/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

The reproduction schema stuff in Volume 2 was easier after I watched this

>>2092513
The color highlighting really clears up some stuff. There videos are interesting. I've watched a few. The Marxist Project.

found this ancient thing, truly a relic of the 00s

From an 1897 speech given to working men in Boston by Daniel De Leon:

"Cheap gas, cheap fares and kindred matters are quite "taking," yet all agitation based upon them, not only leads away from, but is a blunt denial of Socialist principles and aims. Cheapness is among the last things that Socialism is after, because living can not be "cheapened" without the price of labor being proportionally cheapened. It follows from the scientific principle that labor is a merchandise under the capitalist system, that the laws of the market, which rule the price of all merchandise, must also rule the price of the merchandise labor. The smaller the quantity of labor needed to produce an article of merchandise the cheaper it is; if the things needed to keep the workingman alive, and in condition to procreate his species, become cheaper, the merchandise labor-power must become cheaper too.Those who have other things to sell than their own hides may be so much money in if gas, etc., is cheaper; but not the worker. Socialism has not the MARKET for its objective point but the FACTORY, the place where productive work is done. It seeks to put the implements of work in the workers hands; the rest will take care of itself. The municipal agitation for cheapness is a BOURGEOIS AGITATION. Socialism seeks, not to take cheap gas for the workers, knowing that that will only make cheaper workingmen for the capitalist; Socialism seeks to put the gas plant itself and all plants in the hands of the workers, because only so can the worker be rid of the capitalist parasite and keep all that he produces."

is marx worth reading in english? the translator's preface from the latest (2024) english translation of capital makes it sound very intimidating to translate from german, almost to the point where it seems pointless to read it in a tongue other than german… should people learn german before reading capital?

>If Engels applied his own standards to the English version of Capital he edited, that would help explain why he experienced moments of dismay as he guided the proj­ect to completion. Early in chapter 1, for example, the neologism and technical concept “Werthgegenständlichkeit” is rendered three dif­fer­ent ways in a single short paragraph, and none retains the aggressively nonnatural feel of Marx’s term. In one case, it is translated as “value,” in another as “real­ity.” We can say something similar about the much more laconic promises that Ben Fowkes made when he intro- ­ nglish translation of Capital, volume 1, which duced the second major E appeared in 1976. In his “Translator’s Preface,” Fowkes claims that Marx and Engels ­were of one mind about Marx translations, with both prioritizing accessibility above all else. That may—or may not—­have made sense in their day, Fowkes asserts; ­either way, it is now “no longer necessary to water down Capital in order to spare the reader” with re­spect to “Ger- man philosophical terms.” But while Fowkes’s translation does on the whole sound more technical than the Moore-­Aveling edition, ­there are quite a few places where in dealing with such terms he adopts the solutions they arrived at almost a century earlier. To stay with chapter 1, Fowkes follows his ­predecessors in rendering the philosophical neologism “Werthding” as the phrase “object of value,” which, you could argue, points readers in the wrong direction. “Object of value” tends to mark a distinction, or to signify that an object has more value than most ­others, whereas with “Werthding,” Marx wants to name an ontological feature common to all commodities. Below I ­will say more about both “Werthding” and “Werthgegenständlichkeit,” which I translate as “value-­thing” and “value-objecthood,” respectively.

>>2100153
I wouldn't sweat it. I don't think it's any more necessary to read Capital in German than it is to read Hegel before reading Capital. Sure Marx is very dialectical in his argumentation, and sure he coins a bunch of German neologisms that don't translate easily into other languages, but this doesn't make him incomprehensible or untranslatable. Engels was right to be overwhelmed by the task of translating Marx, but it is also important to remember that these ideas can and have been grasped by workers for well over a century now, and even in a diluted form they are still more powerful than an utter lack of class consciousness.

>>2100153
Just read multiple translations. You'll spend less hours doing that than learning German to level needed to understand Capital in German.

>2025
>almost 2050
>still beveling in labor theory of value

Damn… sad state to be in.

>>2100407
How it is LTV wrong though?
>inb4 mudpies

>>2100411
Marginal Utility Critique:

Value Depends on Subjective Preferences, Not Labor:
Critics argue that the value of goods and services is not determined by the labor required to produce them but by their utility to consumers.
Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras, pioneers of the marginal revolution, emphasized that value is determined at the margin—how much additional utility a consumer derives from the last unit of a good.
For example, water has low market value despite requiring significant labor in some cases because it is abundant. Conversely, diamonds have high value due to their scarcity and high marginal utility, not the labor required to mine them.

Labor as a Derived, Not Independent, Measure:
LTV assumes that labor is the intrinsic measure of value, but critics argue that the value of labor itself is determined by supply and demand. Labor is only worth what people are willing to pay for the goods it produces.

Problems with the "Socially Necessary Labor" Concept:
The notion of "socially necessary labor time" is ambiguous. What is "necessary" depends on technological, cultural, and social contexts, which vary widely.
Moreover, producers often work inefficiently, but their labor doesn't necessarily add value.

>>2100407
typical low effort smugness
>>2100412
I don't normally like accusing people of using Chat GPT, especially since it can save you a lot of labor in spending an hour writing an effortpost just to say things others have said before, but, buddy, at least ask chatGPT to format it as a paragraph. It is so obvious you got one of the famouse bullet pointed lists that ChatGPT spits out as an answer.

>Value Depends on Subjective Preferences, Not Labor:

Marx's theory of value distinguishes between use value and exchange value. this isn't some secret knowledge, marx says it right there in the opening chapter of capital volume 1. The subjective component of value is use value. The objective component of value is exchange value, which is expressed in the form of a money price. Money price is influenced by factors other than labor, but its primary and most influential component is labor.

If you have a complex material and/or social phenomenon (like production) where many material and/or social factors influence it, and some of those factors are more influential than others, there is a mathematical way to model it, and more influential terms are distinguished from the less influential. that model is linear regression. In linear regression models of production processes, labor inputs are by far the most influential term. But Marx didn't use linear regression models. Although many capitalist and socialist economists after him did, and many used input-output tables (similar to Marx's reproduction schemas or Quesnay's Tableau Economique) to model labor inputs on a macroeconomic level.

As for shit like supply/demand, it is telling that bourgeois economists insist in introductory economics courses that supply and demand "determines" price in a market, when in fact it determines how price deviates from its "natural" or "equilibrium" price. What determines that "natural" or "equilibrium" price is labor inputs. Bourgeois economists will sometimes say that it's not just labor inputs, but raw materials, transportation, scarcity etc.

Raw materials require labor to find, extract, transport and refine. and the more scarce they are, the more labor they require to find, extract, transport and refine. So this is not a non-labor influence on price by any stretch of the imagination.

And Marx's theory of value, I prefer to call SNLT to distinguish it from the less refined LTV of Smith, Ricardo, Franklin, and many other influences on Marx. Marx was not the origin of the LTV, rather, he refined it beyond classical political economy and took it to its logical conclusion of social revolution. it was the reactionary bourgeoisie who abandoned their own labor theory of value inherited from classical political economy and invented obfuscations like subjective and marginal utility in order to mystify value and suppress class consciousness.

>Critics argue that the value of goods and services is not determined by the labor required to produce them but by their utility to consumers

Marx says it's both. A commodity is only a commodity if it has both use value and exchange value, and was produced with social labor, in a capitalist economy, to be sold for profit. Value as SNLT is a property of social labor in a capitalist economy. Without utility, it is not a commodity in the first place. Marx synthesized Use Value and Exchange Value and reactionary bourgeois theorists ignore this synthesis and insist Marx is only talking about exchange value and pretend he doesn't know what use value is. It's shameless obfuscation.

>Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras, pioneers of the marginal revolution, emphasized that value is determined at the margin—how much additional utility a consumer derives from the last unit of a good.

It is rich to call marginal utility theory a "revolution." All marginal utility theory hits upon is that the subjective component of value, the use value (not the exchange value) decreases if a consumer has too much of something. It is the recognition of oversupply on the level of an individual consumer. Wow. Timmy was hungry. he ate an apple. He is not hungry anymore. he doesn't want a second apple. his second apple has no use value to him. Wow. Mindblowing. But if he goes to sell the second apple which no longer has use value to him, it will still have exchange value. Because it is still useful to other people.

> For example, water has low market value despite requiring significant labor in some cases because it is abundant

addressed above:
<As for shit like supply/demand, it is telling that bourgeois economists insist in introductory economics courses that supply and demand "determines" price in a market, when in fact it determines how price deviates from its "natural" or "equilibrium" price. What determines that "natural" or "equilibrium" price is labor inputs. Bourgeois economists will sometimes say that it's not just labor inputs, but raw materials, transportation, scarcity etc.

<Raw materials require labor to find, extract, transport and refine. and the more scarce they are, the more labor they require to find, extract, transport and refine. So this is not a non-labor influence on price by any stretch of the imagination.

>LTV assumes that labor is the intrinsic measure of value, but critics argue that the value of labor itself is determined by supply and demand. Labor is only worth what people are willing to pay for the goods it produces.

If labor value were "determined" by supply and demand, different types of commodities wouldn't have different equilibrium prices. Supply and demand explain standard deviation away from value as SNLT. Supply and demand "converge" at an equilibrium price, because the equilibrium price is the anchor determined by SNLT. Chronologically, the commodity is manufactured through labor processes before it reaches a market that has certain supply/demand. So the supply and demand is a post-production factor anwyway. Marx is talking about production when he talks about SNLT, not about market fluctuations away from SNLT.

>The notion of "socially necessary labor time" is ambiguous. What is "necessary" depends on technological, cultural, and social contexts, which vary widely.
It is not ambiguous because Marx in fact acknowledges that what is necessary depends on context. It is built into the concept. SNLT is the time required on average, in a given society, at a given time, based on the average skill level of the worker, and the average technological methods. He admits massive variations in SNLT depending on things like technology. And he acknowledges that some societies are slower to adapt labor saving technologies than others because of things like cultural and social contexts. He speaks for example about luddites burning machines and attacking the instruments of production instead of the mode of production.

>Moreover, producers often work inefficiently, but their labor doesn't necessarily add value.

This is the mud pies argument. Of course if someone spends 5 hours doing something that on average takes 1 hour they are not adding value. Marx acknowledges this as well.

You just haven't read Marx.

>>2100407
lolbertarian drivel

>>2100773
I'm actually kinda annoyed at this picture since it implies that porky steals major part of individual workers salary, which isn't actually accurate in most cases. What the porky gets the massive amount of money from is the employment of many workers, so that the surplus stacks up.

>>2100777
it's a meme, not a serious economic model. one could also object that in addition to the 3 circles not being the right size, the porky isn't usually a single proprietor, but a faceless corporation. What this really is attacking is the "taxation is bad cuz big government but my boss is a genius maverick innovator who paves the streets with gold every time he takes a shit" type of person

>>2073480
>in periods of hyperinflation for example, a commodity becomes more valuable than the actual currency (i remember one witty though incorrect tweet from stefan molyneux in 2020; "when your currency is toilet paper, toilet paper becomes currency").
>>2079293
>Don't people with non-hegemonic currencies basically eat shit through hyperinflation when they try to give everyone "free money?"

I've been thinking maybe that maybe the tendency of currency to inflate hides the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, particularly when the inflation is driven by currency depreciation. This relates to the interaction between Marx's argument that the rate of profit tends to fall over time due to increasing organic composition of capital (the ratio of constant capital, so machinery, to variable capital, which is labor), and the role of inflation in contemporary fiat economies. There's a been a lot of hay made ITT over fiat and inflation… the anon who was arguing that fiat makes Marx outdated stopped posting a while ago but he made interesting arguments even though I disagreed with them…

When inflation occurs, especially if it’s driven by money printer go brr, the nominal value of profits may increase even if the real inflation-adjusted profit is actually declining. So like, if inflation leads to rising prices of goods and services, the nominal profits of companies might look healthy or even increase, but this could be misleading because the real value of those profits may not reflect the underlying productivity and profitability dynamics. This can create a disconnect between the appearance of a healthy economy and the underlying reality of profitability in productive sectors. So like asset price inflation mostly.

Then there's cost of capital and investment decisions. Inflation fucks with interest rates. rising inflation can reduce real interest rates (if nominal rates don’t rise as fast), which may temporarily reduce the cost of borrowing for companies. This could trigger a bunch of investment from companies that were hesitating to borrow due to high interest rates, and the apparent rate of profit might not fall immediately as expected, therefore masking it. over time, inflation can undermine the real value of capital and wear away the purchasing power of profits, which may ultimately constranshumanist the potential for investment and profitability.

Inflation also impacts wages. If wages don’t keep pace with inflation, this could short-term reduce the cost of labor-power in real terms, improving the rate of profit , but this is often short-lived. Eventually, wages have to catch up, not with inflation necessarily, but they have to stay at subsistence levels, otherwise workers will starve and won't purchase essential commodities, and the productivity gains needed to offset a falling rate of profit become harder to achieve.

ALSO, and this doesn't really apply to the US right now, but could apply to a country like China, a falling rate of profit might be masked in part by currency devaluation in open economies, especially in countries that rely heavily on exports. A devalued currency could temporarily boost the profitability of exporters in nominal terms (because their goods become cheaper on international markets). But this doesn’t necessarily reflect a true rise in productive efficiency or a sustained increase in profit rates.

>>2100407
Bourgeois cretins love to drive-by repeat apologist dogma without elaborating because they know that a lie travels around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes

>>2100407
One can observe quite easily why labor is so important without even having the most childlike understanding of use value, exchange value, commodities, money, production, distribution, concrete labor, abstract labor, productive labor, unproductive labor, constant capital, or variable capital.


Consider: Why would the global economy come to a complete halt if all the workers went on strike? And why does the economy continue to function fine even when CEO and board members spend half the year on vacation, and the other half in meetings where they bicker over a handful of decisions about distribution among themselves while not engaging in any productive labor?

>>2100407
>talks shit
>gets replies
>left speechless

Damn…. sad state to be in.

>>2101599
Yea i get its a symbolic representation streamlined for easier smuggling into brain, I'm just being sensitive to unintended misunderstandings that can spread through such short form communication. Most people seeing this meme will never actually bother to develop more accurate model even if they buy the idea in the meme.

>>2102286
True. This is a real problem you bring up. Propose a workable solution. Not necessarily ideal, but doable.

>>2101708
>constranshumanist
CONSTRAINS

mods… pls…. have mercy with the overzealous word filters

CEOs are proletarians. Ceos produce value

>>2101963
These same observations could be made about writers. Writers are proletarians, so CEOs are as well

>>2101963
As well as teachers. They spend half of year doing nothing but consuming value. They go on strike and economy functions. Are teachers not proles?

>>2102922
This. Irony is, most teachers complain about how their students are dumb and lazy but the way teachers go about their work, they make it seem like their line of work is a matter of life and death.
Alot of teachers try to romanticise/idealise their respective academic study.
Whether it be through essay assignments or group projects.
Yet, outside of school, it has no real world applications.

>>2102939
>they make it seem like their line of work is a matter of life and death.
because it is. do you know how society would look if most people were still illiterate? If bleeding and leaching were still the primary forms of health care?

>>2075758
>if men create value, why not machines? Marx's answer is because machines don't exchange their labour as a commodity, so are in effect, artificial slaves.
Machines are dead labor. Constant capital. You are stuck where the Ricardians were stuck. This is why David Ricardo's true heir was Marx.

Two contradictions confronted David Ricardo in his primitive labor theory of value which Marx resolved.

1: He could not explain how the exchange of capital for labor, i.e. the hiring workers by a capitalist, was compatible with his LTV. If a worker receives the full "value of his labor" (Ricardo put it this way) i.e. if his wage is equal to the value of the commodity created by his labor, it is impossible to explain profit. If however a worker receives less than the "value of his labor" what about the exchange of equivalents, the law of value?

2: He could not reconcile labor value with the phenomenon of equal profit for equal capital. If value is created by labor alone, commodities on which an equal amount of labor is expended should be sold at approximately equal prices, regardless of the amount of capital used in their production. But this would mean different rates of profit for capital, which was obviously impossible as a long term phenomenon. We know how Marx resolved these contradictions. By recognizing wages are average subsistence while workers sell not their labor but their capacity to labor in the form of the commodity labor power, which is the unique commodity that creates more than its own day's value (subsistence) in a standard shift.

By buying labor power (commodified ability to labor for a set period of time, a shift) the capitalist ordinarily pays the worker the full value of his labor power (subsistence). Thus the exchange between capital and labor takes place in complete accordance with the law of value, which does not exclude the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist. Marx reconciled the law of value with the fact that in real life capitalists' profit is determined not merely by the value of the commodities produced in their factories but by the amount of capital involved. If value is created by labor alone and commodities exchanged roughly at their value, the various branches of production are in entirely different positions. But capital tends to yield a standard rate of profit.

Would the USA need to pay its massive debt to China and other countries if it had a Communist revolution and considered itself a completely different country?

>>2104492
When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they repudiated the debts of the Tsarist autocracy and Kerensky's provisional government. Lenin declared that the new Soviet government would not recognize or pay the debts incurred by Tsar Nicky's regime, which were largely owed to Western countries and banks. This decision was based on the Bolsheviks' ideology that the debts were imperialist and had been used to oppress the Russian people. The Soviet government argued that the debts were illegitimate and that they would not be bound by the financial obligations of the old regime.

As a result, the Bolsheviks defaulted on the Tsarist government's debts, which were estimated to be around 8 billion gold rubles. This move was seen as a bold and revolutionary step, but it also had significant consequences. The Western powers, including the UK and France, which had lent large sums to the Tsarist government, were furious and refused to recognize the Soviet government. The debt repudiation also made it difficult for the Soviet Union to access international credit and finance for many years, which hindered its economic development. Despite this, the Soviet Union never paid back the Tsarist debts, and the issue remained a point of contention between the Soviet Union and Western countries for decades. Somehow I doubt the western powers would have been much nicer to the Bolsheviks if they had footed Nicky's bill.

>>2102990
People confuse academic skills with essential technical skills. We live in an era where more people go to school and for longer times and we are seeing a loss of technical skills. A lot of people don't know how to do tourniquets, grow their own food, do basic plumbing, change car tires,etc.

Also, a lot of teachers don't even really teach outsidd
e of the assigned textbooks.

>>2104552
so it's a problem with the mode of production (disease) and not the teachers themselves (symptom). Actual teachers who teach useful life skills are essential for a healthy society.

>>2104552
>a lot of teachers don't even really teach outside of the assigned textbooks.
in the USA, they get in trouble if they do, i had a friend who is a HS history teacher lament to me about this. it's all about the bear minimum. cram them full of rote-memorized oversimplified entry level garbage and then spam tests at them before they forget about it

>>2104492
Hell no

>>2105973
it's a pretty important question and played a pretty big part in the backlash to past revolutions.

>>2104492
Bro if the US had a revolution/civil war, all the vultures of Europe (including Russia) and China would come to try to scavenge. Don't give capitalists anything.

>>2106004
this is why revolution has to be international and not merely national. But it's hard to coordinate the entire international proletariat so that doesn't seem close to happening.

>>2053406
>pre-marxian-economy.pdf
OK I finally finished this. It was very good. Almost like a shorter version of Theories of Surplus Value, which it cites often. It is helpful to have a history of pre-Marx political economy because it helps you to see through the BS when people revert to earlier forms of utopian socialism or petty-bourgeois ideologies or just plain old liberalism. It also elaborates on how free trade and protectionism are merely strategies to serve the ruling class and neither of them are necessarily historically progressive. Very good book. Enjoyed reading. Set the PDF to auto scroll and hopped on the exercise machine. Been about 3 weeks. Will probably never read again but was definitely worth going through once.

>>2106004
>Bro if the US had a revolution/civil war, all the vultures of Europe (including Russia) and China would come to try to scavenge.
what's there to scavenge

>>2107882
Territory, allied puppet governments, resources and people.

>>2107922
Documents from the alphabet agencies

>>2107931
if the nazi collapse is a model for the US collapse, they'll just burn everything when IT'S OVER

>>2108295
True, they probably digitized everything and have a big button to delete everything next to the archives

>>2108299
CIA invents the chvdjak button (for real)

>>2058542
psshhhhhh math?? it's MCM+ baby. that shrimple.

there's great soviet math textbook that got good reviews even in the West called Mathematics: Its Contents, Methods, and Meaning. It has a very literary style to it and explains things in great detail. You can also tell reading it that it is firmly historical-materialist and dialectical-materialist in its presentation of math. Even as early as the first chapter.

https://archive.org/details/MathematicsItsContentsMethodsAndMeaningVol3/Mathematics-%20its%20contents%20methods%20and%20meaning%20Vol%201/

Gonna be brutally honest here, I don't believe that LTV is empirically right or sound, BUT there any MODERN book show or at least presenting modern empirical evidence of LTV?

>>2110015
there's 390 posts ITT and several of them have covered this question already.

skeptics of LTV always waltz in and say "prove to me LTV is true according to my very specific criteria. I need a book written by a modern bourgeois economist which says LTV is true."

You aren't going to find that because, as has been discussed over and over again, modern bourgeois economists abandoned LTV precisely because it went against their class interests.

read this post >>2100466
There are also books in this post; >>2053406

I recommend reading "A Science In Its Youth" before even tackling anything else because it explains the entire historical context in the field of economics building up to Marx.

There are plenty of modern Marxian economists who adhere to LTV but if you don't think LTV is "empircially sound" you aren't going to listen to them because they're "biased."

You should elaborate on whether you've even read Capital Volume 1 or even a shorter work like Value price and Profit before opening this discussion because nine times out of 10 people skeptical of LTV aren't even refuting Marx's LTV, but the LTV of earlier thinkers like Smith or Ricardo.

Do you know for instance what constant and variable capital are, or what labor power is and how it is distinct from labor? If you don't you have no business being skeptical of LTV because you don't even understand what LTV is proposing.

In fact you should read Marx so you can at least elaborate on what parts of his "LTV" you're rejecting since there's multiple "LTV" in the history of "political economy" AKA "economics" as it was once called.

>>2102918
>>2102920
>9 days
>nobody took the bait
sudoku time

Could be repost but very interesting video debunking Friedman theories on inflation and money supply.

>>2115363
Daily reminder Milton Friedman was debunked on endogenous/exogenous money by Nicholas Kaldor
>The great revival of "monetarism" in the 1970s, culminating in the adoption of the strict prescriptions of the monetarist creed by a number of Western governments at the turn of the decade- particularly by President Reagan's administration in the United States and Mrs. Thatcher's in Great Britain- will, I am sure, go down as one of the most curious episodes in history, comparable only to the periodic outbreaks of mass hysteria (such as the witch hunts) of the Middle Ages. Indeed, I know of no other instance where an utterly false doctrine concerning the causation of economic events had such a sweeping success in a matter of a few years without any attempt to place it in the framework of accepted theory concerning the manner of operation of economic forces in a market economy