/edu/ - Education

>>16402
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>- Whereas Marx claims that tech reduces surplus, by claiming that fixed costs would increase over time, and should lead to a reduction in variable costs like labour, Castoriadis criticises this heavily and says that tech provides opportunities to reduce fixed costs, and subsequently can actually increases the number of jobs
BS.
simple due to sheer numeric differences and difficulty, as well as the fact that a margin of profit means every chain in the supply chain adds a layer of non-production related increase in costs, means that the effect of cost saving in primary and capital-producing industries are not felt as much as they are in more tertiary industries. Every labour saving invention is applied more or less equally in industries, so its next to impossible in reality for labour saving in primary industries to outpace labour saving in tertiary industries after deducting all the profit gathering in layers between them.

>>16402
>- Whereas Marx claims that tech reduces surplus, by claiming that fixed costs would increase over time, and should lead to a reduction in variable costs like labour, Castoriadis criticises this heavily and says that tech provides opportunities to reduce fixed costs, and subsequently can actually increases the number of jobs
We have a couple hundred years of empirical evidence at this point. It's weird to pick a bone like this unless your aim is doing pro-capitalist propganda.

>- Castoriadis is highly critical of dialectics as a whole and suggests that Marx is claiming that simply because two things have tension with each other that they are opposites.
Not a marx-head but he's adapting Hegel's method (which is more than just dialectics) to materialism. He famously never published an intended breakdown of how his method works, so we have to glean this from the analyses he produced instead. So any criticism like this is necessarily something being read into his work, not something that's being stated outright. As to the materialist dialectic, it's pretty evidently about tensions between different forces or tendencies and doesn't track 1:1 with Hegel's idealist dialectics and notions of conceptual contradiction. The way in which material things contradict and act as "opposites" is as opposed poles insofar as they are in conflict. Marx could be argued to be reductive in that respect I suppose, but it's really not that difficult to add the necessary nuance to recognize when, for instance supposed "opposites" (such as bourgeoisie and proletariat) are conditionally opposed and sometimes conditionally aligned. The ways in which the capitalist classes have opposing interests gets plenty of focus, e.g. drive to reduce wages vs drive to increase wages. The times they align with each other would include cases like imperialism or colonialism where both bourgeois and proletarian members of a society stand to benefit from expropriation against another society. Another example would be the development of technologies that benefit both by raising quality of life (workers like to be healthier and happier, and they can produce more value that way too). In this sense they are "not opposites" (meaning literally wholly opposed or in conflict at all times), but they are opposites insofar as they are opposed to each other in general, in the sense that their respective roles are defined according to an opposition qua a relationship based on tension or divergent interests. In other words, they are opposites in a narrower sense with respect to that relationship or dynamic in particular rather than total logical opposites like Being and Nothing.
>Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today that actually unites us on a human level, rather than individual classes of people. Institutions are socially constructed but have taken on a life of their own due to our alienation.
This is why it's important to place the focus on the tensions, the forces, in other words the relations of the system rather than the individuals, entities, groups. It's sometimes a difficult abstraction, but people are very biased toward thinking in terms of the pieces rather than the way in which the pieces fit together. If you think of society as a network, you have the different parts (people, groups, organizations, whatever) and the connections between them (picrel is a very simple example to illustrate the point). Usually people put focus on the parts, represented by the nodes, but what determines the overall shape of the network/society is not the nodes themselves but they ways in which they connect/relate to each other. Part of why this is obscure to people is the fact that the relations shape the parts, e.g. having to work for a capitalist forces the workers to adapt to their situation.

>- Tendency of rate of profit to fall. He analyzed this after the war when it was going back up, but it has continued to fall even lower after that point. However he definitely was right to suggest that capitalism was far more resilient than Marx made out
Yeah Marx was an eternal optimist. If there's something he "forgot to consider" it's the ability for the ruling class to adapt and the lengths they would go to protect their interests.

>>16402
>- Castoriadis is highly critical of dialectics as a whole and suggests that Marx is claiming that simply because two things have tension with each other that they are opposites. Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today that actually unites us on a human level, rather than individual classes of people. Institutions are socially constructed but have taken on a life of their own due to our alienation.
Seems wrong in multiple ways. Dialectical oppositions are not necessarily opposites, and this is true in Hegel as well. Things in tension can be brought into opposition, even if they're not necessarily opposites (and not always even opposed). To take up Hegel again: the true and the good are not necessarily opposites, but they are the oppositions Hegel takes up close to the end of the Greater Logic. They can oppose each other insofar as each makes a separate claim for being an ultimate principle, yet what Hegel tries to show is that the claims of each separately can't hold as purely independent principles without resulting in one principle merging into another or else requiring some separate grounds to understand them together, as a whole, even at their most extreme. In short, it's the rational claim the principle makes and the logic of this claim that drives a principle into dialectical opposition, not whether terms are opposites per se. To think the tensions must always be opposites is to misunderstand dialectic.

>>16405
nice picture.
post moar please because it helps with the words :)

>Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today
Reactionary deflection

Nice, this is perhaps the first time I see a thread about Castoriadis, who is a pretty overlooked thinker.

For context, he founded the group Socialisme ou Barbarie after being disillusioned with Troskyism in 1949. They wrote a theoretical journal and expounded a pro workers' council stance. This group was pretty influential on Guy Debord, around the time the SI took a more Marxist turn.
After the dissolution of SoB in 1967, Castoriadis became more critical of Marxism, nevertheless without totally repudiating Marx, and developed a pretty radical theory about democracy and autonomy by returning to the Greeks. He was also a psychoanalyst and an economist.
I haven't read much besides a few articles there and there, but I recommend vid related, a subtitled interview of him about democracy in Ancient Greece, he knows his shit, and illustrates how much "representative democracy" is a joke, a "liberal oligarchy" in his own words.

>Whereas Marx claims that tech reduces surplus, by claiming that fixed costs would increase over time, and should lead to a reduction in variable costs like labour, Castoriadis criticises this heavily and says that tech provides opportunities to reduce fixed costs, and subsequently can actually increases the number of jobs
The World Bank makes data available about gross fixed capital formation as a % of GDP, dating back from the 1960s-1970s.
I plotted the data for the USA, China, India, Italy and Kenya with this URL: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.FTOT.ZS?locations=US-CN-IN-IT-KE
You can see the picture isn't so clear-cut: for China and India, fixed costs have increased over time. For the USA and Kenya, they stayed relatively stable. For Italy, fixed costs have decreased. It's interesting to note there is a big unemployment problem in Italy.
I don't know what to make of this, but even if bureaucrats can create bullshit jobs, does it mean that we should? Especially in an era where ecological disasters are looming and people don't even know why they commute 5 days a week anymore.

>Castoriadis is highly critical of dialectics as a whole and suggests that Marx is claiming that simply because two things have tension with each other that they are opposites.
No one has been able to explain to me clearly what (materialist) dialectics are. If the explanation is clear, it's usually the dialectics of nature kind, which is metaphysical and not very scientific anymore, ironically.
Dialectics seems to be a neat trick to think about concepts and how they evolve in history. From what I understand, two things are in tension, and this tension needs to be resolved. It doesn't mean that the new thing emerging from these tensions will necessarily be something explosive like a revolution that will completely negate the former historical concepts for eternity. A new concept arising from the conflict between workers and capitalists can emerge, englobing the two categories, like management or bureaucracy.
Anyway, dialectics are a nice tool to think about concepts, but it shouldn't induce religious fervor.

>Especially in the modern world where the lines between workers and capitalists have blurred such that we are all a sort of 'executant' now (think for example, a worker who owns company stock in the company they work out, takes on administrative tasks, or acts as a sort of middleman like a middle manager) and therefore suggests that bureaucracy is the largest enemy we have today that actually unites us on a human level, rather than individual classes of people.
I completely agree with this. Modern day capitalists are as stiff as Brezhnev-era bureaucrats anyway. Middle managers weren't common until the late 19th century after all.
There is a problem some Marxists refuse to face, which is: "why your manager (above a certain level), despite being a worker, will always side with the capitalists?".
It's not just a question of false consciousness, the manager has tangible advantages in the hierarchy of workers, because he is a director of the production process. He does the job of the capitalist, for multiple times the wage of an executant, as well as stocks, and will enjoy bossing you around in the hope he can finally join the capitalist class later in life. At same time, he is kinda stuck in a Skinner box full of Powerpoint presentations and diagrams, where if the numbers are good, he gets a food pellet, and if the numbers are wrong, the floor get electrified.

The executant vs. director problem is interesting: Some people are strictly executants (sweatshop workers), some people are strictly directors (CEOs), at first glance, it's like the proletariat vs. bourgeoisie, but the reason why Castoriadis came up with this, is to explain why work could be alienating, even under a worker's state.
At the same time, directors are themselves directed by directors, which are guided by abstract processes outside of their control, and can't envision any desirable change to the status quo. The bureaucrats are themselves trapped into bureaucratic processes, just like capitalists are driven by profits even if it means their own ruin.
Castoriadis was in favor of direct democracy and mechanisms like sortition, and thought politics was ultimately a matter of opinion (doxa), which gives food for thought.

>Institutions are socially constructed but have taken on a life of their own due to our alienation.
Modern life is like a Kafka novel. Everybody knows ecological catastrophe is looming, everybody knows shit is fucked, but nobody can reach the castle, even by setting buildings on fire in the village. Even those inside the castle don't have any clue of what's happening and what to do.

>- Tendency of rate of profit to fall. He analyzed this after the war when it was going back up, but it has continued to fall even lower after that point.
I don't have the technical chops to weight on the TRPF question, but it makes sense as a reason why capitalists would continue to squeeze workers as much as possible instead of investing more into automation/fixed capital.
Of course, profits were going to soar after Europe had been bombed to the ground.

>However he definitely was right to suggest that capitalism was far more resilient than Marx made out
In a draft of the letter to Vera Zasulich in 1881 about how could socialism emerge in Russia, Marx wrote the following line:
>[Although the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a social regime a regressive form an ‘archaic’ formation, its Russian admirers are…. ]
then crossed it.
Marx was aware capitalism was resilient, but he was also very optimistic.

>>16405
That pic is wrong on so many levels, jesus. Stop spreading your miscomprehension as education tools.

psychoanalysis is pseud bs

bumping this thread just to troll the /ukraine/ LARPers a little bit