level of "it either works or it doesn't"? Are you serious?
A piece of capital, say a lathe, either produces chair legs or it doesn't. It doesn't slowly go from making gold +5 chair legs to wooden -2 chair legs. Things decay and need maintenance, but that's the depreciation and maintenance cost alluded to above.

>How do you determine the notional value?
That's exchange value, or rather anticipated replacement value, divided by the time you expect to use the thing before it needs replacement.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 21:58:17 2020 No.17111228 >>17109430 In practical terms, the guy cleaning toilets is worth ten billion indolent rent collectors and so there should at least be something resembling parity.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:05:40 2020 No.17111274 >>17111228 the rich guy might be a former toilet cleaner when he was coming up, bezos used to work at mcdonalds and got so nice with the eggs that he could crack them with one hand, now u try it

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:09:05 2020 No.17111290 >>17111228 wtf is this obsession with rent collectors that I constantly see, jfc dude, just pay your goddamn rent

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:09:31 2020 No.17111292

>>17111003
>here we go again, fixating on the definition of value
Did you not figure that out from the first reply that I gave that my probing is entirely on those lines?

>>Exchange Value: how much a thing sells for in the market (quantitative)
No issues

>>Value: dearness, attainability, effort required to produce etc. Maps closely to but not identical with Exchange Value, but strongly influences it.
Fine.

>>Use Value: what a thing does for you.
And here's where I start having issues, is this not just an aspect of value? Or rather, I see no reason why this is distinct from value, and not just an aspect of it.
Why the specification?

>A piece of capital, say a lathe, either produces chair legs or it doesn't. It doesn't slowly go from making gold +5 chair legs to wooden -2 chair legs
Why wouldn't the level of effort to maintain a piece of equipment as it ages affect the use value? Why is it just a binary "Yes/no this makes shit", rather than a slowly changing use value affected by how easy and, you know, useful it is?
Say you have two lathes, both are new but one is more tedious/strenous to use compared to another?
Why can't you compare use values relatively and in a non-binary such as that?
Why can't the use value change if it were a single piece of equipment as it goes from the former to the latter?

>Things decay and need maintenance, but that's the depreciation and maintenance cost alluded to above.
Why doesn't that affect the use value?

>That's exchange value
How do you determine exchange value in a Marxist economy?
> or rather anticipated replacement value, divided by the time you expect to use the thing before it needs replacement.
And how do you fix a quantitative price to this value?

Fine whatever, I'll try to outline my key issues:
>Why is use value distinct from value and not just an aspect of value?
>Why isn't use value non-binary?
>Why isn't use value affected by decay?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:12:22 2020 No.17111307

>>17111290
>wtf is this obsession with rent collectors that I constantly see
Communists are usually at the bottom echelons of society, most people at the bottom of society rent property, as they are usually strapped for cash, they earn the ire of their landlord, which in turn increases their ire to them.

This usually culminates in LARP shit like "le guillotine xD" stress relief, when everybody knows they won't actually do shit.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:30:12 2020 No.17111412

>>17110994
>People starve all the time under capitalism
Starving is the natural state for mankind you fucking imbecile. Only through capitalism can even the poorest people in society be fucking obese from eating too much. Meanwhile in socialist societies that were once surplus exporters of food suddenly start suffering from starvation.

Capitalism is merely freedom, the private ownership of the means of production and capital. Simple as.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:31:52 2020 No.17111430 >>17110994 >People starve all the time under capitalism What was the last starvation event in a democracy? I can't remember it. I remember a whole of socialists starving to death though.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:34:55 2020 No.17111455 >>17110994 >People starve all the time under capitalism Of their own accord / failure. Under communism, it's a condition of existence.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:53:19 2020 No.17111585

>>17111430
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States

>>17111290
In this economic sense, 'rent' doesn't mean just money paid to a landlord for lodgings, but rather 'money collected by right of ownership rather than for productive work'. Real estate rent is one form of rent, but when people complain loudly they're getting angry at the whole set of relationships. Any time you're sitting as a middleman between a necessary service and using a your position to make money out of it without adding anything, you're rent-seeking.

>>17111292
Again, use value here is "what a commodity does", not in the same sense as what you can trade it for. From Wikipedia, use-value is "the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose". It's not commensurable, not comparable. Everyone gets very very fixated on the word 'value' (which I have been sperging about all thread), but really this would be much easier to think about if we just used different words.

>Why wouldn't the level of effort to maintain a piece of equipment as it ages affect the use value?
Because you're still getting the same use out of it, assuming it is still performing to spec and within tolerances. Two lathes requiring different levels of input are fundamentally two different use-values: they have different "tangible features of the commodity" which perform slightly differently. The lathe requiring less labour, less strenuous effort, is unambiguously more useful, more efficient. But as long as the single piece of equipment is still doing its job, it's still the same use value. So the use value doesn't change over time; what changes is the exchange value, how much you could sell it for secondhand, because that price will take into account how much it costs to run, maintain, service, etc.

>Why doesn't that affect the use value?
Because it's still doing the job. The use value will be changing in some sense, but that's value as in quality, not quantifiable worth. The quantifiable worth is changing every single second, of course, as it ages and would be liable to sell for less money if you could pass it on.

The last three questions have the same problem of terminology getting in the way of the discussion (which I am enjoying). Basically, because they're just different things. The word 'value' is confusing the issue here, but if we used "market price" and "featureset" you can see the difference immediately I hope. The featureset (use-value) of something doesn't change as it gets older or more worn, as long as it is still functioning; obviously if it stops functioning it is no longer providing the same use-value. But this isn't metaphysical discourse about some magical stuff that inheres in a commodity; use value is just the use you can derive from something. There is no unit of comparison.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 22:58:29 2020 No.17111612
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>>17111412
>Starving is the natural state for mankind you fucking imbecile.
Again, exactly. Everything something bad happens in a capitalist "society" it's immediately forgiven as just being natural and therefore "right" or permissible or what have you. If someone starves, well that's just NATURE NATURING. But if someone starves in a communist society? well that's communism's fault for communisming!

Capitalism does not function, because it has no possible way of being treated as dysfunctional. No matter how bad capitalist "society" gets it is fair, just, and good. Which means it is by definition the worst possible society.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:00:56 2020 No.17111621 >>17111612 based

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:01:23 2020 No.17111623
File: 310 KB, 1200x1200, hunger.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>17111430
people starve every day, even in the richest capitalist countries. The USA has over 500,000 homeless people. In the poorer parts of the capitalist global empire, there are many more.

But you simply do not care about them. They don't "count" because that's what capitalism is. It is dissociation, it is the opposite of a society. No one is accountable, everything is fair, everything goes, and no matter what happens, it's working.

Function by dysfunction.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:02:05 2020 No.17111627

>>17111585
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malnutrition_in_India
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_in_the_United_States
Is this supposed to be an argument?

>Real estate rent is one form of rent, but when people complain loudly they're getting angry at the whole set of relationships. Any time you're sitting as a middleman between a necessary service and using a your position to make money out of it without adding anything, you're rent-seeking.
False. Landlords offer a service that betters the lives of people, otherwise they wouldn't rent in the first place. It's an alternative way of living, renting offers plenty of upside compared to buying a home. What is the alternative for those who can't afford to, or simply don't want to buy a home if you outlawed renting?

>>17111612
Can you deny the fact that starvation (and poverty, in case you didn't know) is the natural state for mankind. How do you solve those problems? You increase wealth. Wealth cures poverty, nothing else.

There has not been a single capitalist society that suffered from starvation or food shortage because capitalism failed, quite the opposite. Socialist countries all over the world that once had a surplus food export, after adopting socialism suddenly suffered from food shortages and starvation.

The definition of capitalism is very simple. The private ownership of the means of production and capital. Please enlighten us how this is a) something negative and b) is a failure.

Reality says you are wrong.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:08:45 2020 No.17111668

>>17111627
Nod an argumend, just proof that famines and food scarcity is common even in "democracies".

>a service that betters the lives of people, otherwise they wouldn't rent in the first place.
Well, people need shelter it's not like people are choosing to rent while also having enough ready capital to buy houses outright in cash. It's not much of a choice between rent and death by exposure. The alternative is mass government housing construction, like council houses in Britain or the Housing Commission in Australia. In the 50s, over 50% of Australians lived in Housing Commission houses and paid "rent" via very small service fees to the government, which was then re-invested into more public housing stock, rather than into the pockets of private landlords.

>Wealth cures poverty, nothing else.
Private wealth in the pockets of twenty billionaires doesn't cure poverty, well-distributed wealth cures poverty.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:10:12 2020 No.17111672 >>17110948 >every first world country has public works, and almost all have public healthcare "but datz nit reelz socialism"

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:11:41 2020 No.17111678 >>17110975 >Sweat shops are an achievement that we should be proud of Workers rights are left wing and they have massively improved the living standard of most people

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:17:32 2020 No.17111706

>>17111668
>just proof that famines and food scarcity is common even in "democracies".
No one denies this fact, however it is not an inherent part of capitalism, democracy or whatever you want to blame for this natural phenomena that is scarcity.

>it's not like people are choosing to rent while also having enough ready capital to buy houses outright in cash
Just another sign that you absolutely have no idea what you are talking about. Renting is done across all income classes and wealth groups, it's not tied to income or access to capital. Renting, as I said, provides great upside compared to buying a home, which is a risky, capital heavy investment that comes with many potential downsides.

>The alternative is mass government housing construction
Doesn't work and is inferior to a free housing market. We know this because several countries have tried it. It's inefficient use of resources and results in nothing positive for society.

>Private wealth in the pockets of twenty billionaires doesn't cure poverty, well-distributed wealth cures poverty.
False. Wealth cures poverty, simple as. You will find well-distributed anything nowhere in nature and especially not so in any society.

>>17111672
That's merely very inefficient use of resources and reduced freedom and standard of living through an inferior top-down centrally planned system.

>>17111678
What were gulags if not government created mandatory sweat shops albeit much worse sweat shops?

Again I ask, what is the alternative? It's poverty, starvation and death.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:19:06 2020 No.17111716

>>17111612
>>17111623
>>17111627
>>17111668
>>17111672
>>17111678
>>17111706
Excuse me gomrades, this isn't generic thread for bitching about Marxism/Sosahlism/Gommudism/Capitalism being better than eachother, take that to /pol/. This is thread for discussion of whether or not machines can create surplus value, and why/why not.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:19:47 2020 No.17111718 >>17111716 No they can't. Value is subjective. Now fuck off to commieland again.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:21:08 2020 No.17111725 >>17111718 But "machines can't create surplus value" is a commie thesis. It's utterly vital to the Marxist idea of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Are you agreeing with communists?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:21:47 2020 No.17111730 >>17111725 I don't give a fuck about what commies think. They are all braindead.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:26:22 2020 No.17111749 They're constant capital. Jesus Christ did you read the fucking book?

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:31:07 2020 No.17111772

>>17111706
How do you account for market manipulation? Freedom absolutely results in that, often in the form of monopoly but there are many other forms, such as dishonesty (see JP Morgan manipulating the metals market).

Freedom for the powerful results in them tyrannizing the freedom of the less powerful. You need an authority capable of safeguarding the freedoms of the less powerful, and the best way to do that is to ensure the product of the society as a whole is put towards the goal of ensuring opportunity for all. This is why the best countries in the world have higher taxes and more social programs.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:45:38 2020 No.17111828

>>17111612
Capitalism does function. Just because it doesn’t strive for some impossible utopia like communism, that doesn’t mean it has no goals. The fact that under capitalism, starvation has become an exception rather than the rule and that diseases of excess far outweigh diseases of scarcity speaks strongly to its effectiveness. Not saying the modern world is great, but what we have going is much better than artificially sustaining some societal limbo where hierarchies are abolished with the fruits of capitalism until we all starve.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:46:24 2020 No.17111830

>>17111772
>How do you account for market manipulation? Freedom absolutely results in that, often in the form of monopoly but there are many other forms, such as dishonesty (see JP Morgan manipulating the metals market).
Market manipulation happens because of government regulation. JP Morgan is manipulating the precious metals market simply because government allows them to. In a free market such behavior would be punished. Free market doesn't mean society free from laws.

These monopolies you speak of simply do not exist in a free market, monopolies only ever exists because of government interference.

>Freedom for the powerful results in them tyrannizing the freedom of the less powerful. You need an authority capable of safeguarding the freedoms of the less powerful, and the best way to do that is to ensure the product of the society as a whole is put towards the goal of ensuring opportunity for all. This is why the best countries in the world have higher taxes and more social programs.

I, you and everyone else had the same opportunity to play American football just like Brady, I also had the same opportunity to play tennis like Federer, or golf like Woods. I had the opportunity to cook like Ramsay or the opportunity to write music like Beethoven. The difference is they had talent, you, me or most other people didn't. Pray tell, what laws stop you from pursuing anything of what I mentioned, or anything else? There is immense opportunity not the least in the west.

Which are these countries you speak of? Because higher taxes and more social programs are hardly something positive. They are inherently negative, and just because countries have them doesn't mean they are good.

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:56:01 2020 No.17111868

>>17110123
Yet they ended up multiplying their wealth greatly and revolutionizing industry and commerce. Resulting in tens of millions more people increasing their wealth.

Where other people born into wealth barely increased their wealth or blow it all

Anonymous Thu Dec 24 23:56:01 2020 No.17111870

>>17111772
>You need an authority capable of safeguarding the freedoms of the less powerful, and the best way to do that is to ensure the product of the society as a whole is put towards the goal of ensuring opportunity for all.
So you want a society in which no one can actually ever become more powerful than someone else? There's no risk then, which means stagnation.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 01:16:40 2020 No.17112308 >>17104717 Why do they always?

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 03:42:37 2020 No.17112806

>>17111585
>use-value is "the tangible features of a commodity (a tradeable object) which can satisfy some human requirement, want or need, or which serves a useful purpose".
>The word 'value' is confusing the issue here, but if we used "market price" and "featureset"
Right, so "use value" is entirely misleading as a term, it's just the practical uses of a product in question.

Additionally, since use value is actually just the usable features of a product, why does this matter?
How is "use value" useful except maybe as a technicality, if that?
Frankly, this all seems like autistic sperging on a what is just a mislabled non-issue by hungry santa.

> Basically, because they're just different things
You haven't sufficiently explained why "Use value" is separate from value, since what a thing can do gives value to an object.
I'm sorry, but from all I can tell it's just an aspect of the value of an object or a description of its functionality.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 03:44:43 2020 No.17112810 >>17102359 Machines and tech fucntion only has a multiplier of value, it would take AI for it to actually create value.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 03:52:44 2020 No.17112836

>>17111828
>Capitalism does function. Just because it doesn’t strive for some impossible utopia like communism, that doesn’t mean it has no goals
once again, for the 100th time, capitalism apologia is a rephrased way of saying "I am not taking any responsibility for society"

Under capitalism it doesn't matter that people starve, because it's "not trying to be a utopia." It simply doesn't count! No matter how much suffering, lies, corruption, pain, impoverishment. It never can be enough, because it's just natural, expected, and normal for there be some poverty! And not only that but capitalism is so great that causing diseases means it's MORE effective (at doing whatever a society is supposed to do?) than LESS.

But when bad things happen in a communist society? That means that it's all communism's fault for NOT being a utopia which means that it's bad, so we should, instead, have a society where bad things happen but are permissible.

It doesn't matter that to this day, right now, there are hundreds of millions of malnourished people on the planet, they don't count, because capitalist society is not responsible. It doesn't matter that in the history of communist countries, famines were statistically rare. It will never matter, because already by definition, capitalism is responsible for nothing, and communism is responsible for everything.

Because that is what capitalism means. That is how it functions in discourse. It is the configuration of a society that does not take responsibility. It is the configuration of a society where no one cares about one another, where it's every man for himself. It's the opposite of a society. It's made entirely of atomized little dissociated bugs all clamoring up against each other for resources in a race to see how fast they can cause everything of value to disappear and the human race to go extinct.

It has no failure condition, because that is already baked into its definition, which means that it is always already dysfunctional.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 04:00:00 2020 No.17112848

>>17112806
The only reason Marx made a big explanation about use value in the first place is because some bourgeois economists in his day used to run this stupid argument based on "people will pay for something based on how useful it is to them", without bothering to look at market mechanisms, effort to produce, supply/demand, or any of that. It was basically a popular just-so story of the time that many economists trotted out to explain why stuff costs what it costs. That's the background to this entire discussion. In order to even discuss market mechanisms effectively, Marx first had to do a bunch of now seemingly trivial groundwork so people wouldn't come at him and make these silly arguments.

The point is just that things are useful in themselves because what they do, but that doesn't relate very well to their exchange value. In a functioning market, a very useful thing, or very nutritious food, that is easy and cheap to manufacture will be sold at a lower price regardless of the pure fact that it is very useful or very nutritious; the exchange value, and for that matter the 'value' as in difficulty-to-obtain, is determined by other factors.

>>17112836
Pls comrade, if you want to discuss communism/socialism/capitalism go to one of the fifteen other Marx/leftism threads, or /pol/, this is surplus value discussion.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 04:00:07 2020 No.17112850

>>17112836
>But when bad things happen in a communist society? That means that it's all communism's fault for NOT being a utopia which means that it's bad, so we should, instead, have a society where bad things happen but are permissible.
Correct, since they directly take on that responsibility.

Capitalism, by definition, does not.

Mixed economies (which are virtually all modern economies btw) explicitly do take this on.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 05:11:14 2020 No.17113019 >>17112810 /thread

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 05:13:13 2020 No.17113024 >>17111868 >Yet they ended up multiplying their wealth greatly Tens of millions of people increased their wealth indeed.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 05:16:12 2020 No.17113034 >>17110123 >Parents, grandparents and so on slowly build wealth over generations What's the issue with this?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 08:28:59 2020 No.17113687 >>17112836 Hysterical braindead based bitch. You have no argument at all

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 08:34:42 2020 No.17113722 >>17102413 NOOOOOOOOO I'M GOING INSAAAAAAANNNEEEE SAVE ME GRAMSCI

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 11:38:15 2020 No.17114658 File: 51 KB, 600x543, Rich kids.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>17113034 No issue, it's perfect.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 11:39:19 2020 No.17114661 File: 326 KB, 1600x1069, Chinese kids.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] (...)

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:18:03 2020 No.17114863 >>17109616 only a fraction of factory workers who are unusually intelligent and invested in their job do, and those people get promoted to better-paying positions where their expertise is maximally utilized.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:22:40 2020 No.17114898

>>17110850
that's completely backwards. it's BECAUSE the problem of value is insoluble that market economics is necessary. no committee or centralized governmental structure, no "community of equals" can decide what should be produced in what qualities under which circumstances, so you need a nodal structure where individuals, groups, organizations can compete over the available productive capacity.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:26:12 2020 No.17114923

>>17112836
>is the configuration of a society where no one cares about one another, where it's every man for himself. It's the opposite of a society.
You literally can’t give a shit about everyone. You can pretend to, but you really don’t. Try to picture 300 million people, you can’t. The best you can do is care about the people around you and work to improve life for yourself and the people you love. That is why communism is shit. You can only act for the good of an unimaginable number of people so there is no positive reinforcement, only the negative reinforcement provided by your corrupt rulers often in the form of concentration camps.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:33:22 2020 No.17114973 File: 48 KB, 600x450, AzOiB_FCcAAgdYe.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>17114661 nooooo not the kidderinos

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:35:13 2020 No.17114993 >>17102379 this but literally

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:37:59 2020 No.17115010

>>17102499
>>17102511
Those two posts are beside the point. We are talking about the supply/production side not about the demand/consumtion side. Obviously value is only realised through selling and therefore demands that someone desires it gives it value. However the question is why humans dont value something that is produced completely automatic. Or if they do, where does the value come from? Can fixed capital aka machines and raw materials produce labour on their own or do they only pour some of the labour that flowed into the design and production of the machines and the extraxtion and transport of the raw materials into the final product? My guess is that this can be solved by looking at energy. If you look at input/output tables e.g. by paul cockshott the labour theory of value seems to hold for every sector except fossil fuels. They are so energy dense that they add value/labour on their own. If robots would be powered by abundand cheap energy like fossils they could create value in excess of labour. I think future marxists will have to add a thermodynamic dimension to the labour theory of value.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:39:36 2020 No.17115030 >>17114973 >>17114661 Hilarious exchange. Both capitalists and communists end up in the same place. Congratulations, you figured out it has nothing to do with ideology - it's just people that are bad in general.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:40:47 2020 No.17115037

>>17113687
Whether something is said to be functional or not is dependent on whether or not it's even POSSIBLE to say that it is functional or not. For capitalism, there is no way to say that it is dysfunctional. If there is a way, tell me what it is. Tell me the condition of possibility for a failure of capitalist society. If you can't, then its working definition, the way it works in discourse, is that capitalism functions by dysfunction.

Whether something it is possible to say something is dysfunctional or not, is dependent on whether or not that thing has a purpose. If a car's engine won't go, that means its dysfunctional, because a car is for going. If a communist society cannot feed and house all its people, it's dysfunctional, because a society is for caring for its people.

But a capitalist society has no condition for failure, because it has no purpose. Even if something like "GDP" or "the stock market" falls for years, it STILL doesn't matter, capitalism is still functioning, because "hey that's just a normal depression." All of this shit about the world being meaningless, having no purpose, and everything good and valuable in the world disappearing is because of capitalism, because capitalist society has no purpose.

>>17114923
yeah, and if everyone just cared about the actual they were in contact with, then every would would care about everyone. You don't need to care about 300 million. If you know 100 people, and you care for all of them, and every single person did that, it would add up to 300 million.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:52:49 2020 No.17115116 >>17102359 Someone has to make the machines and technology. Even if we hit a point where machines and technology are producing themselves, that's just taking labor value away from humans. This is basic laws of thermodynamics, bud.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 12:59:24 2020 No.17115154

>>17115037
>But a capitalist society has no condition for failure, because it has no purpose. Even if something like "GDP" or "the stock market" falls for years, it STILL doesn't matter, capitalism is still functioning, because "hey that's just a normal depression."
yes. just like any other system. weekly newspapers don't stop production just because sales keep going down, they keep going until the machine forcibly grinds to a halt because it's out of fuel, monarchies don't suddenly pack up and hit the reset button because the kingdom isn't doing so great, the soviet union was in its death throes for decades without acknowledging it to itself.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:04:55 2020 No.17115182 >>17104173 What is capitalism and why can't you have technology without it? Does this extend to all technology? If not how do you tell the difference between capitalism-bound technology and otherwise?

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:25:52 2020 No.17115318

>>17115037
I don’t care about your word games. IT does not have a function. Its value is not dependent on some word. Its function is what you get out of it. Quality of life and overall progress is vastly superior in societies with a capitalist framework than a communist one. The overall framework is something that makes sense to the human mind for how abstract to our primal minds the modern world is.

Another issue is that there is no such thing as pure capitalism. There are always socialistic elements.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:27:43 2020 No.17115330

>>17115037
>. If you know 100 people, and you care for all of them, and every single person did that, it would add up to 300 million.
That isn’t the point. If the fruits of your labor are redistributed to 300 million people, there is no feedback loop. No noticeable change occurs when you as an individual decide to work harder. So why would you?

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:32:29 2020 No.17115359

>>17115318
>There are always socialistic elements.
you mean to say that there's a social state. if it's limited by dumb bourgeoisie notions like respecting individuals choice (even acknowledging that there is such a thing), equality before the law and so on, then it's safe to say that you're not looking at a communist system.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:57:17 2020 No.17115491 Leftism is a plague and it's followers the parasites who spread it.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 13:58:42 2020 No.17115497 >>17115491 based, but only if your definition of leftism is good.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 15:27:28 2020 No.17115971 >>17115497 This. >>17115491 BASED. Hopefully, in a few years, conservatives will be laughed at for their ideologies, or if we are lucky, we might even get the chance of killing those white trash rednecks.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 16:30:17 2020 No.17116306 >>17115030 That's right, they should be working on the farm

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 16:33:05 2020 No.17116327 >>17115971 >white trash rednecks look at the way marxists treat the working class with shut reverence and respect, it really is hard to figure out how the proletariat isn't more receptive to collectivization under a communist dictator

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 16:36:22 2020 No.17116351 >>17116327 lots of disillusioned commies become nazis and vice versa really makes you think

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 17:00:19 2020 No.17116510

>>17102359

It’s just because the labor of humans is unique, it’s a notion rooted in the common enlightenment emphasis on the primacy of human labor. Machines are not as dynamic as labor, not at the moment. Even the highly variable kind like those programmable robot arms you see in all kinds of promotional material about industry and manufacturing, they need to be equipped and programmed for their specific task. You can imagine a machine like those robot arms that have the capability to do a lot of different tasks, but have been equipped to do a particular one like make a model of car. Maybe the factory has been fully automated for the car, but the issue is that if that company fully casts off its workforce, its competitors who still have human labor in some capacity will be capable of changing production processes in a way that company cannot. Machines even at this level of complexity we have reached are essentially still just dead tools. These tools can do an immense amount of things now, but they do not respond to reality in the way human beings do.

So effectively all changes in surplus value result from human beings, who are sensitive to the dynamics of human social being and can identify not only what other humans may want, or new ways to create things, but also can adjust their own labor to such things. A machine cannot adjust its own programming to being making different cars in response to market conditions, and it can’t change the way the factory is run to adjust for market conditions in general. People respond to those conditions, even at the lowly level of common unskilled laborers who can identify conditions and problem solve around a project like digging a ditch or erecting a building. If full AI is created, then I think the actual point of human labor’s uniqueness is officially gone and the economy and human society would definitely look radically different as a result.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 17:21:33 2020 No.17116642

>>17115971
It is impressive the extent to which “liberals” have been brainwashed lately. The corporations are on your side, they changed their twitter picture to a rainbow after all. The poor white population that makes up the vast majority of the working class on the other hand is pure evil obviously. They don’t like it when you cut kids dicks off? Literally nazis.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 18:51:32 2020 No.17117310

Reading through this thread and seeing all this boring economic stuff just makes me wonder what Karl Marx modern leftists read because none of this shit has to do with anything they care about with things like race and gender, in fact it’s all produced from capitalist degeneracy

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 19:08:11 2020 No.17117405 >>17102359 Because when you buy a machine it doesn't create further value unless you hire a human to operate it. Check out corn theory of value for a good refutation.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 19:10:20 2020 No.17117413
File: 134 KB, 750x948, 0E4758D7-1BBC-496B-B026-6B68F73E0081.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>17117310
If I were a marxist, the identity politics shit would piss me off more than it does as whatever I am now. It lends itself more to upholding the status quo of the things that matter for a capitalist power structure to absorb every “oppressed” sub group the way it has. It even manages to redirect blame onto the working class lol. It is unreal.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 19:17:38 2020 No.17117459 >>17103047 Not Marx.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 19:19:34 2020 No.17117474 >>17117413 Youre starting to see the daily struggle of the left and why its failing in modern times. Too much infighting.

Anonymous Fri Dec 25 19:22:43 2020 No.17117493

>>17117474
It’s not about infighting, they just aren’t Marxist or anti-capitalist anymore. They define themselves based on inferior hierarchies within the capitalist system and want representation in that system based on ambiguous and decadent identities. Ted Kaczynski was honestly correct, the Left is just a cult of inferiority now with minimal Marxist or materialist analysis

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 20:48:27 2020 No.17117931 >>17117493 This. I have met some far left leaning people who have disdain for the whole set, but they are incredibly rare. The vast majority are completely confined and don’t conceptualize of anything legitimately different.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 21:03:13 2020 No.17117997 another shit thread if machines created value then automating production would make products cost more than their handmade counterparts. and yet they cost less.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 22:31:43 2020 No.17118332 >>17109138 you're such a fucking pseud holy shit shut the fuck up

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 22:39:29 2020 No.17118360 >>17118332 great quality post 10/10 good contribution & thank u 4 seething

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 25 23:06:29 2020 No.17118515 >>17103047 lacan is the biggest pseud-magnet of all time. his psychological theories have all been empirically disproven

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 26 01:16:52 2020 No.17119186 >>17106587 tl;dr: NOOOOOOOOOOOOO YOU CANT JUST BTFO MY WHOLE IDEOLOGY THERES GOTTA BE SOMETHING IN THESE BOOKS THAT PROVES ME RIGHT NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 26 01:18:54 2020 No.17119195 >>17102856 >Surplus value is unpaid labour time lmao

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 26 01:22:13 2020 No.17119208 File: 35 KB, 393x533, 6182d28e9eb07c28b05d700847af705dimagejpeg.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] I don't know what surplus value is but if machines make it I'm against it

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 26 07:01:08 2020 No.17120491 >>17104708 Graeber was criminally underrated during his life. he will be a giant after his death. his posthumous book is gonna be a banger.

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/lit/ - Literature