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taoism seems explicitly market-minded, in that it seeks a balance between supply and demand without any external authority imposed, like the emporer, who rules best by not having himself seen. his analog of the knife sharpening itself to bluntness can be put on jevonian and austrian notions of marginal utility. a thing loses its value when there is too much of it; a paradox, such as aristotle presents, that water is better than gold, yet gold is more expensive. he says this is due to scarcity - would you have an alternative position? i really like todd mcgowan's lacanian economics: >>>/leftypol/2390777
where he sees surplus value as a negative magnitude of what he deems "inutility" (but what can be rendered as jevonian "disutility" or the expenditure of labour). his idea is that the sublimity of the commodity is in the surplus enjoyment it gives us, by a phantasmatic "gap" between exchange-value and use-value (objet petit a). thus, what is generative is the void of uselessness attached to the commodity (he uses the example of how the vacuum seal of a product constitutes its surplus enjoyment by the degree of its emptiness; the same way that he says an apple iphone packaging is often preserved by people despite being useless; thus, the phone is useful, but what is "extra" valuable is what is useless (thus, we purchase what we cannot use). this appears similar to the tao; that it is its absence which is its presence. value to marx is similarly ephemeral, but comprises what we may call "subjectivity". value is something subjective to the extent that it is mutually recognised in sale; yet to marx there is also a "phantomlike" objectivity to value which we may adequately call "unconscious". it drives us to its own determination, but as todd says, what is unconscious cannot be *directly* realised, but only indirectly. this is why todd says that disutility must be sold as utility for it to be sublimed, in what it is not (its truth is only known by a fiction) - thus as lao tzu writes:
<The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
https://terebess.hu/english/tao/mitchell.html
once we name the thing directly, we lose it. so this is a potential criticism of "value"; that as a signifier of itself (i.e. $1 = $1), it loses itself to the signification. you can mend this in a hegelian way by seeing the value of something as the quantity of something else (X = Y), as jean-baptiste say and marx do. marx also says this:
<The commodity that figures as universal equivalent, is, on the other hand, excluded from the relative value form. If the linen, or any other commodity serving as universal equivalent, were, at the same time, to share in the relative form of value, it would have to serve as its own equivalent. We should then have 20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor magnitude of value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
so then, (X ≠ X), in a similar manner to this:
<How then is the value, e.g., of a 12 hour working-day to be determined? By the 12 working-hours contained in a working-day of 12 hours, which is an absurd tautology […] Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch19.htm
so then, a product of labour is not itself labour, or as engels writes:
<As an activity which creates values it can no more have any special value than gravity can have any special weight, heat any special temperature, electricity any special strength of current.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch00.htm#1885
so then, we may see the nature of indirect signification, such as in the way of the tao. a thing is measured by its labour content, but is itself not labour. value to marx thus is not something *in* commodities, but a subjectivity which is realised *between* commodities in exchange: (X = Y)/(Y = X), etc.

just some basic suggestions. hope they help. 😅

This is not the problem you think it is. Philosophy expounded on causality and time in ancient times. It is a thoroughly modern doctrine that makes these idiotic koans about "historical progress" as a blind force. History never worked that way.

Main difference with European/Christian philosophy is that Law and the state were described exhaustively, whereas for the rest of the world, rulers didn't make any pretenses that their rule was about justice or order or anything necessarily good or reasonable. If you think English common law is arbitrary and dumb, get a load of the laws most of humanity followed. The point of describing the state exhaustively was precisely to work against the conceit that there was anything mystical about the state's laws, whereas for most of the world, this concept of the state and the conspiracy around it didn't exist in the first place. It was expected by most of humanity that the state and those who ran it would be awful and bring nothing good whatsoever, and the idea that it could be different never got anywhere. The state societies of Europe were far more given over to conspiracy and habitual lying.

It might be interesting to you to learn that "lassiez-faire" as described by the French physiocrats was lifted directly from Taoism and Chinese political thought; that was how they were translating the concept of wu wei. I always found it funny that the most despotic economic thought was somehow "liberal" and came to be associated with democracy.

>>25243

With China being a dynastic society for thousands of years, pretty much its entire history, the totalitarian state was always treated as a universal fact of life, that's the only kind of society people in ancient China ever knew, there was nothing else. The Tao Te Ching delves quite a bit into politics and how to run a society, but it does so entirely through the lens of a dynastic society ruled by an autocratic ruler, making the case for a benevolent passive dictator who rules by not ruling, applying the principle of wu-wei to a monarchy.

I feel like Western philosophy had its own primordial elements which had a lot in common with Eastern philosophy. The East had Taoism and Confucianism as the two original opposing yet complimentary philosophies which inspired everything that came after while The West had Plato and Aristotle. I think Aristotle's view of the world became the much more dominant force in Western thought over the years.

I didn't know about the thing with French economists applying wu-wei to capitalism, it's funny how ideas can be so open to interpretation.

>>25244
Quesnay who was the French physiocrat writer was really big into Chinese history and wrote a book about Chinese despotism (remember that at this time the ruling idea of France is enlightened despotism where the King had centralized a lot of things and emphasized his absolute authority over the state). The physiocrats write slightly before Adam Smith, and Smith specifically rejected the physiocrats after giving them a treatment in Wealth of Nations. It should say something that "lassiez faire" was never what the British promoted in the way that was assumed. The British Empire would from time to time interfere in political matters to rejigger this new thing, "free trade", and if you look at the actions of the East India Company they are running whole countries like a business, rather than operating as "regular rulers". Corporate government, in one way or another, is obsessed with control over the levers of management. There is nothing in Adam Smith that suggests that "state capitalism" can't be a thing. The important thing in Adam Smith is this moral philosophy where everyone is expected to be a rational actor and educated to conform to that if the society is to work, and it is implied that the class of university graduates had a super-authority over the entire arrangement and a rightful lock on positions in government, since they were more committed to the Empire and long-term thinking than typical businessmen.

For the physiocrats the rationale for "lassiez-faire" was not about a belief that this would optimize efficiency or create the most moral society. Quesnay openly states that if people starve, then this is just the natural order, likening the economy to a biological system. This is really important and often forgotten in the discourse, because Quesnay is the first place I've seen that description of an economic system (not that it was called a "system" at the time). Ibn Khaldun way back in the middle ages suggested that the history of states and empires could be likened to the lifecycle of an organism, but this was a statement about politics and had nothing to do with economics, which remained the affair of individuals (which is a roundabout way by which it entered later political economy, and when you think about the status of merchants in Islam and Islamic law it makes a lot more sense).

>>25239
I recognize your writing style. Why'd you stop posting with the quasi-ironic nazi flag?

>>25246
>The important thing in Adam Smith is this moral philosophy where everyone is expected to be a rational actor and educated to conform to that if the society is to work
what? adam smith promotes self-interest of the citizenry (the so-called "invisible hand"; a humean principle of "sympathy" as opposed to the more vulgar "private vices, public virtues" of mandeville). at the conclusion of book 1 of the wealth of nations he speaks on how self-interest also has its class character however, and so shows that what is promoted by capitalists is harmful to society, since it subsumes one's interest as that of another, while what is in the interest of the worker or landlord is good for society (since as he writes, wages and rents rise with prosperity and productivity, while profit rises in antagonism to these two). thus he concludes:
<But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society. On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going fastest to ruin. The interest of this third order, therefore, has not the same connection with the general interest of the society as that of the other two […] It is by this superior knowledge of their own interest that they have frequently imposed upon his generosity, and persuaded him to give up both his own interest and that of the public, from a very simple but honest conviction that their interest, and not his, was the interest of the public. The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations/book01/ch11c-3.htm
here, smith even sees the craftiness of capitalists as the cause of substituting public benefit for private gain by a rhetorical appeal to public interest (i.e. muh GDP).
>Ibn Khaldun way back in the middle ages suggested that the history of states and empires could be likened to the lifecycle of an organism, but this was a statement about politics and had nothing to do with economics
the founder of modern political economy, atoine montchretien (1615), speaks on how the economic body is an organic unity of the polis, with the practitioners of "mechanical arts" (as opposed to "liberal arts") as the foundation of social wealth. i translated the first book of his treatise here: >>25139