Well, I never read Capital by Marx, I read couple of more short works of his, but still something is bothering me, Marx wrote in the XIX century, so his work are maybe outdated from my point of view, I think, but I'm open minded, does anyone here actually read Capital can tell me if still worth reading Capital or is relevant to the modern economics theories?
>>2114464Go to the political economy general.
>>2053059There's a lot of in depth discussion in that thread about whether Marx is outdated, what developments like fiat currency etc. mean for value as socially necessary labor time, the falling rate of profit causing "neofeudal" rent-seeking behavior of contemporary capitalists due to software-as-a-service models of payment, arguments over unequal development and/or unequal exchange, etc. etc. etc.
I found capital is a lot easier to read if you ground yourself in the era it is written and the eras leading up to it. i.e. learn about the origins of capitalism (Ellen Meiksins Wood has a great book on this), political economy before Marx (Barbon, Petty, Boisguillbert, Quesnay, Turgot, Smith, Say, Ricardo, Owen).
Maybe also read
3 components and 3 sources of Marxism by Lenin which is a very short work.
Familiarize yourself with Hegelianism and the dialectic a little bit, not a lot, since Marx uses these concepts a lot, especially in the first chapter. I don't think you need to read phenomenology of spirit or science of logic even though Lenin thought so out loud in one of his postmortem-published notebooks.
Some people were insisting Capital was outdated before Marx even died. I think a reviewer in the 1870s called it the work of a self-taught man unfamiliar with the last 25 years of development.
But I think it has a lot of important stuff to say nevertheless.
>>2114586I think Marx's labor theory of value and theory of surplus value harmonize nicely and resolve contradictions in Smith and Ricardo which approached but did not reach his level of understanding. I think the bourgeoisie since Marx push subjective and marginal utility theories in economics in order to obfuscate class relations. I think the bourgeoisie have also made a few social-democratic concessions to obfuscate class relations. Hence average wages slightly above subsistence instead of at subsistence, which makes it possible for the bourgeoisie to repeat over and over that exiting poverty is merely a matter of abstinence from pleasure and saving/investing money. Also the popularization of speculative assets. Proles are pushed now to invest in mutual funds, ETFs, retirement plans, savings accounts, stocks, bonds, etc. The abandonment of the gold standard and the adoption of fiat currency doesn't abolish money, commodity production, or value, but merely obfuscates class relations as well. The bourgeoisie have been remarkably successful since the Victorian era in which Marx wrote at obfuscating the superficial appearance of class relations without changing their essence.
But at the core of it, I think Marx is still right about the essence: labor can be divided into labor that produces surplus value, and labor that does not produce surplus value. I think surplus value is still appropriated by the capitalist and used to expand production. I think natural prices or equilibrium prices still approximate value. I think supply and demand and monopoly prices are still post-production factors that cause prices to deviate from equilibrium. I still think equilibrium/natural price of a commodity is still predictable within a small margin of error by socially necessary labor time. I think the way resource scarcity and transportation influence price can still be translated into factors of labor (i.e. the labor needed to find and transport a scarce resoure). I still think constant capital is dead labor and variable capital is living labor. I think the value of a commodity that becomes a means of production is transferred onto the commodities it helps people to manufacture over the course of its wear and tear. Marx was remarkably thorough in his investigations for a man whose doctorate was in classical antiquity, and who pursued political economy as an autodidact. There's a reason even contemporary and much more mathematically minded economics experts still call themselves "Marxian." There's a reason people still debate his ideas. There's a reason governments all over the world tax "value added" during each stage of commodity production.
>>2114655Euclid's geometry was so relevant for so long that his
Elements basically remained the definitive math textbook in the West until the renaissance
>>21146661. not the anon
2. i disagree that marx is outdated
3. HOWEVER I want to point out that one of the most common allegations for WHY Marx is outdated directly answers your question:
>how did the economy empirically changeI have heard ideological opponents of Marxism on several occasions allege that the transition to fiat currency destroys Marx's ideas because Marx's formulations were in an economy that relied on a Gold standard. Their argument goes like this: Money backed by Gold has a sociallly necessary labor time because it has to be mined, refined, purified, smelted, formed into standardized units, etc. The bank is legally obligated to remunerate reserve notes with precious metals. Since banks are no longer obligated to do this, we no longer have commodity money, we have fiat money, which is (allegedly) "backed by trust in the government that issues it" rather than backed by a money-commidty with a socially necessary labor time. Therefore, they allege, money in its current form does not conform to Marx's ideas, and his ideas are therefore outdated, and socially necessary labor time cannot predict price formation for commodities that are exchanged for fiat currency.
I disagree with this and I find the counterargument in pic related interesting.
>>2114733Socialism4All is actively doing this except instead of doing follow up videos he just actively makes commentary while reading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPNOYWZ4oX8&list=PLXUFLW8t2snsVGwM4dAE3ysZcJM1VIXrRAndrew S Rightenburg also has a complete audiobook for all 3 volumes of capital on youtube. As well as theories of surplus value.
https://www.youtube.com/@AndrewSRightenburg/playlists >>2114708for anything scholarly i far prefer being able to easily annotate and underline. fiction and narrative non-fiction or anything im not as concerned with retaining/deeply understanding i do epubs
spinecheck was great banter though
>>2114760No need for scare quotes.
>>2114708>why would anyone use a physical book and not a digital document they could digitally search through?Because they're hobbyist middle-classers looking for cool internet person points.
>>2114851it is uncomfortable for me to read on a computer and doesnt come nearly as naturally for me to add notes digitally. i will still read on my phone and make (physical) notes based on that for books that are rarer/more expensive, but i dont prefer it and its more difficult for me. ive been reading paper for most of my life and i prefer that, except for narrative pleasure reading which goes quick and is easier to get on my phone.
idk why thats a problem, this
>>2114845>Because they're hobbyist middle-classers looking for cool internet person points.is such a needlessly cynical assumption. using my hands and a pen to directly write on the page works best for me and is what im comfortable with, and yeah i do just enjoy having physical copies of books in real space even if its not the primary reason. its just a secondary benefit that its nice to sit out in the sun with a real book, i spend enough time looking at screens to try and use them to maximize my efficiency for something that already works for me
>>2114908Holy shit, take your meds retard.
>BECAUSE DEFINITIONSThe left-wing of capital is explicitly anti-communist.
>>2114736That’s pretty nifty! But personally audiobooks don’t do anything for me. It’s easier for me to internalize text than speech I think.
Not aiming to compete with anyone or “fill a void”, just figured it’d be a nice kind of public form of study.
>>2114580Lmao please ignore this guy who thinks you need to study a degree before reading capital.
Start reading and check out some YouTube summaries if you get confused. The early chapters are quite dense so you will probably need to
>>2115309None of you are academic researchers. Academic research is outdated by five years on average in most fields
>>2114665Geometry isnt a field of research. Elements isnt research. Mathematical proofs arent research. Dumbass.
>>2115312>valid if no older than four yearsversus
>outdated by five years on averageI see you're retreating
>Geometry isn't a field of researchlol then why am I able to look up research papers in several geometry subfields so easily?
https://arxiv.org/list/math.AG/currenthttps://arxiv.org/list/math.DG/currenthttps://arxiv.org/list/math.MG/current >I am interested in the single most impactfull book of the past millenium but I feel like I am too smart and my time too precious to spend the time reading the book that helped shape the current world, so I just want people to affirm that my preconceptions about putting in any effort into understanding the ideas i claim to support is a waste of time so I can continue wasting my time on image boards.
All works by any marxist that is well know is usable and still holds true for most of it and all of them have some aspect that might be slightly different now or not directly applicable.
The whole point of being a marxist is being able to read about different situations, about ideas written by others in different times, and understanding them, the context, and trying to see which is true, which is usable, which has changed and needs an update, and how your situation is different from them, so you need to figure out how to apply the general methods of research and praxis they undertook to build a more correct model to put to use now.
Marxism is not about you being a fucking spineless faggot waiting for yet another narcissistic cult leader to claim they know true reality and to only read their work, do what they say, gargle their balls, and to not bother reading the books that were read by actual revolutionaries because they claim its a waste of time because they figured it all out for you and all you need to do is follow them into death.
So no, it is not "outdated", and it is not "a waste of time", and yes, you should actually read the actual books because if my experience is anything to go off off, then everyone you know irl or online who claims to have read the works actually hasn't read the works, hasn't bothered to analyse their own situation and previous tactics at a fundamental level, and is just parroting "common knowledge" aka dogma they picked up along the way of pretending to be an actual good marxist. Read the fucking book, and then also read all the books that all stuck up marxist cunts who are entrenched in their small incapable orgs claim to follow to realise they don't actually know what the fuck they talk about and that their idols directly contradict half of what they do.
>>2115491Addition, because i'm fucking done with this anti-intellectual bullshit.
This is all the more proven by all the retarded dumbfucks online, 99% of marxists you encounter even irl, who when someone asks for a book to read to get deeper into marxism, recommends some normie-focussed bs whose only strength is rhetorical storytelling while being theoretically shit like all books by Parenti or god help me Zizek.
Do you want to be a marxist? Do you actually see that the movement is absolutely, irrefutably, on its ass, that nobody has any fucking idea what they are doing? That there is no group with an actual good plan that isnt just doing the exact same shit they have done in the past 80 years while claiming everyone who isnt them is a retarded revisionist piece of shit? That the entire movement is so splintered and uneducated that you can both post well known quotes from one guy and attribute them to another guy with opposing view, or make up shit entirely and nobody for years will call you out, they just immediately go into rationalising why XYZ figure would have said it, taking it for truth, just because a big name is on it?
If you can see this simple evident truth, be the person the movement needs, be different from 99.99% of this board, be different from 99.999% of the "marxists" in real life, and read the fucking books, read them critically, make noted, write down thoughts you have, questions you have, try to find books that answer them, do statistical research on our current society, and try to bring your theory into practice if you can.
Put on all of lenins big works as an audio book and just plow through it. Same for mao. Read engels and marx' smaller works first, then read capital. Read trotski, read stalin, read books written by people in the movement 30 years ago on their development. Try to identify areas in which you and your org or local "scene" is not making any fucking headway and use the modern wonders of google to find books on marxists.org about them, click through the links, read summaries, if they refer to something, read up on that, read critically, read critally, read critically, because even people who you disagree on some topic with know more about something or are more correct about something else. There are generations of people who broke their head trying to solve the same fucking problems we are trying to solve too but nobody takes the effort to just read them. If they read AT ALL, which they don't do, they just skim basic economic works of marx, or watch some youtuber summarize them and then pretend like they actually engaged with marx rather than some vulgarized summary that skips the most important part:
Reading these books teaches you how to think as a marxist, so you can use those same thought patterns, those same ways of investigating, where to investigate, what to question, in your own situation. You're not in fucking school, nobody is going to test trivia.
>>2115498Replace "Marxist" with "Christians" or "Muslims" and you have a far more common problem.
But it goes to show that political discussion is mainly brainlet territory
>>2116100>Replace "Marxist" with "Christians" or "Muslims" and you have a far more common problem.You say "I want a more peaceful world"
Now replace "a more" with "to fuck" and "peacefull world" with "children"
Not so innocuous now huh, sicko?
marx is a theorist of the gold standard whose ideas that money is a "measure of value" is undone by the work of history. money does not "measure" value (as per its universal equivalent value form), but standardises value as according to its denomination. marx in chapter 3 of capital vol. 1 insists that money js not the thing which makes values commensurable, but that it is the value embodied in commodities themselves (with marx prefiguring money as a commodity of its own, as he elaborates in the "value form" section in chapter 1). this is because marx sees barter as the relative value form which eventually expands into the money-form. his idea that political economy progresses by this historicity akin to hegel's historical conception is a false start.
he is correct where it concerns surplus or "unpaid" labour as the determinate factor of profit however. but this is hardly an exclusively "marxist" insight. his criticism of bourgeois economy is that they confuse the appearance of value (price) as its essence (value), and so the exploitation of labour is obscured by the wage relation, whereby "labour" alone is paid for; but marx's point, which can be called his own invention, is that (concrete) labour is inherently dispossessed from the worker, and so what he sells is his labour-power as a commodity, not his labour per se.
thus as he says in chapter 19: "Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value".
here, he makes distinction between its concrete and abstract aspect, or immediate (private) and mediated (social) form. this has its obvious political implications, which seem to be most valuable to readers of marx.
i would suggest you read the first 6 chapters of capital vol. 1. there, you will get the gist.
>>2118170>this is because marx sees barter as the relative value form which eventually expands into the money-form.A clarifying point: Marx was not a theorist of barter in the sense that Adam Smith was. Marx pointed out (and this was verified by anthropologists in the 20th century) that under "primitive communism" (what we now call hunter gatherer societies), barter took place between
communities rather than individuals.
So the level of barter constituting the relative form of value in real life was not a constant search for double coincidences of wants between individuals living in the same society, as Adam Smith asserted. At the community level things were shared (to a considerable extent but not a total extent) while between communities barters were arranged. Basically bater occurs between groups that tolerate but do not entirely trust each other, i.e between hunter gatherer societies, plural. Furthermore (and here I'm going with Caroline Humphrey and David Graeber) to the extent that people did barter inside primitive societies, it wasn't pure barter, but rather long term arrangements of social custom that didn't rely on a continual coincidence of wants. I.e. I give you fish today, since they will go bad if I do not, and you give me the stone axe a week from now after you have finished making it. I accept this time lag because I trust you and I understand how your concrete labor (axe making) differs from mine (fishing) and we will make similar arrangements in the future and have had similar arrangements in the past.
Here is Marx in chapter 2 of capital volume 1 where he mentions barter for the first time in that book:
>The direct barter of products attains the elementary form of the relative expression of value in one respect, but not in another. That form is x Commodity A = y Commodity B. The form of direct barter is x use-value A = y use-value B.[5] The articles A and B in this case are not as yet commodities, but become so only by the act of barter. The first step made by an object of utility towards acquiring exchange-value is when it forms a non-use-value for its owner, and that happens when it forms a superfluous portion of some article required for his immediate wants. Objects in themselves are external to man, and consequently alienable by him. In order that this alienation may be reciprocal, it is only necessary for men, by a tacit understanding, to treat each other as private owners of those alienable objects, and by implication as independent individuals. But such a state of reciprocal independence has no existence in a primitive society based on property in common, whether such a society takes the form of a patriarchal family, an ancient Indian community, or a Peruvian Inca State. The exchange of commodities, therefore, first begins on the boundaries of such communities, at their points of contact with other similar communities, or with members of the latter. So soon, however, as products once become commodities in the external relations of a community, they also, by reaction, become so in its internal intercourse. The proportions in which they are exchangeable are at first quite a matter of chance. What makes them exchangeable is the mutual desire of their owners to alienate them. Meantime the need for foreign objects of utility gradually establishes itself. The constant repetition of exchange makes it a normal social act. In the course of time, therefore, some portion at least of the products of labour must be produced with a special view to exchange. From that moment the distinction becomes firmly established between the utility of an object for the purposes of consumption, and its utility for the purposes of exchange. Its use-value becomes distinguished from its exchange-value. On the other hand, the quantitative proportion in which the articles are exchangeable, becomes dependent on their production itself. Custom stamps them as values with definite magnitudes. >>2118586i NEVER said marx was irrelevant, just incorrect. big difference. being incorrect matters more than being unfashionable.
>>2118591before reading chapter 2, read chapter 1. his telos is that the elementary value form (barter) is prefigured in the destiny of all societies, which by necessity leads to the money-form, most exemplified in capitalism. he historicises this very directly:
>"It therefore follows that the elementary value form is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity, and that the gradual transformation of such products into commodities, proceeds pari passu with the development of the value form."thus he concludes: "The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form."
he is an historical determinist, so to say. his idea is that barter becomes money, and this is the necessary progress society takes. this tracts with the obscenities that engels writes in anti-duhring too, that if you want socialism, you need slavery and all the other horrors that history produces, otherwise youre "unscientific". bullshit. man makes his own destiny. we have chosen to suffer. marx thinks otherwise as he also writes in chapter 1:
>"it is not the exchange of commodities which regulates the magnitude of their value; but, on the contrary, that it is the magnitude of their value which controls their exchange proportions."and as he restates:
>"when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic."this all depends on marx's dogma of equal exchange being the basis of the value form, but that is self-evidently false. marx never resolves the discrepancy between price and value, since he imagines money to be a messure of value (so as to argue against the merchant consciousness of relative profit, and so to establish his theory of surplus-value). in this, he also obscures the value of machines and slaves in unsatisfactory tautologies where the capitalist is actually in a conspiracy to lower his rate of profit by increasing output (since marx sees an antagonism in the two-fold nature of labour, between its concrete and abstract properties). its no wonder most marxists never actually read marx.
>>2118170> ideas that money is a "measure of value" is undone by the work of history.Money cant be consumed, thus acts as a measure of value due to this simple fact. You cant eat money, you cant drink money and it is an awful paperweight too. Due to this fact its value stays the same always since its use-value does not exist outside of being a measure of value and thus acting as a vehicle of trade due to this; it is smart bartering so to say. Instead of giving 15 fish for an axe, you have a paper that is worth 15 fish, and also an axe, and also 14 apples and you can exchange for anything you want according to its value; you are not limited to getting axes because the axe guy is the only one who barters for fish, you can get whatever you want as this money thingy can be used to get whatever you want thus everybody accepts it and uses it. It is genius and sets the precedent for all economic relationships to follow because it is the main engine behind them!
>he makes distinction between its concrete and abstract aspect, or immediate (private) and mediated (social) form. this has its obvious political implications, which seem to be most valuable to readers of marx.what he is talking about is that labor alone is not a commodity due to the fact that you can not eat labor, you can not drink labor and you can not wear labor, you can not use it in anyway whatsoever. Only when is this labor constricted to a certain context is that it becomes a commodity thus giving birth to labor-power; labor becomes dispossessed from the worker to become labor-power, because when someone is working that person is not doing what he wants he is doing what someone else wants to, it is not his own thing he is doing so as to create wealth. This labor-power becomes, thus, the substance of value due to it being the genesis of all commodities (it takes labor to take an apple from a tree after all) and it also becomes the immanent measure of value because it is absolutely required for commodities to exist (you gotta pay the boy who brings you the apples or else he will starve and you will not get any apples). Most of marxism lies upon the conflict that arises between both the employer and the employee due to the context this labor-power relation brings forth in the context of economic compensation, nothing else.
>>2119527>his idea is that barter becomes money, and this is the necessary progress society takes.<living in history<people discover barter<swear by it and use it to get everything they want and even some of their needs<it gets to the point they are bartering for things they do not want because such things are the ones they barter for things they do want and otherwise could not get<it gets pretty messy with people having lots of things they dont need just because of things they need, they might spoil and take too much space<anon is surprised when suddenly money is invented out of nowhere again
>thus he concludes: "The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form."<be in history<barter simple commodities<imagine if instead of bartering for something specific you could barter for something you could barter for whatever you wanted<it would be like a simple commodity but like way better<money gets invented again for the 2819th time that year
>marx never resolves the discrepancy between price and value, since he imagines money to be a messure of valueBecause price and value are different things. There is also this thing known as commodity fetishization which is the reason why there is a discrepancy between what something is worth (in this is case the value) and what something is priced at, I mean just read it it is clearly explained in bold letters even the wikipedia article does a great job at explaining the thing.
>this all depends on marx's dogma of equal exchange being the basis of the value formYes, because you can not define the worth of an object or commodity on itself, you need something to compare it to to define what it is worth, what its value is. You cant say a pineapple is worth a pineapple without being stupid or high like a kite; you can say a pineapple is worth three apples or two fishes and in such a way you start creating the value form when you start relating every object there is to each other so as to create a network of value in the end every object is more or less compared to each other and that is when money enters the game as a bartering vehicle that reigns economic operations as it is a substitute for the thing itself that allows for the thing itself. It is genius!
> that if you want socialism, you need slavery and all the other horrors that history produces, otherwise youre "unscientific". bullshit.<be in history<create money<realize you actually can change the money for a live person<tfw somebody does it<tfw slavery is widespread since it is a darn good business as people need live persons for whatever<tfw unless we go through the conditions that allow these things to happen in the first place we will never get to socialism because socialism is just these conditions converging into a point of sink or swim that give birth to socialism as the natural response of the fight for life that exists deep within every human being<tfw
>in this, he also obscures the value of machines and slaves in unsatisfactory tautologies where the capitalist is actually in a conspiracy to lower his rate of profit by increasing outputHe does not obscure any value at all, what are you talking about? The whole thing of lowering his rate of profit is just bad faith on your part. Have not you ever worn a really cheap chinese-brand shirt? Even if is technically the same thing as an american made cotton shirt and does the same thing it is lower value because everybody can see it is cheaply made (and faster to create too thus allowing for greater revenue in the short term) and thus wont pay the same for it as for a hand made american made cotton shirt. What Marx talks about is "business man follow path of making things cheaper and cheaper because it brings forth big revenue in the short term, people buy them and then pay less for them and buy less as they are cheap and not worth that much (their value is lower even if it is the same thing) lowering his profit thus making business man make thing even cheaper than before again (and even faster production times) rolling down into a downward spiral of cheap made things, a short-term burst of cash inflow and ever-lowering long-term profits in relationship to what is invested into the business mainly because the products it makes are just frankly not worth that much because again everybody can see they are just so cheaply made it feels like even a kid with down syndrome could make something better".
To be honest the only conspiracy here is the capitalist hurting himself in the long term because he just wants that pie so badly in the short term.
>>2119651>Money cant be consumed, thus acts as a measure of value due to this simple fact.to marx, money is a commodity, so in theory can still be consumed. gold standard economies still had gold jewelry in circulation. money is just the form of value a commodity takes when it is appropriated as a universal equivalent. the issue is that money in reality is not a commodity; its function does not exist as an outgrowth of simple commodity-exchange, and so is not entered into this dialectic, of elemental to expanded, to general and money-forms of value.
>Due to this fact its value stays the same money's value stays the same? nonsense. value is always changing.
>its use-value does not exist outside of being a measure of value and thus acting as a vehicle of trade due to this; it is smart bartering so to say.no it isnt. bartering in reality is the trading of utilities and thus incurs no value relation. marx's contrary idea is that when there is commodity exchange of any sort, equivalent values are exchanged.
>Instead of giving 15 fish for an axe, you have a paper that is worth 15 fishhere is your original marxist sin. to marx, money measures value because it is itself a value in direct equivalence with other values. paper in itself has no value, thus cannot function as money to marx, unless it represents the fixed amount of gold in circulation (and thus acts as a substitute). from chapter 3:
>"Paper money is a token representing gold or money. The relation between it and the values of commodities is this, that the latter are ideally expressed in the same quantities of gold that are symbolically represented by the paper. Only in so far as paper money represents gold, which like all other commodities has value, is it a symbol of value."money to marx is not a medium of exchange which sorts values into commensurability, but only attains to its measure of value by itself being a value, as says here:
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time."this again makes more sense if you take your own perspective that to marx, money is just an advanced form of barter, and thus, paper cannot have an equal value to what it is supposed to represent. paper only has symbolic value if it represents a real value to marx, so to marx there cannot be any paper "worth" anything.
>thus everybody accepts it and uses itmoney is a tool of imperial power to enslave populations to the state; it is not spontaneously accepted as a convenience, but in all cases, serves a monopoly of power, which is the issuer of currency.
>It is geniusyet all monetary systems eventually fail
>what he is talking about is that labor alone is not a commodity due to the fact that you can not eat laboractually, marx sees concrete labour, or useful labour as producing utilities, which also exist independently of exchange. you can eat labour; its what we are always doing. what you cant eat is value, which is why it serves the bourgeoisie.
>Only when is this labor constricted to a certain context is that it becomes a commodity thus giving birth to labor-poweryou have it backwards. labour power gives birth to labour. labour power is the capacity to perform labour.
>labor becomes dispossessed from the worker to become labor-powerconfused writings
>This labor-power becomes, thus, the substance of valueonly by its conversion into concrete labour. take this quote from chapter 1 for example:
>"Human labour power in motion, or human labour, creates value, but is not itself value."this refers to labour per se, or concrete labour. take this other quote from chapter 19 as a mirrored quote,
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."marx restates his meaning; that (concrete) labour creates use-values (or the substance of value), but has no value, since value is in the magnitude of value, or exchange-value. it is only by exchange that concrete labours can become social use values, and thus be mediated by a common value, which is abstract labour, or labour power (expressed as SNLT).
>money is invented via barterthat is ahistorical nonsense, which is why i criticise marx for peddling it.
>Because price and value are different thingsonly in appearance and essence. to marx, price is the value form of money, and thus denotes an equivalence of value. the difficulty is when he posits "imaginary prices" coming from the pricing of non-valuable commodities like uncultivated land, which then contradict his ideas, since if exchange denotes equivalence, then how can unequal quantities be compared in the value form? his entire argument around surplus-value for example is in the presumption that only labour power as a commodity can produce a surplus in its value relation since part of its use-value is unpaid for, but only through the wage, which denotes the value (SNLT) of this labour-power.
>There is also this thing known as commodity fetishization which is the reason why there is a discrepancy between what something is worth (in this is case the value) and what something is priced atthats not what commodity fetishism means. also as i say, to marx, the value form measures equivalent values, not arbitrary whims of the market. this is central to understanding marx.
>he thinks slavery started by people voluntarily paying for slaveslol
>He does not obscure any value at all, what are you talking about?he claims that machines and slaves produce no value, but only convert their constant capital onto variable capital (yes, he also calls animals means of production). the issue is first his ricardian distinction between living and dead labour - the slave is "dead" but the worker is alive. seems like nonsense. also, the worker himself has labour-power, yet means of production are just pure labours, and not entered into a potent relationship to their own abilities for some reason. why not? i think all beings, including hammers, can possess labour power. the difference is that these beings do not exchange their labour power; they do not receive a wage. thus, if you paid a slave a wage he would suddenly become "valuable". here, the animal or machine can also be entered into the value relation if paid a wage; thus, their value is obscured and even denied by marx, only due to their non-actual status, which then projects onto their immanence as values. my own theory thus is that capitalism can easily work within automation by simply subsidising machine labour, which sustains the value relation and thus maintains the rate of profit. crises of overproduction are in essence, crises of underconsumption. this is keynes' usurpation of marx.
>business man follow path of making things cheaper and cheaper because it brings forth big revenue in the short termmarx's idea is more that automation simultaneously leads to the efficiency of labour but also leads to unemployment by the same stroke; thus, profit lowers since less people are available to exploit. this would also posit capitalist automation as impossible, yet we see it increasing more every day. why? because what allows profit is the compensation of machine labour, which is entered into the relations of labour as a whole. UBI capitalism is an impossible concept to marx, yet possible to us. why? this has been the work of history overturning marx, as i say. marx simply didnt go far enough, im afraid.
>>2119743>commodity, so in theory can still be consumed.Its only use value lies in being used in exchange, nothing else. Money is not gold, you can not use the paper or the coin for anything outside of "i pay you with this thing".
> its function does not exist as an outgrowth of simple commodity-exchangeIt is commodity-exchange the reason why it exists. It is a commodity made only for being bartered, a vehicle for bartering, to make bartering easier and centralized in terms of value so to speak.
>money's value stays the same? nonsense. value is always changing.Price is what changes. Not value. Because money's use value is only one.
> marx's contrary idea is that when there is commodity exchange of any sort, equivalent values are exchanged.Yes, because nobody gives away something for something else that is worth less.
> to marx, money measures value because it is itself a value in direct equivalence with other values. paper in itself has no value, thus cannot function as money to marx, unless it represents the fixed amount of gold in circulation (and thus acts as a substitute).Money is a symbol of value. Paper alone does not act as money, it must be a symbol of value to work.
>this again makes more sense if you take your own perspective that to marx, money is just an advanced form of barter, and thus, paper cannot have an equal value to what it is supposed to represent.He is literally saying the reason why commodities are worth something is because they are created by labour, not because people paid for them. Because they are worth something because of labour put into them is it that you can measure their worth with money.
> money is just an advanced form of barter, and thus, paper cannot have an equal value to what it is supposed to represent. paper only has symbolic value if it represents a real value to marx, so to marx there cannot be any paper "worth" anything.Of course the paper has no real value, but that is just because it is a symbol of value. You can not use it for anything but you can use it to get things that you can use, that is its value.
>money is a tool of imperial power to enslave populations to the state; it is not spontaneously accepted as a convenience, but in all cases, serves a monopoly of power, which is the issuer of currency.It is a spontaneously created tool. Money can not be directly and fully controlled by a central bank. What you are talking about is taxes.
>yet all monetary systems eventually failBecause of bad practices.
>actually, marx sees concrete labour, or useful labour as producing utilities, which also exist independently of exchange. you can eat labour; its what we are always doing. what you cant eat is value, which is why it serves the bourgeoisie.You can eat the product of labor, but you cant eat the action of creating such of a product (labor).
>Only when is this labor constricted to a certain context is that it becomes a commodity thus giving birth to labor-power>you have it backwards. labour power gives birth to labour. labour power is the capacity to perform labour.Labour is doing something. Labour power is when you use this ability to do something to work for someone else.
>confused writingsYou sell your ability to do something to someone, it is not yours anymore.
>only by its conversion into concrete labour. take this quote from chapter 1 for example:>marx restates his meaning; that (concrete) labour creates use-values (or the substance of value), but has no value, since value is in the magnitude of value, or exchange-value. it is only by exchange that concrete labours can become social use values, and thus be mediated by a common value, which is abstract labour, or labour power (expressed as SNLT).Labour only has value in the products it creates. There is no value in someone picking apples, but there is value in the apples because somebody picked them.
>that is ahistorical nonsense, which is why i criticise marx for peddling it.So you are really saying that money could be created without bartering existing first?
>Because price and value are different thingsonly in appearance and essence. to marx, price is the value form of money, and thus denotes an equivalence of value. the difficulty is when he posits "imaginary prices" coming from the pricing of non-valuable commodities like uncultivated land, which then contradict his ideas, since if exchange denotes equivalence, then how can unequal quantities be compared in the value form? his entire argument around surplus-value for example is in the presumption that only labour power as a commodity can produce a surplus in its value relation since part of its use-value is unpaid for, but only through the wage, which denotes the value (SNLT) of this labour-power.
That is why they are called "imaginary prices". That is why it is called surplus, marxism is about the worker receiving this surplus too since it is the value created by his labor power.
>thats not what commodity fetishism means. also as i say, to marx, the value form measures equivalent values, not arbitrary whims of the market. this is central to understanding marx.Value is not the same as price. Price can be influenced by commodity fetishism/fetishization.
>he thinks slavery started by people voluntarily paying for slaves>lolAs an economic institution it began that way.
>he claims that machines and slaves produce no value, but only convert their constant capital onto variable capital (yes, he also calls animals means of production). the issue is first his ricardian distinction between living and dead labour - the slave is "dead" but the worker is alive. seems like nonsense. also, the worker himself has labour-power, yet means of production are just pure labours, and not entered into a potent relationship to their own abilities for some reason. why not? i think all beings, including hammers, can possess labour power. the difference is that these beings do not exchange their labour power; they do not receive a wage. thus, if you paid a slave a wage he would suddenly become "valuable". here, the animal or machine can also be entered into the value relation if paid a wage; thus, their value is obscured and even denied by marx, only due to their non-actual status, which then projects onto their immanence as values. my own theory thus is that capitalism can easily work within automation by simply subsidising machine labour, which sustains the value relation and thus maintains the rate of profit. crises of overproduction are in essence, crises of underconsumption. this is keynes' usurpation of marx.Slaves, machines and animals do not have any value because you can not do anything with them. Animals and machines are means of production and do not have any labour power because outside of someone using them to create something they are totally useless on their own.
>marx's idea is more that automation simultaneously leads to the efficiency of labour but also leads to unemployment by the same stroke; thus, profit lowers since less people are available to exploit. this would also posit capitalist automation as impossible, yet we see it increasing more every day. why? because what allows profit is the compensation of machine labour, which is entered into the relations of labour as a whole. UBI capitalism is an impossible concept to marx, yet possible to us. why? this has been the work of history overturning marx, as i say. marx simply didnt go far enough, im afraid.UBI capitalism is created through taxes and other economic measures. Nothing to see with machine labour. Even if machines did not exist it could exist just from redistributing money from ordinary taxes to the people.
>>2114684>Their argument goes like this: Money backed by Gold has a sociallly necessary labor time because it has to be mined, refined, purified, smelted, formed into standardized units, etc. The bank is legally obligated to remunerate reserve notes with precious metals. Since banks are no longer obligated to do this, we no longer have commodity money, we have fiat money, which is (allegedly) "backed by trust in the government that issues it" rather than backed by a money-commidty with a socially necessary labor time. Therefore, they allege, money in its current form does not conform to Marx's ideas, and his ideas are therefore outdated, and socially necessary labor time cannot predict price formation for commodities that are exchanged for fiat currency.I've never heard this argument. It must be made by libertarians or something. The function of currency doesn't change no matter what it's value is tied too. Weird thing to say and most people will disagree at first, but trust in the government is a far more tangible thing than gold to the average person. My ability to labor and do commerce depends far more on power being on, the water being drinkable and criminal gangs not running rampant in the street. Wtf I care how many gaudy yellow bars the government is holding?
The gold standard is just a left over from feudalism when it made senses to tie liquidity to a resource that doesn't rot. That's it, golds value itself is subjective, it's not a useful metal to you're average peasant but it's scare and it's scarcity was needed so consumption couldn't outstrip the scarcity in the market. Around Marxs time he rightful predicted over production. Industrialization meant the production of the economy outpaced the scarcity of the currency. Even during marxs time banks were already forced to do fractural reserved banking were more paper money was lent out than actual gold on hand. The end of the gold standard was just formalizing this reality.
>>2119743i think youve got it backwards and are severely misunderstanding what marx is trying to say. like sure its important to be precise with your terms but you are just digging for a fallacy instead of getting to the argument. money being a token doesn't mean its does not represent value. Marx wasn't an islamist who thought it was a sin not to use dates and salt for trading. it sounds like you think you are catching him in some kind of logical contradiction that he presents as his preference rather then him objectively stating how capitalism works.
>since if exchange denotes equivalenceits defined as equivalent according to law under capitalism, we did this in the last unequal exchange thread. the capitalist has the right to demand higher compensation and this is not unequal because they legally own the mop. its not a tautology its just how it works.
>he claims that machines and slaves produce no value,they dont, and you must realize that the living labor embedded in machines is accounted for. you cannot produce value without exploitation. you can produce things, and those things can have value, but that value comes from embedded labor, not the machines.
>thats not what commodity fetishism means. again big problem with you not recognizing what is going on here and instead arguing over terms and minutiae. maybe this is marx's fault for doing the hegel thing and using a bunch of hyphenated capitalized nouns that have the same first part that matches a colloquial common word, but value comes exclusively from the wage relation, which is obviously equal exchange from the perspective of capitalist society, and just as obviously unequal from the point of view of the destitute worker who has nothing to exchange but their labor. it might not be precisely what commodity fetishism means, but what the poster is pointing to is that profit comes from the legal right to appropriate value from this relationship where production requires "voluntary" association with a private employer, and that commodity fetishism obscures this exploitative appropriation even if thats not "what it is"
>>2121016Sure people also made jewelry and culture artifacts from other materials. They weren't used as a currency though, I mean they could've but gold was chosen because it's scarcity. Which when it comes to industrial economies makes a piss poor currency because it's scarcity artifical limits all other economic activity.
Anyways not to get lost in the weeds, the Anon saying the gold standard was "true capitalism" makes no sense because the function of currency didn't change when we went to "fiat" currency. All it did was formalize the reality that economic production had for outpaced the scarcity of gold. Which was true during marxs time and banks got around this by lending out more paper currency than then they had on hand with fractional reserve banking.
>>2120464>Its only use value lies in being used in exchange, nothing else.i agree. marx disagrees; lets take this quote from chapter 2 for example:
>The use-value of the money-commodity becomes two-fold. In addition to its special use-value as a commodity (gold, for instance, serving to stop teeth, to form the raw material of articles of luxury, &c.), it acquires a formal use-value, originating in its specific social function.so marx sees commodity-money as having 2 use-values, a special and formal use-value.
>Money is not goldi agree, marx disagrees. lets take another quote from chapter 2;
>"although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver"and another,
>"What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in gold, because it is money"and another
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money."and finally, from chapter 3
>"And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."to marx, gold is money by its very nature. this is incontestable.
>Price is what changes. Not value.what do you think the value form is exactly? price to marx is denoting a thing's value, in relation to other commodities.
lets quote chapter 3
>"The expression of the value of a commodity in gold […] is its money-form or price. […] gold, now suffices to express the value of [x] in a socially valid manner […] because the equivalent commodity, gold, now has the character of money."the money-form is the final and most perfect value-form to marx, as we see in ch. 1, sec. 3
also
>Price is what changes. Not value<not valuelets see what marx says, from chapter 1
>"The introduction of power-looms into England probably reduced by one-half the labour required to weave a given quantity of yarn into cloth […] and consequently fell to one-half its former value."and more generally stated,
>"The value of a commodity would therefore remain constant, if the labour time required for its production also remained constant. But the latter changes with every variation in the productiveness of labour"marx makes the point over and over again that value, or exchange value, is a relation between commodities, not something inherent in their materiality; that would be their concrete aspect.
>Yes, because nobody gives away something for something else that is worth less.no, no. marx's point isnt that humans equate value by rational deduction, but that value is a self-determined magnitude. thats what makes value objective to marx. lets quote from chapter 1,
>"Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic."Value is an autonomous entity to marx, not an estimation of worth. this is precisely how values are brought into equivalence.
>Money is a symbol of valuenot to marx
lets read from chapter 2,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol.">Paper alone does not act as money, it must be a symbol of value to workit must in the first case by forced on a population. like i say, value relations are not spontaneous discoveries; they are conspiracies of power.
>He is literally saying the reason why commodities are worth something is because they are created by labour, not because people paid for themlets read from chapter 1,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value […] A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values."thus, value to marx is not due to (concrete) labour, but exists as a relation between concrete labours in exchange, and so is abstract labour. so then, value only exists in exchange.
>It is a spontaneously created tool. Money can not be directly and fully controlled by a central bank. ridiculous.
>[mometary systems fail] Because of bad practices.what happened to dialectics? it fails because it is born in sin.
>Labour is doing something. Labour power is when you use this ability to do something to work for someone else.nonsense.
lets see marx's description from chapter 1,
>"Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure […] The labour, however, that forms the substance of value, is homogeneous human labour, expenditure of one uniform labour power."labour power thus is "human labour in the abstract".
>You sell your ability to do something to someone, it is not yours anymore.you are confused because you dont understand. what a worker sells to the capitalist in marx's understanding is his own labour power as a commodity, from which he receives its (equivalent) value in wages. its from this basis, that a worker's alienated (concrete) labour is dispossessed from him, and thus confronts him in the commodity form; profits accrued from this are thus the representative of surplus-value, since to marx, money is the essence of value in its appearance. this is why in chapter 19 he says,
>"That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."his scourge in that chapter is against bourgeois economy which speaks of the "value of labour". to marx, labour has no value, as he says. this is all part of his political polemic which insists that what is truly progressive is not higher wages, but is lower working hours.
>Labour only has value in the products it creates.when they are exchanged.
>There is no value in someone picking apples, but there is value in the apples because somebody picked them.more confused writings.
>So you are really saying that money could be created without bartering existing first?yes.
>That is why they are called "imaginary prices". That is why it is called surplus, marxism is about the worker receiving this surplus too since it is the value created by his labor power.pure nonsense lol. only the capitalist is capable of receiving a surplus to marx because his profits are literally surplus-value. does a worker profit from his work? he is exploited.
>Value is not the same as price.price is just the value form to marx.
>Price can be influenced by commodity fetishism/fetishization.again, you dont know what these words mean. lets read from chapter 1,
>"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them."his point is just that, as he says,
>"the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly, through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things"the fetishism of commodities is just how the singularity of commodities nonetheless represent social labour. it is a poetic device by marx which relates to his theory of value.
>[slavery] As an economic institution it began that way.? as an economic institution, it began by the enslavement of labour, from which those products are sold between free men. the purchasing of flesh is a secondary order to the domestic creation of slaves. you dont need to buy slaves if you already have enough.
>Slaves, machines and animals do not have any value because you can not do anything with them. are you mad? you cant do anything with slavss and machines? and marx never says they dont have value at all, but that they just dont produce value; they instead transfer value onto living labour. they are as constant capital, fixed values.
>they are totally useless on their own.animals and slaves are useless on their own. seriously, the madness marxoids who havent even read marx will say. i hope you take all this in.
>UBI capitalism is created through taxes and other economic measures. Nothing to see with machine labour. Even if machines did not exist it could exist just from redistributing money from ordinary taxes to the people.ridiculous. illiterate. just plain wrong. that is, everything you have said in this post. but hey, if you are humble, you will accept my criticism.
>>2121020i am right and you have no arguments at all. thats why you cant formulate a proper criticism.
>>2121136>fiat money vs. real money is a false dichotomyit isnt to marx. how about you actually read my quotes.
>all your quoting of Marx is in effort to prove that he was a theorist of the gold standard and therefore value no longer exists as he conceived it.all my quoting of marx is an attempt to be true to marx's meaning. sorry if that busts up your quack religion.
but here's a genuine question and i want an answer. can you conceive of marx being wrong?
>>2121014>money being a token doesn't mean its does not represent value. lets read from chapter 3,
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money"and further,
>"In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."lets also read from chapter 2,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."lets read him more directly however,
>"although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver"and finally,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money"these precious metals to marx are not mere symbols, but directly embody the world of values. this is important in understanding marx, obviously.
>its defined as equivalent according to law under capitalism, we did this in the last unequal exchange thread.no, no, no. this is a repugnant obfuscation. to marx, values meet themselves on the market according to their self-determination. lets read,
>"Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it"lets read that last part
>"We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it"so we equate values spontaneously to marx. this is the entire meaning of the value form.
to marx, values are not "assigned". thats where youre dead wrong. it has nothing to do with convention, since to marx, the elementary value form subsists even without a universal equivalent.
>again big problem with you not recognizing what is going on here and instead arguing over terms and minutiae. i am being accurate to marx's work you fucking moron. minutiae? if you are using words incorrectly, then correct yourself, not your humble teacher. this whole thread is about marx's own theories, not your personal adaptation. i am being academic, you are being frivolous.
>commodity fetishism obscures this exploitative appropriation even if thats not "what it is"no, the other moron i was talking to is just implying that some commodities have higher prices because they are "fetishised".
>>2120943yes. that is the strange thing. but thats what makes libertarians concretely reactionary. they want to turn back time in order to grasp the mechanics of bourgeois economy. someone like peter schiff for example wants to crash the world economy by ending the fed and institute a gold standard, because that way its at least "real". i remember stefan molyneux saying something similar. that we will all just have to "take it". but see the immanent contradiction. the capitalists want to shrink capitalist production (also in their anti-monopolist rhetoric). this is because to me, lolberts operate in the terms of C-M-C and have no concept of an objective surplus. this is marx's critique of bourgeois economy's confusion of appearance with essence, which disguises exploitation, except that lolberts literally believe in the lie of cynical capitalist ideology. in the end, the greatest threat has always been the petty bourgeoisie.
>>2120825>The value of an ounce of Gold is the socially necessary labor time required to find, mine, and refine an ounce of Goldto marx, this value can only be realised in exchange, dont forget. if no one buys it, it has no value, like the man who only works for himself.
>>2120772>I've never heard this argument. It must be made by libertarians or something. The function of currency doesn't change no matter what it's value is tied too. marx is a goldbug, so bears resemblance to libertarians. muh hard cash. this is because to marx, money must be a measure of value as according from its own value, as we might read in chapter 3 of capital vol. 1,
>"It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."if money has no value thus, then it loses its ability to measure values, and so can no longer be money, thus as he says in chapter 2, capital vol. 1:
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."and from chapter 3,
>"The State puts in circulation bits of paper on which their various denominations, say £1, £5, &c., are printed. In so far as they actually take the place of gold to the same amount, their movement is subject to the laws that regulate the currency of money itself. A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."lets see more from from chapter 2 however;
>"although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver">"What appears to happen is, not that gold becomes money, in consequence of all other commodities expressing their values in it, but, on the contrary, that all other commodities universally express their values in gold, because it is money.">"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour">Around Marxs time he rightful predicted over production. Industrialization meant the production of the economy outpaced the scarcity of the currency. Even during marxs time banks were already forced to do fractural reserved banking were more paper money was lent out than actual gold on hand. The end of the gold standard was just formalizing this reality.yes, precisely. the internal contradictions of capital were due in marx's time to the internal contradictions of money, as it was progressing from the gold standard into credit systems.
>>2121163>i am I
>right formulated
>and several
>you criticisms
>have in
>no the
>arguments other
>at thread
>all. but
>thats you
>why stopped
>you replying
>cant after
>formulate a
>a while
>proper and
>criticism.besides, all your replies are like this and are a headache to read. You quote Marx in the same disjointed way to prove your point. Value is socially necessary labor time, and I don't care how many times you quote Marx talking about price when he means
equilibrium price specifically which is evident from the context. Even the bourgeoisie admit the value of a commodity is its socially necessary labor time because most bourgeois governments levy a value added tax for each stage of commodity production that adds value through abstract labor. If you think Marx is and you actually care about the working class movement moving on from him then go write a book about it.
>marx is a goldbug, so bears resemblance to libertarians. muh hard cash. this is because to marx, money must be a measure of value as according from its own value, as we might read in chapter 3 of capital vol. 1,There you go again. Marx is not a "goldbug" because goldbugs are reactionary idiots who want to RETVRN to the gold standard while Marx was writing during a time when it was dominant. Anyway it literally doesn't matter.
Just because fiat can't be redeemed for gold at banks is irrelevant because it still has an exchange value with Gold and can still be used to purchase gold in the private sector. And just because that exchange value fluctuates is also irrelevant because it also fluctuated under the gold standard too. And just because mainstream economists say the value of fiat is "trust in government" doesn't make it true. Fiat's exchange rate with gold is managed indirectly rather than directly as it was under the gold standard. At the end of the day the value of a commodity is still its socially necessary labor time and just because the measure of value is no longer REDEEMABLE in gold doesn't mean it doesn't have an EXCHANGE RATE with gold which still has a SOCIALLY NECESSARY LABOR TIME. This is the essence of why your focus on Marx as a "goldbug" is entirely irrelevant. His analysis of COMMODITIES REQUIRING aA MEASURABLE AMOUNT OF LABOR TIME TO PRODUCE is still relevant even if governments switched to fiat currency from currencies redeemable in precious metals. It's just a layer of abstraction and obfuscation, which is exactly how you are using it to "refute" Marx's statements about commodities requiring abstract labor.
>>2121195this could all make sense except that fiat cannot measure values for it is not a commodity and represents no commodity in particular. thus in marxist terms it cannot serve as a universal equivalent, and so cannot be money.
lets read once more what he says in chapter 2,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol.so money is not symbolic. it cannot suffice as a symbol of value but can only be substitutory, as we read in chapter 3,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."so i remain convicted in my assessment.
but i will grant you the fact that marx was not a goldbug. i speak flippantly and rhetorically there.
also you never answered my question. can you conceive of marx being incorrect, or are you just worshipping a dead man?
>>2121210we live in capitalism, but a different kind of capitalism. thats my point. the notion of overproduction can be offset by subsidisation and other mechanisms.
>>2121163>lets read from chapter 3,i didn't say it is value i said it represents value, which your quote does not refute.
>values meet themselves on the market according to their self-determinationyes that is what i said, that is the way value is defined. you are trying to find a contradiction between the definition and later analysis that doesn't exist.
>"although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver"i hope you dont think this is some kind of exclusive declaration. hes, again, describing how things are, not some kind of essential characteristic of money or gold.
>if you are using words incorrectly, then correct yourself, not your humble teacher.no, if you dont understand people you need to ask for clarification. not everyone is a graduate academic and they can perfectly understand and explain marx without all the jargon. you are just appealing to jargon and skipping past the meat of the argument because it doesn't perfectly reflect marx's own terminology even though they are correct.
>Value formidk if you are presenting a value form theory here, and value form theory can be helpful for understanding marx, but its ultimately incorrect. it is one of many western interpretations meant to "fix" a problem that never existed, cockshott and kliman are both wrong, the soviets were right.
instead of repeatedly quoting marx out of context you should make your overarching point in a couple sentences because its not even clear what you are trying to say it really just seems like obfuscation meant to confuse
there is no ecp. prices reflect but are not values. prices in aggregate asymptotically approach values over time, and when they dont its easily accounted for by lack of market competition like with monopolies. you can accurately derive aggregate prices from economic calculation, and actual prices of individual commodities deviating from this derivation do not disprove the theory.
the common denominator in all transactions is labor/time/value(im not interested in checking which because im not a pedantic asshole like you) and not price, which is a fetishized reflection. the variable value represented by money price is always proportional to the total socially necessary labor so whether that money is fiat or gold doesn't matter, and gold could be replaced by other standardized commodities like wheat, theres nothing special about metals. the reason people have a preference for physical commodities is because monetary systems rely on trust, not because of some essential characteristic of the commodities. fiat can replace physical commodities if there is still trust, or can be imposed by force, it doesn't matter because the common denominator is labor, which money is only a representative tool for administrating the distribution thereof.
>>2121217>this could all make sense except that fiat cannot measure values for it is not a commodity and represents no commodity in particular. it maintains an exchange rate with all commodities despite not being a commodity itself and not being explicitly redeemable does not prevent it from being exchangeable with commodities. if money as Marx described it while alive is CONCRETE money then fiat is ABSTRACT money. Because commodities have values relative to EACH OTHER due to being the result of accumulations of labor time at each stage of production, then it is evident that fiat as a medium of exchange can serve as abstract money. No it has no socially necessary labor time in and of itself but it can still serve as a measure between equivalents by having exchange rates with them. Two commodities that have equal SNLT will have equal
equilibrium prices in a fiat currency but not
price in general. >>2121217>this could all make sense except that fiat cannot measure values for it is not a commodity and represents no commodity in particular.it represents labor idk how many times you have to hear this. you are skipping right past the obvious answer which is that labor is fetishized by its representation as money. the difference between fiat and gold is that the speed of change in the ratio of how much money represents a unit of labor, but the total aggregate labor available to society is the a variable constant, reflecting the population of the workforce and its reproduction cost in a given society. its just like a stock that has a market cap and a valuation, and the share price changes accordingly, which is separate from but correlated to the the underlying thing the stock represents. if the gold supply increases this would decrease the value of gold, but in practice it doesn't because the value of gold is set by decree, exactly the same as fiat. you are, like has been said repeatedly, in accepting the ecp as real, falling for the exact fetishization that the critique is meant to dispel, treating money as essential part of concrete reality rather than an emergent obscuration of the actual material relationships.
>>2121244>it [fiat] maintains an exchange rate with all commodities despite not being a commodity itself yes, therefore it is not money in a marxist sense, and thus, marx's theory of money, and therefore value is ultimately incorrect, even if he got some things right
also, what sustains this exchange rate? or in other terms, what gives fiat its value? is it SNLT, or supply in relation to demand?
>if money as Marx described it while alive is CONCRETE money then fiat is ABSTRACT moneyyou are confusing terms. all value relations to marx incur the equivalences of an abstract labour, therefore all money is abstractly mediated. again, to marx, its not the use-value of gold which makes it valuable, but its factors of production, namely, labour-power.
>No it has no socially necessary labor time in and of itself but it can still serve as a measure between equivalents by having exchange rates with them.how exactly does it measure these values?
>>2121247>it [fiat] represents labor idk how many times you have to hear thisto marx, only commodities can represent abstract labour in exchange, otherwise, concrete products of labour are just use-values. fiat is not a commodity, therefore… (and if you consider it a commodity, what is its SNLT?)
>if the gold supply increases this would decrease the value of gold, but in practice it doesn't because the value of gold is set by decree, exactly the same as fiat.wait, so values are set by their prices as exchange ratios? this then defeats LTV nonsense since you can set any price by decree.
>>2121278but no criticism at all about his political economy?
>>2121235>i didn't say it is value i said it represents value, which your quote does not refute.what can represent value to marx is a commodity. a "token" unless it directly represents a commodity cannot represent value, as we read here,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."and here,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."money to marx is not symbolic, it is not a token, but is a universal equivalent (a particular commodity) which measures values, according from its own value, as he says here,
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money"and thus,
>"It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."money to marx is not a token. at least admit this.
>yes that is what i said, that is the way value is defined. no, what you said was this,
>"its defined as equivalent according to law under capitalism"your conception is precisely contrary to marx's. that money makes commodities commensurable according to custom (or by decree? e.g. fiat). i agree to those terms, but it is the very opposite of what marx writes,
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary.">hes, again, describing how things are, not some kind of essential characteristic of money or gold. lets read what he says here,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money."he seems very clear here.
>no, if you dont understand people you need to ask for clarification. not everyone is a graduate academic and they can perfectly understand and explain marx without all the jargon.ITS FUCKING CHAPTER 1
if you literally cant read ONE chapter of a book, dont call yourself a "marxist", retard. am i a snob because i actually did my homework?
>it doesn't perfectly reflect marx's own terminology even though they are correct. its was literally wrong. like, completely wrong, due to the fact that he (and you, presumably) have never actually sat down and read marx.
>value form theoryi never posited that at all. i am describing marx's conception of the value form, or do you not know what the value form is? that was my original question, because you seem confused.
>quotes out of contextliterally in context. i give you the chapter and everything. youre grasping at straws.
>the common denominator in all transactions is labor/time/value(im not interested in checking which because im not a pedantic asshole like you)<i never read marx like youokay, so be proud of being uneducated and illiterate i guess?
but all this can be helped if you just admit that i am right. not because im "me", but because i have dealt with the primary source.
>>2121286>but no criticism at all about his political economy?sorry he didn't live through the nixon shock and comment on the continuation of capitalism after the gold standard ended, let alone long enough to finish all 6 planned volumes of capital
I do think there are small contradictions here and there and many contemporary marxians discuss and address these ideas but the core analysis about the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie remains relevant and you aren't going to build a mass movement out of academic nitpicking. I don't think you're entirely wrong for pointing out the fiat issue but at the end of the day the working class is exploited whether or not the measure of value is commodity money or fiat money
>>2121289>inflationinflation doesnt mean anything if you just adjust prices. a lot of wage exploitation comes from not adjusting for inflation, for example, so has significance in that regard
>unproductive labourall consumed (hired) labour is productive by necessity. thats also marx's point, that the capitalist exchanges for the use-value of labour power.
>cost of maintaining fiathas nothing to do with its functional value as a means of exchange. what determines the value of fiat is its demand in relation to supply. that is self-evident. thats also why all monetary systems in general require taxation; to lower supply.
>But at the end of the day commodity production requires socially necessary labor time, this is the main contributor to the cost of producing anythingdoes anyone deny this? any bourgeois economist presupposes this.
>>2121298i agree the working class is exploited, but marx doesnt have a monopoly on that concept. even adam smith said that profits were the enemy of labour. your idea that socialism = marxism is what is deranged
>academic nitpickingits called taking research seriously. what else am j supposed to do? be stupid and wrong on purpose so that i can keep worshipping a dead man.
hopefully we have come to a resolution through all this though. i am sick of repeating myself.
>>2121286>to marx, only commodities can represent abstract labour in exchangein exchange. hes talking about the mechanism for how markets work in determining value under 1800s capitalism, not how things should be or how they essentially must be. he does not say "can" he says they
do>wait, so values are set by their prices as exchange ratiosno value exists completely separately from prices and it is the snlt embedded into the commodity by labor. the price is an exchange ratio represented in money that is determined by its average production cost to society, its the percentage of total available social labor hours allocated by capital holders to produce a specific commodity, which is a represented by a certain amount of money, and how much money is in turn determined by the total money supply, and total hours. the fact that the quantity of money can change does not mean that the hours required changes, or that those hours being used to produce that commodity denies them being used for other things.
this is all extremely stupid and besides the point. ltv isn't about prices and values is about proving the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and all this quibbling is around the secondary point that money is a justification for bourgeois dictatorship.
whatever it is that you are trying to prove is the same thing that people say when some policy proposal is made and they respond with "but whos gonna pay for it". the limit of societies production is not money, its not permission from capital holders, its not having enough gold coins or paper tickets that say its okay for you to make more things, its how many workers you can get to do labor. people need housing, there is empty land, and trees. the thing stopping them from cutting down the trees and building houses is not money, this is fetishization, the thing stopping them is the bourgeois having a monopoly on force that legally requires money as a prerequisite for proportioning labor. in saying that marx is wrong you are accepting capitalist justification for private ownership as a natural law.
>>2121304I honestly think you should try writing a book to flesh your ideas out. I don't think what you have to say is entirely stupid but it needs more work and I don't like the way you constantly accuse people of "worshiping Marx" because it is the very same lazy thing reactionaries say when they want to equate secular political ideas to the Abrahamic faiths.
I also think a critique of contemporary political economy is sorely needed, and it doesn't have to be built entirely out of bashing Marx. Marx didn't just criticize those who came before him, he also borrowed heavily when he thought they were correct.
>>2121287>but is a universal equivalent (a particular commodity) no, labor is the universal equivalent, money is the social representation of it
> It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable>money to marx is not a token. at least admit this.money, in the time marx was writing, was not a token, there is a difference between saying x is y as a social convention, and saying x is essentially and eternally fixed as y 1:1, which is undialectical, you are treating money ahistorically, as a thing instead of a social relation, fetishizing it
> i agree to those terms, but it is the very opposite of what marx writes,it is precisely what marx writes
>you literally cant read ONE chapter of a bookmaybe you need to read more than one book
>or do you not know what the value form isand you are completely ignorant of the controversy surrounding your
opinion. maybe if you want to bludgeon people with your academics you should understand what school of thought you subscribe to first
>Since the mid-1960s and after the collapse of state socialism and Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, there has emerged a new critical literature by Western Marxist and non-Marxist scholars about the conceptual foundations of Marx’s theory of value[3]
>The criticism most often heard from the critics of Marx, such as Friedrich von Hayek, Karl Popper, Francis Wheen and Ian Steedman is that, even if Marx himself meant well, Marx's value-form idea is simply an esoteric obscurantism, "dialectical hocus pocus", "sophistry", or "mumbo jumbo". Francis Wheen refers to "a shaggy-dog story, a picaresque journey through the realms of higher nonsense."[8]
>The old Marxist theory was held together by the philosophy of dialectical materialism,[34] but in the new academic Marxism of the West, "value theory" is said to be the unifying factor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_value-form_theoryyes ill take "solving problems that dont exist" for 500
>>2121309>>2121309>in exchange. hes talking about the mechanism for how markets work in determining value under 1800s capitalism, not how things should be or how they essentially must be. he does not say "can" he says they dono, no, no.
this is where you are confused. value (or exchange value) to marx is inherently market-oriented. thats why commodities incur equivalent values by exchange. his point is precisely contrary to bourgeois economy, that value isnt a natural category, but is a social category, for example,
>"As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value."and
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."and as he concludes chapter 1,
>"So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond"and as he states in chapter 19,
>"That which comes directly face to face with the possessor of money on the market, is in fact not labour, but the labourer. What the latter sells is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."thus the "coarse materiality" or "embodied labour" of a commodity is the opposite of its value. this is why labour power is "human labour in the abstract" and exists as a pure quantity, apart from use. value to marx thus is an essentially market phenomenon. what exists in the absence of markets is valueless, yet useful labour, as he writes in chapter 1,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value. […] A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities."labour =/= value
>no value exists completely separately from prices>completelythat is not marx's opinion. why does value need a "phenomenal" form to begin with?
>"exchange value, generally, is only the mode of expression, the phenomenal form, of something contained in it, yet distinguishable from it."this distinction of the value form from exchange-value is not possible however, since,
>"use value becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value."such that embodied (concrete) labours are the
"material depositories of exchange value."
marx also gives equation later on,
>"A commodity is a use value or object of utility, and a value. It manifests itself as this two-fold thing, that it is, as soon as its value assumes an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value. It never assumes this form when isolated, but only when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind."so exchange value is the "form of value" (as subtitled by sec. 3 of ch. 1). Value as per this quote too only "assumes an independent form – viz., the form of exchange value" when placed in a value or exchange relation with another commodity of a different kind."
this is why the value form, or "form of value" only exists in exchange relations, and why to marx, value must be "measured" between 2 concrete commodities and so on. so, no, value is not "separate" from the value form. the value form is the appearance of its essence to marx, and thus price is the value form of money, and so expresses equivalent values.
>[value] is the snlt embedded into the commodity by labor.no, to marx, only abstract labour, or labour power, possesses value, while labour in itself (or concrete labour) possesses no value. value thus is disembodied labour, as opposed to its embodied state. SNLT is a relation existing between commodities, not within commodities. this is why concrete labour is the private form of labour while labour power is social, by being realised in exchange (and so, "social use values").
>the price is an exchange ratio represented in money that is determined by its average production cost to societyif value and price differ in this way, can you pay someone less than their value? if not, then "value" to you just assumes the "natural price" of production, as opposed to market price. no? marx's disagreement is that labour has no value and thus has no price, but only labour power has a price.
>the fact that the quantity of money can change does not mean that the hours required changesno, but if your labour is unprofitable because not theres not enough money to go around then you no longer have labour-power to sell
>ltv isn't about prices and values is about proving the tendency of the rate of profit to fallyes i agree that this is marx's polemic, but it only works if you consider labour-power as the only commodity capable of producing values. but what grants this privilege. in my estimation, it is the wage relation (or so to say, a compensation for labour which entails an unpaid portion). thus, if you figuratively or literally paid machines a wage, yet allowed this money to circulate in the economy, you solve the issue.
this is fundamentay why i think marx is a theorist of the gold standard, because what he is really saying is that theres not enough money to go round, and this is the cause of certain crises - to marx, production exceeds consumption, but if as i say, unprofitable parts of society are subsidised then the house of cards stays up. that is my own criticism of TRPF; that machine labour is disconsidered from marx's anthropocentrism.
im not saying we should have UBI capitalism, im just saying that its very possibility overcomes marx, theoretically.
>>2121311i am very inspired by marx, so i only bash him to exorcise myself mostly lol. i dont want to throw the baby out with the bath water, but i do see that the water is quite dirty.
>>2121318>no, labor is the universal equivalent, money is the social representation of itno, to marx, a universal equivalent is the particular commodity itself. yes, value is self-related by this equivalence, but its abstract essence must still have a concrete form.
>money, in the time marx was writing, was not a tokenyes, which is why he incorrectly formalises his own contemporary relations as a fact of things in themselves
>there is a difference between saying x is y as a social convention, and saying x is essentially and eternally fixedyes, i take the former, marx takes the latter
this is what marx writes in response to locke's assertions that silver possesses an "imaginary value"
>"But if it be declared that the social characters assumed by objects, or the material forms assumed by the social qualities of labour under the régime of a definite mode of production, are mere symbols, it is in the same breath also declared that these characteristics are arbitrary fictions sanctioned by the so-called universal consent of mankind."his point is that precious metals have universal value, for as he concludes chapter 2,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money."he is speaking entirely sincerely here.
lets just refresh ourselves very quickly with these remarks,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."and
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."to marx, a "token" must represent a commodity in particular
>maybe if you want to bludgeon people with your academics [in asking what the value form is]its okay not to know, but its crucial for understanding marx. its tiresome going through it all if i am not listened to.
to put it simply, the value form is the "form of value" which manifests between commodities as exchange-value. this is the "independent" form which value takes, as a quantity, or magnitude of value, represented as "human labour in the abstract" (labour power), or SNLT.
in section 3 of chapter 1 he goes through the dialectical movement of the value form:
elementary/accidental value form (A) (barter),
then the total/expanded value form (B),
then the general value form (C) (where we establish a universal equivalent).
finally we get the money-form (D) where the universal equivalent becomes money and assumes the price-form.
in all this, values are equated according to SNLT, and so the difficulty is that the price-form as the ultimate value form must represent equivalent values.
price and value cannot be cleanly separated then, for prices to marx expresses a commodity's value as such.
this is his polemic for why you cant overprice your way into surplus-value, since only labour-power can create actual profits. this is why C-M-C (simple commodity exchange) must turn to M-C-M' (capital circulation) as more and more labour-power is purchased.
i will leave it there for now. and look, im not your enemy if you want to be earnestly looking for the truth. but if you are nothing but a dogmatist, this discursive exercise will prove to be beyond futility.
>>2121344>this distinction of the value form from exchange-value is not possible however, since,you keep doing this thing where you realize something doesnt make sense, and then think its with marx and not your incomplete understanding of what he is saying. instead of assuming he is wrong and mining for things to debunk, treat it as an exercise in discovering what he could have possibly meant that would make that statement true. like why would he use two different terms if the distinction between them is "impossible". is it instead possible that things are in constant change and what is meant by a thing is determined by its context, not just within a text but within society at large?
>value must be "measured">why does value need a "phenomenal" formwhat are you measuring? does value spring into existence upon the exchange, or is it a relation that exists prior to that whos magnitude is determined(measured) by exchange?
maybe you should restate your point as has been asked because its really really not clear what you are trying to prove
>price is the value form of money,absolutely not and i suspect this is important. you are essentially saying that value=price, which is definitely completely wrong
>this is why the value form, or "form of value" only exists in exchange relationsok
>and why to marx, value must be "measured" between 2 concrete commoditiesyeah
>value is not "separate" from the value formsure, in the sense that they are related in some way
>the value form is the appearance of its essence to marxyes…
>and so expresses equivalent valuesnope. they express equivalent values by definition. because of how capitalism operates, it is assumed that exchanges are equivalent, if they were not they wouldn't happen. the market is free and fair because thats what a market is. this isn't marx saying that its how it should be he is describing how people operate in market conditions.
>im not saying we should have UBI capitalism, im just saying that its very possibility overcomes marx, theoretically.how would that overcome marx, unless your object of study
>no, to marx, a universal equivalent is the particular commodity itself. no its labor. why arent you busting out your quotes?
>yes, i take the former, marx takes the latternah. thats like his whole project lmao
>his point is that precious metals have universal valueno its not, its that social relations have concrete effects in the material world, emphasis on
mere, not on symbols. they are real abstractions
>he is speaking entirely sincerely here.okay thats just as true as with oil, salt, wheat
>>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."can you really not see here how he is directly saying that money replaced by symbols is still money, which is real separate from its existence as gold. gold money has a physical property, that it is made of gold, and a social relation, that it is money. you might stamp it into coins to represent that social relation, and you might make laws that say an equivalent weight of gold is worth so many coins, but the "money" is a different thing that is being referred to than the "gold" even in cases where it is raw and unprocessed, even when it is literally the same physical object, because what we call money is not a physical thing, that is its appearance, money is the social relation that it governs,
which is the distribution of social labor
>im not saying we should have UBI capitalism, im just saying that its very possibility overcomes marx, theoretically.how does this overcome marx at all? you are entirely sidestepping the critique to focus on something inconsequential.
>because what he is really saying is that theres not enough money to go roundin a sense, but that is the appearance. what he is saying is that the bourgeois dont distribute labor effectively, the trpf shows the contradiction between private ownership that is reliant on profit and the ability for capitalism to increase the means of production. as the means of production increase the ratio of constant and variable capital increases, so there is less profit to be obtained by the capitalist. marx does not disconsider machines, he accounts for them by accounting for the labor required to produce them. if you hypothetically pay machines a wage, you are just adding to your variable capital, considering machines as labor, and decreasing your profit. even if you get rid of human workers all together, and only have machines, and take all the machines "wages" and distribute them as UBI, you have only moved funds around, you havent actually created a situation where the capitalist can appropriate additional profit, in fact you have only proposed a way for them to make less money! why would they ever agree to that? the problem with capitalism is not that there isn't enough money to go around, its that money is an irrational way to organize social reproduction.
>yes i agree that this is marx's polemic, but it only works if you consider labour-power as the only commodity capable of producing values.i can only believe you think this if you think value = price, which it is not. value is snlt, labor power is the only thing capable of producing snlt.
>its okay not to knowim talking about you apparently not knowing that value form theory is an attack on historical communism as part of the larger project to neuter marx into a bourgeois friendly theorist. if you were more open about your influences maybe we could find you a more direct response, but it really does seem like you are stuck at step one, agreeing with bohm-bawerk and thinking value = price like some facebook boomer.
>>2121370>how would that overcome marx, unless your object of study is different from his. how does ubi solve the anarchy of production caused by differing bourgeois interests and market competition leading to boom and bust cycles that lead to mass death and destitution? what question does considering machines as labor "solve"? marx's question is something like "why has liberalism and the industrial revolution and the overturning of the feudal order not emancipated all of humanity from drudgery of work, from being subjected to the whims of nature, and given people the material resources necessary to pursue their natural desires". he says its because of a contradiction inherent in the capitalist mode of production.
how does your value form critique overturn this? how does fiat existing overturn this?
>>2121357> for prices to marx expresses a commodity's value as such.cant it be the case that prices express a commodities value at the specific place and time of the exchange, and that the price differing between two exchanges can reflect changes in the size of the population and distribution of labor, which would represent changes in the magnitude of value, measured as a proportion of the total snlt, and represented in dollars, which are in turn a unit reflected a proportion of the money supply, which is correlated to the aforementioned population and distribution of labor, which is value. so while a price may express a commodity's present value, while that value is constant, its appearance in dollar terms is constantly in flux, as the composition of society and the distribution of the labor changes from day to day?
>Coal miners, bakers, carpenters and chefs don’t directly relate to each other as workers. Instead the products of their labor, coal, bread, cabinets and pasta, meet in the market and are exchanged with one another. The material relations between people become social relations between things. When we look at coal, bread, cabinets and pasta we don’t see the work that created them. We just see commodities standing in relation of value to each other. A pile of coal’s value is worth so many loaves of bread. A cabinet’s value is worth so much pasta. The value, the social power of the object, appears to be a property of the object itself, not a result of the relation between workers.
>[Money is the god of commodities. Through money all other commodities express their value. The amount of social labor that goes into a pencil becomes 20 cents. The portion of the social labor that goes into making a grand piano becomes 20 grand. As the god of commodities money becomes the ultimate expression of social power. It can be anything, buy anything, do anything. Yet money is just a scrap of paper, a pile of shiny rocks, a digit in a computer… It only has this power because it is an expression of social relations.]
>We are atomized individuals wandering through a world of objects that we consume. When we buy a commodity we are just having an experience between ourselves and the commodity. We are blind to the social relations behind these interactions. Even if we consciously know that there is a network of social relations being coordinated through this world of commodities, we have no way of experiencing these relations directly because… they are not direct relations. We can only have an isolated intellectual knowledge of these social relations, not a direct relation.
>This process whereby the social relations between people take the form of relations between things Marx calls “reification”. Reification helps explain why it is that in a capitalist society things appear to take on the characteristics of people. Inanimate objects spring to life endowed with a “value” that seems to come from the object itself. We say a book is worth 20 dollars, a sweater worth 25 dollars. But this value doesn’t come from the sweater itself. You can’t cut open the sweater and find $25 inside. This $25 is an expression of the relation between this sweater and all of the other commodities in the market. And these commodities are just the material forms of a social labor process coordinated through market exchange. It is because people organize their labor through the market that value exists.
>The illusion that value comes from the commodity itself and not from the social relations behind it is a “fetish”. A capitalist society is full of such illusions. Money appears to have god-like qualities, yet this is only so because it is an object which is used to express the value of all other commodities. Profit appears to spring out of exchange itself, yet Marx worked hard to explain how profit actually originates in production through the unequal relations between capital and labor in the workplace. Rent appears to grow out of the soil, yet Marx was adamant that rent actually comes from the appropriation of value created by labor. We see these fetishistic ideas in modern day mainstream economic theory in the idea that value comes from the subjective experience between a consumer and a commodity, and that capital creates value by itself.
>Yet the theory of commodity fetishism isn’t just a theory of illusion. It’s not that the entire world is an illusion, reality existing somewhere far below the surface, always out of sight. The illusion is real. Commodities really do have value. Money really does have social power. Individual people really are powerless and material structures really do have social power. There is not a real world of production existing below the surface in which the relations between producers are direct. Relations between producers are only indirect, only coordinated through the mystifying world of commodities.https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2010/05/05/the-law-of-value-2-the-fetishism-of-commodities/ >>2121357>his point is that precious metals have universal valuethey are used as a universal equivalent and a standard measure of value because they are convenient, portable, can be stored, don't rot, and crucially, have a high SNLT because they take a lot of labor time to find, mine, and refine into an pure ingot form. Governments can mint them into standardized coinage which makes them useful for legally sanctioned and monitored transactions. We have largely overcome coinage and precious metals as universal equivalents but commodities still have exchange rates with each other based on their socially necessary labor times i.e. which make them expressable as
equilibrium prices, as well as other non-production factors like supply and demand and monopoly prices which make them expressable as
market prices. Market prices deviate from equilibrium prices. Therefore the actual price usually deviates from the value, but labor time still constitutes the primary and most influential factor in the price formation of the commodity. If this were not the case bourgeois governments wouldn't levy a value added tax based on the accumulation of value from each stage of labor as the commodity is built up from its raw materials. Fiat money or not, the price is a numerical quantity and the equilibrium price expresses the socially necessary labor time. Two commodities that have equally socially necessary labor times and are in supply/demand equilibrium will have equal prices. Therefore it no longer matters whether the money itself is a commodity with value, or even if it can be redeemed at a bank with metal.
>>2121125This is either great trolling or you are very stupid. In neither case does it make sense to talk to you, so I say the following for the sake of newbies reading the thread.
>>Its only use value lies in being used in exchange, nothing else.>i agree. marx disagrees; lets take this quote from chapter 2 for example:<The use-value of the money-commodity becomes two-fold. In addition to its special use-value as a commodity (gold, for instance, serving to stop teeth, to form the raw material of articles of luxury, &c.)Marx does not disagree with the other poster. The other poster is talking about
fiat money. Marx is explicitly talking about physical properties of
commodity money specifically. It is asinine to claim that gold coins don't have physical properties, yet this seems to be your position here.
>>Money is not gold>i agree, marx disagrees. lets take another quote from chapter 2;<"although gold and silver are not by Nature money, money is by Nature gold and silver"That quote is about the physical property of easy divisibility, which makes gold and silver a good fit for commodity money. In both text snippets it is clear that Marx does not consider only gold to be proper money. If he did why would he refer in the first quote to gold with "gold,
for instance…" and right before that he mentions gold
and silver. And again he mentions gold
and silver in the second quote.
The rest of that post is more of the same shit.
>>2121370>>2121370[1/2]
>your incomplete understanding of what he is sayingi literally provide endless receipts of what he is communicating. i understand perfectly. its unread people like you who literally cant understand what he means because youre not familiar with the source material. think about this, seriously, youre arguing with a guy who has read the book, and you think you know better. what next, you know the quran better than a muslim? madness. seriously, be humble.
>instead of assuming he is wrongwhat do i "assume"? i present a very clear picture of his mistakes, on his own terms. tell me where i "assume" anything. i assume nothing. i provide primary sources.
the difference is that you dogmatically assume he is correct, despite never reading him. you are a cultist worshipping a dead god. is marx human or superhuman?
>like why would he use two different terms if the distinction between them is "impossible"its dialectical. the value form is the appearance of value, which is an essence. if you understand hegel (which you obviously dont), every essence requires an appearance to assume an intelligible form. value cannot be expressed in its own terms, since to marx, this is a tautology, lets read from chapter 19,
>"But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. 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."this is why he says in the elementary value form, a commodity's value cannot be equated with itself; linen cannot be worth linen (1 dollar cannot be "worth" 1 dollar, but must be exchanged for a commodity to realise its value). this is why the relative form of value requires an equivalent to begin with; this is also why value achieves its "independent" form in exchange-value. that is to say, it cannot be expressed outside of exchange. this is WHY to marx, value can only be measured by commodity-money.
value and the value form are inseparable because its essence requires an appearance. this is also why value only exists in exchange relations, or *between* commodities, not *within* commodities (value is "human labour in the abstract", the very opposite of "concrete labour"). lets go over this again,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value […] A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities."and finally,
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.5) In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed."to marx, labour has no value, and its value is only expressed between commodities in exchange. PLEASE listen to me so i dont repeat myself for the millionth time; the concept of "the value of labour" to marx is a bourgeois concept. value is not a natural category of inputs, but is a "social relation between things". lets see what he says in CHAPTER ONE,
>"The value of commodities has a purely social reality"this does not mean "subjective value"; it alludes to the fact that only humans trade commodities, or as he concludes chapter 1,
>"So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond"values are assigned by the value/exchange relation thus. do you finally understand?
>what are you measuring? does value spring into existence upon the exchange, or is it a relation that exists prior to that whos magnitude is determined(measured) by exchange?i am glad you are asking questions instead of asserting absurd conjecture.
marx describes the function of money as a "measure of value" in chapter 3,
>"The first chief function of money is to supply commodities with the material for the expression of their values, or to represent their values as magnitudes of the same denomination, qualitatively equal, and quantitatively comparable. It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."and further,
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time."thus the money-form as a universal equivalent is also a measure of value. the value it measures is wrought by the equivalence of SNLT between commodities. this is why to marx, money must be a commodity, so as to relate its value. he speaks alternately of paper money here,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."and here,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."so to marx, paper money must represent commodities in particular and not generally. this is why i say he has no real concept of fiat. do you now understand where im coming from?
>>2122906>>2121370[2/2]
>does value spring into existence upon the exchange, or is it a relation that exists prior to that whos magnitude is determined(measured) by exchange?thats a very good question, and one which is contested by marxists of all sorts. if i have hopefully proved to you already that to marx, value cannot be measured by itself, i.e. 12 hours cannot be worth 12 hours; 1 dollar is not worth 1 dollar, but only achieves value by being exchanged - then we can proceed.
as marx understands it, concrete labours are useful labours, entirely distinct from having value, as we read,
>"As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value."and
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."thus, value is not a natural category - SNLT is not a statistic of production, but a relation of production, or in other terms, to marx, value is not in the cost of production (i.e. labour) but is the cost of labour-power in equivalent exchange (the entirety of chapter 19 delves into this). so then, value is a social relation between things, as we read from chapter 1,
>"the value of commodities has a purely social reality"and
>"the expression of value of the linen, represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value."note, "non-natural" and "purely social"
further,
>"the existence of commodities as values is purely social"and as he concludes chapter 1,
>"So far no chemist has ever discovered exchange value either in a pearl or a diamond"so then, SNLT is not a natural property of commodities (the substance of value; use-value) but is a social relation between commodities (the magnitude of value; exchange-value).
this is why to marx, value can only be measured by exchange relations, since value is a creature of exchange. the question then, does value come into being in exchange? i say yes. to marx, value has no existence before exchange.
a final quote to make this clear,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value […] A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities."so to marx, labour has no value; only commodities have value in exchange relations.
>maybe you should restate your point as has been asked because its really really not clear what you are trying to prove<trying to proveall i have been doing is explaining marx to "marxists". i should be preaching to the choir but instead i am being run out, like Christ preaching to the pharisees; i have come for israel […] yet only the gentiles embrace me.
>price is the value form of money<absolutely notabsolutely, eh? lets see what marx says,
>"The elementary expression of the relative value of a single commodity, such as linen, in terms of the commodity, such as gold, that plays the part of money, is the price form of that commodity. The price form of the linen is therefore 20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold, or, if 2 ounces of gold when coined are £2, 20 yards of linen = £2."the price-form is the value-form of money; thats what to marx signifies the development of the universal equivalent to attain to the money-form. this is why as he says in chapter 3; the two-fold property of money is to be "the measure of value" and "the standard of price".
>you are essentially saying that value=price, which is definitely completely wrongno, no. *I* am not saying that; marx is saying that. the value form is the appearance of its essence, thus prices denote equivalent values in exchange. this is the basis of marx's polemic that you cant overprice your way to surplus-value. contradictions immediately arise however, like how he describes commodities having "imaginary prices" (from chapter 3),
>"an object may have a price without having value. The price in that case is imaginary, like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price-form may sometimes conceal either a direct or indirect real value-relation; for instance, the price of uncultivated land, which is without value, because no human labour has been incorporated in it."here he states a contradiction but offers no real solution to it except speculation that value is reated in the exchange somewhere. price and value are not separate entities to marx, but are the same thing, in different expressions. this is why i raised an original scepticism towards marx's value form denoting equivalent exchange.
so who is "completely wrong" here? marx?
>nope. they express equivalent values by definition.lets read,
>"whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic."here, marx is saying very clearly that man does not determine exchange relations; value as an independent entity converts commodities into social relations which express an equality. this is why for example, labour-power is received with its equivalent value in the wage relation, and thus surplus-value is able to be extracted. if your conjecture is true, then you cant claim surplus-value is extracted since "by definition", all exchanges denote an equal product. this is marx's criticism of bourgeois economy, which says that the "value of labour" is bestowed upon the worker, when what is related is not mere appearances, but essential relations, socially expressed. again, this is why money is not a "token" or "symbol" to marx, but is a commodity. marx never says that labour-power meets its unequal value in the wage, but instead says that the FULL VALUE of labour-power is given, in SNLT. this is why marx did not want to raise wages (since that would just raise prices), but wanted to shorten the working day. )
you get it yet?
>the market is free and fair because thats what a market isi hope youre joking lol
>how would [UBI) overcome marxbecause to marx, you have to work to receive your value, otherwise you are exploiting labour (this is why engels in the prefaces to capital sees unemployment as revolutionary conditions), yet in UBI, citizens still exploit labour, but machine labour (which to marx is impossible, since it is "dead labour"). people say the west just exploits the third world, and thats a fine opinion, except you have to explain that by revisions like unequal exchange.
>no [the universal equivalent] is labor. why arent you busting out your quotes?because it seemed self-evident. i will bust out my quotes and destroy your uneducated position however, but will you admit i am correct?
here is the first mention of the universal equivalent in the text (in relation to the general value form),
>"The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent."wait? "single commodity"? but you said it was "labour"…
lets continue,
>"a particular kind of commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material in which they uniformly express their value."hmmm. curious. almost as if the universal equivalent is a commodity entered into the general value form, and is transformed into the money-commodity. and as i have masterfully displayed, labour to marx is valueless; but i will repeat if i have to,
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."and
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed."okay. so labour is valueless. thus, for it to equate values, it must be entered into the commodity form for it to have an exchange value (or value). in this, abstract labour is spotaneously compared between the 2 items.
so in all this, you are absolutely incorrect. i have provided my quotes and destroyed your ignorant conjecture. will you be humble enough to admit it though? do you figuratively know more about the quran than a muslim? you tell me.
>nah. thats like his whole project lmaoyou cant know what marx's "project" is because youve never read him. you are trying to convey the will of allah to me once again.
>no its not [that to marx, precious metals have universal value], its that social relations have concrete effects in the material worldyour blather has already been contested. you dont know what value is, so you dont know what i mean by universal value. lets take this quote again,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money."what else can this mean to you? oh, its just social custom? value to marx is a purely social reality, so precious metals, as they are entered into economy, are to marx, "the direct incarnation of all human labour" or as he rhetorically writes earlier, they are subject to the "universal consent of mankind."
>can you really not see here how he is directly saying that money replaced by symbols is still money, which is real separate from its existence as gold.it only has value as it direct represents gold, not as it "replaces" gold. read carefully,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."again, look close,
<"only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."paper money to marx must "represent" a particular commodity to be viable as money.
>what we call money is not a physical thing, that is its appearance, money is the social relation that it governs, which is the distribution of social laboryou are close but miss the crucial point, that money as a form of value is to marx the universal equivalent commodity, and thus can only measure these social values by having a concrete existence, not a symbolic existence. money to marx thus has a physical and abstract aspect, as concrete and abstract labour.
>how does this overcome marx at all? i already explained that in UBI, machine labour is exploited.
>if you hypothetically pay machines a wage, you are just adding to your variable capital, considering machines as labor, and decreasing your profit.we are considering machines as "labour power" (marx already considers machines as "dead labour" or pure labour), but i agree that this wage relation converts its constant capital into a variable form, but how does this decrease profit if we are in turn exploiting the surplus labour of the machine? it increases profit, in proportion to the consumption of materials. marx's idea is that the ratio of constant capital to variable replaces variable capital over time, leading to less profits since there is less exploitation. converting constant capital into variable capital thus increases profits (as long as these products are consumed, which in a UBI situation, they are - think of it like how automation replaces workers - this to marx is the deathnel of capitalism because of unemployment, but as we see, massive unemployment and precarious work doesnt destabilise the structure of capitalism in a welfare state - this then relates back to the earlier curiosity, that libertarians simultaneously defend capitalism while promoting the conditions of its destruction; but this is also the nature of capital itself, which destroys itself, without state intervention).
>the problem with capitalism is not that there isn't enough money to go around, its that money is an irrational way to organize social reproduction. the problem with capitalism is that its immoral, not that its "irrational" or "inefficient" lol.
>i can only believe you think this if you think value = price, which it is not.i already explained this
>im talking about you apparently not knowing that value form theory is an attack on historical communismwhere do i invoke value form theory? again, anon, i plead in all earnesty to assess yourself. just admit you dont know what youre talking about. what i quoted was from marx in chapter 1, discussing the development of the value-form, from A, B, C to D. its not an anti-communist conspiracy, its literally marxism 101. but this has been the strange thing; i explain marx's ideas and you call marx a moron. i dont think he's a moron, but you do, apparently.
>>2121389>so while a price may express a commodity's present value, while that value is constant, its appearance in dollar terms is constantly in flux, as the composition of society and the distribution of the labor changes from day to day?all prices are proportional however. if we had massive inflation, the price of an item would still be in proportion. think for example of the yen denomination in japan; the standard of price is denominated in comparable terms to the penny, thus ¥100 = $1 (in simple terms).
yes, the price is the appearance of value to marx, but he solves this by seeing how value is measured in *proportion*, not in particular. thus to marx, money has a two-fold nature, as the "measure of values" and "the standard of price" 😃
>>2121448>We have largely overcome coinage and precious metals as universal equivalents but commodities still have exchange rates with each other based on their socially necessary labor timesi could agree to those terms, except that in marxist terms, these commodities are thus compared on a particular basis, and thus operate either in the elementary form of value (barter) or the expanded form of value, for we have no universal commodity to measure values. im not saying you have to abandon marx's value form, but it does mean saying that money has been abolished (which has been my entire point). this is unless you consider fiat to be a commodity (which it isnt) or it have SNLT (which it also doesnt), so it cannot measure values, which you at least seem to be open to saying. fiat has no value yet commodities can be equated as values - this is your point, right? thats fine. i just resist when people pretend that fiat is a universal equivalent. again, im fine with marxists who are honest (and have actually read his work).
>but labor time still constitutes the primary and most influential factor in the price formation of the commodity.no one denies this.
>>2122648>This is either great trolling or you are very stupid<gives no reason whyanother illiterate fool, i suppose.
>fiat money and commodity moneyall money to marx is commodity-money. thats why i say that in marxist terms, it has a two-fold use-value; its "special" and "formal" use-value.
>In both text snippets it is clear that Marx does not consider only gold to be proper money.while you are nominally correct, lets read from chapter 3,
>"It thus serves as a universal measure of value. And only by virtue of this function does gold, the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."and lets supplement this with the ending of chapter 2,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour."clearly marx holds precious metals in very high regard as universal equivalents, or as he says, "[gold] the equivalent commodity par excellence, become money."
his attribution of gold as "world money" later in chapter 3 also displays marx's notion of its historical necessity.
>>2122906ive read it too
thats how i know you are wrong
>its dialectical. the value form is the appearance of value, which is an essence. if you understand hegel (which you obviously dont)youre like halfway there, maybe you should read hegel too
>to marx, labour has no value, and its value is only expressed between commodities in exchange. PLEASE listen to me so i dont repeat myself for the millionth time; the concept of "the value of labour" to marx is a bourgeois concept. value is not a natural category of inputs, but is a "social relation between things".youve got half of this backwards again. value is snlt, and is measured in exchange, but exists prior to it, it being a bourgeois concept doesn't mean it isn't real, it being a social relation between things, in a capitalist economy, is what makes it a bourgeois concept. he isn't saying its an incorrect formation hes situating it in its proper historical context.
>i am glad you are asking questions instead of asserting absurd conjecture.marx describes the function of money as a "measure of value" in chapter 3,
see you are saying money is a measure of value. you are agreeing.
>so to marx, paper money must represent commodities in particular and not generally. this is why i say he has no real concept of fiat. do you now understand where im coming from?he doesn't say must. i really have no idea where you are coming from, whether or not he has a concept of fiat doesn't really change anything
i guess here is a good point to ask you to reassert your point
>value cannot be measured by itselfand???
so what? its measured in exchange
>value is not in the cost of production (i.e. labour) but is the cost of labour-power in equivalent exchange (the entirety of chapter 19 delves into this)this is semantics, its the social cost of putting labor in one place which denies it being used in others
>so then, SNLT is not a natural property of commodities (the substance of value; use-value) but is a social relation between commodities (the magnitude of value; exchange-value).im not disputing this, ive said the same thing multiple times, im not sure how you think this relates to what you are saying at all
>all i have been doing is explaining marx to "marxists". i should be preaching to the choir but instead i am being run out,because you are wrong. im beginning to expect that you used secondary sources when you read capital, and somehow exclusively used modern value form theorists, and as a result aren't actually aware that you are advocating for one of the three or four modern distortions of marx popular in english speaking academia
>no, no. *I* am not saying that; marx is saying that.again this is pre-101 level misunderstanding, like this is the sort of thing that people were saying about him in his own lifetime that he explicitly rejected
thats what MYSELF and many others have been trying to explain to YOU
check out the sources ive been posting in between these discussions
>this is the basis of marx's polemic that you cant overprice your way to surplus-value. idk what you are trying to mean by "cant" because an individual capitalist can overprice to appropriate surplus values from their competitors, such as under monopoly conditions like brand recognition. while this doesn't create value, it does allow a capitalist to get profits, even if the source is their competitors. it might not be sustainable or infinitely reproduceable but it happens, probably besides the point, but i didn't bring it up
>so who is "completely wrong" here? marx?your understanding of marx is foundationally mistaken and you have openly admitted it. im still interested in whatever point you think you are making but im still not sure what it is
>price and value are not separate entities to marx, but are the same thing, in different expressions. super extremely wrong
>this is why i raised an original scepticism towards marx's value form denoting equivalent exchange.again, he assumes equivalent exchange, he doesn't declare it to be so. is that your dispute?
>here, marx is saying very clearly that man does not determine exchange relations;what? how else do they happen, do dogs trade?
>value as an independent entity converts commodities into social relations which express an equalityno capitalist market dynamics convert labor into commodities, which obscures the fact that they are social relations
>if your conjecture is true, then you cant claim surplus-value is extracted since "by definition", all exchanges denote an equal product.lol. Marx is strait up saying that exchange is both equal and unequal. Since you are such a master dialectician figure it out lmao.
>again, this is why money is not a "token" or "symbol" to marx, but is a commodity.assuming this to be the case, why is it important, and why does this overturn his work?
>i hope youre joking lolhalf, but no. theres a better explanation picrel
> i will bust out my quotes and destroy your uneducated position however, but will you admit i am correct?if you prove that marx does not claim labor to be the universal equivalent sure, but he does.
>okay. so labour is valueless.see this is what i mean by getting caught in specifics. maybe im just not being clear but marx definitely says labor-something is value, was it SNLT? i dont care you should be able to figure out what i mean and you are not because your understanding of marx is wrong
>Labour is the substanceyes this is saying that its the universal equivalent
>you cant know what marx's "project" is because youve never read him.his whole project, dialectical materialism, is showing that concepts are determined by their historical social relations, that the universe is a manifold in flux, rather than a collection of independent eternally fixed static objects
>you are close but miss the crucial point, that money as a form of value is to marx the universal equivalent commodity, and thus can only measure these social values by having a concrete existence, not a symbolic existence. money to marx thus has a physical and abstract aspect, as concrete and abstract labour.YES!
<thus can only measure these social values by having a concrete existence, not a symbolic existenceAnd that concrete existence is social labor! not fucking rocks lmao
>how does this decrease profit if we are in turn exploiting the surplus labour of the machinebecause wages go up over time, thats point of replacing people with machines. when a machine can do 10x the work of a person, you would have to pay the machine 10x as much to UBI those 10 unemployed people. so you havent increased or decreased profit you have just moved it around.
>the problem with capitalism is that its immoraldid marx say that too?
>where do i invoke value form theory? idk because you arent being transparent
>discussing the development of the value-formhow bout here? accepting that there is a distinct value-form that is somehow consequential to the truth of the theory seems to be an endorsement of some kind of interpretation other than what is commonly understood as marxism
>>2122993>The value in a currency is its function as a medium of exchange for other commodities. The use value* specifically, not the exchange value
>Different anon but there's no such thing as fiat currencyI am also a different anon and I agree with you. Tell me what you think about pic related
>>2122919>all prices are proportional however.so prices are not values, they are different than values, yet proportional. thus, being different things, they are separate.
>so the difficulty is that the price-form as the ultimate value form must represent equivalent values.what do you mean by ultimate? prices determine values in the sense that they find out what it is by measurement, they dont determine it in the sense that they cause it to come in to being
he doesn't say they must be equal he assumes that they are, them sometimes not being equal in particular exchanges is further proof that capitalism is exploitative.
a lot of this argument is like trying to prove that b can override the trend in a^2 + b, that somehow extremely large starting positions can overcome velocity when measuring distance over time. thats essentially what the economic calculation problem has always been, and its even more frivolous when you realize marx was talking about general solutions and not particular, and that when integrating and deriving you drop constants. pointing out that you cant derive price from value is essentially just restating mathematic principles not proving marx wrong.
>>2122976>ive read it toonow you are doubling down on a lie. bad news.
>youve got half of this backwards again. value is snlt, and is measured in exchange, but exists prior to itwhere? concrete labours are valueless to marx. value comes into being by the exchange relation; it is this social relation which bears its being as "human labour in the abstract". again, if your idea that SNLT is a factor/cost of production, you fall into what marx sees as the bourgeois fallacy of applying a value to labour.
>it being a social relation between things, in a capitalist economy, is what makes it a bourgeois concept.no, no, no. again, you are illiterate. marx's point in chapter 19 is that "the value of labour" is a bourgeois concept, but the value of labour power overcomes bourgeois economy by basing its analysis in the essence of relations, not appearances. to marx, value is only bourgeois if misapprehended as "the value of labour"
>see you are saying money is a measure of value. you are agreeing.and how does it measure values? from its concrete form as a universal equivalent, not from its symbolic character; lets read from chapter 3,
>"It is not money that renders commodities commensurable. Just the contrary. It is because all commodities, as values, are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values can be measured by one and the same special commodity, and the latter be converted into the common measure of their values, i.e., into money. Money as a measure of value, is the phenomenal form that must of necessity be assumed by that measure of value which is immanent in commodities, labour-time.">he doesn't say must [in how paper money must represent commodities in particular]lets read from chapter 2 first to refresh ourselves,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol."okay, so money is not a mere symbol, but must represent commodities in particular, as we read in chapter 3,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold."<"can spring up […] ONLY from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold"so it must necessarily represent a commodity to function as money.
will you see the error of your ways?
>this is semantics [in regards to the difference between costs of production and the value of labour power]its marx's entire theory, which you clearly disregard, yet attempt to simultaneously defend. you are being bourgeois by seeing labour as valuable in itself, which is false to marx.
>im beginning to expect that you used secondary sources when you read capitalyou do realise that a quote is a primary source, right? i am proving that i have read the source material, while you have read nothing.
>idk what you are trying to mean by "cant" because an individual capitalist can overprice to appropriate surplus values from their competitorsokay, so you explicitly deny the concept of equivalent exchange then? good to know. you are bourgeois in marx's eyes, because you thus configure labour power as merely one commodity of many, of it can either be over-priced or under-priced.
>while this doesn't create value, it does allow a capitalist to get profitswhat are profits except surplus value?
>your understanding of marx is foundationally mistaken and you have openly admitted it.admitted it where? i have been studious to marx's word.
>super extremely wrong [that price and value are the same thing, in different expressions]<he therefore denies the money-form of value
>again, he assumes equivalent exchange, he doesn't declare it to be so.woahhhh. so marx is just guessing? lol
>what [in the determination of values]?this is the point. lets read from chapter 1 again,
>"Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic."what does, "We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it" mean to you? what marx is saying is that value by virtue of its exchange value, equates commodities unbeknownst to ourselves. his point is that in exchange, we are deadlocked into this relation of equivalence. value thus determines its equivalence by meeting itself in the market. thats his principle of equal exchange, and why only labour power can create surplus value (since it meets its value, yet exceeds its value).
>no capitalist market dynamics convert labor into commodities, which obscures the fact that they are social relationscommodity production existed long before capitalism, and marx's point is that even in barter, value as a social relation is exchanged.
>Marx is strait up saying that exchange is both equal and unequalwhere? nowhere.
>assuming this to be the case [that money to marx is a commodity], why is it important, and why does this overturn his work?it matters because it implies that fiat currency isnt money - this matters integrally to marx's theory of capitalism as a circuit of expanding value, crystalised in the money-form (M-C-M').
>if you prove that marx does not claim labor to be the universal equivalent sure, but he does. bro, i literally provided you many direct quotes, but you arent reading them. the universal equivalent assumes the shape of a COMMODITY. i will repeat myself,
>"The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent."and
>"a particular kind of commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material in which they uniformly express their value."this is why money as a universal equivalent, is to marx, a commodity which measures values.
so i have proven you wrong. how do you respond?
>see this is what i mean by getting caught in specifics. maybe im just not being clear but marx definitely says labor-something is value, was it SNLT? i dont care you should be able to figure out what i mean and you are not because your understanding of marx is wrongholy fuck the wheels have really come off here havent they? you are illiterate and dont even understand what youre talking about.
>yes this is saying that its the universal equivalenthaha. the "substance of value" is use-value, which to marx, has no value,
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."NO VALUE.
the universal equivalent as concrete labour only expresses value in exchange with other commodities, not in itself. as i say, you cant measure value with value; "1 dollar is worth 1 dollar" is an "absurd tautology" as marx says.
>And that concrete existence is social labor! not fucking rocks lmaoconcrete labour is embodied in a commodity. social labour is expressed by exchange. thus, value is concretely expressed in a commodity.
>when a machine can do 10x the work of a person, you would have to pay the machine 10x as muchpay them 1 penny a year instead. machines dont have bargaining power lol.
>did marx say that too?i am not a marxist so its irrelevant to me
>accepting that there is a distinct value-form that is somehow consequential to the truth of the theory seems to be an endorsement of some kind of interpretation other than what is commonly understood as marxismhere, i will screenshot this page of marx's capital (picrel). the value-form, or "form of value" is marx's idea of how exchange value is expressed. it has 4 forms as i have said,
elementary/accidental form (A)
total/expanded form (B)
general form (C) (where the universal equivalent is established)
the money-form (D), which develops the price-form
i am literally just quoting marx, like ive been doing all this time.
again, STOP arguing with me about things you dont know.
>>2122994excellent 😁
>>2122993>Different anon but there's no such thing as fiat currency.off to a banger!
>The value in a currency is its function as a medium of exchange for other commoditiesyes i agree. marx disagrees.
>Your acting as if paper money is defying some economic law of thermodynamics how? i am defending the concept of paper money, as against marx's "commodity-money" nonsense.
>>2123008>so prices are not valuesprices are the form of value to marx, or value's "phenomenal form"
>thus, being different things, they are separate.distinct, but inseparable.
>what do you mean by ultimate?it is marx's final value-form as described in sec. 3 of ch. 1, or value-form D. - the money-form.
>he doesn't say they must be equal he assumes that they are, them sometimes not being equal in particular exchanges is further proof that capitalism is exploitative.so marx guesses?
and marx's point on exploitation is that what is exploited is labour-power, precisely because it is given its equivalent value, in wages. therefore surplus labour is unpaid, not "underpaid".
>>2123033but i already explained…
literally just read below what you quoted from me
>i already said that since value is snlt its embedded in commodities at production, not created in exchangeread this quote,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value […] A thing can be useful, and the product of human labour, without being a commodity. Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values."and this,
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value."marx does not think production creates SNLT, but SNLT is only expressed as an exchange relation between commodities. SNLT is not a factor of production primarily, but is a "purely social reality". lets read this for example,
>"As use values, commodities are, above all, of different qualities, but as exchange values they are merely different quantities, and consequently do not contain an atom of use value."and
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."thus, value is a "social relation between things". if there is no "social relation" (exchange), there can be no value - so to return to the original quote,
>"A thing can be a use value, without having value"and finally,
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."NOT AN ATOM. this is because value is "human labour in the abstract" as opposed to concrete labour.
>>2123080>admitted it where?when you said that marx thinks value = price
>i am proving that i have read the source material, while you have read nothing.you are actually proving my assumptions about you correct, that you learned heinrichs interpretation of marx in an academic setting
whether or not you believe i have read capital is separate from my argument
>okay, so you explicitly deny the concept of equivalent exchange then? you missed the point of that detour just to double down
>what are profits except surplus value?its literally in that sentence, they appropriate surplus value from their competitors
>woahhhh. so marx is just guessing? loldid you not read the pic i linked? and assumptions are not guesses.
>what does, "We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it" mean to you? commodity fetishism, which you also ignore
>where? nowhere.hes saying that it is equal in the sense that by capitalist market dynamics they are exchanged as equivalents, but these market dynamics ignore social forces in which people meet in the market on unequal grounds. it is equal because they are paid the full value of their labor, but it is unequal because the commodity produced by that labor, that is legally the property of the capitalist, is worth more than the labor that went into it.
>bro, i literally provided you many direct quotes, but you arent reading them.im actually skipping and ignoring them because they dont change the overall argument.
> the wheels have really come off here havent theyim just getting tired of you doing the professors assistant thing of correcting my terminology and not addressing the argument. whoops i said trancendental instead of trancendent the world is ending. youll find most people on imageboards are autodidacts.
>haha. the "substance of value" is use-value, which to marx, has no value,no the substance of value is labor, or labor time, or snlt or whatever. thats one of the things you keep not responding to, and in trying to get my terms in order it looks like the "substance" theory has been named as in opposition to the "value-form" theory. thats what i mean by you not being transparent. you are clearly pushing an
interpretation of marx and presenting it as marx
see this whole time i thought we were dealing with some tssi thing because thats who usually is in opposition to the dickblast people, which is why i said days ago
>it is one of many western interpretations meant to "fix" a problem that never existed, cockshott and kliman are both wrong, the soviets were right. and sourced that later
>>2121330but you are literally this guy
>>2123044i even forgot about him because no one ever posts about it here. its usually people who come to marx in their final year of a critical theory degree. hes also one of those that rejects dialectics openly thinks LTV is wrong and blames Engels for popularizing distortions, not to mention Lenin Stalin & Mao
and even if you came to this interpretation independently that its still what you are saying, that LTV is wrong, value cant exist without money etc, and by extension all historical socialist projects were founded on a lie
>>2123104>no the substance of value is labor, or labor time, or snlt or whateversubstance of value = labor
magnitude of value = labor time
(not the same anon btw - see pic rel)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm >>2123084>i am defending the concept of paper money, as against marx's "commodity-money" nonsense.what? has this really been the issue the whole time?
are you actually secretly a marxist but think that a wrong interpretation of marx meant to debunk him was actually what he said and so you did a bunch of work just to arrive at what marx already wrote? read something other than capital lol. thats what i said when this thread started, reading capital is for proving marx right which is only necessary if for some reason you dont already know he is.
>final value-form okay so because it comes at the end it makes it difficult? is there supposed to be some consequence?
>marx does not think production creates SNLTi might have mispoken, however, while value is determined in exchange, and commodities imbued with labor that are not exchanged are valueless, value is still created at production. its one of those owl of minerva things.
>value is "human labour in the abstract"yes, social labor, which money represents
>thus, value is a "social relation between things". if there is no "social relation" (exchange), there can be no value - so to return to the original quote,social relations dont happen between things, things are not social, people are, which is why social relations happen between people, though they appear as relations between commodities, which is commodity fetishism
>no, no. *I* am not saying thatso do you disagree with
>but the "money" is a different thing that is being referred to than the "gold" even in cases where it is raw and unprocessed, even when it is literally the same physical object, because what we call money is not a physical thing, that is its appearance, money is the social relation that it governs, which is the distribution of social laboror do you think that marx does? because if its true that money is just a tool for distributing labor, then doesn't that make fiat okay? if its the case that marx really did disagree, does that actually debunk LTV? you seem to be saying that leaving the gold standard fixes the inherent contradictions in capitalism, but its been 50 years and we still have crisis of overproduction. I dont see how paying machines a wage and appropriating a surplus-value to UBI solves this. It increases money supply, it doesn't increase social labor, like idk banning abortion does. Thats what theyre doing to save capitalism for now. UBI is just like MMT stuff, its just social democracy, its a different way of increasing taxes.
Im trying to come up with a hypothetical where Marx doesn't agree but I'm pretty sure this is actually central to his argument, so if he somehow said money had to be gold it really is inconsequential because money is fiat now, so he was wrong and fiat represents the distribution of social labor and hes right about everything else. If we had machines capable of full automation and UBI then maybe you could overturn Marx in a way, we advance to techno-feudalism, and barbarism will have won by virtue of socialisms failure.
>>2123104>marx thinks value = priceno, marx thinks price is in the appearance of value, but not its essence.
>"The elementary expression of the relative value of a single commodity, such as linen, in terms of the commodity, such as gold, that plays the part of money, is the price form of that commodity. The price form of the linen is therefore 20 yards of linen = 2 ounces of gold, or, if 2 ounces of gold when coined are £2, 20 yards of linen = £2.">you are actually proving my assumptions about you correct, that you learned heinrichs interpretation of marx in an academic settingso now you are a conspiracy theorist?
>whether or not you believe i have read capital is separate from my argumentyou have never read capital. thats why you say dumb things like, i am a spy of heinrich's forbidden school of marxist revisionism. a difference between me and heinrich is that i dont attempt to save marx from himself.
>commodity fetishism, which you also ignoreyou dont know what that means
>it is equal because they are paid the full value of their laboragain, marx doesnt believe in "the value of labour"
>is worth more than the labor that went into it.nonsense sentence.
>im actually skipping and ignoring them [quotes from marx] because they dont change the overall argument. haha. so you literally admit that you are afraid of marx's own words.
>im just getting tired of you doing the professors assistant thing of correcting my terminology and not addressing the argument.<"stop being right!">you are clearly pushing an interpretation of marx and presenting it as marxi have done nothing but quote marx directly, but you wouldnt know that because you arent reading the quotes, as you admit. you ask for evidence, i provide it; you ignore it. thats been the general theme of this thread. i present rational argumentation, my critics present conjecture; rinse and repeat. i have not seen a single quote from marx by anyone else, since 95% of "marxists" never actually read him.
>>2123162>what? has this really been the issue the whole time? my original post is literally a criticism of marx's perspective on money: (>>2118170)
>read something other than capital lolhow about you actually read capital at all
>thats what i said when this thread started, reading capital is for proving marx right which is only necessary if for some reason you dont already know he is. reminds me of people saying God loves you even if you dont believe in him. your axiom is "marx is right", therefore to read marx is only to prove him right. thats idolatry. what if my axiom was "marx is wrong", therefore, marx is wrong. it defeats reason.
>yes, social labor, which money representsand how is it represented? to marx, in the commodity-form. money is a universal equivalent.
>social relations dont happen between thingslets see what marx says,
>"the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".to marx, commodities self-relate in exchange.
>which is commodity fetishisma misuse of the term
>so do you disagree with [money is not a physical thing, that is its appearance, money is the social relation that it governs, which is the distribution of social labor] or do you think that marx does?no, i think money is still a particular object, like marx, but i dont think this object is a commodity possessing value. marx thinks that as the universal equivalent, a singular commodity must be two-fold, between its commodity-form and money-form. as marx says, money has no price (for it is the standard of price), yet gold (or any equivalent) has a price, and this is its internal contradiction (between its measure of value and standard of price), or its two-fold use-value; its special and formal use-value.
now, fiat as a symbol of value has its formal use-value but no special use-value. its use-value is as a means of exchange. this is what is developed from marx's money-form. fiat also represents no commodity in particular, and thus is not a universal equivalent (which is why i say that if you retain marx's value-form, you might see how fiat operates as either an elementary or expanded value form, but not as money). however, values are still compared and thus "measured" according to a standard of price - and what does this? how do we calculate prices? simply, based in markets, which are regulated by labour (costs). to me, this also depends upon an unequal exchange of value implied by different markets, but a marxist would simply say these fluctuations are market prices, not equilibrium prices or alternatively explain them by attributing different levels of labour-power, but this analysis breaks down when we look at imperialism imo. finally, all this matters because marx sees M-C-M' as the circuit of capital circulation, wherein values expand as they are embodied by money (or to marx, crystalised labour). this is a theory of the gold standard as i say, for it inherently limits distribution, thus leading to crises of overproduction. with fiat alternatively, distribution becomes easier, mitigating crises. this also breaks marx's theory of capital expansion in general, since if you can just "make money" then the expansion of values seems entirely relative (except in the class relation, which is also held in the bourgeois state). this is why i think most marxists become reformists who see redistribution as the ideal situation.
so overall, me and marx disagree, but for different reasons. yes, money represents social labour, but money is not social labour in itself. marx comes close here though,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour. Hence the magic of money.">because if its true that money is just a tool for distributing labor, then doesn't that make fiat okay?yes, of course. its very existence proves its efficacy.
>if its the case that marx really did disagree, does that actually debunk LTV? well, there are different types of the LTV. I think marx's LTV is wrong, but smith's has popular viability, in that the costs of production maintain market prices borne from an original natural price. this to marx is bourgeois in character since it supposes the "value of labour" (that is, it mystifies exploitation), but i think if you accept also as smith did, that "profits are the enemy of labour" then you can conceive of wage labour as a form of exploitation. the difference is that the bourgeois conception is that wages "underpay" workers, while marx's conception is that surplus labour is "unpaid" all together. so its not just an economic question, but also a political question.
>you seem to be saying that leaving the gold standard fixes the inherent contradictions in capitalism, but its been 50 years and we still have crisis of overproductionnot in the same way as marx understood it. overproduction was rooted in unemployment; now its rooted in "overemployment" - or overwork. so we still have crises, but in different terms. i dont think we have "solved" capitalism, but we are at least closer to an authentic socialism.
>I dont see how paying machines a wage and appropriating a surplus-value to UBI solves this. It increases money supply, it doesn't increase social laborwhy not? because a machine is a lesser being to you?
>so if he somehow said money had to be gold it really is inconsequential because money is fiat now, so he was wrong and fiat represents the distribution of social labor and hes right about everything elsewell its all related. its too much to get into, so i'll leave it there.
>If we had machines capable of full automation and UBI then maybe you could overturn Marx in a wayit doesnt even have to be full automation. marx's essential point is that machines dont produce values because their labour-power isnt exchanged for, the same as the slave. the worker then is just a wage-slave, as marx says here in chapter 19,
>"All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer."this to me is one of the most mysterious passages from marx - if it is the case that to create the conditions of "paid labour" for the slave is to make him a valuable worker, then why cant a machine be paid for its labour so as to achieve its place in the value relation? today the machine is a slave, tomorrow a proletarian? but this is only speculative of the concept of labour power. if labour power is truly the only vessel of value-creation, then for political economy to advance (if it isnt abolished) is for machines to become proletarian.
>>2123192>>2122909>>you are essentially saying that value=price, which is definitely completely wrong>no, no. *I* am not saying that; marx is saying that.
>no, marx thinks price is in the appearance of value, >but not its essence.which is snlt
>>2123194>>read something other than capital lol>your axiom is "marx is right"you do know he presented his ideas in other works? you can understand his argument without needing to read capital, but if you have already accepting incorrect bourgeois theories you might have to go through the details to get over them. its not required to slog through examples and counter-examples if you already know why they are wrong. he was trying to convince people who opposed him, who are going to interpret him in bad faith like you are doing, so he had to be meticulous and i just find it excessive, which i know because i have read it, as well as most of his other works, which is why i feel comfortable giving that recommendation.
>(which is why i say that if you retain marx's value-form, you might see how fiat operates as either an elementary or expanded value form, but not as money)what is value-form? does it regulate the distribution of social labor? more importantly what do you think value is?
>yes, of course. its very existence proves its efficacy.because at this point it sounds like you are arguing over definitions but actually agree almost entirely, you seem to be saying that you think marx believes production is regulated by commodities in general, of which money is one, and labor-time another, and since fiat isn't money, this blows up marx. but what he is actually saying that production is regulated by labor, or labor-time as a universal equivalent, or rather that the limit of production is human input, and you are mad because that devalues robots, which to me sounds like you are introducing a new type of value.
>why not? because a machine is a lesser being to you?how does this work? what social relations do machines engage in? are you giving machines human rights? when you pay machines a wage aren't you paying a price representing snlt? how does this increase production if machines dont reproduce snlt?
>its too much to get intoim honestly confused how you think this is supposed to work. i hope this isn't a troll
>>2123194>no, i think money is still a particular object, like marx, but he doesn't think that
>a misuse of the termgo ahead and explain it then
>this analysis breaks down when we look at imperialism imoand this.
>>2123213>>2123213>you do know he presented his ideas in other works? have you read any of those other works? if so, which ones?
>you can understand his argument without needing to read capitalgive me a summary of his "'"argument""".
>who are going to interpret him in bad faith like you are doingtell me exactly how i am interpreting him in bad faith
>i have read it, as well as most of his other worksyou are a liar
>i have read capitalnext sentence:
>what is value-form? haha.
i have explained many times now
marx's value form has 4 phases:
elementary/accidental value form (A) (barter)
expanded/total value form (B)
general value form (C) (which establishes the universal equivalent
the money-form (D) which is expressed in price
>does it regulate the distribution of social labor?yes, since if money is limited in distribution, it disallows value to meet itself in exchange.
>more importantly what do you think value is?marx describes value as "human labour in the abstract"
>you think marx believes production is regulated by commodities in general, of which money is one, and labor-time anothermarx believes that production is limited by constant capital outcompeting variable capital, leading to unemployment - which is to say, it is limited by a lack of consumption which allows social reproduction.
>but what he is actually saying that production is regulated by labor, or labor-time as a universal equivalent, or rather that the limit of production is human inputyou are close, but wrong. marx disconsiders "inputs". he doesnt consider concrete labours to possess value, remember. the limit of production then is the payment for labour power; or employment - or in other terms, the failure of value (money, to marx) to be entered back into its circulation (M-C-M'). the limits of production thus are the limits of consumption.
>and you are mad because that devalues robots, which to me sounds like you are introducing a new type of value.no, i am just being bourgeois in marx's estimation by considering the cost of production, or labour, to be primary to value relations, rather than seeing labour-power as a unique commodity.
>how does this work? what social relations do machines engage in? are you giving machines human rights?no, i am mostly being rhetorical. if a slave *becomes* valuable when he is paid a wage, then why not a robot? its a hypothetical posed at marxists who fabulate labour-power as a relation of production rather than a relation of exchange.
>im honestly confused how you think this is supposed to work.a wage to marxists suffices as subsistence, so a subsistence fund for a machine can be calculated in advance. lets say a machine costs £1000 and will last 1000 days. "pay" it £1 a day and you will be exploiting its labour, since it makes more value than it costs (if the products of its labour are consumed). now replace a machine with a man. a man costs £20 a day to subsist. give him this value while selling his surplus product - now you have invented slavery. so whats the difference between slavery and capitalism?
to marx, it has its many socio-historic dimensions, but where it concerns material conditions, the main difference is that a subsistence fund is given to the worker for them to purchase commodities so as to make a profit for the capitalist, in exchange. the difference thus is the exchange of values which constitute the wage relation, whereby labour-power becomes a commodity. this is why i say that a worker is literally just a wage-slave. give a slave a wage, he becomes a worker - thus, give a machine a wage, and what happens? fundamentally, whats the difference between a robot amazon worker and a human amazon worker? that the human consumes the social product. he engages in commodity exchange - thus, humanity is able to exploit machine labour generally, only as long as this labour is consumed - thus as i say, the limits of production are the limits of consumption - or, the money supply. marx's idea of commodity-money limits his conception of political economy thus.
>>2123219>but he doesn't think that okay so baby steps now.
money is a universal equivalent, right?
what is a universal equivalent? lets read marx,
>"The general form of relative value, embracing the whole world of commodities, converts the single commodity that is excluded from the rest, and made to play the part of equivalent – here the linen – into the universal equivalent."and
>"a particular kind of commodity acquires the character of universal equivalent, because all other commodities make it the material in which they uniformly express their value."to marx, the universal equivalent is a commodity, whereby it develops into the money-form of value.
>go ahead and explain it then [commodity fetishism]lets read from chapter 1,
>"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them."he is simply describing by poetic device, the way in which commodities represent the entire world of values. they are "independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race", or as he later says,
>"the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things". >>2122993Fiat usually has very low production cost, but it is made to be hard to fake, so its
reproduction cost for third parties has to be high enough that they won't do it.
>>2123345>but it is made to be hard to fakeSo was coinage and precious metal money. Only the kings treasurary was allowed to mint coins. If you were a peasant in 1325 and stumbled across a gold bar. You could sell that gold bar as a commodity but not go to the market place and use it as currency. It can be made into a currency by taking it to the kings treasurary and having them smelt the gold bar, press it into coins and minted it with the kings mark. That's when it becomes currency, the currency gets its use value as a medium of exchange by the labor to Mint it and backing of a social institution. And that value only holds true if that labor is done by certain institutions. Otherwise it's counterfeit, which begs the question
If precious metals are inherently money. Then why was it possible to counterfeit them? And I'm not talking about just tossing in some zinc into the mix of the coin. Any coins minted outside the treasurary were considered counterfeit even if the weight and composition of the metal was equivalent. There's an extra layer of labor that's required to transform a commodity into a currency.
Any commodity can become a currency but only if it has the labor of a "trusted" institution embedded in it, trusted as in you trust you can do commerce with their currency, the currency will maintain stable value, and the institution (Any institution btw, government, bank, local warlord ect) can guarantee a market to exchange said currency for commodities. The only reason paper/digital currency is treated different than metal currency is because paper currency started off as IOUs for gold issued by banks. Eventually people just started exchanging these IOUs directly instead of lugging around a sack of coins. Cause you could "trust" that you can exchange your IOUs for gold. Which created constant economic crisis and bank runs when people did try to exchange their IOUS. Despite these issues and crisis people continued to use paper currency. Why? Because currency is a commodity in of itself. Even if you don't trust the currency as long as enough people do you can sell(exchange) that currency for commodities or even sell(exchange) that currency for other currencies as long as a market of buyers exist.
So there was zero reason for paper money to be tied to gold but it was because for the longest time mostly Europeans understood gold to be currency because that's what the best option at the time was but it wasn't the only option. In meso-America the Aztects used coco seeds as their currency.
https://bigthink.com/sponsored/aztec-mesoamerican-chocolate-money/Ironically around before but around the time of Europeans arriving they had started switching over to cloth money that represents a value of coco beans. So you know if the aztecs had gone interrupted they likely would have had an economic crisis they made them switch to a fiat currency and there would be a bunch of Aztec economist laminating about how only a coco bean can be a real currency.
>>2123453"paper money" and fiat currency are very different things, even as you allude to
to marx, "paper money" is paper representative of the money commodity
fiat currency is different because it isnt tied to any commodity in particular, and thus cant serve as a universal equivalent, unless you consider its SNLT to be a measure of value
but youre completely correct that money proper requires a monopoly of power, or sovereign issuer to be legitimised. thats why the production of money is tied to class relations, where taxes thus serve as rents of the state.
this act of legitimacy is hardly a "labour" unto itself however. you are implying that this is its SNLT. it isnt. fiat currency does not "measure" values, it mediates the exchange of commodities.
>>2123465>that money proper requires a monopoly of power, or sovereign issuer to be legitimised.I didn't say that. You don't need a monopoly of power or even sovereignty to issue currency. Me and you could make a currency right now, it doesn't need legitimaticy to be used as a currency it just needs enough buyers/users of that currency and market where it can be used as a medium of exchange for other commodities or currency. The legitimacy of a currency depends on how well it does on the market. The more legitimate the institution issuing the currency the more likely the currency will gain value as a medium of exchange as its used in the market.
Like my Dave and busters tokens are a currency issued by Dave and busters. What makes their currency legitimate is I can use my Dave and busters tokens in the Dave and busters market for goods and services. I can even sell my Dave and busters tokens to purchase other currencies at different exchange rates. Currency is a commodity, even if a commodity stops being a currency it's still can be used as and sold as a commodity. I can purchase other currencies like I purchase commodities.
>>2123512>anyone can make a currency<because currencies are commoditiesso when does a commodity *become* money to you?
also, my point on sovereign issuers is that this is what institutes currency as *money* proper, where money is a minted currency, and thus is under monopoly power, which grants the means of taxation as a rent - like how one gains royalties from issuing license for intellectual property.
as you say, gold was not money - it *became* money under the royal mint, like how caesar's face had to be put on roman coins.
>>2123465Also forgot to ask
>"paper money" and fiat currency are very different thingsHow so? They're both commodities that require labor to produce. The only thing that made paper money fiat was it being arbitrarily tied to another commodity.
>this act of legitimacy is hardly a "labour" unto itself however. you are implying that this is its SNLT. it isnt. Every commodity requires labor to produce. Even if paper/fiat was magical summoned from the ether or just naturally found on the ground outside. It would still require labor to summon the money or pick it up off the ground. Maybe I'm confused but I don't understand how you believe in LTV and also believe that fiat currency has some magical property that precludes any labor input into its creation or the issuing of it.
>>2123576>How so? They're both commodities that require labor to producepaper money (a promissory note, lets say, worth £10 of gold) is a receipt for a particular commodity with a fixed exchange rate
fiat is not tied to any particular commodity so has a floating exchange rate.
where it concerns marx, value is measured by a universal equivalent that serves as money, yet fiat is not a universal equivalent and so cannot measure values. paper money can represent commodities, but is not a "mere symbol" unto itself.
lets take these 2 quotes,
>"The fact that money can, in certain functions, be replaced by mere symbols of itself, gave rise to that other mistaken notion, that it is itself a mere symbol." [capital vol. 1, ch. 2]and,
>"A law peculiar to the circulation of paper money can spring up only from the proportion in which that paper money represents gold. Such a law exists; stated simply, it is as follows: the issue of paper money must not exceed in amount the gold (or silver as the case may be) which would actually circulate if not replaced by symbols." [capital vol. 1, ch. 3]paper money to marx is substitutory, not symbolic.
>The only thing that made paper money fiat was it being arbitrarily tied to another commodity. >arbitrarilythe reason gold (the money of war and misery) and silver ("the people's money") have served as money is because they are naturally scarce and so add security as to the monopoly power of issuers. in more closed economies though, any item can serve as money, like seashells or ancient "blockchains" since social trust is more powerful than force.
>Maybe I'm confused but I don't understand how you believe in LTV and also believe that fiat currency has some magical property that precludes any labor input into its creation or the issuing of it.i dont believe in LTV. i am a critic of marx.
i use his work to compare his ideas to the contemporary situation.
>>2123676I used arbitrarily maybe a little flippantly. I meant it as arbitrarily as in the grand scheme of conceptulizing an economy. I agree there is cultural, historical and even logical reasons gold was used as currency first. However in a vacuum that doesn't matter.
Let's say I starter printing out pictures of the poop emoji on pieces of paper 💩. Then I go into my backyard make 100 mudpies and collect 100 rocks. I set up a stall outside my house and over to let people purchase my mudpies and rocks in exchange for my shit bucks. 5 shit bucks buys you a rock and 10 shitbucks buys you a mudpie.
I've created a market with commodities and a currency to purchase those commodities. Even if it's a market of 1 person. All these things require labor to create. You can say nobodies going to want to exchange dollars, pesos, Canadian loonies or whatever for my shitbux in order to purchase commodities in my market place. Which is prolly true but Markets aren't rational, they're just logical. Otherwise things like crypto or pet rocks wouldn't exist. Even if the chance is infinitly small my shitbux could become the global reserve currency if enough markets are invested in shitbux so they can purchase my mudpies and rocks. That's why I say anyone can make a currency and anyone can make a commodity because all that's required to do so is the labor to create it. What legitimatizes a market/currency and the commodities sold in that market is how many people participate in it. The market itself being a form of labor to distribute the commodities. I agree with a lot of what your saying. And I also admit that I'm not the most well read on marx. All my ideas are just from a layman's understanding of marx and my own thoughts on conceptulizing an economy. I believe in LVT but also like you I don't believe in "dead labor" as marx describe about machines. Otherwise are work horses and ox dead labor? Labor is labor and everything requires labor to give it value. Maybe I'm wrong but I've really enjoyed talking to you and this thread and want to stop to thank you real quick for this discussion and you're ideas.
>>2123890>All my ideas are just from a layman's understanding of marx and my own thoughts on conceptulizing an economy.yeah thats completely fine. as long as youre honest you are forgiven.
>I believe in LVT but also like you I don't believe in "dead labor" as marx describe about machines. Otherwise are work horses and ox dead labor? Labor is labor and everything requires labor to give it value.well to marx, "dead labour" and "living labour" are alternative terms for "constant capital" (means of production) and "variable capital" (labour power). MoP is dead labour to marx because to him, this is a value of a constant magnitude (or fixed price) whose labour cannot produce values of themselves, but can only transfer values to the worker - for example, to marx, a machine increases the labour power of the worker by increasing his output - so dead labour interacts with living labour, but to marx, only living labour creates value.
and yes, slaves and animals are "dead labour" in this sense, since they are commodities, not labour powers. thus, marx sees slavery being abolished in bourgeois society since capitalists need labour power to exploit by the wage relation. so slaves can be as *productive* as workers in theory, but not as *valuable* (since value to marx is grounded in the exghange relation, not production per se)
this is also where marx's LTV differs from bourgeois economy for example; to the bourgeois economist, he only sees the cost of production as the condition of value, but this is immaterial to marx. to marx, value is fundamentally in the cost of labour-power.
this is why marx says mysterious things like,
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value.5 In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth."so to marx, labour (or concrete/useful labour) is valueless in itself and only achieves its value form in exchange, or as he says elsewhere,
>"the value of commodities has a purely social reality"and
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition."so i'll just leave it there for now. labour to marx is two-fold; abstract and concrete, dead and living, useful and valuable, and so on.
>Maybe I'm wrong but I've really enjoyed talking to you and this thread and want to stop to thank you real quick for this discussion and you're ideas.thx i appreciate it. i liked talking to you as well.
>>2123236>next sentence:>marx describes no im asking what YOU think value is. we already established that you dont understand marx.
i think were done here because you keep skipping critical questions meant to advance the discussion to simply repeat yourself. im obviously not alone in this because what ive been trying to tell you have been explained to you multiple times by other anons. at this point it appears your lack of transparency regarding your sources is intentional and that your even adopting your oppositions rhetoric to patch up the holes in your position. should have figured that out the first time you skipped responding to entire posts refuting you to argue semantics. you are pushing a false interpretation of marx and presenting it as the only way to read him. it should be abundantly clear that the idea marx had a monetary theory of value, which is a type of value-form theory, is highly controversial, and the only way you can believe it is by excising whole portions of his body of work to stuff it into a box where it cant do anything in the real world.
>>2124096okay so you dont defend the claims against you being illiterate, proving you are some weirdo liar who pretends to read marx yet doesnt even have a basic understanding of him. how as your life come to this?
>we already established that you dont understand marx. youve literally never read a page of marx in your life. this is like a scientist and a toddler quarreling over the theory of gravity. youre incurious and idiotic.
but i would still like to hwar your explanation as to why im wrong, and therefore to see how you correct me.
>at this point it appears your lack of transparency regarding your sources is intentional i have supplemented every single thing ive said with a source. its you who read wikipedia who has no sources.
>you are pushing a false interpretation of marx and presenting it as the only way to read himexplain how
>it should be abundantly clear that the idea marx had a monetary theory of value, which is a type of value-form theory, is highly controversial, and the only way you can believe it is by excising whole portions of his body of work to stuff it into a box where it cant do anything in the real worldexplain marx's theory of value to me then. educate me, im all ears.
>>2124124you asked no questions, but only gave baseless accusations. but i humbly plead of you regardless, explain marx's theory of value to me.
>>2124129yes. i have bourgeois consciousness in marxian terms since i deny the notion of labour power's particularity. value is what determines prices in exchange, which has its basis in the cost of production. i explain briefly here marx's opposition to this concept
>>2124110 >>2124135>you asked no questionslmao i asked you like thirty questions in the post before this and you answered one or two and skipped all the ones that matter. its like you know that getting into it will prove you wrong so you are dodging.
marx is clearly talking about how money is used as a mechanism for the control of the social distribution of labor. the huge anti-fiat post in the other thread told you the same thing and so did multiple other people but you are stuck on thinking that he has a money theory of value when he does not. someone even explained to you how he builds up larger points from smaller examples through dialectics and instead of realizing that you are hyperfocusing on a narrow part of his over all theory you started randomly putting the word dialectics into your posts in an attempt to deflect. its completely inconsequential if he actually did think that money had to be a commodity, because his entire theory has essentially nothing to do with money, but with labor.
thats why i keep repeatedly asking you what you think value is and what commodity fetishism is, because you are pretty much taking the exact stance as what he is in fact critiquing, but due to your misunderstandings think that critique is somehow incomplete. it also looks very much like you are mixing marx, your special interpretation of marx, and your own opinions that are completely divorced from the conversation without clarifying which is which
>>2124430>>2124536>Value becomes visible in exchange, and only sort of visible, since exchange value is not quite the same as value.and this appearance of value is its social reality that constitutes its essential relation. its dialectical. to marx, there can be no value without its form of appearance. value is inseparable from exchange for this reason, or as marx writes in sec. 3 of ch. 1,
>"if, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity."lets repeat what he says at the end,
<"value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity"what else can this possibly mean to you? value is a market phenomenon to marx. full stop.
>you are stuck on thinking that he has a money theory of value when he does notexplain M-C-M' to me then you fucking imbecile. marx's entire theory of capital (and therefore surplus value) is in the expansion of the money supply, since value is inherently tied to money.
>you are hyperfocusing on a narrow part of his over all theoryhis theory of value is a minor part of his work? lol
>his entire theory has essentially nothing to do with money, but with labor. hahaha. and what exactly is money, genius? a representation of social labour. money to marx is crystalised labour, or as he says in chapter 2,
>"These objects, gold and silver, just as they come out of the bowels of the earth, are forthwith the direct incarnation of all human labour."money and labour are inseparable concepts in commodity production.
>thats why i keep repeatedly asking you what you think value is and what commodity fetishism isand i keep answering with perfect extractions from marx's work, but you already admitted that you dont read the quotes of marx that i provide. you are stupid and ignorant on purpose.
also you never gave me your explanation of marx's theory of value, because you have none, since you've never read him. you know nothing yet pretend you know everything. its pathetic. no one has actually countered me with any evidence but only baseless assertions, while i provide endless textual primary sources, and im not even a fucking marxist. if this is the state of "marxism" in 2025, then your salvific notions of "communism" are impossible.
>>2126074>his theory of value is a minor part of his work?your obsession with commodity money is a minor part of his theory of value
>and what exactly is money, genius? a representation of [labour]. money to marx is [labour]glad you agree
>and i keep answering<commodity fetishism0 results
money is a fetish, its not real, labor is
hope that helps
>>2126093>your obsession with commodity money is a minor part of his theory of valueno it isnt, which is why it matters to you that i am even discussing its internal contradictions
> a representation of [labour]. money to marx is [labour]no, no, no. "labour" (concrete labour) to marx is valueless. thats integral, and why labour in its concrete form (as a commodity) can only represent human labour in the abstract by exchange. this is why i qualify it as "social labour" to marx, which manifests differently. marx calls concrete labour the "substance of value" but labour power a "social substance"; like how he calls a product of private labour a use value, but a commodity in exchange a "social use value", ergo, a value, or as he writes,
>"Whoever directly satisfies his wants with the produce of his own labour, creates, indeed, use values, but not commodities. In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values […] Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."what he is saying directly mirrors ricardo's remarks in ch. 1 of "principles of political economy",
>"Utility then is not the measure of exchangeable value, al-though it is absolutely essential to it. If a commodity were in no way useful,—in other words, if it could in no way con-tribute to our gratification,—it would be destitute of exchange-able value, however scarce it might be, or whatever quantity of labour might be necessary to procure it." why this matters is because to marx, labour and labour power have opposite relations; in concrete and abstract labour.
>money to marx is [labour]labour expended in a concrete form [i.e. a commodity] which thus serves as a universal equivalent
you are very close but just incorrect. if you were more humble, you would understand.
>[commodity fetishism] 0 resultshere:
>>2121125>>2123236in both posts i quote marx's introduction of the concept in sec. 4 of ch. 1;
>">"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities. This Fetishism of commodities has its origin, as the foregoing analysis has already shown, in the peculiar social character of the labour that produces them."and relate it to this later description,
>"the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".>money is a fetish, its not real, labor ismore nonsense
>hope that helpswhat would help is your explanation of marx's theory of value, but i will wait forever for that it seems
>>2126101where is that pic quoted from? its incorrect. yet you take those counterfeit words over marx's own?
lets read marx again,
>"the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".lets read that part again,
<"as what they REALLY are, material relations between persons and social relations between things".this is why marx later says,
>"Hence, when we bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values, it is not because we see in these articles the material receptacles of homogeneous human labour. Quite the contrary: whenever, by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labour, the different kinds of labour expended upon them. We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it. Value, therefore, does not stalk about with a label describing what it is. It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic."and just to re-emphasise,
<"We are not aware of this, nevertheless we do it ["bring the products of our labour into relation with each other as values"]and since you fearmonger about michael heinrich - this is what he calls the "impersonal rule" of commodities, as they socially relate - or so to say, in the order of the market, WE as human beings become objectified and it is the commodities which become imbued with life. this is necessary to understanding marx's theory of alienation. lets finish with a re-emphasising of the point,
<"as what they REALLY are, material relations between persons and social relations between things". >>2126107too cowardly to tag me?
and production IS limited by consumption. how the fuck can a penniless unemployed person participate in the social mode of production? marx's critique is that capital simultaneously hires and fires labour, by appropriating its objective conditions into constant capital and thus outcompeting variable capital as production continues, leading to crises of overproduction (or underconsumption) via unemployment (and thus a lack of compensation for labour power). i am using marx's own words you retard. and i see you abandoned a criticism of my explanation of commodity fetishism, just as you dodge everything i say.
>>2126108this is a great example of
>someone even explained to you how he builds up larger points from smaller examples through dialectics and instead of realizing that you are hyperfocusing on a narrow part of his over all theorymarx is talking about the assumed limits of production within capital relations before he goes on to make his larger point about human input being the physical limit of socially productive output
>>2126109my productive capabilities as one unit is limited, which is why capital invests in machines and workers. production (as a whole) is limited by how profitable labour is. is that not self evident to you? of your place of employment makes no money, you lose your job.
>>2126110>marx is talking about the assumed limits of production within capital relations before he goes on to make his larger point about human input being the physical limit of socially productive outputand where do i stray from that perspective?
>>2126114yes which is why marx is criticising political economy in the first place!!!!!
his "critique of political economy" is that the tendencies of capitalism lead to its self-overturning (into socialism), with one of its internal contradictions being commodity money. what we find however is that marx's theory of value (a market phenomenon as i say) is wrong, since capitalism can survive without commodity money.
this is also why his and engels' predictions of an immanent revolution were incorrect.
marx is not saying communism conforms to the law of value, but overcomes it. thats the whole point. marx wanted to ABOLISH money remember? he wanted to ABOLISH markets, remember?
marx wants to OVERCOME value, not reproduce its relations.
my criticism rests on why capitalism still exists.
>>2126121no i understand him perfectly, which is why
you have dodged everything
i have said.
>>2126074>to marx, there can be no value without its form of appearance.I would say the value is
hidden behind the appearance of exchange value.
<"value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity">what else can this possibly mean to you? value is a market phenomenon to marx. full stop.Well he is talking about capitalism. And even under capitalism the products relate to each other because of physical dependencies in the production process and not just as finished commodities.
<The labour process. – Fixed capital. Means of labour. Machine. – Fixed capital. Transposition of powers of labour into powers of capital both in fixed and in circulating capital. – To what extent fixed capital (machine) creates value. – Lauderdale. Machine presupposes a mass of workers.
>Capital which consumes itself in the production process, or fixed capital, is the means of production in the strict sense. In a broader sense the entire production process and each of its moments, such as circulation – as regards its material side – is only a means of production for capital, for which value alone is the end in itself. Regarded as a physical substance, the raw material itself is a means of production for the product etc.
>But the determination that the use value of fixed capital is that which eats itself up in the production process is identical to the proposition that it is used in this process only as a means, and itself exists merely as an agency for the transformation of the raw material into the product. As such a means of production, its use value can be that it is merely the technological condition for the occurrence of the process (the site where the production process proceeds), as with buildings etc., or that it is a direct condition of the action of the means of production proper, like all matières instrumentales. Both are in turn only the material presuppositions for the production process generally, or for the employment and maintenance of the means of labour. The latter, however, in the proper sense, serves only within production and for production, and has no other use value.
>Originally, when we examined the development of value into capital, the labour process was simply included within capital, and, as regards its physical conditions, its material presence, capital appeared as the totality of the conditions of this process, and correspondingly sorted itself out into certain qualitatively different parts, material of labour (this, not raw material, is the correct expression of the concept), means of labour and living labour. On one side, capital was divided into these three elements in accordance with its material composition; on the other, the labour process (or the merging of these elements into each other within the process) was their moving unity, the product their static unity. In this form, the material elements – material of labour, means of labour and living labour – appeared merely as the essential moments of the labour process itself, which capital appropriates. But this material side – or, its character as use value and as real process – did not at all coincide with its formal side. In the latter,
>(1) the three elements in which it appears before the exchange with labour capacity, before the real process, appeared merely as quantitatively different portions of itself, as quantities of value of which it, itself, as sum, forms the unity. The physical form, the use value, in which these different portions existed did not in any way alter their formal identity from this side. As far as their formal side was concerned, they appeared only as quantitative subdivisions of capital;
>(2) within the process itself, as regards the form, the elements of labour and the two others were distinct only in so far as the latter were specified as constant values, and the former as value-positing. But as far as their distinctness as use values, their material side was concerned, this fell entirely outside the capital’s specific character as form. Now, however, with the distinction between circulating capital (raw material and product) and fixed capital (means of labour), the distinctness of the elements as use values is posited simultaneously as a distinction within capital as capital, on its formal side. The relation between the factors, which had been merely quantitative, now appears as a qualitative division within capital itself, and as a determinant of its total movement (turnover). Likewise, the material of labour and the product of labour, this neutral precipitate of the labour process, are already, as raw material and product, materially specified no longer as material and product of labour, but rather as the use value of capital itself in different phases.
>As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process – as fixed capital. But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker’s means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker’s activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine’s work, the machine’s action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker’s activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital. The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in the form of the product’s production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value only as condition to that end. In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital’s relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of capital as such. In another respect, however, in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a specific use value, it does not correspond to the concept of capital, which, as value, is indifferent to every specific form of use value, and can adopt or shed any of them as equivalent incarnations. In this respect, as regards capital’s external relations, it is circulating capital which appears as the adequate form of capital, and not fixed capital.
>Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society’s science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge. This is not the place to go into the development of machinery in detail; rather only in its general aspect; in so far as the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital’s] requirements.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch13.htm#p690 >While, up to now, fixed capital and circulating capital appeared merely as different passing aspects of capital, they have now hardened into two particular modes of its existence, and fixed capital appears separately alongside circulating capital. They are now two particular kinds of capital. In so far as a capital is examined in a particular branch of production, it appears as divided into these two portions, or splits into these two kinds of capital in certain p[rop]ortions.
>The division within the production process, originally between means of labour and material of labour, and finally product of labour, now appears as circulating capital (the last two) and fixed capital [the first]. [1] The split within capital as regards its merely physical aspect has now entered into its form itself, and appears as differentiating it.
>From a viewpoint such as Lauderdale’s etc., who would like to have capital as such, separately from labour, create value and hence also surplus value (or profit), fixed capital – namely that whose physical presence or use value is machinery – is the form which gives their superficial fallacies still the greatest semblance of validity. The answer to them, e.g. in Labour Defended, [is] that the road-builder may share [profits] with the road-user, but the ‘road’ itself cannot do so. [2]
>Circulating capital – presupposing that it really passes through its different phases – brings about the decrease or increase, the brevity or length of circulation time, the easier or more troublesome completion of the different stages of circulation, a decrease of the surplus value which could be created in a given period of time without these interruptions – either because the number of reproductions grows smaller, or because the quantity of capital continuously engaged in the production process is reduced. In both cases this is not a reduction of the initial value, but rather a reduction of the rate of its growth. From the moment, however, when fixed capital has developed to a certain extent – and this extent, as we indicated, is the measure of the development of large industry generally – hence fixed capital increases in proportion to the development of large industry’s productive forces – it is itself the objectification of these productive forces, as presupposed product – from this instant on, every interruption of the production process acts as a direct reduction of capital itself, of its initial value. The value of fixed capital is reproduced only in so far as it is used up in the production process. Through disuse it loses its use value without its value passing on to the product. Hence, the greater the scale on which fixed capital develops, in the sense in which we regard it here, the more does the continuity of the production process or the constant flow of reproduction become an externally compelling condition for the mode of production founded on capital.
>In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides great capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather, dissection [Analyse] – through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. (See under economy of power.) Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’. [3]
<Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.
>The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)
>Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm#p704 >>2127064>>2127064>I would say the value is hidden behind the appearance of exchange value.yes, the same way an abstract triangle is "hidden" within its form of appearance. you cant have one without the other. so then, why does value as an essence require a form of appearance? because to marx, values can only be expressed between commodities, since different use values are mediated by an exchange value. or as he writes here,
>"The value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition […] the value of commodities has a purely social reality […] value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity."this inverse relation between use-value and exchange-value is also noted by smith and ricardo, which in marxian terms, can be called the inverse relation between the intensity and duration of labour-power.
marx speaks of the nonsense of value being self-compared here,
>"20 yds of linen = 20 yds of linen; this tautology expresses neither value, nor magnitude of value."and
>"But what is the value of a commodity? The objective form of the social labour expended in its production. And how do we measure the quantity of this value? By the quantity of the labour contained in it. 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."this is why to marx, the value form (form of value) must initially develop, to reach along the division of labour and thus to realise social labour in the act of exchange.
>well he is talking about capitalismno shit. value is a market phenomenon as i say. it exists historically (as per marx's comments on aristotle's preconception of value), but finds its "free development" under capitalism, as marx writes,
>"the law of value which only begins to develop itself freely on the basis of capitalist production[…]"someone like michael heinrich might otherwise postulate that value only truly begins its social reality in capitalism however, since as marx writes,
>"Greek society was founded upon slavery, and had, therefore, for its natural basis, the inequality of men and of their labour powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely, that all kinds of labour are equal and equivalent, because, and so far as they are human labour in general, cannot be deciphered, until the notion of human equality has already acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice. This, however, is possible only in a society in which the great mass of the produce of labour takes the form of commodities, in which, consequently, the dominant relation between man and man, is that of owners of commodities."marx however speaks of 4 value forms, with the first "elementary" value form being a form of barter, which to marx, naturally precedes the slavery of greek society. now, marx clearly has a "monetary" theory of *surplus* value [M-C-M+].
if your contention is that "value" will exist in socialism, then you sorely misunderstand marx's entire project. what does a "critique of political economy" imply besides its abolition? as i write here:
>>2126115>under capitalism the products relate to each other because of physical dependencies in the production process and not just as finished commodities.even the means of production, raw materials and labour-power are commodities under capitalism. everything relates as a commodity in a market. production has a price which determines all other prices.
>>2126115>this is also why his and engels' predictions of an immanent revolution were incorrect.What did you think their prediction was? that commodity money would make capitalism spontaneously combust?
They were correct about immanent revolution, they didn't say it would win. Thats kind of the whole point of making an intervention into politics instead of just observing and recording it. The prediction is that contradictions will increase and that will result in a rise in class consciousness, and that communists need to have a correct plan an organize if they want to win. If fiat saved capitalism 2008 wouldn't have happened.
>>2129970yes. a very important chapter. something to consider;
>"Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value. In the expression “value of labour,” the idea of value is not only completely obliterated, but actually reversed. It is an expression as imaginary as the value of the earth"and this,
>"in respect to the phenomenal form, “value and price of labour,” or “wages,” as contrasted with the essential relation manifested therein, viz., the value and price of labour-power, the same difference holds that holds in respect to all phenomena and their hidden substratum.">>2129977>What did you think their prediction was? that commodity money would make capitalism spontaneously combust?engels writes here in the 1886 preface to capital vol. 1,
>"The working of the industrial system of this country, impossible without a constant and rapid extension of production, and therefore of markets, is coming to a dead stop […] The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression. The sighed for period of prosperity will not come; as often as we seem to perceive its heralding symptoms, so often do they again vanish into air. Meanwhile, each succeeding winter brings up afresh the great question, “what to do with the unemployed"; but while the number of the unemployed keeps swelling from year to year, there is nobody to answer that question; and we can almost calculate the moment when the unemployed losing patience will take their own fate into their own hands."engels sees unemployment (as the symptom of overproduction) lead to revolutionary circumstances, which clearly did not suffice. he sees capitalism slowing down and coming to an end, but this never happened either.
>The prediction is that contradictions will increase and that will result in a rise in class consciousnessthats a different prediction than what marx and engels were making.
>If fiat saved capitalism 2008 wouldn't have happened.we still live in capitalism… lol. whats your point? mitigating crises doesnt mean "fixing" inherent contradictions.
>>2129983>mitigating crises doesnt mean "fixing" inherent contradictions.thats my point? whats yours?
>which clearly did not sufficebut there were revolutions, they just didn't win
>thats a different prediction than what marx and engels were making. their prediction was that capitalism results in recurring crisis. classical economists believe that crisis are external to capitalism. thats how liberals justify being against market intervention.
>>2129994>thats my point? whats yours?your point was,
>"if fiat saved capitalism 2008 wouldn't have happened."yet 2008 happened, and we recovered. recoveries are possible under capitalism, thats what is ignored by people. i never claimed fiat "saved" capitalism, just that it has preserved capitalism for as long as it may last, which obviously isnt forever.
>but there were revolutions, they just didn't winasian despotisms in russia and china weren't sublations of industrial capitalism like marx and engels predicted; in england they saw the seeds of socialism, which was never realised.
>their prediction was that capitalism results in recurring crisisyes, which they gave a definite lifespan on, due to their own contemporary conditions.
>classical economists believe that crisis are external to capitalismin what sense? smith and ricardo both saw contradictions in capitalism rising from class relations.
>thats how liberals justify being against market interventionwell, there are different types of liberals.
>>2129997>which was never realisedi was talking about the failed german revolution
>asian despotisms in russia and chinalol
>>2130247i would rather say that smith conceives of man as "homo economicus", hence "labour was the first price", which imposes economic categories on man but not the relations of capitalism in particular - though, smith does view developments like division of labour favourably, especially considering his liberalism that cuts against mercantlist voodoo. this industrial consciousness of commodity production which separates "wealth" and "money" thus also allows smith to perceive the inversion of use-values and exchange-values in the market.
i would say marx reverses smith here, where rather than "labour was the first price", marx's sentiment is that "the first price was labour", showing its captivity to the law of value in exchange, and thus the descent of man's alienation in history. marx's chapter on "primitive accumulation" also show the demystified developments of capitalism having their basis in brutal state violence - thus the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie preaches peace since it lives in the shadow of its original sin, objectified in the state apparatus itself.
i do think smith was obviously uncritical and incorrect, but not a mere bourgeois apologist either.
>>2130295>i do think smith was obviously uncritical and incorrect, but not a mere bourgeois apologist either.Smith was very critical, but his criticism was mainly leveled at mercantilism, chartalism, protectionism and government intervention in trade, which, until his era, had reigned supreme in Europe. He was an advocate of free trade and like was sadi before, did not conceive of capitalism as something unique to the era of industrialization and proletarianization, but saw it as transhistorical. He basically equates capital with capitalism, and is therefore able to see capitalism as tranhistorical, and consequently sees capitalism wherever capital exists historically. This is why Marx segregated the two, seeing merchant's capital and usurer's capital, the "antediluvian" forms of capital as he calls them, as pre-existing capitalism itself. Capitalism being characterized by general commodity production, proletarianization, arising from industrialization. It is a mode of production characteristic of bourgeois society. Smith did not and perhaps could not see these trends, partly because he lived and died before they were finished culminating in Marx's time, and partly because he himself was bourgeois, and was revolutionary in his thinking only insofar as it contradicted the economic doctrines of the feudal aristocracy and the royal chartalist monopoly companies of the mercantilist era.
>>2129929The bit by Marx about the ancient Greeks is about the development of
awareness of value, value in ancient Greece wasn't as active in forming social relations as under fully developed capitalism, but it already existed back then.
<under capitalism the products relate to each other because of physical dependencies in the production process and not just as finished commodities.>even the means of production, raw materials and labour-power are commodities under capitalism. everything relates as a commodity in a market.Physical-technical dependencies have an influence on production ratios, whether the means of production are commodities or not.
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