/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

Thank you based Smith Anon.

Has anyone here read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments? Is it worth reading? Or is only Wealth of Nations worth reading?

Bump a lump

>>2190347
>bump after less than 2 hours
buddy I appreciate you but you should probably add something to the thread. /leftypol/ is very slow. It takes about 40 or 50 days for a thread to die on average. You can wait a while before bumping. It's easy to find dying threads in the catalog.

More Stuff

Was Adam Smith… A Filthy Socialist? (13 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=payHXQZL41o
How Adam Smith Inspired Karl Marx - Economic Update with Richard Wolff (5 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrYCfLJtwUs
Noam Chomsky on Adam Smith (5 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1GF_o7Fj0M
More Similar than You’d Think - Adam Smith & Karl Marx (11 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrN5ZeVOj_0
Archived from webm thread #225: Adam Smith: Transition from premodern exchange to capitalist markets (9 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0HP0JH_c8

(@ a post from the previous thread)

>>2189759
Cockshott rejects dialectics because, in his opinion, dialectical materialism is an invention of Joseph Dietzgen, not Marx, and he believes that the soviet union mistakenly attribute these ideas to Marx, and that dialectical materialism is not Marxism, and that true Marxism embraces empiricism over dialectics. I do not have strong opinions one way or another on this. Just thought I'd share.

>>2190402
reposting some things that made me thonk

>>2190402
found the article btw
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/04/28/please-waste-no-time-on-hegel/

Please waste no time on Hegel! by Paul Cockshott, published 2020-04-28:

<Hello all, I want to study Hegel’s dialectical materialism. Can you suggest some lucid material?

<(Post on Facebook Marxist Internet Archive )

>We can all see that this is a rather naive question. The person asking was under some vague impression that as a leftist they should understand dialectical materialism, and that this had to do with Hegel. But the answers to it were in a sense even worse, revealing a level of ignorance and scientific backwardness that has handicapped the left for a couple of generations.

>Some responded that dialectical materialism was invented by Marx not Hegel. That is wrong, it was invented by another German proletarian philosopher Joseph Dietzgen:

<Yet, it is not sufficient to dethrone the fantastic and religious system of life; it is necessary to put a new system, a rational one, in its stead. And that, my friends, only the socialists can accomplish. Or, if the doctors of philosophy think this language too presumptuous, I will put it differently, though the meaning remains the same: our social-democracy is the necessary outcome of a non-religious and sober way of thinking. It is the outcome of philosophic science. Philosophers wrestled with the priests in order to replace a non-civilized mode of thinking by a civilized one, to replace faith by science. The object is achieved, the victory is won. Cannibal religion of primitive ages was softened by Christianity, philosophy continued in its civilizing mission, and after many untenable and transient systems produced the imperishable system of science, the system of democratic (dialectic) materialism.<(https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1870s/religion.htm)

<Idealism, which derives its name from the circumstance that it sets the idea and the ideas, those products of the human head, above and before the material world – both in point of time and importance, this idealism has started very extravagantly and metaphysically. In the course of its history, however, this extravagance has toned down and become more and more sober till Kant himself answered the question which he had set out to solve, viz.: “Is Metaphysics at all possible as a science?” in the negative; Metaphysics as a science is not possible; another world, that is, a transcendental world can only be believed and supposed. Thus the perversion of idealism has become already a thing of the past, and modern materialism is the result of the philosophical and also of the general scientific development.

<Because the idealist perversity in its last representatives, namely Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, was thoroughly German, its issue, dialectical materialism, is also a pre-eminently German product.

<Idealism derives the corporeal world from the mind, quite after the fashion of religion where the great spirit floats over the waters and has only to say: “Let there be,” and it is. Such idealist derivation is metaphysical. Yet, as mentioned already, the last great representatives of German idealism were metaphysicians of a very moderate type. They had already emancipated themselves considerably from the transcendental, supernatural, heavenly mind, – not, however, from the spell-bound worship of the natural mind of the world. The Christians deified the mind, and the philosophers were still permeated to such an extent with this deification, that they were unable to relinquish it – even when the physical human mind had already become the sober object of their study – making this intellect of ours the creator or parent of the material world. They never tire in their efforts to arrive at a clear understanding of the relation between our mental conceptions and the material things which are represented, conceived and thought.

<To us, dialectical or Social-Democratic materialists, the mental faculty of thinking is a developed product of material Nature, whilst according to the German idealism the relation is quite the reverse. That is why Engels speaks of the perversity of this mode of thinking. The extravagant worship of the mind was the survival of the old metaphysics.<(https://www.marxists.org/archive/dietzgen/1887/epistemology.htm)

>But nobody on the Marxist Internet list advised the poster to go study Dietzgen. Instead a whole bunch of ‘hegelian marxists’ were advocated: Marcuse, Lukacs, Colletti etc.

>But the bigger question of why waste your time with Hegel was left aside. As an undergrad, under the influence of public lectures by the Trotskyist Gerry Healy, I read the Logic, Phenomenology of Spirit and good part of the Philosophy of Nature along with Lenin’s notes on Hegel. I must say it was a total waste of time.

>Even as an undegrad I was struck by the way the author pretended to deduce things from premises, which went far beyond what the premises would support. The dialectical logic looked awfully like a conjuring trick used to distract attention whilst the desired conclusions were introduced as if by magic.

>Later, I think as a second year student, I read Bachelard and Althusser whose skeptical views on Hegel reinforced my own hostile impression.

>It is an odd paradox that Marx and Engels, the most prominent Communists theorists developed their own historical materialism in a process of root and branch criticism and demolition of Hegelianism of German philosophy of the 1840s ( The Holy Family, The German Ideology). But today in the 21st century almost the only reason that Hegel is studied is because many Marxists believe that Hegel’s ideas were in some way fundamental to understanding historical materialism.

>It is notable that in the German Ideology, not only do Marx and Engels make no mention of dialectics, let alone a positive reference to it but they quite specific in their rejection of Hegel. Speaking of the young Hegelian school they write:

<Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel. Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined to this — each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as “substance” and “self-consciousness”, later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species “the Unique”, “Man”, etc.

>The idea that Marxism was based on dialectical rather than historical materialism goes through two stages. First Dietzgen invents dialectical materialism in the 1870s and claims that the theory of social democracy is based on it. At the start of the 20th century it was still recognised that Dialectical Materialism was Dietzgen’s innovation. The dialectical materialism of Dietzgen then became the official philosophy of Social Democracy and then of Communism. Since Marx’s Historical Materialism was also the official theory of both movements, dialectical materialism was projected back onto Marx and Engels and supposed to be their ‘method’. This is formalised in texts such as Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Stalin gave no credit to Dietzgen but instead projects the whole of diamat back onto Marx and Engels claiming that they had got diamat from the ‘rational kerenel’ of Hegel.

>Later, during the cold war, a wave of Western Marxists arose who, despite their anti-stalinism had so imbibed Stalin’s statement about Marx using the rational kernel of Hegel that they went back to study Hegel in order to try to understand Marx. Trotskyists like Healey demanded that their followers study Hegel’s logic if they were to understand revolutions.

>Marx had remarked :

<The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm)

>The horrible paradox is that a tradition that Marx himself had decisively rejected in the 1840s came, a century later, to weigh like a nightmare on the brains of late 20th century marxists.

The problem is that if you read a very out of date logician like Hegel, you cut yourself off from a century and half of advance which has long since shown the futility of the whole Hegelian idealist project. The point about Turing, brought out brilliantly by the more recent Turingist Greg Chaitin in his books is that as he puts it ‘you can not get two kilos of theorems from one kilo of axioms’. Hegel wants to derive all sorts of things from the dialectical development of negation, but what Chaitin and Turing prove is that you can never derive more from a logical system than is contained in your initial axioms. Hegel only appears to do it by sleight of hand where he introduces conclusions that he wants that are actually unsupported by his axioms. If you are willing to allow that sort of handwaving nonsense you completely depart from all science and materialism.

>You have the absurdity of Marxists using computers and the internet to discuss anachonistic terms like dialectical versus formal logic when their very activities are entirely depependent on other logicians and materialists like Boole, Shannon and Turing about whom they know little or nothing. Without Booles logic and Shannon’s demonstration that this could be implemented in switching circuits, there would be no digital electronics. Without Turing no mechanisation of thought, without Shannon’s information theory no wifi or internet.

>If you want to understand logic Hegel is the last person to study. If you want to understand complex systems as they change, study Markov theory cybernetics and process algebra not Hegel.

wow way to poison the well OP. just dump the whole bucket right in.

>>2190522
Care to elaborate on what you're complaining about?

>>2190525
flooding the start of thread with a minor esoteric interpretation of marx that directly opposes the entire history of marxism

https://archive.ph/2N97I COCKSHOTT VS HEGEL - ROUND 3 - FIGHT!!!
https://archive.ph/IKGnX leftypol.org 04/30/21 No.201865 If you don't understand Hegel
https://archive.ph/ZSznk bunkerchan.xyz 02/21/2020 No. 290148 /cybersoc/ general


March 20, 1970
About "istmat" and its similarity with quantum physics. It is absolutely true that political economy (and this is real history, unlike its pop images in textbooks) should not be charged with the task of explaining why potatoes on the Zatsepsky market on March 20, 1970 cost so many kopecks. It suffices that it has revealed the law of value, and thereby of the movement of prices. But the real - the real "istmat" can also explain the "individuality". I mean "The Eighteenth Brumaire …", where the personality of Napoleon the Small is outlined no less expressively and accurately than in any other novel. So it's not out of the question. http://caute.ru/ilyenkov/texts/phc/shilov.html

April 12, 1970
This is the reduction of Logic to a system of operational technical schemes for working with signs, and only with signs. After such a "division" of real thinking into "reason," in this understanding, there remains too great a remainder, perhaps the most important thing in thinking. Including mathematics in thinking. This is one of the most formidable phenomena of the division of labor developed by bourgeois society - a tendency towards professional cretinism, towards the transformation of each profession into a closed caste, already isolated from its neighbors by language . - a group of people who do not understand another group - who, therefore, do not understand the "common cause" around which they actually continue to work, not seeing it and not clearly understanding their specific role and the limits of its competence - hence the constant conflicts …

No offense be said, lately it is the representatives of your profession who often (much more often than the "humanities") sin here. You are already protected from unprofessional intrusions into your area with your language, we are not. Although we (philosophers) also have our own language, and if I wished, I could also enter into such a dispute in the armor of my impenetrable terms for mathematicians, such as “transcendental apperception”, “in-itself and for-itself of being”, “ selfhood” and similar professional phrases. I always have to translate these esoteric expressions into “natural language”, otherwise you wouldn’t even talk to me, but the conversation is so interesting to me, and therefore I am forced to decipher expressions in natural language that have a very long and rather complicated history behind them. And this translation quite often leads to the fact that everything has to be “deciphered” in more detail - up to the original definitions and axioms of philosophy, to clarify their definitions.

The fact is that in mathematical logic, many terms, starting with such as “general”, “special” and “individual”, have a different meaning and meaning than in the logic in the traditions of which I work. Hence our disagreements in the conversation about Anna Karenina, about my right to consider "pop art" as an inevitable form of the decay of art on the soil of bourgeois culture (disregarding the fact that there are such things as excellent recordings of Wagner's masterpieces as a rather insignificant fact when it comes to the general trends in the development of this culture as a whole) and draw a conclusion from this (“inference”) about the abnormality of known forms of life.

Take, for example, the "general" ("universal"). In mathematical logic (and this is probably justified in it), this term is a synonym for the identical definition “in all cases of a given series”. All people are bipedal, all triangles have the sum of angles equal to two right angles, and so on. The exception here - the only one - "refutes" the universal, shows that this is only an erroneously fixed universal, that in fact it is not universal, but only "special".

In the logic developing in the traditions of Kant-Fichte-Hegel (and precisely in these traditions, materialistically reinterpreted by Marx), the term "universal" has a significantly different meaning. Perhaps this is the root of our disputes.

A sense that is closer to the word usage of natural language, according to which we speak of a “common field”, a “common cause”, that is, an object to which we all, while remaining different, doing completely different things, performing different functions, and precisely thanks to this "division of labor", we have an equally essential relationship. The meaning of the “universal” here is not the meaning of an identical, invariant “feature”, but rather the meaning of the “cumulative”, the meaning of a certain “whole”, a certain “totality”, which is internally divided into different and even opposite ) moments, "parameters", so understood the universal always has within itself(as part of its immanent definitions) tense dialectics, which is not fixed in the formally understood "general", in its definitions, subject to the well-known "prohibition of contradiction".

According to Hegel, and here, in my opinion, he is 100% right, the principle of “identity” and its negative form of expression is “the prohibition of contradiction”, the prohibition to violate such identity in definitions. - it turns out and remains the principle of the formation of an abstract representation , and in no case the form and principle of the concept. For the concept here is a form of synthesis, a form of combining diverse abstract representations in the composition (in unity) of a system of abstract definitions. And such a meaningful system (unlike a purely formal one) is always built in violation—through a series of violations—of the original "identity." That this is also the case in mathematics was shown brilliantly, in my opinion, by Lakatos…

Lakatos himself is a supporter of neo-positivist logic. With all her weaknesses. That is why he, like Kant in his time, from the fact of the constant emergence of antinomies in the composition of the formal system and from the impossibility of once and for all so “clarifying” the original definition so that the possibility of the appearance of “monsters” was forever excluded, draws a conclusion to the impossibility of theoretical truth in general , i.e. to the position that in our language is called "agnosticism" - the conclusion that in scientific thinking there are some " problems " but no, there was not and cannot be a single " solution " to at least one of them…

If a similar train of thought towards complete agnosticism is already possible in mathematics, then what can we say about the “humanitarian” disciplines?

And the "guilty" here - as far as I understand - is precisely the formal (from Locke and Hobbes) idea of ​​the "universal" as "the same" for all "single" cases without exception. The following logical definition is adopted - agnosticism becomes the only logical position in relation to theoretical knowledge in general …

According to a different logic—its sample has been realized consciously and systematically so far, it seems, only in Capital (that's why I'm doing it most of all)—a solution turns out to be possible. And besides, in such a way that the "monsters" that arise in the course of the development of the initial definitions do not force us to revise these initial definitions each time, if they are really firmly established. This means that the original definitions themselves suggest the possibility (moreover, the necessity) of the emergence of "monsters" - in the form of contradictions that are revealed as part of a universal concept.

Such, for example, is the analysis and definition of "value". Marx's definition made it possible to resolve numerous antinomies without "correcting" the original concept - not by "refining" it as such, but by developing it through the definitions of such "monsters" as profit, rent, interest, etc. - all those "monsters" which in their definitions contain a "sign" that directly contradicts the definitions of value in general, although they constitute "special" types of this cunning category, their "universal".

In general, this logic, figuratively described by Hegel as follows: “A bud is destroyed when a flower blooms, and, one might say, is refuted by the appearance of this latter” (I quote inaccurately, from memory), and works in the course of the development of concepts and their systems. Development is not purely deductive, as in mathematical formalism, but content-dialectical.

In real mathematical thinking (in contrast to the scheme of its expression in formalism, that is, in its result ), the situation is probably the same, and it would be very interesting to reveal the dialectics of mathematical thinking. But, alas, my ideas about mathematics are too amateurish to do something serious here. It's sad but what can you do

Related to this is the discussion about the “price of potatoes” (I was not talking about the price of potatoes, which, in general, can and should be predicted approximately ), but about the price of this potato at a given single point in space and time - say, about its price on Zatsepsky market on September 17, 1973. This is an unrealistic task, not a single fastest computer can solve it precisely because of the nature of “price” as a market category, because in the process of price deviation from value (and this deviation is the very nature of the price) an actually-infinite number of fundamentally unpredictable factors take part. Right down to the mutation of the microbes that cause disease in this crop, up to the stupidity of the management of this market or the difficulties in the transport system that provides transportation. It is just as impossible to take into account and predict mathematically precisely, as well as exactly what kind of movement a molecule will make in the chaos of a Brownian system at such and such a moment in time … It is impossible to calculate about a single molecule, right? It is possible only in relation to the system - "in general and as a whole." So here too.

I’ll finish with this today, otherwise it turns out to be a planned work, more precisely, an unplanned one to the detriment of all my planned ones … It’s probably easier to sit down and talk about all this face to face than alone with paper …

Give me a call when the time comes - I'll be very happy. And the records must finally be returned - it’s inconvenient for me to keep them for so long and without any need, because I made the recording a long time ago, already two months ago, and it seems not bad.

With best wishes and with the hope that mutual understanding somewhere in the ideal, at least in the limit, is still possible - contrary to the philosophy of Lakatos, who (like his teachers in philosophy) excludes such a possibility in principle …

Ewald
http://caute.ru/ilyenkov/texts/phc/shilov.html

https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/articles/school-learn.pdf


>>998487
>Even hypothetically, if a hypercomputational system of logic existed it would be incomprehensible to human minds because we can’t compute it. For the same reason humans can’t apprehend actual physical infinities. There is literally no human brain big enough to understand it, let alone write it down. If such a system existed only an infinite being (i.e. God) would have any chance of understanding it.


It was common in Soviet Marxist discourse to use “positivism” in a rather loose way to mean any form of western philosophy that is not dialectical. Ilyenkov was not an exception in this regard and often used “positivism” in this rather casual way.
So used in this broad sense it would mean not just positivism proper (i.e. the philosophy of Comte and Poincaré) but also later neo-positivists (logical positivists such as Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle); but beyond that to include empiricism (from Hume, Locke and Berkley as well as more modern philosophers such as Russell) and also the various expressions of pragmatism (Peirce, James and Dewey).
So even though empiricism, positivism and pragmatism all have different nuances of expression, for the Marxist they all have one thing in common - they are all non-dialectical.
The easiest way to get your head around it, is to think of more in terms of the terminology in sociology as an academic subject. There are really only two ways to do sociology - either through a Marxian frame or a positivist frame.
And it is that stark contrast that between the (dialectic and the non-dialectic, the one and the other), that the Soviet (and other eastern European Marxists) use the term “positivist” in a general lose casual sense only.

This use of positivism is not as loose as the Frankfurt School's virtual equation of positivism with 'scientism. Here positivism refers to a phenomenalist tendency…. i.e. surface level sense data or 'just the facts'.

>>2190526
are you complaining about one of the links? all of the links in the OP were the same as the last thread? were you even in the last thread or are you just looking for something to complain about? Directly quote the part of the post you take issue with and actually elaborate on what you're angry about. So far you've been very vague.

Cockshott rejects dialectical materialism, agrees with Böhm-Bawerk in rejecting Marx's LTV and rejects the existence of class consciousness and in turn its role in socialist revolution. Hes an idealist that thinks socialism can be achieved by making the best argument in the market place of ideas, that the problem with socialism is that it hasn't been scientifically proved correct to the bourgeoisie.

https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/05/17/guest-post-pauls-theory-and-marxs-theory-of-value-a-response/


>What is the theoretical basis for a new socialism? The principal bases for a post-Soviet socialism must be radical democracy and efficient planning. The democratic element, it is now clear, is not a luxury, or something that can be postponed until conditions are especially favourable.

https://users.wfu.edu/cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf
Cockshott defends the bourgios position that the USSR failed because it was not sufficiently demoratic rather than being overthrown in a coup.


Cockshott is a reformist and rejects revolution in "advanced countries"
http://paulcockshott.co.uk/reality/polemic/strat.htm

Cockshott is against Irish independence.
Cockshott thinks the British Empire is "the most progressive force"
Cockshott cherry picks data removing it from context to say things that it doesn't prove, basically makes the 13-50 argument

>Science is a process which is decentering of the subject, moving beyond it in order to come to terms with objects as they relate to each other. It is only by whack-a-moling the subject as it appears in objects do we make scientific progress. Science, just as ideological production, must be accomplished by particular individuals. And when a science is in its infancy, and the product of only a small number of individuals, these personal subjectivity, particularities of time and space, can be greatly amplified.

>These reactionary tendencies are the results of accidents of history, of the particular subjectivity of Professor Cockshott and his cohort, rather than the fundamental goals and methods of the science they have helped to produce, and in fact that the liberatory goals of socialist cybernetics are precisely at odds with these prejudices.

>Cockshott’s class analysis of male homosexuals, painting them as an upper middle class interest group, is quite convenient considering what it leaves out, such as the extremely high rates of poverty, roughly double the poverty rates for the general population. Perhaps more importantly, however, is the arc of the article itself which acts as an indictment of gay men as economic-political actors on the one hand, and a dismissal of LGBT concerns on the other…

>It is notable however that this kind of analysis is missing when talking about trans people, given their high poverty rates and homelessness. Eliminating poverty and guaranteeing access to housing are key aspects to any socialist program, after all…

>Cockshott would have us believe that his social reproduction analysis makes his point of view a foregone conclusion, however his point of view is premised on a total rejection of the concept of the subject in a way that makes his analysis of language lead to analytic and positivist errors.

>There is something fundamental left out of this analysis. We acknowledge the person who inherits the Dukedom, and we acknowledge the Duke as a structural role, but what exactly is the relationship between the two? What is the Duke to the person who inherits the title? Here is the crucial role of interpellation – if the title-holder acknowledges themselves as the Duke, they themselves become the subject of this logic of the estate, they as an individual.

>Assuredly, one could create such categories with arbitrary criteria for the purpose of scientific study, but the social categories of male and female are both historically contingent and relate to individuals not through analytic sorting but through complex processes of interpellation…

>A materialist conception of history entails that when we advocate for a new mode of production, a new set of relationships of production, we are also embracing new values and social conventions, whether we can really anticipate what those will be or not.

>Cockshott would like to have his cake and eat it too, he wants his radical commitments to reorganize society through economic planning and new economic forms or organization, but he’s unwilling to accept that this may produce results counter to his aesthetic preferences as a British baby boomer…

>Moving from his poor treatment of transgender women and homosexual men in his online blog, there is a more central, though less explicitly reactionary problem to be found in his theoretical work of economic planning.

>This is the problem of methodological nationalism: the socialist commonwealth found in “Towards a New Socialism” was originally intended to directly correspond to the countries of the communist bloc, and the text was intended to be a method of reforming the inefficient and failing planning system of the 80s. Given this background, it is no wonder that Cockshott focuses on the one hand national economic systems and trade between states on the other.

>Attempting to apply the lessons of the book to political and economic struggle in capitalist countries seems to suggest that the application of socialist cybernetic planning would be in what to do after nationalizing industry after gaining control of the state…

>Perhaps more importantly, waiting to apply socialist cybernetic planning until socialists take power is a grave mistake based on the simple fact that in order for the workers movement to succeed it must be powered by a political, ideological and economic revolution which are concurrent.

>While not as immediately abrasive as the attacks on trans women and gay men, methodological nationalism can lead to endorsement of very dark reactionary tendencies should socialists ever take power somewhere in the world, including the rejection of internationalism itself as was the case in many shameful points in the history of the communist bloc…

>In both cases, though, we may surely find that these errors are the result of pure sentimentality grounded in the subjectivity of one Paul Cockshott, who cannot go beyond his generational distaste for queer people, or the now long dead soviet union which dominated the questions of socialist politics for the first half of his life.

https://casperforum.org/blog/a-defense-of-cybernetic-planning-and-social-reproduction-theory-from-the-reactionary-tendencies-of-paul-cockshott/


https://comraderene.wordpress.com/2021/01/18/the-dialectical-conception-of-cybernetics-translation/

the point of capital is proof by contradiction of exploitation and the trpf

>>1202347
>>1203171
The argument isn't really whether brains are computers or not but whether the mind is a computer. Brains are defined within preconceived limits that could arguably be equivalent to a computer, but there is nothing scientific or useful that follows from this, its an empty conjecture that proves nothing but its own theoretical limitations. The mind is not a computer, and this is the problem. Cockshott rejects the existence of the mind, consciousness, the subject as superfluous "idealism" and "bourgeois legal categories" and refuses to acknowledge or engage with scientifically rigorous definitions of mind outside of this restricted view.

As Marx explained these "bourgeois legal categories" come from definite social relations. They are social constructs but they real in the same way that money is real. To call them fictional is to say that all of language is fictional.

This idea that the mind is a computer relies on the assumption that the mind==brain by imposing the limits of the brain as definite physical object which is an anthropocentric abstract concept created for scientific utility in medical applications.

To prove the mind is the brain you would have to show it is possible to simulate the mind in full, which is the same problem as predicting the weather. You can make forecasts by arbitrarily limiting the scope of data by conceiving the planet earth as a closed system, and you can make the predictions more accurate by including solar flares or whatever you want but you cannot fully capture actual reality from inside a finite set of data.

The computation theory of mind says that there is a central processor, which can access one memory location at a time, but this is not how reality operates, there is no central processor. Its flawed from the beginning. Cognition is interelational and distributed.

The truly objective view conceives of the mind constituted as a relational process between the brain and its environment, including the body, society, all of nature up to and including the whole universe. The self is a concept created by the physical human that imagines it is a discrete object separate from its environment but it is not.

This is the essence of dialectics, objects refer to definite collections of matter, but are human created categories that split the actually existing material world into subjectively defined parts to more easily deal with them. They are only useful in so far as they are applied to their specific domain and must be tailored to the specific task at hand by applying theory to practice.

The universe itself is a hypercomputer, physics is nonlocal and there are no parts, there is only the actually existing material whole, and existence is being itself in totality.

>>1002488
This argument already happened decades ago and we already know how the modern rehashing ends. Cockshott and his followers redefine words to narrow categories that fit their conclusions and then claim victory. He has already done this with "subject" "Machist" "idealist" "materialism" and "positivism". Every time this comes up we go around in circles and then the vulgar materialist side declares that they won because they don't literally believe exactly what Mach believed in the exact same terms even though every argument against Berkeley, Mach, Bagdanov etc applies directly to Cockshott in the same way. It is the fight scene from They Live with you refusing to put on the glasses every time and never bringing anything new to the argument. It is all so tiring.

>Therefore, no matter how formally irreproachable Plekhanov’s criticism of Machism as terminologically disguised Berkeleianism was, it made virtually no impression upon the Machists. ‘Who cares,’ they would say, ‘that our philosophy doesn’t correspond to the criteria of “Baron Holbach” or the “verbal trinkets of Hegel”? This upsets and disturbs us not in the slightest – our strength lies in our agreement with the principles of contemporary scientific thought.’

>It is not surprising that Bogdanov considered it sufficient to simply brush Plekhanov and his supporters aside with one phrase from all their criticism – he didn’t even want to examine their ‘polemical ploys’ against Mach which accused him of idealism and even solipsism. ‘All this,’ he said, ‘is nonsense, having nothing to do with the essence of the argument, which is that Mach teaches mankind “the philosophy of 20th century natural science,” while Plekhanov has stayed behind with the “philosophy of 18th century natural science, as contained in the formulations of Baron Holbach”.’

>This ‘scoffing at the spirit of dialectical materialism’ by Plekhanov is shown by the fact that during the debate with the Machists, because of a number of considerations he limited his task to demonstrating that the philosophy of dialectical materialism and Bogdanov’s philosophy are two different things. He set out to prove that dialectics and materialism are integral components of Marxism and by no means the verbal atavism of Hegelian and Feuerbachian philosophy, as Bogdanov’s supporters had tried to suggest to the reader.


>In the given instance this confusion emerged in the form of a lack of knowledge about materialist dialectics, i.e. about the actual logic and theory of knowledge of modern materialism, and about modern scientific cognition of the surrounding world. This was accompanied by a false conception of materialist dialectics as idealist philosophical speculation. As was perfectly well shown in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, ignorance of dialectics was the catastrophe leading to the degeneration of the spontaneous materialism of natural scientists – their ‘natural’ epistemological position – into the most vulgar and reactionary varieties of idealism and clericalism, which was diligently encouraged by professional philosophers, the conscious or spontaneous allies of clericalism.

>Actually, not a single word of theirs can be trusted when it comes to the theory of knowledge, logic, or the method of scientific thinking, for they professionally do not know this field and therefore they become confused, and stagger at every step, continually stumbling into idealism, i.e., into a philosophical position which is essentially anti-scientific and hostile to science in general, including their own specialised science. And even under these conditions they continue to be leading theoreticians in their own, specialised field of thought.




>Philosophical materialism (the materialist theory of knowledge, logic which is materially understood) is orientated toward a strict, critical differentiation between what scientists actually do in their specialised fields and how they speak and write about it. Idealism, on the other hand (and this is especially characteristic of 20th century positivism), is always orientated only toward the words and utterances of scientists, as the ‘initial data’ of their specialised analysis and their philosophical work.

>Idealists concentrate, of course, not just upon any words, but upon those which can best be used to reinforce the idealist reconstructions of the real process of cognising nature and to interpret this process in an idealist way. As a result, those assertions which, in the mouths of the scientists themselves, were terminologically incorrect descriptions of real events in the path of cognition, are presented as the precise expression of their essence and as conclusions drawn from natural science.

>And such assertions are no rarity, especially since the idealist-positivists are precisely engaged in trying to arm natural scientists with philosophically inexact, muddled and incorrect terminology, given out as the last word in modern philosophy. It becomes a closed circle. Thus the image is created that it is natural science which refutes both materialism and dialectics, while the ‘philosophy of natural science’ (as positivism prefers to call itself) is simply and unpretentiously summing up the true epistemological positions of natural science.

>To create this image the positivists instil in scientists a muddled conception both of matter and of consciousness. Meanwhile they try to discredit the simple, clear and carefully considered definitions of the primary concepts of materialist philosophy with labels that are primitive, naive, non-heuristic and antiquated.

>As a result, 20th century positivists have managed to achieve considerable success insofar as the whole environment in which the majority of scientists for the time being live and work, ‘estranges them from Marx and Engels and throws them into the embrace of vulgar official philosophy’. Hence, ‘the most outstanding theoreticians are handicapped by a complete ignorance of dialectics’.

>These words of Lenin’s which were spoken more than 70 years ago remain absolutely true even today in relation to the capitalist world and the situation of the scientist in it.



>Lenin was absolutely clear and unequivocal when he raised the questions about the relationship between the ‘form’ of materialism and its ‘essence’, and about the inadmissibility of identifying the former with the latter. The ‘form’ of materialism is made up of those concrete scientific ideas about the structure of matter (about ‘the physical world’, about ‘atoms and electrons’) and those natural-philosophical generalisations of these ideas, which inevitably prove to be historically limited, changeable, and subject to reconsideration by natural science itself. The ‘essence’ of materialism consists of the recognition of objective reality existing independently of human cognition and reflected by it. The creative development of dialectical materialism on the basis of the philosophical conclusions drawn from the latest scientific discoveries’ Lenin sees neither the revision of the ‘essence’ itself, nor in the perpetuation of scientists’ ideas about nature and about ‘the physical world’ aided by natural-philosophical generalisations, but in deepening our understanding of ‘the relationship of cognition to the physical world’, which is tied to new ideas about nature. The dialectical understanding of the relationship between the ‘form’ and ‘essence’ of materialism, and between ‘ontology’ and ‘epistemology’ constitutes the ‘spirit of dialectical materialism’.


>The main, link in the entire strategy of the Machists’ campaign against the philosophy of Marxism consisted of the attempt to sever the living unity between materialist dialectics as a theory of development and as a theory of knowledge and logic, first by isolating ‘ontology’ from ‘epistemology’, and then by counterposing one to the other, thereby destroying the essence of dialectics as a philosophical science. The design was simple: having made such a separation it would be easiest of all to identify the materialist world outlook with any sort of concrete and historically limited scientific ‘picture of the world’, with the ‘physical’, and then ascribe the flaws and errors of this ‘ontology’ to all materialism. On the other hand, the same operation could be performed with materialist epistemology by identifying it with whatever was the latest scientific conception of the ‘psychical’. By identifying philosophy as the generalised summation of scientific facts, claims could be made that natural science itself gives birth to idealism. To destroy what distinguishes philosophy, its system of concepts and its approach to phenomena, meant to ascribe idealism to natural science itself. Lenin unmasked these schemes by giving a clear demonstration of what constitutes ‘the fundamental materialist spirit’ of modern natural science, which gives birth to dialectical materialism.

>According to Lenin, the latest results of science, in themselves, or the ‘positive facts’, as such, are by no means subject to philosophical generalisation (and consequently, to inclusion in the system of philosophical knowledge). Rather what is subject to philosophical generalisation is the development of scientific knowledge, the dialectical process of the ever more profound, all-sided and concrete comprehension of the dialectical processes of the material world, so that it cannot be excluded that even tomorrow natural science itself will re-evaluate its results in a ‘negative’ manner. While interpreting the revolution in natural science from the standpoint of dialectical materialist philosophy, Lenin draws generalised conclusions about how the objective content of scientific knowledge can be fixed and evaluated only from the standpoint of the dialectical materialist theory of knowledge which reveals the dialectics of objective, absolute and relative truth. He shows how ‘ontology’ is just as inseparably connected with ‘epistemology’, as the categories expressing the dialectical nature of truth are connected with objective dialectics. To include the ‘negative’ in the conception of the ‘positive’, without losing the unity of opposites (and this is what constitutes dialectics) is impossible without an ‘epistemological’ approach to the ‘ontology’ of scientific knowledge. Genuinely scientific philosophical generalisation must consist, according to Lenin, of the ‘dialectical reworking’ of the entire history of the development of cognition and practical activity, and of the interpretation of the achievements of science in the context of its integral historical development. From such a position Lenin broached the question of the relationship between philosophy and natural science.

>From an analogous position, positivism looks upon the theory of knowledge (epistemology). Its scheme is to counterpose epistemology as a ‘strict and exact science’ to materialist dialectics as a philosophical science, and then to criticise dialectics in the light of such an ‘epistemology’. This plan is even reflected in the title of Berman’s book, Dialectics in the Light of the Modern Theory of Knowledge. In essence, however, this is not a theory of knowledge at all, but once again the accumulation of ‘the latest facts’ from research in psychology, psychophysiology, the physiology of the sense organs, and so forth. The interpretation and application of these facts in isolation from ‘ontology’, from the universal laws of development of nature and society, made it possible to counterpose ‘epistemology’ to dialectics.



>what in Machism is connected with this school is not what distinguishes it from all other trends and systems of idealist philosophy, but what it has in common with philosophical idealism in general.’



>Without dialectics, materialism invariably proves to be not the victor (or a militant), but the vanquished, i.e. it inevitably suffers a defeat in the war with idealism, Lenin repeats a bit later in his philosophical testament, the article ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’. This is a fundamental idea with Lenin. Moreover, this idea is not simply stated in the form of a thesis, but proven by a meticulous analysis of the crisis-ridden state of affairs in physics, and by a meticulous, critical analysis of those concepts, the non-dialectical explanation of which led to ‘the slipping of the new physics into idealism’.

>Among them belongs the principle (concept) of the relativity of our knowledge, including scientific knowledge, a principle ‘which, in a period of abrupt breakdown of the old theories, is taking a firm hold upon the physicists, and which, if the latter are ignorant of dialectics, inevitably leads to idealism.’

>As for ‘philosophers’ who write today as if Lenin was not interested in dialectics when he was working on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism but was simply defending the ‘universal ABC’s of all materialism’, it must be that they just have not carefully read this chapter of his book. Or, what is also possible, they have a conception of dialectics which is essentially different from Lenin’s and about which he speaks not only here, but in all his subsequent works on philosophy including the Philosophical Notebooks and the article ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’.



>Bogdanov disassociates himself from what he finds to be the unpleasant dialectic of the relative and the absolute in the development of scientific knowledge by means of diatribes against ‘all absolutes’, although along with these ‘absolutes’ he is forced to fulminate against the thesis of the very possibility of objective truth.

>This question by no means centres on whether this or that concrete truth is objective. The central point being discussed is about the fundamental possibility of objective truth in general. According to Bogdanov, any truth is either objective or purely subjective; no third is given. The attempts to search for this third by way of investigating the development of cognition, the transformation of the objective into the subjective and vice versa, is for him, as well as for Berman, only an insidious fabrication of Hegelian speculation. For this reason his conception precludes the very posing of the question about the relationship of the object to the subject and the subject to the object.

>Therefore, in Bogdanov’s schema there is subsequently no place for the material relations between people – for the economic relations between people and classes. He is forced to interpret them as the externally expressed psychical relations between classes, as the ideological schemas of the organisation of class experience. And all this began with an inability to unite in the theory of knowledge such opposites as the relative and the absolute. It must be either one or the other. Bogdanov never acknowledged any other logic.


>Neither Bogdanov nor Berman understood the real dialectics of Marx and Engels; they simply did not see it. And they only began to search for it (in order to refute it) among the statements about dialectics which can be found in the writings of the classics. This meant first of all, of course, among those fragments by Engels where he popularly explains the ABCs of dialectics, the most general propositions.

>Berman’s entire ‘criticism of dialectics’ for example, is reduced to demonstrating that the ‘examples’, which Engels introduces in order to illustrate the correctness of dialectics, can easily be restated in different terms, without using ‘specifically Hegelian’ terminology. Berman proves nothing else. In general there is no mention in his book of any actual dialectics, either Hegelian, or much less Marxism. His book deals exclusively with words and terminology which, he says, Engels and Marx unwisely copied from Hegel.

>By rummaging around in the ‘Hegelian’ lexicon and diligently explaining what is meant in pre-Hegelian and post-Hegelian logic by the terms ‘identity’, ‘contradiction’, ‘negation’, ‘opposition’, and ‘synthesis’, Berman triumphantly proves that ‘Hegel and his imitators use these terms in an extremely unscrupulous and completely uncritical manner’, i.e. ‘in various meanings’ and ‘in different contexts’. All this, he says, is because ‘Hegel treated formal logic with contempt’, ‘continuously lumped together’ contrary and contradictory judgements, and so forth. After he had calculated that ‘with Hegel the term “contradiction” has six different meanings’, Berman triumphantly decrees the ‘one solitary sense’ in which this term must henceforth be used. That is nonsense and nothing else. Whosoever uses this term in any other sense (and particularly in the ‘ontological’ sense!) will be excommunicated from Marxism and from ‘modern science’ in general by the Machist logic and theory of knowledge.


https://www.marxists.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positiv1.htm

https://archive.ph/Dysyo Cockshott Unironically the most important Socialist theorist since Lenin.
https://archive.ph/tkHi4 Is Hegel really necessary to understand Marxism?
https://archive.ph/vw14d Lenin's Materialism and Empiro-Criticism

>>2190531
guy still hasn't elaborated on what he's bitching about and as soon as he started bitching someone started doing ACTUAL text dumping out of context. maybe agent #2 posted a little earlier than he was supposed to lol

>>2190544
all me baby. you cant just post cockshotts drivel and not the response. thread is balanced now. enjoy.

>>2190554
ok so you were bitching about the cockshott links in the OP. Why didn't you simply answer the question? Those same links were in the last thread, which was up for MONTHS and you didn't notice or care. Why suddenly upset?

>>2190567
yeah just keep pretending to be retarded buddy👍

lol at these two posts from the bunkerchan archive linked ITT

>>2190574
>vagueposts bitching about something in the OP but won't elaborate on what it is
>repeatedly refuses to answer a simple question
>spams huge textwalls responding to posts that have slid off the board as well as archive links
>I finally figure out from this that he's bitching about the cockshott links in the OP, which constitute a very marginal portion of the OP links
>I point out that these links were in the last version of the thread, which was up for months, and nobody complained. I ask why suddenly mad
<yeah buddy keep pretending to be retarded (literally dodges the question again)

You're transparently avoiding simple questions over and over again. You could just directly communicate with the people responding to you instead of spamming random stuff from dead threads that was responding to lost posts in a completely different context.
>

>>2190578
>something in the OP
>flooding the start of thread
>post cockshotts drivel and not the response

>You're transparently avoiding simple questions over and over again.
because you keep bringing this back to the OP and characterizing the argument as "bitching" when its already been answered and then re-presenting cockshotts arguments that dont actually address the debate in any way. this was settled at the end of the last thread and now you are relitigating it. you say its out of context but im not the one who started a political economy thread and then immediately derailed it back into this anti-marxist bullshit

>>2190532
>Cockshott agrees with Böhm-Bawerk
How do you know that an author you don't read agrees with another author you don't read? Must be the power of doing "dialectics" (Greek for crack).

>Cockshott is against Irish independence.
>Cockshott cherry picks
Like that time he cherry-picked some statement from an article written half a century ago? Oh no wait, that's you right here.

>>2190534
What does this mind-brain blahblah have to do with economics.

>>2190603
>What does this mind-brain blahblah have to do with economics.
ask >>2190418

>>2190592
>because you keep bringing this back to the OP
the conversation started here >>2190522

Notice how the post doesn't elaborate on anything?

And then instead of simply elaborating and providing a handful of links (for us to use next time) you spammed huge walls of text and strikethrough links to dead posts?

And the question of why didn't you complain in last thread is relevant because the same links were in the last thread but nobody spammed like this. Somehow we were able to get to 600 posts without this kind of spam. Most people know how to conduct themselves. Respond directly to questions. Quote people. Not vaguepost complain, refuse to elaborate, then spam text out of context. It's very strange behavior. It also makes me think you've been absent for months if you didn't notice it in the previous thread. So not only are you doing this out of nowhere, you're doing this out of nowhere without even noticing that this thread is part of a series.

>>2190621
you can stop this derail and actually address the content of the posts any time

>>2190645
>you're derailing becuase I vaguepost complained and spammed walls of text that respond to dead posts

you can actually start responding to claims people ITT made instead of spamming text from dead threads aimed at posts we no longer have. you are challenging people to a debate who made no claims in the first place. you simply got mad that OP had links that you didn't like. And instead of simply saying "Hey, OP, I'm not a big fan of cockshott because X, Y, and Z" like a normal person would, you said "WAY TO POISON THE WELL" and then spammed text from dead threads that are responding to lost posts.

>>2190645
Also I'm not responding to your giant copypasta gish gallops from dead threads because I made no claims to contradict them in the first place. I am not interested in arguing the value of Hegel because the thread is about /political economy/

<Uuuuuuuugh way to poison to well *refuses to elaborate and proceeds to spam the thread to death and then demand a debate*

>>2190679
ive already told you three times i dont have a problem with the links its the posting the full text of cockshotts blog and screenshots from old threads out of context and claiming 'neutrality' without posting the rebuttals, now ive provided the rebuttals and you are crying that your attempted anti-communist echo chamber has been btfo. i know you want to make the thread about me instead but its not gonna work

>>2190680
> the thread is about /political economy/
you are never going to understand Marx's critique of political economy if you dont understand his dialectical method

>>2190708
what is marx's dialectical method?

>>2190708
notice how the OP simply linked cockshott and didn't actually paste random posts from dead threads? notice how the OP is just a collection of links to get a thread started and not an opening salvo of a debate about hegel? Noticee how you started your "conversation" by randomly accusing of "poisoning the well" and when asked to say what you meant you spammed dead posts from dead threads responding to other dead posts out of context in an insane gish gallop instead of simply responding to the people who asked you questions? Let me just copypaste the epic of gilgamesh because I'm getting a vague vibe that you're not well read in sumerian mythology because you haven't posted any yet

>>2190709
You should try reading the thread first before posting in it. If you want to claim that Engels Lenin Stalin Mao and every communist country in history is wrong about Marx and some youtuber is right its going to take a lot more work than just asserting it to be so.

>>2190717
going on four times telling you i dont care about the links. all the dead links and replies were archived and posted here and are directly related to the blog post itt. if you didn't want to get blown up you shouldn't have brought up a settled debate

>>2190723
who brought it up where?

>>2190402
> I do not have strong opinions one way or another on this. Just thought I'd share.
oh boy this sure sounds like "debate me and spam dead thread links and walls of text ITT"

>>2190726
so let me get this straight, you start off bitching at OP for having cockshott links, but you won't admit that's the case

you then start spamming debatebro posts from dead threads out of context

then you claim the REAL post you were responding to was one that said

>I do not have strong opinions one way or another on this. Just thought I'd share.

this is insane behavior. nobody else does this. just talk to people like a normal person instead of copypasting huge walls of text from 5 year old bunkerchan threads. you could have just given the links and said "read this if you're interested" instead of filling up the whole thread like this and then claiming everyone but you is derailing

>>2190725
sounds to me like someone pretending to be naive while presenting only one side of the argument and framing the thread in a way to exclude Marx's actual ideas.

>spam dead thread links and walls of tex
>out of context in an insane gish gallop
Yeah just keep saying this over and over while not addressing the argument its extremely convincing.

>instead of simply responding to the people who asked you questions?
maybe ask a question about the actual topic instead of about me? maybe address the content of the thread instead of your obsession with my posting style?

Theres no way to have a post currency economy without post scarcity right? But we already have post scarcity with a lot of goods, we make commodities that get off the assembly line and go straight into the garbage. If not having been trucked across the world a couple times first. How would you distribute post scarcity goods? Just a giant costco like place were you pick up shit you need and then walk out?

>>2190729
>sounds to me like someone pretending to be naive

so you know other people's intentions because you have psychic powers? insane behavior. psychotic behavior. I feel bad for your friends, family, significant others.

>>2190729
>Yeah just keep saying this over and over while not addressing the argument its extremely convincing.
nobody was arguing with you in the first place. you showed up, complained about "well poisoning" and then spammed text. this is psychotic behavior.

>>2190731
a lot of "scarcity" is artificial scarcity, planned obsolescence, crises of overproduction, etc.

we are capable of producing more than everyone needs, especially if we stopped making shit nobody needs, and then throwing it in the garbage. hence planning.

>>2190728
I'm pretty obviously accusing them of samefagging considering they posted multiple times and bumped their own thread and are continuing a bad faith discussion from last thread. Even if they aren't the same poster they are giving arguments for the same position that doesn't actually address Marx's thought.

You could be right though maybe they actually are completely ignorant about the topic in the same way you seem to be when I directly tell you that they are framing the thread in a way to exclude Marx's actual ideas and you still seem to be confused about how this is well poisoning.

off to a good start though already approaching 50 replies you should be happy isn't that what you wanted?

>>2190741
>I'm pretty obviously accusing them of samefagging
that wasn't really obvious and this is the first time you said it. In fact you refused to get the point for several posts in a row, instead opting to spam old posts you didn't even write from dead threads that had an entirely different context to respond to a "debate" someone wasn't even trying to have with you (except you interpreted that way because you decided to be a mind reader and assumed that the "i don't have a strong opinion either way" was secret coded evil intentions)

it's pretty fucking weird dude, ngl

>>2190741
>when I directly tell you that they are framing the thread in a way to exclude Marx's actual ideas

OP has a link to audiobooks of all 3 volumes of capital above the cockshott links. are you retarded?

>>2190742
> bro I shat all over this thread isn't that what you wanted
no?

>>2190746
you are still talking about me instead of the content of the thread. since you apparently care so much a lot of those old posts actually are me and are in exactly the same context as the debate on whether marxists should 'waste time on hegel' or if marx had a dialectical method. i saved them because this topic comes up often because people on this site are obsessed with watching youtube videos and refuse to read and i got tired of writing out the same rebuttal to a settled debate that is now half a decade old

>>2190747
for the fifth time, im not talking about the links in the OP im talking about posting the debunked screenshot of an old leftypol thread regarding cockshott and hypercomputation and the full text spamming of his blog.

>make a political economy thread without links to people like shaikh and cockshott
<marxists are dinosaurs they have nothing new to say for 150 years
>make a political economy thread with links to people like shaikh and cockshott
<you hate marx you fucking revisionist you are deliberately obfuscating his real ideas, take this fucking spam from 5 year old threads, you have evil intentions and are pretending to be naive, i can read your mind

can't win

>>2190752
>i'm not talking about the links in the OP
was this you? >>2190522

>>2190752
> im not talking about the links in the OP im talking about posting the debunked screenshot of an old leftypol thread regarding cockshott and hypercomputation and the full text spamming of his blog.

that post literally said "here's some things that made me think" and the other images in the same post weren't even anti-dialectics. you wanted a debate someone wasn't trying to have

compare the length of the short article that was posted (and written for general consumption) to the huge out of context textdumps that link to dead posts and don't even mention turing, etc.

>>2190757
>out of context
since you still dont get it and apparently missed the last thread the debate at hand is about Dialectical Materialism vs Positivism. it started because Smithposter after weeks of going in circles finally openly rejected dialectics and I asked if they were a positivist which they didn't answer directly but implicitly denied by admitting that some abstract concepts are valid, but they also denied agreeing with the Austrian school which they clearly do, so I posted an article from an author critiquing the positivist interpretation of Marx's LTV that directly refutes the exact arguments they have been making this whole time. its not out of context at all but explicitly and directly a continuation of what this thread has been about and you have spent the whole day making sure that the thread does not stay on that topic and instead made it about you not liking the way i post.

>>2190763
I wasn't part of that debate, I just saw that one post from it. wish I hadn't. there were lots of simultaneous discussions in the last thread and that was not one of the ones I was partaking in. my bad for responding to you. I did not mean to make you think I was really that invested.

>>2190719
just explain marx's dialectical method
shouldnt be hard for a genius like you

The problem is that Smithposter is either extremely ignorant of or extremely dishonest about how their views fit into the larger debate. Arguing with positivists about dialectics is like arguing with a neoconservative that constantly accuses you of being ideological while claiming they are non-ideological and on top of that will tell you they are not a liberal while upholding free markets. Positivists will tell you they are not positivists and then turn around and demand positive proof as the criteria of truth.

To debunk Marx you have to actually debunk Hegel and Dialectical Materialism, which would mean you have to actually read and understand it, not just show how he might have made a calculation error.

>>2190726
found your problem. you're talking to many different people

>>2190793
so you have read hegel?
can you explain him to me? he is a very difficult writer

>>2190709
NTA but here's a research paper explaining what it is (i guess)

>>2190805
>can you explain him to me?
NTA but I found this neat thing
https://autio.github.io/projects/scienceoflogic/

>>2190808
you just sent me the text of the science of logic
i havent read kant, or the phenomenology, so how can i jump into this?

>>2190809
there's a visualizer thingy that shows the dependencies of the concepts in the book. maybe you can't see it cuz javascript disabled or something

>>2190811
yes i see it, but i cant know the map without understanding the territory either

>>2190813
damn

so no one actually wants to talk about political economy?

>>2190856
Of course profit rates don't equalize.

>>2190859
lmao. spectacular post my friend.

>>2190859
you don't understand hegel. you need to understand hegel and ignore economic data to truly understand marx

>>2190856
what is this picture supposed to mean

>>2190879
OP Cockshautism confirmed

>>2190878
Cockshott said Hegel was retarded and you can skip him and go straight to Marx and I trust Cockshott so you can fuck off.

>>2190975
ok so you're just making stuff up now after textdumping and spamming the thread. really hostile weird person. I thought you weren't complaining about the OP. firs you complain about the OP, then you say, no, you're complaining about this other post. Now you're complaining about OP again.
>>2191054
careful anon, he'll say we're the same person for having the same opinion and textdump more random posts from 5 years ago that don't even say why Turing is wrong about the nature of information, or why Hegel is somehow able to get two kilos of theorems out of one kilo of axioms.

>>2190731
The biggest hurdle in conversations about that IMHO is the lack of precision.

>Theres no way to have a post currency economy without post scarcity right?
I suppose by post currency you mean a system without prices and consumers having budgets of tokens to spend. (I spell it out because in Marxist language not every distribution system with these rules is referred to as using money/currency.)

But no, there are other rationing methods, usually much more clumsy to use. For example, people can fill out forms ranking consumer items and then some algo figures out how to assign the stuff (for example: people do turns taking one item each according to their best-ranked thing that's still available). I just loathe that ranking concept. When I get groceries, do I have a ranking of all the stuff in my head? Not really, some parts of my shopping list may be short rankings (if I can't get pizza A, I look for pizza type B), but my shopping list is not one big ranking.

>How would you distribute post scarcity goods?
Better say consumer items or products, or some marxister-than-you debate-bros will accuse you of wanting a market. People don't seem to actually agree on a definition for post scarcity. Some people seem to mean that if it is very easy to meet demand and metering usage is quite a big hassle in comparison to the other costs of producing, so it looks like we shouldn't bother metering it, then it's post scarcity. (That term metering usage is a bit ambiguous. I mean specifically linking the usage to particular individuals, not just measuring how many units of something are taken in total.)

If we sum up how many units of something are wanted among all people wishing for one or several units of it, and that sum is not above what is in stock, then we have post scarcity for now regarding that particular thing. But people may not be aware of that, because the wish data is not collected; or it is collected, but distribution is decided by a lousy algorithm that is vulnerable to exaggeration strategy and so people exaggerate how many units they want and then it looks like what's in stock is way below below the amount people want.

There is an algorithm for getting people to not exaggerate their wish amounts:
https://pastebin.com/bPyr7Vau
(Please ignore the word budget in the comment description. The programmer thought about parceling out a shared budget within a group of people living together, but this can be used for other things than money. We have had some incredibly stupid debates about this: "IT SAYS BUDGET RIGHT THERE!! YoU aRE doInG cApitali$m!!") The way it works_ If you want e. g. 5 units (and you would rather get 4 than 3, and rather get 3 than 2 and so on), you just ask for that. Asking for a higher amount does not increase the likelihood that you get at least 5.

The algorithm's result is the same as walking in a circle among people with a sack full of cookies, stopping at each person and asking them if they want one more cookie. They compare their wish amount with the amount they already got, and if their wish amount is higher, they ask for one more cookie. You walk around in the circle of people until either nobody wants a cookie anymore or you got no cookies to share anymore.

The algorithm is only strategy-free on the individual level though. For example, if two people live together and Alice wants 3 cookies and Bob wants 7, Alice can help Bob by asking for more cookies than the amount she wants. The algorithm can be modified so that the optimal strategy for households of people automatically happens if they register as living together, so then then the algorithm is also strategy-free on that level: When the virtual Santa Cookie with the cookie sack stops at a virtual person and asks if they want one more cookie, that person looks not just at their own wish list and how many cookies they already have, but also what the situation for the sum of wishes in the household is in relation to the already received cookies. (Likewise the algorithm could be modified to take care of strategy issues for groups of groups of people, and groups of groups of groups etc.)

since the endless Smithian arguing in the 1st edition inspired the 2nd edition to be "Adam Smith Edition" maybe the 3rd Edition will be "Cockshott vs Hegel Edition". Would that be too on the nose? I don't think there will be room in the OP to "present both sides of the argument" since the character limit in OPs is lower than it used to be, as of the site death a few months ago

>>2191061
>I thought you weren't complaining about the OP.
Did you know OP can stand for both Original Poster and Original Post?

>>2191453
I still don't owe you an essay because I said one thing I found interesting but didn't necessarily agree with at the end of an argument you were having with someone else

Can anyone recommend some texts (preferably from a Marxist perspective) about the political economy of fascism?

>>2191062
cool cybernetic economy post, would like to see more of this here

I have a question, what school of economics does Unlearning Economics subscribe to? Is it just Keynes? Or what? Cuz he constantly calls Marxist economics as useless.

>>2191838
in his video on value, he says he subscribes to a marginal utility theory, like austrian economists
politically he appears as a keynesian though; "free money" and all that

>>2190438
>>2190572
>>2190757
>>2191061
The quote "Hegel is somehow able to get two kilos of theorems out of one kilo of axioms" humorously captures the prolific and expansive nature of Hegel's philosophical system. The metaphor uses weight (kilos) to suggest that Hegel generates a significant volume of conclusions ("theorems") from a modest set of foundational principles ("axioms"). This highlights his method's productivity, deriving extensive insights from basic ideas.

Hegel's works, like Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic, aim to construct a comprehensive system explaining reality, history, and consciousness. The quote may acknowledge his ability to weave a vast, interconnected worldview from core principles. The "somehow" hints at ambiguity—admiration for Hegel’s generative logic or skepticism about its rigor.

The quote encapsulates Hegel’s unique approach: transforming foundational axioms into a rich, evolving system through dialectics. Whether seen as a testament to his intellectual fecundity or a critique of his complexity, it underscores the remarkable scope of his philosophical project.

Hegelian Logic vs. Formal Logic: A Category Error?

The incompatibility between Hegel’s dialectical method and the formal logic underpinning modern computing (Boole, Shannon, Turing). Chaitin and Turing’s insights—that “you cannot get more out of a logical system than you put into its axioms”—apply to formal systems with strict rules of inference. Hegel’s project, however, is not a formal logical system but a philosophical framework for understanding contradiction, change, and totality.

Marxism’s strength lies in its analysis of social relations (exploitation, alienation), not technical logic. The infrastructure of the internet (Shannon’s circuits, Turing’s machines) is a product of capitalist innovation, but Marxists critique the social use of technology, not its material basis.

Engaging with Hegel is less about formal logic and more about grappling with concepts like totality, contradiction, and historical process. For example, dialectics is often invoked to analyze nonlinear social change (e.g., revolutions).

The use of Markov chains, cybernetics, or process algebra for understanding complex systems is well-founded. These methods are undeniably powerful for describing change, but they do not inherently address the normative or historical questions central to Marxism (e.g., "Why does exploitation persist?"). Dialectics attempts to bridge description and critique.

Dismissing Hegel entirely risks losing insights into nonlinear causality and systemic contradictions—concepts that resonate in fields like ecology or complexity theory. The challenge is to reconcile dialectical intuition with materialist rigor.

>>2191883
chatgpt ahh post 🤣

>>2191889
your post offers no alternative to formal logic, which did not begin in modernity, but begins back with aristotle. also, aristotle has a form of dialectic called the syllogism, which mimics the famous (mis)understanding of hegel's thesis-antithesis-synthesis like so:
>IF socrates is a man
>AND all men are mortal
<THEN socrates is mortal
this if-and-then reasoning "builds" from axioms and gives abstract expression to totality also, where particulars all participate in the oneness of being down the chain of logic. if youve ever coded you'll also notice this syllogistic form operated in algorithms.

>>2191895
>your post offers no alternative to formal logic
It doesn't need to. Dialectics and formal logic are on entirely different planes. Attempting to refute Marx through formal logic is a category error. I already said this multiple times in different ways idk how it could be more clear.

They are also not mutually exclusive so accepting dialectics doesn't mean you have to throw out science or vice versa. In fact the appeal to scientific socialism demands both and Engels correctly identified good science like the theory of evolution is unconsciously dialectical.

>>2191906
who is trying to "debunk" marx? i am debunking the bullshit of dialectical philosophy, which you pose against formal logic. if you want marx to be wed to dialectics, then thats a problem you make for him.

>>2191909
>which you pose against formal logic
i try to refrain from just calling you retarded but you do it to yourself. i just told you that they are not in opposition. i really cant tell what the problem is, maybe you are actually illiterate?

>>2191909
>who is trying to "debunk" marx?
SmithianAnon, for one.
>if you want marx to be wed to dialectics, then thats a problem you make for him.
me and every non-analytical marxist that has ever lived

>>2191912
>theyre not in opposition
formal logic says A=A
dialectics says A=/=A
it is a contradiction at the level of formal identity
and if theyre not in opposition, why choose one over the other?
>>2191916
maybe people are adverse to marxism because you gatekeep it with crackpots like hegel, who makes no sense to anybody, yet is simultaneously claimed by everybody

>>2191920
>why choose one over the other?
>>2191906
>not mutually exclusive
>scientific socialism demands both
why post if no can read?

>>2191922
you simply dont understand
A=A is an axiom, or a self-evident proposition
if A=/=A in any circumstance then the axiom does not hold.
this is why you cannot have formal contradictions in formal systems. computers operate on algorithms based in formal logic for this reason.
to say A=/=A is to introduce a contradiction and therefore to disrupt the system from advancing.
they are by definition mutually exclusive

>>2191923
yes i see now the problem is(as usual) exactly as i diagnosed previously. you think you arent endorsing a metaphysics by appealing to facts and logic but you are actually a positivist, which makes you an idealist, and your lack of reading makes you not equipped to have this conversation.

>Hegelian dialectics does not reject the law of identity outright. Instead, it argues that identity is always mediated by negation and embedded in a dynamic process.A ≠ A is not a formal contradiction but a recognition that identity is relational, temporal, and processual. Dialectics examines how systems evolve through internal tensions, not how propositions cohere. Hegel isn’t proposing an "alternative logic" but a philosophy of process that formal logic alone cannot capture. Its Apples vs. Oranges. Critics who dismiss dialectics as "A ≠ A nonsense" miss the point. Formal logic is indispensable for science and technology, while Dialectics is a heuristic for analyzing qualitative change in complex systems.

>>2191927
terminal STEMlord brain. he doesn't even know that he does not know.

>>2191743
fascism doesn't have a political economy. Its methodology was completely different in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Showa Japan. If you really want to use Italy as the "orthodox model" you can read books about that. Maybe also look at dirigisme stuff in general.

>>2191743
fascism exhibits a core political economy marked by state/military control of the economy and reactionary control of the state/military. and a focus on "nationalist" (in the chauvinist sense) objectives. While economic policies are tailored to each nation's context, the overarching theme remains the dominance of the reactionaries over economic activity, both in historical and modern manifestations. So royals, bourgeoisie, and lumpen thugs, together in a fascist clique, forming a fist, and fucking everything up.

>>2191927
>metaphysics
yes, logic is metaphysical. its based on first principles. yes its idealist by accepting abstract propositions as true statements. but logic is also correct. you realise that hegel and aristotle were also idealists, right?
>positivism
care to prove the notion of negativity? hegel's dialectic of abstract-negative-concrete is impracticable since in defining variables, you cannot define what something is-not. hence to say there is A and non-A in mutual relation is to give an unquantifiable formula. this is why we dont use dialectical logic in the real world.
>A ≠ A is not a formal contradiction
YES IT IS. you dialectical retards love using the term "contradiction" until youre actually accused of it.
>internal tensions, not how propositions cohere.
so its not logic then, its gobbledygook.
>Formal logic is indispensable for science and technology
no shit.
>>2191930
>i am le scientific socialist
<but science is cringe, actually

>>2191946
>care to prove the notion of negativity?
lmao. not surprising. you didn't read the thread you are posting in
>so its not logic then
yeah that is exactly what i said multiple times
><but science is cringe, actually
science is fine. being an ifls fedora tipper stemlord is pretty cringe

>>2191962
the fuck are you talking about? i said its not meant to be or replace formal logic like 30 times. the state of these children today is fucking sad. sorry that your education failed you

Sooo anybody wants to post something about… economics?

>>2191989
its funny bc the whole point is to generate the whole universe from one axiom
for hegel its that the real is rational and the rational is real
which for marx is that being determines consciousness
and for lenin its that atoms exist even when you close your eyes
its a response to kant's claim that the thing-in-itself is unknowable
what thats supposed to mean is that reality is intelligible
that it has a rational structure capable of being understood

whether hegel was a secret materialist is another topic
but assuming he was an idealist
the point of the marxist turn in historical and dialectical materialism
is to condition your concepts
its not just checking for personal or ideological biases
for most people what you see is what you get
you see an object call it A and A exists
but objects dont just exist independently
you have to make sure that what you think you see
and the concept you give to name it actually correspond
and because many objects humans encounter have a particular human use
and humans are social creatures
and language is socially constructed
you have to investigate the historical development of an object
to correctly understand it
and then once you have grounded your concept in social history
then begins the empirical analysis

which brings us to marx's study of money and the commodity fetish
money is just another commodity
and sure its special because its the universal commodity
but it could be anything silver, gold, salt etc
people see money and can hold money so money must exist
but marx says this is not the case
money is actually a real abstraction of social labor
and what we think we can see and hold that we call money is just a phantom
because money as capital is really private control of collective human action
and thats why dogecoin or monopoly bucks can be money
because what is commodified is not the physical token
its labor
thats why we get a labor theory of value

the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas
so when people talk about bourgeois consciousness
its not a statement about just thinking about things the wrong way
its about whether or not those things actually exist
whether the conceptual abstraction that you name and presume to exist
has justified material content
so when someone says vulgar materialist or a positivist
or a subjective idealist or physical reductionist or a mechanical materialist
or that you are doing scientism
and that something is ahistorical or undialectical
thats what they mean
that terms are being assumed as given
without proper investigation

money as price is a contentless abstraction
how many hours you have to work to afford something is real
the point isn't just to describe the world but to change it
and to change it you first have to not just correctly describe it
but understand how it changes
you can't begin to have a foundational critique of capitalism
if you dont have a correct understanding of money
and if you think modern money as capital under generalized commodity production
is just the same thing as a primitive universal commodity like seashells
then you have no basis for changing political economy
because money is just a thing that exists
eternal static and unchanging with no social or historical development
but if you identify it correctly as social labor
you identify the revolutionary subject in a conscious agent
in the proletariat

>>2192031
> reality is intelligible
>that it has a rational structure capable of being understood
only partially. you can't make a thing understand itself completely because that would require more energy than is contained in the thing. all models are simulations which divide real continuous things things into discrete rational things, taking differentials and accumulating integrals. All models are mere approximations.

The major difference between Marx and Smith also Ricardo is that he found that profit rates do not equalize which was the assumption those economists made. It’s been proven 100 percent that profit rates do not equalize across an economy so all erroneous criticism of Marxist economics comes from that one assumption about profit equalization which has been long disproven for at least 120 years. It’s like someone still assuming that we live in a cosmological ether where everything will fall into the sun which was what people believed in the 19th century but of course now we know much better about the universe with respect to those assumptions. The observations have absolutely removed profit rate equalization from serious discussions of economics. The only reason anyone would continue to use it these days is political rather than scientific.

>>2192031
>that newline structure
is this supposed to be a free verse poem

>>2192026
fuck that bitch slanty yellow

>>2192136
>all models are simulations which divide real continuous things things into discrete rational things, taking differentials and accumulating integrals. All models are mere approximations.

"real continuous things" dont exist. only matter and motion and the names we give to its forms. concepts are approximations. differentials and integrals describe the limits of concepts exactly. you are just describing the limits of empiricism discovered by kant that hegel overcame. godel obviously agrees considering he was a christian. the incompleteness theorem shows formal logic is not the only way to justify knowledge, you have to also accept synthetic a priori truths because the theory cant justify itself. if you believe that formal systems are consistent then you agree.

america imported 28% of its fertilizer from the Russian federation in 2023 despite the war. Material explanation? I… thought this was a civilizational war between the vanguard of multipolarism and the golden billion? Why does cucktin not simply starve the deceitful yank?

>>2192137
I'm sure none of those three guys actually believed profit rates to be practically equal so the question really is how strong the economy's pull towards an equalized profit rate looked in their minds.

I don't believe your claim that Marx assumed no such pull. I'm at loss how you otherwise explain the belief in price ratios at equalized profit rates as the centers of gravity for the actual price ratios. (I don't have that belief myself, I'm saying Marx did, see Capital III).

>>2191974
>dialectics is not supposed to replace formal logic
yet dialectics attempts to dispute the law of identity in place of the law of contradiction; the idea that nothing is self-similar and is therefore negatively self-relating. hegel in science of logic chapter 2 for example sees how the law of identity is "an empty tautology" and says that within identity is already the difference of difference (negation of negation). so hegel sees that the axiom is actually born out of contradiction. dialectics depends upon this.

>>2192520
kant never overcame empiricism, he just replaces it with a form of neo-rationalism in which "synthetic a priori" judgements gain possibility. kant's literal proof of this is that [5+7]=[12] is separated between means and ends in the understanding, therefore arithmetic (as the "pure intuition" of time) includes the prior and particular of experience within itself.
hegel doesnt advance from kant, he just abstracts noumena as the "thing in-itself" of the concept.

>>2193010
>so hegel sees that the axiom is actually born out of contradiction
which axiom?

>>2193031
the axiom of formal identity - A=A
to speak of self-similarity to hegel is inefficient
all dialectical materialists say something similar, that objects are never static entities, therefore to give identity to something is to miss how it must negatively self-relate to its own objectivity - so-called "real contradictions". i believe engels invokes causality into this, where he says that causality implies an object necessarily exists in two places at once, but is contingently separated by the arrow of time. einstein provides a basic rebuke of this, that if we grasp space and time as a unity: space-time, then all spaces are also unique times. "time" in the newtonian sense is abolished for relativity.

>>2193015
>kant never overcame empiricism
that was implied
>you are just describing the limits of empiricism discovered by kant that hegel overcame
that means kant was not successfully able to overcome empiricism, and hegel being a response to kant that leads to marx is why mainstream/academic western philosophy is basically still pre-kantian and dead on arrival due to its anti-communism

>>2193037
ok thats what i thought you meant but it didn't make sense because your post was basically an explanation of how dialectics compliments formal logic but you seem to think they are in a dispute?

Can we talk about economics here pls

no one is stopping you lol

>>2193038
marx in a preface to capital vol. 1 calls hegel a "mighty thinker" and still obviously employs his dialectical structure in analysing political economy. the early and late marx differ in this respect.
>>2193039
>dialectics compliments formal logic
at most it is a discourse on formal logic, but not an advancement from it. again, hegel in chapter 2, section A, remark 2 of the science of logic discusses the basics of his perspective in regards to identity. he simply says that identity only comes into being by first being a negation of negation by the law of contradiction - wherein a thing is said to not be what it cannot be by the relation of A and not-A. this entails "reflection" to hegel, of a self-vanishing nothingness, such as he discusses in chapter 1 between the dialectic of being-nothing-becoming (with the rest of the text extrapolating from the immanence of this primary relation). he edduces the immanent difference of identity also and so moves from identity to absolute, or simple difference. okay, this makes sense in one way, but in another it remains impracticable. my concern is that if we take dialectics as true yet it only remains a method of thinking rather than acting then we are useless.
>>2193065
only formal logic has application to the real world

>>2193890
>identity only comes into being by first being a negation of negation by the law of contradiction
yeah thats the part im talking about. materialist dialectics grounds identity in reality. the previous posts about incompleteness also compliment this. formal logic as an approximation of reality can only involve a static snapshot with respect to a given time period. its not saying the models are useless, its saying they are limited to their specific scope of study. the law of identity by itself is an "empty tautology" in the same way that money as price is a "contentless abstraction", but identity grounded in material and social history is pragmatic and even necessary for understanding. saying A=A means nothing. "A"s dont exist in reality. when you say there is an A and B they are contentless, and treated by formal logic as being equal in that they are of the same type so whether you privilege one or the other is a matter of subjective taste. Ax=By you can just switch the terms around and find the relation to x or y, which is what the classical critique of Marx is, that he just chooses Labor arbitrarily when it could just as easily be Use. But Marx isn't choosing arbitrarily and Use and Labor are not equal in the way that A and B are equal.

>>2193890
>only formal logic has application to the real world
prove it :)

wanted to post this video ITT. it's kinda old now but I found it interesting.

>>2193920
>materialist dialectics grounds identity in reality.
in the monist sense of everything = matter?
this only causes a parmenidean problem of oneness being reality and everything else being unreal. this is also why materialists often say that nothing has a fixed nature and therefore has no means of certain knowledge, and so defeats itself.
>formal logic as an approximation of reality can only involve a static snapshot with respect to a given time period
this is only if you measure the identity of an object by its accidental or material properties rather than by its abstraction. an apple remains an apple if it grows or rots; if it is in my house or the supermarket, apples are still apples. aristotle would call this its formal reality, but we dont have to presuppose an ideal relation, but only that abstract categories are themselves valid.
>the law of identity by itself is an "empty tautology" … but identity grounded in material and social history is pragmatic and even necessary for understanding."
as opposed to what?
>"A"s dont exist in reality
the number 2 is both itself a variable and the principle of doubling 1. 2 is only a form which embodies the principle, but the principle still exists. "A" still holds within itself an objective abstraction. you are literally missing thr forest for the trees.
>whether you privilege one or the other is a matter of subjective taste
if you give A or B quantities then you determine them in relation to each other. if i say 1+1=3 is that valid since it is a formal relation? no.
>But Marx isn't choosing arbitrarily and Use and Labor are not equal in the way that A and B are equal.
thats because to marx use is a quality and labour time is a quantity. if use was a quantity then they could be compared.
>prove it
computers operate on formal logic. i already explained how basic code operates syllogistically. the way we think is also logical, which is why you literally cannot reason illogically, but just present incomplete logic. logic just describes reality then and so the mind conforms to it.

>>2193952
>the way we think is also logical
>logic just describes reality then and so the mind conforms to it.
oh i didn't know you were a hegelian. the challenge is if you disagree with hegel you have to prove formal logic with formal logic.

>>2193974
the foundation of logic is the proposition, which aristotle in "prior analytics" first defines as either affirmative or negative. an axiom is a self-evident proposition, which is a proposition which affirms itself in its own formulation, such as in the principle of identity. the equality between terms is also employed in the syllogism:
>if A = B
>and B = C
>then A = C
this is also how you escape the "tautology" of identity, by relating identity to other variables. many things can share in a common identity thus. to say A=A is not to say that A=/=C. if A and C can be determined as sharing an equality then they gain mutual identity. this is basic algebra. for example, a chair and a rock are both solid, so solidness is a shared identity between them.

the basis of logic then is the axiom, or the principle of self-evidence. is this possible? yes, by virtue of existence itself. decartes has the famous i cogito (i think therefore i am), and this can be expressed in any type of way. even to say "nothing exists" is to be self-contradictory thus. does this suffice?

>>2193979
>this is also how you escape the "tautology" of identity, by relating identity to other variables.
by what it is not, through negativity
>self-evident
axiom is just another word for assumption. you cant justify your assumption with formal logic because thats not how it works. how do you not know the demon isn't tricking you? how do you know reality is intelligible
>by virtue of existence itself
again youre just circling around pre-hegelian justifications or paraphrasing hegel. he literally starts with being and nothing lol. if you were to say something like "existence is necessary" you would be even closer and by invoking descarctes you have to rely on the ontological argument for a benevolent personal god whereas in hegel god is nature, not a being, but being, which is rational, and therefor intelligible.

>>2194000
>by what is not
you are close, but the way that affirmative identity relates is positively. we equate things by what they *are*, not by what they are-not. yes, at a certain level of abstraction, A and C could mutually be not-B, but by the same measure, to speak of anything is also to include within it what it is-not (as per the law of contradiction), but even as hegel says, this self-difference of reflection instantly vanishes in identity. negativity then is always mediated by what a thing positively is. the non-A cannot exist without A, but what is the content on not-A? nothing, precisely. thus it is not a variable in an equation and so cannot be quantified. this is why negativity is always abstract, and so has no affirmative content to self-relate.
>axiom is just another word for assumption
presupposition would be a better term.
>you cant justify your assumption with formal logic because thats not how it works.
its exactly how it works
>how do you not know the demon isn't tricking you? how do you know reality is intelligible
it is self-evidently so. this is what you are missing. we do not begin from a position of emptiness and construct the world out of axioms. we already exist in a reality which we then abstract. logic is the language of nature for this reason.
>again youre just circling around pre-hegelian justifications or paraphrasing hegel. he literally starts with being and nothing lol.
hegel invented metaphysics?
>existence is necessary
existence is presupposed, but not necessary. theres no reason why anything has to exist, but things do.

>>2194015
>its exactly how it works
not according to godel

>hegel invented metaphysics?
he completed it lol. if you are aware you are doing metaphysics you could at least be transparent about what school of thought you subscribe to. i dont know all the popular names like antirealism and all that either but then i could at least look up what you believe. because it sounds like someone who studied stem and has been around marxists trying to say they dont have a metaphysics and then describing positivistic empiricism but using dialectical materialst verbage. like empiricists think the mind is a blank slate at birth and rely on self evident axioms, but then you seem to say axioms are self evident because we are born into an embedded history which is more then self evidence.

>self-evident
i agree but thats a pretty subjective justification and a lot of people might not agree. im fine with it if you want to get one kilo of axioms out of no kilos but it upsets some people and they will accuse you of mysticism.

>the non-A cannot exist without A, but what is the content on not-A?
everything else. just like you cant find the area under a curve without assuming an infinity. its like an infinite series that converges to a finite sum. identity is defined through difference

>this is why negativity is always abstract, and so has no affirmative content to self-relate.
are you aware that this is deleuzes position(transcendental empiricism) which is also dialectical? affirmation of affirmation instead of negation of negation? rather then an overcoming of hegel its just another inversion like stirner. or are you just clarifying what hegel thinks and agreeing with him?

descartes was a dualist. for hegel there is no object-subject distinction. instead substance is subject, so you are the universe experiencing itself. instead of logic(human thought) describing reality and so the mind(human thought) conforms to it, which is what marx critiques vulgar materialism for, if thought is a part of reality, and thought is rational, reality is rational. hes not an "ideasist" in that ideas are primary to matter hes an "idealist" in that concepts are ideal because they correspond to the real, like an annoying christian who says cancer is gods plan but without the perfect benevolence part. very similar to you saying "theres no reason why anything has to exist, but things do." but still saying any particular thing has to exist is different then saying existence has to exist. every thing is necessarily contingent, so everything is contingently necessary. as long as we are here to experience it thats how things are. its how he overcomes kant who is also a dualist thinking that phenomena and noumena are separate categories and imposing a gap and limit to knowledge.

>>2194049
>godel
so you are disputing the very concept of self-evidence? if i say,
>"existence = that which is" (A=A)
you say this is an incorrect formulation? if i say,
>"i think, therefore i am"
this is not the case?
the presupposition here is that to think is already to be, and therefore the affirmative proposition depends upon itself, hence the notion of self-evidence.
this is why if i said,
>"i think, yet am not"
i create a contradiction, since i negate a presupposed affirmative. this also works ethically. if i say,
>"debate is useless"
i am still debating the point, and therefore contradicting myself, so i either accept that i am being unethical or i am a hypocrite. this is rather self-evident logic, as it were. axioms then depend on axioms. this is because something is the case due to it being the case. the point goes for logic all the same. can you disprove logic? if so, how? only by using logic. so logic is self-evident, or a self-dependent category.
>hegel completed metaphysics
how?
>you could at least be transparent about what school of thought you subscribe to
if you would actually read my posts, i already affirmed that logic is a metaphysical (first principles) category of knowledge. i never denied metaphysics. i also never claimed to be an empiricist. you just project miscellaneous titles onto people because youre looking to diagnose people with wrongthink.
>everything else
no, no. you are now giving negativity a positive content. hegel's movement of identity to difference entails the absolute difference of nothingness - this is why in the process of reflection, negativity instantly vanishes in place of identity.
>infinity
hegel imagines two infinities; positive and negative - bad and good infinity.
>identity is defined through difference
but you are confused as to what difference even is. to hegel, difference is immanent to identity because it is internal of identity, not external in positive difference. to hegel, difference is internal negativity.
>or are you just clarifying what hegel thinks and agreeing with him?
i am clearly disagreeing with him. you cannot formulate negativity and so you cannot create consistent dialectical systems without only presuming that appearance contains an essence which is unseen. thus, difference depends upon identity, as essence depends on appearance. this is why simply examining the positive appearance of things suffices. it is the same case for prices and values.
>descartes was a dualist. for hegel there is no object-subject distinction
yes there is. its just that subject and object can be mediated by mutual antagonism. remember the master-servant dialectic?
>its how he overcomes kant who is also a dualist thinking that phenomena and noumena are separate categories
they are separate categories, which is why hegel just replaces noumena with the concept and so fails to advance from kant. kant is a humble thinker who understands limits. hegel is possessed by the phantom of abstract freedom.
>and imposing a gap and limit to knowledge.
knowledge is necessarily limited by the categories of reason. thats what kant gets exceedingly correct. this is also what makes him correct in the field of practical reason and aesthetic judgement. we can only speak of the way things appear but not of what they are in themselves. you can relate this to logic by the axiom; all further propositions emerge from the axiom, yet the axiom depends on itself. this is also what makes reason something inherently circular, or tautological. in the end, evidence returns to itself. something is true because it is true. now, as you say, a theological thinker will often invoke a prior necessity, but necessity is a condition which arises from contingent determination, like quantification. A and B do not have inherent relations until they are given quantities by which to relate.

>>2194949
havent we had this exact conversation before? i can feel myself using the same words and analogies. you are even using the same image. do you actually believe what you typing or are you just being contrarian?

>>2194977
i see no argument provided

>>2194981
yeah i had a response typed out but i deleted it. it was basically just telling you to read engels lenin and mao anyway. i was going to include part of one of my old posts but then i realized it was to you.

>But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say…
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/int-mat.htm

>The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook…
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/+fideism

https://www.google.com/search?&q=site:https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/+agnostic

>>2194983
all i see is that you cant provide a counter-argument to my points. you instead call upon your saints to save you from certain damnation.
>i was going to include part of one of my old posts but then i realized it was to you
link me to it, so you can make sure it was me
>picrel
what does that have to do with anything? the point is that to speak of things in-themselves is to necessarily find them unknowable. engels just rejects the category itself, which is fine, but that does not challenge kant on his own grounds. hegel does the same. he is disturbed by kant's theoretical limit and so censors it in his own mind, filling it with fantasies of reconciliation.

>>2194992
>engels just rejects the category itself, which is fine
right you dont actually hold one view or the other you are just doing some socratic thing. i just want to know what you actually think.

>>2194949
>it is the same case for prices and values.
presumably you actually do want to talk about this. unless you dont really believe it and its just a technique to generate posts.

>>2194994
if you wanted to know what i think, you could have just asked me. as i said in the previous post, kant is correct that reason is limited by its own conditions, but instead of seeing these limits in the understanding (spatio-temporal intuition), i would rather see the limit as more fundamentally based in the axiom. the law of identity incurs a tautology, to which all other things are are self-referred. aristotle in "metaphysics" also runs into this issue, where he sees the prime mover as "God", or thought-thinking-itself. here, reason can only be circular, since it is itself axiomatic. in the mind thus all things are ultimately self-similar. this is also the general issue of ontology, and why hegel is right, that to make ontological claims is self-defeating, since being and nothing share the same identity. to say "everything is x" is as sufficient as saying "everything is y", since within everything is already the infinite, and the infinite is an absolute negativity - zero. thus, it is impossible to speak of being as such, and so we can only speak of things in particular, hence the law of identity. we speak of things, but not every-thing. kant includes this limit into his system, while hegelians just brush it off and project it into negativity.
>>2194995
to marx, price and value has the same structure as appearance and essence. my basic point is that we cannot speak of difference until identity, and thus, prices occur before values, since values are themselves measured as prices. i have summed up the issue thencewise.

>>2194998
>while hegelians just brush it off and project it into negativity.
how is that just brushing it off?
>prices occur before values
doesn't that rely on a particular interpretation of marx?

>>2194998
>thus, it is impossible to speak of being as such
is that what you are saying or what you think hegel is saying i dont see how it follows

if value is created in production and surplus value is redistributed in exchange then prices aren't before values, unless you think prices are values, which marx does not

if you want to use value-form theory to say value is created in exchange then you rely on dialectics

if you rely on dialectics you admit at least that both philosophical positions are equally arbitrary but choose to be a relativist

i conceded that both positions are equally arbitrary, i just prefer materialsm over idealism. i also think hegel and marx are equally valid. but really i think if you read hegel correctly hes insisting on both. lenin falls very far on one side but imo its polemic/rhetoric. i think marx is saying value is created in production and realized in exchange

as i said before though the only reason you would privilege one over the other is if you objective is different then marx. its a political distinction not a philosophical or logical one. marx does not think that money has the quality of value, he thinks human activity is valuable, and he doesn't think it should have a price he says it should be free.

>>2194949
>hegel is possessed by the phantom of abstract freedom.
so i wonder if you believe in human emancipation but you just think communism is the wrong way, or if you think freedom is impossible. or do you think communism is slavery because something freedom something necessity? are the robots supposed to make us free? are you a market anarchist or mutualist? a crypto-libertarian?

>>2195000
>how is that just brushing it off?
because what is unknowable is not simply the unknown. the hegelian faith is that in the end, all things can be known, but the kantian position is that even the act of knowing means not-knowing, since experience is internally limited.
>doesn't that rely on a particular interpretation of marx?
well in the logical structure, how would you define values outside of prices? how can negativity precede positivity?
>>2195008
>is that what you are saying or what you think hegel is saying i dont see how it follows
it is what hegel says and i am agreeing. every-thing = no-thing in particular, and thus, for being to-be, we must have determined negation. the big bang gives us a clear picture of this ex nihilo, and entropy shows how everything collapses back into nothing.
>if value is created in production
if i make a million commodities and no one buys them, have i produced value? to marx, value is created in production *and* exchange, hence the twofold division of labour in the commodity. values and prices then exist together.
>unless you think prices are values
they are the appearance of values. exchange-value (price) expresses value for this reason.
> i think marx is saying value is created in production and realized in exchange
yes, and so both are necessary
>marx does not think that money has the quality of value, he thinks human activity is valuable
and how much activity goes into money?
>so i wonder if you believe in human emancipation but you just think communism is the wrong way, or if you think freedom is impossible.
yes essentially. freedom is an obnoxious and impossible ideal. one man's freedom is another man's bondage, and so in the end, freedom is impossible for anyone. i like aristotle's conception however of self-sufficiency. like the axiom, the ethical man ought to rely upon himself, and socially, it should be the same. my position then does not necessitate freedom, but only ethics. most also imagine capitalism to be unethical and so seek an alternative.

>>2193952
>computers operate on formal logic.
because humans designed them based on that system, not because it's the only valid system

>>2195126
this is like saying 1+1=2 now, but maybe it wont in the future

>>2195019
>if i make a million commodities and no one buys them, have i produced value?
no
>yes, and so both are necessary
>value is created in production *and* exchange
thats not what realized means
>it is what hegel says and i am agreeing
but hegel does speak of being and while he says its nothing he says this implies becoming. he doesn't say that means we cant know anything. why are you assuming bad infinity and not good infinity
>how can negativity precede positivity?
dont you know about the owl of minerva? why are you even asking if you have already read hegel.

>if you wanted to know what i think, you could have just asked me.
you could have said you disagree with marx because you reject hegel on kantian grounds like three months ago or any of the numurous times i asked you to be more transparent about your actual thought instead of abusing anon and fiegning ignorance to force me to rehash settled debates. this whole time youve been trying to convince people marx believed something he didn't when you clearly do understand his justification. not accepting his justification for arbitrary metaphysical reasons is not the same thing as proving him wrong. and then you accuse others of not justifying their beliefs to your satisfaction. if you know marx thinks money is social labor then you know fiat doesn't debunk him. youre holding him to a standard he doesn't believe and niether do you. you dont even agree with what you are saying half the but import ideas to muddy the waters. you accuse others of not being honest and hiding their beliefs in rhetoric to appeal to the masses saying you uphold individualist virtue and then just do the same. why hide your real beliefs if you are so sure of them? if the denial of dialectics is capitalist apologia then what are you doing? you propose ubi as a solution to ltv but you dont actually agree capitalism is a problem, still hedging on "most" instead of "i think". so you havent really resolved marx you just think the question of liberty fulfilled is meaningless. still ignoring direct questions too. "ethical capitalism" lmao. people of accusing you of bourgios consciousness are right. its a question of action not thought. this whole converstation has been like pulling teeth while you shove your head further and further up your own ass to get away from the doctor.

>prove humans are valuable
yeah i can see why u dont like the tankies

>>2195019
>if i make a million commodities and no one buys them, have i produced value?
Counter-question: If I make a million sellable commodities and at the moment I am not offering them for sale yet, have I not already produced value?

>>2195916
Commodities have to have a use value (be the product of a particular type of labor that serves some need or want in society) and a value (be a product of general, human labor apart of society’s social division of labor)

If no one buys your commodity, it means society has determined your particular type of labor and labor product is not useful and thus the socially necessary amount of labor time spent to make your commodity (how value is measured) was in fact, not needed. And useless.

This can be for numerous reasons, maybe other competitors have a kick on the market, maybe your current labor product is outdated and society has advanced to a new commodity with different methods of labor, etc

Regardless this is reflected in the marketplace with you not having a buyer, no one willing to exchange their money for something that they see as having no value, whether it be in its ability to satisfy a want or desire or means to create something else, much less hoard for the purpose of acquiring money.

>>2196191
NTA, jumping in
>If no one buys your commodity, it means society has determined your particular type of labor and labor product is not useful
in a society overflooded with worthless commodities some actual useful ones are missed because they didn't have an advertising budget.

>This can be for numerous reasons, maybe other competitors have a kick on the market, maybe your current labor product is outdated and society has advanced to a new commodity with different methods of labor, etc

people are low info and will buy bad, cheap, defective products because they are better advertised. People don't have perfect information and aren't always rational actors. Senile people get scammed into buying useless shit all the time. I've had to stop my own grandparents multiple times and other times I didn't stop them in time…

These ideas have a general application of course, but there is so much insanity going on that it seems like there are a lot of exceptions.

>>2196197
I mean yes all of that is true, I’m speaking in generalities not specific manifestations due to decaying de-industrialized American finance capital epoch


And yeah buyers not having an encyclopedia of all goods/ expected to be “informed conscious” buyers with everything at their fingertips and not heavily at a disadvantage due to the social relations between the capitalist and worker is something he touches on

Im not disagreeing with you, just that those specificities don’t discount what I said

>>2196219
By *he I meant Marx in capital.

>>2196219
yeah that makes sense, thanks for replying, got nothing to add
>>2196222
understood
>>2196221
lol I haven't seen this one since 2019ish

>>2195138
At the fundamental hardware level, traditional computers rely on binary logic which is rooted in formal logic because of how transistors work. At the core of traditional computing hardware, formal logic is the dominant framework but there are emerging areas like quantum computing that use different principles like superposition and entanglement that aren’t strictly formal logic-based. quantum computing isn’t just an extension of formal logic, it's a fundamentally different approach to how information is processed. Quantum computing is definitely more than just marketing buzz. It’s a real, developing field of research. we’re still in the early stages of making it scalable and reliable for broad use. These phenomena don’t follow the rigid, true-or-false logic of classical computing but instead work with probabilities and quantum states that are more complex and less intuitive. quantum logic is more dialectical than formal in some ways. Traditional formal logic, like Boolean logic, is based on rigid, binary principles (true/false, 0/1). In contrast, quantum logic reflects the probabilistic and often non-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics, where states can exist in superposition, and outcomes aren't determined until measured. dialectics often deals with contradictions, change, and interconnections, which somewhat aligns with quantum behavior where a particle can be in multiple states at once (superposition), and measuring one part of a system can affect the whole (entanglement). Quantum logic doesn’t follow the strict, binary principles of formal logic but instead embraces uncertainty, potentiality, and relationships between particles. So, in a way, it’s closer to a dialectical approach than classical formal logic.

>>2196191
>Commodities have to have a use value
>If no one buys your commodity, it means society has determined your particular type of labor
>you not having a buyer

Read the question again:
1. "sellable commodities"
2. "not offering them for sale yet"

The situation the question considers is: Things are made that can be sold, but right now they are in storage and not yet offered on the market. They will be sold. The question is about our concept of value if we are following Marx: Should we say the value is already produced at the point in time before the selling? (I'm inclined to say yes.)

>>2196261
Value in itself is a social relation, right, its reflects the SNLT that went into a product compared to another, but it’s only realized in the exchange sphere


You have produced *potential* value, but you haven’t realized that value until your commodity (which is a use-value to buyer, but the buyer, it’s only a source of potential value)

Also “sellable” implies that a money commodity has been established and exchange of commodities has reached a degree that some commodity has become the universal equivalent (money), the commodity through which all other commodity’s can express their magnitude of value based on a fixed unit.


Just the fact you said your “million commodities of X” produced is “sellable” that implies you have already thought of a notional amount of the money commodity (say gold) that you could theoretically acquire with that commodity in your given society’s marketplace

But your commodity isn’t gold “yet”, just because you give your commodity a money-name (price) you are only equating the labor time spent making one to the labor time spent making another just expressed in gold.


You still have to actually go to the marketplace and find someone with the money commodity, in which your commodity will express its value *relative* to the money commodity by saying a certain quantity of your commodity X has the same amount of labor time that this real, definite quantity of gold.


The underlying processes that determine value are their regardless, but because labor is organized privately (without regard to whether or not your commodity is actually useful or Society can absorb it) but the product of labor are in a directly social form (a commodity that was produced for the purpose of selling), the only way you can “realize” this value or be confirmed that the labor products of your own private labor (your corporation, etc) is by gaining something that is recognized as being the universal emobidement of all labor power (the money commodity)

>>2196374
*sorry to the seller, your commodity is not a use value, the seller only sees it as a source of potential value (hence why the seller has produced those commodities for the sole purpose of exchange, and given it a notional money-name that the seller hopes to realize in the market)

I produced 5 pair of pants that I think (based on the current tailoring industry, other pants makers in my economy, the expense to acquire the fabric to make the pants, etc) that I can get 100 gold coins for these pants.


I have produced potential value, but I have no way of knowing if those 5 pants will all be sold, or only some, or if I can even get 20 gold coins for a pair of pants. The only way is buy bringing my goods to the market, and if the seller is willing to exchange 20 gold coin for a pair of jeans, my labor has been recognized as created a product that is useful for society, while also being the product of general, simple labor power that confirms this amount of labor within the entire totality of the social division of labor, was in fact necessary.


If you can only sell 2 pants but still have 3 left. That means the total amount of SNLT that went into making all 5 of those pants was wasted. And such, society wasted that total amount of time. Maybe society already has enough jeans in the economy, maybe it only needed your labor time towards 2 jeans, etc regardless

>>2196374
>You have produced *potential* value
>>2196381
>I have produced potential value, but I have no way of knowing

Suppose you produce stuff and put in storage for more than zero seconds and then manage to sell the stuff. Looking back, is it wrong to say you had already produced this value before the act of selling confirming it?

>>2196414
Yes, but again value itself is a social relation determined by humans, if you store your commodities before somewhere, you are assuming these commodities are worth a notional amount of money, and can be exchanged for a *real* amount of money at the point of the sale

You have no way of showing to society that your labor was expended productively, which is the point.

The commodity that acts as the universal equivalent (money, in this case gold) is the social signifier that you have expended a certain amount of labor time (and made some sort of sale) that was equivalent to the real amount of money you are holding.


Basically “value” is determined by society, so in the most technical terms sure, given that you reside in a society where commodity production has become so generalized and widespread that the very act of producing commodities that don’t serve an immediate use or need, but for the purpose of exchange, is reflected in the social relations to our labor well before you even made your commodities.

Idk if I’m making sense. But your commodities store are useless, so yeah you can say narrowly you produced value, but again it’s a social relation. If you were to try and directly exchange your millions of commodity X for a different commodity, in most cases you would get rejected.

Why? Because your commodity isn’t in a form that has been recognized by society as being the universal equivalent of all forms of labor power, nor in a form that is ready to be circulated without exchanging itself for another commodity (the money commodity serves both these roles)


Now on the other hand, you can say “why do consumers buy a bunch of junk that objectively has no value?”

This is where commodity fetishism comes in, the process by which value is realized (the market-place) presents itself as a rational system of free actors and free markets, individuals coming of their own volition to exchange for products of their own labor

This obscures the fact that this “free market” exists on the basis of the social division of labor having workers (who don’t own the means of production, must sell their labor power) take the products of private labor, to the market in order to both “realize” value (their private labor products are exchanged for a labor product in a socially valid form, money) and also gain a commodity (money) which is necessary to buy other commodities like food, clothes, etc

This is a self-reproducing cycle, with your value being realized and such your spot within the social division of labor, but on the surface it looks like individual buyers with free will just going to the market place


It doesn’t show workers *have* to go to the market, or else how will they get money for their products? The capitalist *has* to put their commodities in a form that is socially recognized because they are producing a bunch of use values that aren’t necessarily useful to himself or lots of people, but they need ti acquire money (and by extension capital) that will allow them to satisfy their own wants and needs but also accumulate more capital.

>>2196459
*are not useless. Fuck I hate the spelling

TDLR: yes in layman’s terms, but marx (and society) isn’t going to recognize your commodities as value until you bring it to the marketplace. That is the point Marx makes in capital about value being a social relation

>>2196459
Commodity fetishism obscures the relations that go into realizing value and how commodities are produced.


You make a sell/purchase by exchanging your commodity for money. Or you have money and can now acquire any commodity in the world, given you have the right quantity.

But it’s not the commodities themselves that give them value, it’s the fact that a certain amount of labor time went into making the commodity that makes it equivalent to another commodity.


This is commodity fetishism, societies think value comes from commodities themselves because that is what the surface level look at the free market shows you, but in reality it is the labor time that went into it, and such the further people become removed from the production process, the more and more alienated they become to how real human labor power (and a real human, with real skills, thoughts, etc) were used to make this product.


Such you have billionaires with massive amounts of commodities, and where does capitalism say it comes from? It is due to the hard work and wit of the capitalist, he has a bunch of wealth, obviously he must have done something good to deserve this.


Not, wow, a bunch of labor time was expended to produce that many commodties, what was the productive process like, what are the conditions of the workers, how was labor organized in such a way that so many commodities are produced in Y time, what is the impact of the environment, etc


All of that is ignored

That is why the first sentence of capital, marx starts with “The Wealth of all societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, the COMMODITY “appears” to be the elementary form of the wealth.


He says “appears” as it’s only a surface level observation that does not take into account the totality of how commodities appear in circulation

>>2190874
>a society in which the division of labour and its private character prevail

I find this phrasing very unclear. (So what if Marx also put it like that. Fidelity to Marx does not absolve you). If there is any division of labor, labor has a social character.

People might have all sorts of ideas about individual responsibility having a big role, that's capitalist ideology ("pull up yourself by your own bootstraps"—every tried that literally?) and people are held responsible for all sorts of things as individuals that they cannot control as individuals, that's legal fiction. People are dependent on each other as a matter of fact, and on quite a big scale.

I understand saying that in capitalism effort is verified in sales, that it counts when it leads to sales. But why say that's the moment labor becomes social? (Aren't you just replicating capitalist ideology in that.)

>>2197088
i think they are talking about social production and private appropriation, or maybe the private direction of socialized labor. the thing they are saying has a private character is capitalist society not labor

>>2197486
They may be thinking that, but they are certainly not saying that.

>>2195916
>If I [dont sell anything] have I not already produced value?
no. if i spend a 100 hours painting a picture, do i create value? muh mud pies. value to marx is self-related in exchange because in the commodity, the buyer gets use-value and seller gets exchange-value.
>>2196191
to marx, use-values are not necessarily the product of labour, and value is not general social labour, but is labour-time expended in commodity production, which is paid back in wages (and profits) after sale.
>>2196234
>So, in a way, it’s closer to a dialectical approach than classical formal logic.
if the superposition collapses upon measurement, it still applies a singular true/false function, and so does not break formal logic by introducing contradiction. if a function was determined true *and* false, computation could not continue.
>>2197088
marx in chapter 2 of capital vol. 1 says that divisions of labour can exist without exchange (value) existing.
>>2196469
>He says “appears” as it’s only a surface level observation
not at all. "wealth" and "value" are opposite terms. adam smith already discovered this.
>>2195842
>he doesn't say that means we cant know anything
i never implied that? to put necessary limits on knowledge is not to deny knowledge, but actually to give possibility to the category of knowledge itself. this can be demonstrated on the grounds that to know, one must perceive reality with limited sensation. to have unlimited sensation would mean knowing nothing.
>you could have said you disagree with marx because you reject hegel on kantian grounds
marx and hegel have no relevance to each other in the realm of political economy, except in marx's use of dialectics. and as ive already explained, i disagree with marx on the basis that i prefer empirical facts over unquantifiable and unfalsifiable entities. this is legitimated by the fact that you cannot measure value outside of price. price precedes value, viz. A & not-A.
>if you know marx thinks money is social labor then you know fiat doesn't debunk him
to marx, money is a "measure of value" in the form of a commodity; a universal equivalent. you can read chapter 3 of capital vol. 1 for this. you can also read section 3 of chapter 1, on the value form.
>the denial of dialectics is capitalist apologia
how? lol
>still ignoring direct questions too
like what? you dont ask, you accuse.

>>2197935
>In his Vol. 3 transformation procedure Marx holds that total value equals total price
yes, in chapter 9 specifically, in which he concludes with smith's original discovery, that the total value of a commodity is in its cost of production:
<"Hence, the price of production of a commodity is equal to its cost-price plus the profit"
which maps onto marx's formula of value:
>C = c + v + s
which is identical with smith's:
<P = capital + wages + rents
or as marx says in "value, price and profit",
>"Profit is Made by Selling a Commodity at its Value"
… since surplus is included in its cost.
>Marx’s theory of value does not require that goods trade in exact proportion to the labor time embodied in them.
who wrote this bollocks? the entire basis of exchange to marx is an exchange of equivalents. if there was unequal exchange then you could never determine value - this is why smith's "average price" of commodities serves as a "guiding star", in marx's terms.
>Rather Marx argues that prices and values systematically deviate
yet they are said to equalise across industry. that is the entire claim of the transformation of values into prices. it is also self-evident that to sell low means to sell high in another area to make back what was lost. marx attempts to determine this by ratios of organic composition [c/v], but supply/demand can also suffice in the logic of equilibrium.
>value cannot be created in exchange
yet it cannot exist outside of exchange. it is a "double result", as he puts it.
>[…]This leads to the bizarre notion of “subjective profit”
yet "super-profits" suffice? lol. leninists and austrians both believe in the inequality of exchange so its the same difference.
>Marx does not believe that every exchange involves an equality of labor times
where is the sauce?
>The very concept of socially necessary labor time (SNLT) implies inequalities in exchange between the social value of a commodity and the individual value
this is why marx largely disqualifies unskilled labour, since it is not socially necessary. and individual labour-powers are accounted for also.
>[…] But this type of profit is different than the super-profit that comes from selling below the SNLT
🤣
>If a commodity is exchanged above or below its value then value is transfered from one person to another. This can be a source of profit for one person but it cannot increase the total amount of profit in society.
here, the author is confusing price for value. in simple commodity-circulation (C-M-C) there can only be an exchange of equivalents since you can only sell above or below the equilibrium price, but the equilibrium does not change. thus, "profits" in this closed system are just temporary privations of another, not self-expanding value, or valorisation. it is as much "profit" as theft brings, or as the author implies, stealing money means being "super" profitable, but this is not a revelation… and this category of "extra" profit is already understood as "rents" by adam smith, and is later annunciated by marx in capital vol. 3 as an additional cost of production.
>The amount of value created by the worker in production cannot be determined by looking at the wage. It can only be determined by looking at the total amount of work that has been done
…. or in other words, by subtracting wages from the profits 🫨 therefore, value can only be determined after the sale of commodities, where profit is realised.
>Marx’s theory of SNLT contains both types of profit, profit proper and super-profit
🤣
>This allows them to appropriate value through exchange
surely he means "surplus value" if they are "profits" after all
>The source of this super-profit is the surplus value created by workers in other firms
ah, he corrects himself, but its already too late, since he imagines super profits being an intrinsic feature of unequal exchange. does a merchant appropriate the value of a commodity, or its surplus value?
>Sometimes we are told the notion of prices of production involves some modification of Marx’s value theory.
why would it when marx just appropriates this conclusion anyway?
>All of the tools we need to understand prices of production are already present in the notion of SNLT
which is derivative, not originative, of the prices of production, as they are distributed in wages and profits. you cannot determine value outside of these.

>>2197660
idk seems clear to me.

>>2198015
to understand marxist notions of "unequal exchange" - you can overprice or underprice a commodity, but you cannot under-value or over-value a commodity. what is exchanged at any price is still the value of that commodity. all exchanges are equal then, but not all prices. this is shown very basically by the fact that the same commodity can have two different prices in different markets. whatever isnt contributed as a rent (like transportation costs) is a fluctuation of supply and demand, which orients market prices. calling disparities of supply/demand "super profits" is hilarious nonsense, especially if youre a marxist. what is the material relation, "super exploitation"? now, i do think this monopoly logic is economically relevant, but it does not change the essential relations of labour costs, except by a nominal efficiency in large industry. market prices =/= natural prices.

>>2198154
>calling disparities of supply/demand "super profits" is hilarious nonsense, especially if youre a marxist.
Marx calls it extra surplus-value. Its not the supply/demand that determines directly it but the productivity from better technology which means they capture more market share while producing faster than the average socially necessary labor. Usually they continue to sell at the same price but the introduction of the technology means they produce less value and pay less in wages so can pocket the difference. Other companies that dont introduce the same measures slowly go out of business but when the new process becomes generalized prices fall to match the new average value.

>>2198161
>Marx calls it extra surplus-value.
a more proper term would be "relative surplus value" considering he coins this in the same chapter (ch. 12, capital vol.1)
>"On the other hand, however, this extra surplus-value vanishes, so soon as the new method of production has become general, and has consequently caused the difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value to vanish."
this is not the same as claiming that simple commodity-circulation (C-M-C) is balanced by forces of mutual super profits, or unequal exchanges. what you describe is unequal productivity, not exchange.

>>2198015
In the context of text, ellipses within brackets indicate that words have been omitted from a direct quotation, the ellipsis itself is not part of the original text, but rather an editorial or authorial addition, likely shorten the post as a courtesy. If you want to see the full text you can click the link included at the bottom.

>>2198173
what have i missed from what was posted?
the author has a leninist interpretation of marx's original meaning. at the very least, we need to set records straight.
unequal exchange can otherwise be called monopoly, and is part of the theory of imperialism, but this is at odds with marx's notion that exploitation is constituted by the equality of exchange, since the value of a commodity already includes surplus value. now, as i said in an initial reply, there are notions of unequal development which creates relative surplus value, and this can be imperially impressed on people, but by the same measure, you do not grow power from profits, but only by a diminishing ratio of immiseration. it is feudal, to put succinctly, since if you deny growth, you must cultivate stifling institutions of rent. this has also largely occured in the post-fordist west. rent then, not profits, causes this setback. marx in capital vol. 3 then properly sees a mutual antagonism between profits and rents, the same as adam smith, and all economic thinkers, really (if we thus convert rents into taxes).

>>2198164
Who is claiming that?

>>2198182
this post:
>>2197935
that in exchange, there are profits and super profits

>>2198015
>here, the author is confusing price for value. in simple commodity-circulation (C-M-C) there can only be an exchange of equivalents since you can only sell above or below the equilibrium price, but the equilibrium does not change. thus, "profits" in this closed system are just temporary privations of another, not self-expanding value, or valorisation. it is as much "profit" as theft brings, or as the author implies, stealing money means being "super" profitable, but this is not a revelation… and this category of "extra" profit is already understood as "rents" by adam smith, and is later annunciated by marx in capital vol. 3 as an additional cost of production.
so the real enemy was rent all along?

>>2198278
that would be a classical-liberal sentiment. i mention monopoly also to show its contradistinction with free markets, and how the volition of industry naturally lowers rates of profit through cheapening goods. this is the general antagonism between "wealth" (use) and money (exchange) that smith identifies, and what marx sees as the central struggle of labour in the commodity, by its twofold division (between use-value and exchange-value). marx also notes that value has an internal division, between duration and intensity, which means that the more productive labour is, the less valuable it is (per commodity produced). this creates "crises of overproduction" however, where productivity (use) outcompetes duration (value), and so goods are too cheap to be profitable. generally, this causes unemployment, and so a devolution of industry. keynesian stimulation (free money) helps this situation however, like how governments constantly bail out companies. conservatives then display a paradoxical attitude, where they are mad that business stays afloat, yet complains that this somehow ruins the economy. the most dangerous types are those like peter schiff who thinks fiat should be replaced by gold, and therefore wants a new great depression. you'll notice that this logic serves the ends of monopoly. gold is a fixed currency, meaning that in the private sphere, it has fixed ownership. my feeling is that institutions of rents (monopolies) then arise from this crisis of profit, but this is not due to the free market, but the regression of markets into feudal structures. you can see the immanence of rents in the market, but as marx correctly understands, rents are a feudal hangover which actively competes with industry, while simultaneously depending on it. i consider myself a classical liberal of some sort, so i see that the lowering of profits is proportional with the spread of wealth, and that high profits are the enemy of wealth. smith also sees how profits are the enemy of wages, or the claims of labour to its own product. marx's best moments are those which follow from these foundations.

>>2198183
>that in exchange, there are profits and super profits
is not the same thing as
>claiming that simple commodity-circulation is balanced by forces of mutual super profits, or unequal exchange

>>2198635
yes it is
super profits nominally exist by underselling values, so to a believer in unequal exchange, supply and demand fluctuations are relations of super profits changing hands. the primary claim is that exchange itself is unequal, so someone is always being exploited.

>>2198651
thats not what they said. its also not what exploitation means.

>>2198657
>thats not what they said
explain to me what they said then

>>2198663
>profit can’t come from exchange

youre conflating individual producers with the whole economy and also the source of profit. they are critiquing the idea that profit comes from unequal exchange not endorsing it. exploitation doesn't mean unfair it means "to make use of" like exploiting a forest for its lumber. exploiting workers means making use of them, or using them as a means to an end, treating them as a source of commodified labor power.

>>2198670
>they are critiquing the idea that profit comes from unequal exchange not endorsing it.
they are saying that unequal exchange produces super profits, and that this occurs in the mechanism of exchange itself
>exploitation
to extract super profits is by derivation a form of super exploitation? no? what would you call it?

maybe one of you smart fellas can figure this out for me: Why do 1st world capitalists outsource jobs to 3rd world workers if their labor is less efficient and their economies less developed? I hear the laborpower is cheaper, but then I also hear that the laborpower is less efficient due to less automation. What gives? Is it that the third world countries have less unions? more austerity? more oppressive leaders? Is this all because of coups or is some of it homegrown? My brain branches off in too many directions when I think of this stuff and I just end up confusing myself.

>>2198685
jobs can be seen as being exported at the rate that labour in the west became too expensive

>>2198685
of course it's less efficient! they're shipping unassembled parts all over the fucking globe to wherever they can be assembled the cheapest! of course that's a giant fucking waste of time and money and resources! it's unfathomably wasteful that you would design an appliance in the USA, order the parts from china, have them shipped to mexico to be assembled, and then have the finished product shipped back to the USA to be sold!

yet, even when accounting for all this inefficiency and waste, if the labor can be ruthlessly exploited to the degree that it DOES yield a greater profit, even if it's only a fraction of a percent of margin, they'll do it. every extra dollar spent on wasteful logistics and wasteful shipping and wasteful supply chains is made up by extracting that amount of surplus value from ever more poorly paid laborers; where else would it come from?

>>2193952
>computers operate on formal logic. i already explained how basic code operates syllogistically. the way we think is also logical, which is why you literally cannot reason illogically, but just present incomplete logic. logic just describes reality then and so the mind conforms to it.
Every single development in the history of computing has tried to humanize it despite it being pure formal logic in its most basic form. Assembly assigns human words to pieces of machine code. Procedural programming organizes it into tasks it has to perform, as computing power is worthless if you can't give it instructions to what you want to do, not just perform calculations for the sake of it. Object-oriented programming first has you create abstract models of your program (based on, again, what you want the program to do) and break it up into separate parts accordingly. During every single step of this development code evolved from ones and zeros towards something that resembles plain English, the kind that two very bad ESL speakers would converse in. Don't get me started on AI. When it writes code, it mimicks code written by actual humans. It is non-determentistic. Not in the strict sense of course, but for all intents and purposes it is. It doesn't look for a one or a zero, meaning a 100% true or a false result. It generates a probable answer. And it is the only thing that can interact with a lot of things outside the world of computing. Face recognition, self-driving vehicles, LAWS, etc. The development of graphical interfaces representing the functioning of programs with pretty symbols is also absolutely necessary for most use cases of computing.

Computers never make mistakes, but humans do and they are the ones giving them instructions. The same can be said for formal logic.

>>2198685
The inefficiency is worth undermining organized labor at home.

>>2198685
For all their talk of efficiency, capitalists are actually inefficient. The way capitalist exploitation works is that it undervalues human labour, treating it as nothing but a cost instead of what it really is, an end to itself, human activity. Capital can not create value from thin air, only labour can, so for capital to persist, it must appropriate a part of labour to itself. This also means that it doesn't just undervalue labour, it has to keep it undervalued. Automatization would allow humans to produce more while working less, but for capital, it is a disaster. The amount humans work is mostly fixed, therefore employing more machinery on the long term would only increase upkeep costs relative to human labour, a part of which capital always appropriates. As long as human labour exists, profit will probably still exist too in some form, but capital will always try to fight against this natural process. This is why China is socialist. The state and state-owned companies aren't obligated to make profit. Their goal is to fulfill party directives. This means that they are able to invest where capital wouldn't because it doesn't find it profitable. What private capital does exists is forced compete against itself, further increasing the organic composition of capital and weakening it in the long run.

>>2197941
>>If I [dont sell anything] have I not already produced value?
>no. if i spend a 100 hours painting a picture, do i create value? muh mud pies.
That post >>2195916 you reply to here is very, very, short. What's so hard about parsing it? It is explicitly said in the post: SELLABLE. Maybe that somehow went past you, but there are also posts after it explaining the question again. Don't bother replying before having read those.

And this reply:
>marx in chapter 2 of capital vol. 1 says that divisions of labour can exist without exchange (value) existing.
got nothing to do with the question in >>2197088 either. It was about phrasing becoming social within the context of capitalist society.

>>2197941
concrete labor->exchange-value->abstract labor
labor comes first

>>2198857
chicken and egg problem tbh. overcome with dialectical understanding of repeating cycles with incremental development

>>2198673
well they dont "produce" or "extract" super profits. super profits or extra surplus-value or relative surplus-value are just profits above the average and are appropriated in exchange. profit is just surplus value which is created by labor. Marx begins with an idealized market under equal exchange as a theoretical starting point to isolate production's role, then explains how unequal exchanges in reality redistribute surplus value without creating new value. individual prices deviating slightly up or down from their actual values doesnt create more value it just passes it around. total value equals total price, even if individual exchanges are unequal. marx also says labor is paid its full value, yet profit exists. this is because the value of labor power as a commodity is less then the value it creates in production, hence surplus.

>>2198755
>Computers never make mistakes, but humans do and they are the ones giving them instructions. The same can be said for formal logic.
until an alternative is given, we have to stick with what works.
>>2198770
>It is explicitly said in the post: SELLABLE
anything is "sellable", but until it sells, it makes no money. i can have a winning lottery ticket, but until i cash it in, i havent won anything. value is a retroactive category. it is determined *after* sale.
>there are also posts after it explaining the question again
those blog posts from people who have no reference to the primary sources? its all too common for people to have opinions on things that theyre not experts in. lets keep it simple. here's a direct quote to enlighten you,
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange [.] 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. [capital vol. 1, chapter 1]"
this is a direct restatement of what ricardo writes in chapter 1 of his "principles",
>"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."
value to marx can only exist in the exchange of commodities between persons.

>>2198857
>labor comes first
yes, labour, not abstract labour (value). labour is abstracted as labour-time in wages, which presupposes prices. marx encounters the indeterminate relationship of prices to values in so-called "imaginary prices", showing how prices can precede or supersede values. these we can refer to as purely market goods, which have a price without a value, like money, which also operates by supply and demand ratios.
>>2198956
>super profits or extra surplus-value or relative surplus-value
i would just not equate these terms. what the original text seems to be referencing is that one can exchange for a good *below* its value, and therefore appropriate a surplus from relations of exchange alone. relative surplus-value is still operating on a system of equivalent exchange, but just unequal development. what they are describing is a system of rents (monopoly).
>then explains how unequal exchanges in reality redistribute surplus value without creating new value.
where does marx ever invoke the concept of unequal exchange? this notion is a pure revision, which is why no quotations have surfaced to support its claims.
>total value equals total price, even if individual exchanges are unequal
yes, supply and demand are mediated by an equilibrium. adam smith concurs.
>marx also says labor is paid its full value, yet profit exists. this is because the value of labor power as a commodity is less then the value it creates in production, hence surplus.
or you can just subtract wages from profits.

>>2200171
>>2200171
>The assumption that the commodities of the various spheres of production are sold at their value merely implies, of course, that their value is the centre of gravity around which their prices fluctuate, and their continual rises and drops tend to equalise. There is also the market-value — of which later — to be distinguished from the individual value of particular commodities produced by different producers. The individual value of some of these commodities will be below their market-value (that is, less labour time is required for their production than expressed is the market value) while that of others will exceed the market-value. On the one hand, market-value is to be viewed as the average value of commodities produced in a single sphere, and, on the other, as the individual value of the commodities produced under average conditions of their respective sphere and forming the bulk of the products of that sphere. It is only in extraordinary combinations that commodities produced under the worst, or the most favourable, conditions regulate the market-value, which, in turn, forms the centre of fluctuation for market-prices. The latter, however, are the same for commodities of the same kind. If the ordinary demand is satisfied by the supply of commodities of average value, hence of a value midway between the two extremes, then the commodities whose individual value is below the market-value realise an extra surplus-value, or surplus-profit, while those, whose individual value exceeds the market-value, are unable to realise a portion of the surplus-value contained in them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm

>excess profit arises from the lowering of the price of the product, in agriculture the relative size of rent is determined not only by the relative raising of the price (raising the price of the product of fertile land above its value) but by selling the cheaper product at the cost of the dearer. This is, however, as I have already demonstrated (Proudhon)[2], merely the law of competition, which does not emanate from the “soil” but from “capitalist production’’ itself.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/tsv/tsv-v2.pdf

>which presupposes prices
which presupposes labor. you have to consider labor historically not just in capitalism. first there was labor, then there was money, then there was generalized social labor, then there was

labor precedes price

>where does marx ever invoke the concept of unequal exchange?
he doesn't and neither does the author. you have to read what people actually say not just assume what you think they said

>>2200483
>The individual value of some of these commodities will be below their market-value (that is, less labour time is required for their production than expressed is the market value) while that of others will exceed the market-value
<the law of competition
so… supply and demand, basically. or as he writes later in the chapter,
>"Supply and demand determine the market-price, and so does the market-price, and the market-value in the further analysis, determine supply and demand."
he also references smith in footnote 2, in saying that market-values (prices of production) determine market-prices (supply/demand), not the other way round. marx also astutely recognises the fact that some goods have prices without values, but also expressly disregards that inquiry.
>labor precedes price
i already said that. labour precedes price, but *abstract* labour is labour which has a price, or is its own price, as per smith; "labour [time] was the first price". this measure of value allows commodities to be compared, but some market goods simply conform to supply and demand.
>he doesn't and neither does the author. you have to read what people actually say
the irony is immense. lets re-read what the author says, to take your own advice…
>"Though Marx doesn’t use the term, sometimes one hears the words “super profit” used to describe this profit arising from unequal exchanges […] Marx’s theory of SNLT contains both types of profit, profit proper and super-profit […] This allows them to appropriate value through exchange, hence making an additional super-profit on top of the profit proper."
whoops!

>>2200560
in volume 1 marx uses an idealized model of a market according to capitalist assumptions, then in volume 3 he shoes how the model works in a real market. if he thought exchanges were always equal in the sense you are implying he wouldn't say that individual commodities can sell for more or less then their value, which is obviously not equal. equal exchange refers and applies only to the situation where it is used. you are just repeatedly making the mistake of taking something he says and then holding him to it in a completely different situation on a different level of abstraction where it doesn't apply and is not relevant.

>labour precedes price, but *abstract* labour is labour which has a price, or is its own price
nope. abstract labor is abstract it doesn't have its own price its price is determined by the average value, and its also preceded by labor. labor is first.

>>2200582
so what is it? first you deny the concept of unequal exchange now you implicitly support it. make up your mind.
the relations of individual to market values is an equation that is given in the aggregate between the two extremes, as he says;
>"If the ordinary demand is satisfied by the supply of commodities of average value, hence of a value midway between the two extremes, then the commodities whose individual value is below the market-value realise an extra surplus-value, or surplus-profit, while those, whose individual value exceeds the market-value, are unable to realise a portion of the surplus-value contained in them."
so the high and low balance out into averages. this is also his analysis in the previous chapter on an average rate of profit. surplus-profits do not exist as factors of accumulation since they are erased by the loss incurred by other individual values, just like supply and demand cancel each other out.
>abstract labor is abstract it doesn't have its own price
the price *is* the abstraction. remember exchange-value? labour-time? wages?
>its price is determined by the average value, and its also preceded by labor
the average labour-time* (SNLT). this manifests as the wage. the precedence of labour also has nothing to do with value. to marx, labour has no value.

>>2200604
>first you deny the concept of unequal exchange now you implicitly support it. make up your mind.
i didn't actually take a position because im not falling for your bait. unequal exchange can refer to many different things its up to you to figure out what people are talking about from context.

>the price *is* the abstraction
and abstract labor is a further abstraction. its the determinant negation of concrete labor. people actually doing work still comes first not prices.

>>2200613
>i didn't actually take a position because im not falling for your bait
more intellectual cowardice. here's a quote that you made not long ago:
>>2200483
>he [marx] doesn't [invoke unequal exchange] and neither does the author. you have to read what people actually say not just assume what you think they said
then when i showed very clearly that the author subscribed to the concept of unequal exchange and super-profits, you responded with this,
>>2200582
> if he thought exchanges were always equal in the sense you are implying he wouldn't say that individual commodities can sell for more or less then their value, which is obviously not equal. equal exchange refers and applies only to the situation where it is used
then i asked you formally to make up your mind, and now you are not even engaging in the question - but at least you know youre out of your depth.
>and abstract labor is a further abstraction
no, the price of labour is the primary abstraction. wages are the standard of value to marx.
>its the determinant negation of concrete labor.
its the opposite of concrete labour. in hegelian terms, first is concrete labour as *quality* (substance), then abstract labour as *quantity* (magnitude), then the commodity form itself as the *measure* of value. this dialectic appears in the first section of hegel's "science of logic"; quality - quantity - measure.
>people actually doing work still comes first not prices.
there are two prices though, remember. natural and market prices. labour and supply/demand.

>>2200618
they are talking about two different things. hes explaining marx not disagreeing with him. if you are saying marx does not invoke unequal exchange i have to agree because he does not use the term. but if you are talking about the exchange of one thing for something of a different value then that is something marx obviously thinks happens, as he describes it, yet he does not call it unequal exchange. colloquially people might call it unequal exchange but they are not referring to the same think you are when you are asking "where does marx invoke" because he does not, which you know. and when talking about unequal exchange theory the topic is again entirely different, and not proposing a revision or refutation of marx.

>>2200630
the larger and more correct point is that "individual" values are aggregated into market values, the same way "individual" labour-times are expressed as an average. what is expressed in exchange is the average, which has an equality with other averages by proportion.

When Marx talks about equal exchange hes talking about wages for labor, not commodities for money. Surplus profit from international trade does not come from underpaying labor, because wages for labor are equal, it comes from systemic unequal levels of productivity expressed through competitive advantage in commodity markets, which some people refer to as unequal exchange.

>>2200635
>When Marx talks about equal exchange hes talking about wages for labor, not commodities for money
labour-power to marx *is* a commodity
>Surplus profit from international trade does not come from underpaying labor, because wages for labor are equal
okay
>it comes from systemic unequal levels of productivity expressed through competitive advantage in commodity markets, which some people refer to as unequal exchange.
its not unequal "exchange" though, its unequal development, or relative surplus value. the original post expressly refers to "super profits" as being a strategy of accumulation, but this circulation of surplus just describes rents from monopolies, which extracts money without creating value. it circulates without producing.

>>2200641
>its not unequal "exchange" though, its unequal development, or relative surplus value.
thats exactly what i said. im just telling you the sense in which people might use unequal exchange since you clearly dont understand. unless of course you are lying so you can direct the conversation to your pet issue.
>which extracts money without creating value.
again, exactly what has already been said. value comes from labor. super profits and uneven development do not produce or create value, they appropriate it in exchange.

>>2200656
>im just telling you the sense in which people might use unequal exchange
what, incorrectly? sure.
>unless of course you are lying
lying about what you fucking idiot? you are the one who is constantly making apologies for some random literal blog post. why? just accept that they are wrong since you can offer no rebuttal to my long line of rebuttals.
>value comes from labor
marx doesnt think labour has value
>super profits and uneven development do not produce or create value
now, now. why change up the terminology? say "unequal exchange" if you really believe in it.
>they appropriate it in exchange.
so its not a form of profit, since it isnt produced, but is a form of extraction. that is the nature of rent.

>>2200167
>>there are also posts after it explaining the question again
>those blog posts from people who have no reference to the primary sources?
What primary sources would you need for getting told that you misread a question. There is no point about repeating over and over that usefulness is necessary for value to exist. The question was not about stuff that can't be sold so answering with muh mudpies was not relevant to it. And what primary source would other posts need that just paraphrase the question. Neither that post nor the posts rephrasing it made any claims about what Marx said. It was only a question about when value comes into existence.

Now to the part of your post that actually answers the question:
>value is a retroactive category. it is determined *after* sale.
>here's a direct quote to enlighten you…
Again comes the statement that usefulness is necessary for value. Nobody claims otherwise.
>To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange
Hmmmm. Read the sentences right before it:
>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 not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)
I don't actually think that the quoted passage unambiguously establishes that value comes into existence at the moment of sale or that commodities become commodities at the moment of sale.

>>2200676 (me)
>I don't actually think that the quoted passage unambiguously establishes that value comes into existence at the moment of sale or that commodities become commodities at the moment of sale.
I don't mean that as an either-or.

>>2200666
>what, incorrectly?
in a different sense. the same word can mean different things in different contexts. i shouldn't have to explain basic reading comprehension.

>marx doesnt think labour has value
good thing that is not what i said

>>2200676
>I don't actually think that the quoted passage unambiguously establishes that value comes into existence at the moment of sale or that commodities become commodities at the moment of sale.
until a commodity is sold, it has no use-value. that seems quite clear, no? how can something be useful if it has no social existence?
>>2200681
>the same word can mean different things in different contexts
its a misuse of the term. you attempted to defend the misuse of the term, then got corrected, and now you appeal to random contextualisation. all you can do is be wrong when youre wrong.
>good thing that is not what i said
lets re-read what you said:
>"value comes from labor"
what does this imply to you?

>>2200687
>its a misuse of the term
its actually quite common and becoming increasingly so with modern investigations into the dynamics of imperialism. idk why you are so hung up on semantics it doesn't change the analysis if you actually care to look at what is being discussed instead of crying about the words used. its been kinda controversial around here lately but considering the quantity of shitposts you generate maybe thats also just you. being a pedant doesn't make you correct it makes you an asshole.

>>2200687
>until a commodity is sold, it has no use-value. that seems quite clear, no?
Let's see…
>Use-values become a reality only by use or consumption
(Marx, Capital 1, chapter 1)
So the use-value of a thing isn't yet real when something is merely bought, it has to be used. For a thing to have value requires it to have use-value, so… a thing's value comes into existence when it is used? Schwa? But can't we treat it as obvious what a consumer item's potential for use is? And if it looks certain enough that it will be sold, why not say then that it already has value when it is produced and not yet sold?

>>2200694
>being a pedant doesn't make you correct it makes you an asshole.
using words correctly is important. sorry you disagree. also, what describes "imperialism" or finance capitalism is called MONOPOLY and RENT, as ive already explained.
>>2200698
>And if it looks certain enough that it will be sold, why not say then that it already has value when it is produced and not yet sold?
the same way i dont win the lottery until i actually cash in the ticket. am i a millionaire if i have a piece of paper that claims im a millionaire? also, you keep missing the important point that value is paid out in wages, and wages cannot be paid without sales. so here's the riddle, if i create 100 of commodity [x] do i also create surplus value if i create value? have i profited from the mere act of employment, or is profit only constituted in exchange?

>>2200704
there is an established accepted use for the term. sorry you disagree

>>2200704
>and wages cannot be paid without sales
Do you actually think capitalists wait for sales and then pay wages? Why do you insist on isolating everything? I know its simpler but its not going to help you understand a complex system.

>>2200709
>there is an established accepted use for the term
and all configurations of it are wrong. marx never postulated a theory of unequal exchange which creates "super profits". that is pure revisionism.
>>2200713
>Do you actually think capitalists wait for sales and then pay wages?
where do wages come from, genius?

>>2200704
>you keep missing the important point that value is paid out in wages, and wages cannot be paid without sales. so here's the riddle, if i create 100 of commodity [x] do i also create surplus value if i create value? have i profited from the mere act of employment, or is profit only constituted in exchange?
I don't understand that post at all. Value, surplus value, wages, profits, these are four different concepts surely? Are you trying to say value is downstream from the price system?

Another question: Consider an item that is mass-produced on an industrial scale with intent to sell, something that was and is successfully sold over and over. One unit of it gets stolen before it is sold. Does that unit not have value?

>>2200737
>Are you trying to say value is downstream from the price system?
yes of course. what is the value of labour? wages
what is "surplus value"? profits
and so on.
>One unit of it gets stolen before it is sold. Does that unit not have value?
yes, it loses value, since it is not exchanged for. if we broadened this logic to the entire stock being stolen, do these stolen goods create value?

>>2200717
>marx never postulated a theory of unequal exchange which creates "super profits".
right he just talks about how individual commodities sell above or below their actual value in exchanges that are not perfectly equal and how this is the mechanism by which capitalists appropriate extra surplus-value.

this comes from the fact that some capitalists pay less for wages because they invest in technology as capital which can create more of a given commodity in the same amount of time with less labor input. this lowers the average value for commodities of that type, so other capitalists have to invest more time than is socially necessary, because they dont yet have the same technology. both of them sell at the average but the one who spent more time is getting less then was put in while the one who spent less time is getting more than they put in.

youve got two capitalists producing the same commodity. they employ laborers at $10/hr for 10 hours and make 10 commodities each. so you get 100 commodities for $100. one of the capitalists invests in a new machine where one laborer can make 10 commodities in an hour. so he fires 9 of them and keeps one. after a day both capitalists have 100 commodities but for one it only costs him $10 while the other is paying $100. the first capitalist gets 100 commodities for $10 and the second 100 for $100. before the average was $1 now its $0.55. but the second capitalist is still paying $1 meaning they are losing out on every one they make, while the other one is only paying $0.10 making extra profit on every sale, as long as they are still selling at the old price. to stay profitable he has to pay the worker less, which will make them want less hours, if he says no they can go work for a competitor that has the technology, or he can get the upgrades too. labor still makes the same thing, which is equal to its value, but there are less workers. the individual commodities are sold not equal to their actual values, but to the social average of all values for that given commodity. when all the different capitalists implement the new tech, the average goes down and the value too, as well as the price after a lag. then they can lower wages and there is no competitor to go work for. but this decreases the ratio of value:profit which means they have to make more to get the same return at the lower rate, leading to overproduction, underconsumption, and crises.

>>2200751
>>Are you trying to say value is downstream from the price system?
>yes of course.
So Marx pokes at the concepts everybody knows, value and surplus value, to reveal a hidden reality behind appearances: the price system!

>>2200756
>right he just talks about how individual commodities sell above or below their actual value in exchanges that are not perfectly equal and how this is the mechanism by which capitalists appropriate extra surplus-value.
individual commodities average out into market values, and its the market value which equilibrates toward average rates of profit. surplus-profits do not contribute toward accumulation, but are canceled out by less profitable exchanges. supply and demand. what is extracted thus is not profit, but is a surplus-profit.
>while the other one is only paying $0.10 making extra profit on every sale, as long as they are still selling at the old price
this is not how profits are made. you do not sell above value, you sell at the exact value of commodities. this is the principle of equivalent exchange. more goods = cheaper goods. cheaper goods = more goods sold. this is how competition lowers the value of labour yet still pulls ahead. there is a discrepancy then between value and price. you can over-price or under-price a commodity, but cant change its value in relation to other commodities.
>to stay profitable he has to pay the worker less
to marx, labour-power is paid at its value
>the individual commodities are sold not equal to their actual values, but to the social average of all values for that given commodity.
if someone is leading with technology, then they lower the value, and so its the more independent competition who usurp surplus-profits, like how a small business will sell at a higher price to compete, while a big business will sell at a lower price.
>>2200765
you can measure prices

>>2200782
tbh i think marx is missing a rather crucial element of the concept of "in equilibrium" and "in disequilibrium"
also marx makes a few references to the claim that yes labor can be paid below its value in specific circumstances, but not on average.

in fact i'm literally on that bit right now
>https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch12.htm
>With the four shillings and sixpence which he produces in nine hours, he commands one-tenth less of the necessaries of life than before, and consequently the proper reproduction of his labour-power is crippled. The surplus-labour would in this case be prolonged only by an overstepping of its normal limits; its domain would be extended only by a usurpation of part of the domain of necessary labour-time.
<Despite the important part which this method plays in actual practice,
>we are excluded from considering it in this place, by our
<assumption,
>that all commodities, including labour-power, are bought and sold at their full value.

>>2200784
well i am just trying to fill in the cracks marx is making, especially in the relation between price and value. to pay below value can mean something different than exchanging labour-power less than its SNLT, especially if man depends upon the wage to even survive. and if all values in a market have supply/demand fluctuations, then value is anchored to market conditions, namely price, for its reference. how does one over-value or under-value a commodity except in over or under pricing it in reference to an equilibrium, or cost of production?

>>2200782
>you do not sell above value, you sell at the exact value of commodities
>if someone is leading with technology, then they lower the value
average value. the one who has technology spends less on wages and has less value, this lowers the average value, but the commodity still sells at or near its previous value for a time. exactly how close the the average depends on how far they want to push it to increase their margins by lowering the price to capture more market share, but they aren't going to immediately start undercutting to $0.55 when they could sell at $0.99 or $0.80. and the guy without technology certainly isn't going to start selling at $0.55 when it costs him a dollar to make. trend and tendency and rate doesn't mean 'always exactly in all cases at all times'

>>2200717
>where do wages come from, genius?
it could come from investors or lots of places i guess it would depend on the specific business and how they do their accounting. usually investors expect a return on their investment. they aren't promising workers to pay them after sales are finalized and workers aren't sitting around waiting for that.

>>2200790
>especially if man depends upon the wage to even survive
yeah and capitalism sometimes literally just depopulates its workforce.
you have to remember this.

>>2200794
>the one who has technology spends less on wages and has less value, this lowers the average value, but the commodity still sells at or near its previous value for a time
is there a consideration of values and prices here? can there be an average price with values still having an equality with each other? i ask, because to simply over-price a commodity causes a temporary monopoly on exchange, but no profit is related, which is why i call this phenomenon rent-seeking. you can appropriate surplus value without actually producing it. you can circulate values as rents, and this is what extractive monopolies do.
>they aren't promising workers to pay them after sales are finalized and workers aren't sitting around waiting for that.
thats not what i implied. you are reaching. capital revenue already presupposes sales and profits. when you work for a company, it is making money all the time, and that goes into your wage. it shouldnt be controversial to say that.

>>2200800
>thats not what i implied.
i mean it kind of is, otherwise you would have been able to simply answer the hypothetical

>>2200801
my original statement was that wages come from sales, which is obviously true. now you make it into this obtuse nonsense.
and what hypothetical?

>>2200751
>it loses value, since it is not exchanged for.
how does it lose something it doesnot have?
hmmm

also consider that the labor power does have value, which is why it was paid for, and that value was realized in the exchange for wages. the fact that the capitalist doesn't get to sell the resulting commodity is a separate transaction unrelated to the worker.

>>2200804
>how does it lose something it doesnot have?
hmmm
good point. i phrased it wrong. it never had value.
>also consider that the labor power does have value, which is why it was paid for, and that value was realized in the exchange for wages
i would say that labour-power does not have value until the worker receives a wage.
>the fact that the capitalist doesn't get to sell the resulting commodity is a separate transaction unrelated to the worker.
can you expand on what you mean here?

>>2200818
>phrased
Interesting way to admit you were wrong. First you say one thing and then change you mind. How can anyone trust what you say? Is this intellectual cowardice? Using words correctly is important.

>>2200822
>First you say one thing and then change you mind.
i never changed my mind, i misspoke. know the difference?
>Is this intellectual cowardice?
to admit that i misspoke..?
>Using words correctly is important.
yes, which is why i corrected myself. if only some people here would follow my example.

>>2200825
>misspoke
We are not speaking. If you are I can not hear you over the internet unless you record it and attach an sound file.

>>2200828
hmm. who is being pedantic now?

>>2200829
hmm. is that an admission?

>be marx
>write Capital, literally put it in big thick words under the it CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
>150 years later retards still think it's an economics book and try to deboooonk it by throwing gotchas at it
Maybe we will never actually achieve socialism

>>2201407
criticizing political economy does not put marx outside of political economy. he spent 20 years reading poltiical economy, studying political economy, and trying to figure out how scientific socialism and political economy would interpenetrate
>deboooonk
not everyone here is trying to do that

>>2201407
>Maybe we will never actually achieve socialism
why do people say this as if the soviet union wasnt already tried and failed?

>>2202576
by "achieve socialism" they mean socialism prevailing over the majority of the earth as the dominant mode of production the way capitalism currently does

i was reading some capital vol. 3 and found this in chapter 37,
>"This is vulgarised still more by those who pass from the general determination of value over to the realisation of the value of a specific commodity. Every commodity can realise its value only in the process of circulation, and whether it realises its value, or to what extent it does so, depends on prevailing market conditions."
this relates to what has been previously discussed, namely, does a "commodity" possess a value before its sale? i then found other examples of marx speaking on this dichotomy of the determination and realisation of value,
>"the quantitative determination of value, namely, the duration of that expenditure, or the quantity of labour … [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
and,
>"The law of the determination of value by labour-time … [vol. 1, ch. 12]"
further,
>"What competition does not show, however, is the determination of value, which dominates the movement of production; and the values that lie beneath the prices of production and that determine them in the last instance. [vol. 3, ch. 12]"
and on the realisation of value,
>"The value of a commodity is, in itself, of no interest to the capitalist. What alone interests him, is the surplus-value that dwells in it, and is realisable by sale [vol. 1, ch. 12]"
and of course, the original discovery,
>"Every commodity can realise its value only in the process of circulation, and whether it realises its value, or to what extent it does so, depends on prevailing market conditions. [vol. 3, ch. 37]"
this reminds me of the "double result" of capital,
>"It is therefore impossible for capital to be produced by circulation, and it is equally impossible for it to originate apart from circulation. It must have its origin both in circulation and yet not in circulation. We have, therefore, got a double result. [vol. 1, ch. 5]"
what we can say then is that a commodity has a determined and realised value, and thus, as per "market conditions", it may only achieve its value in exchange, as marx expressly states in capital vol. 1, chapter 1;
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange [.] 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."
it is clear to conclude thus that a commodity's value has a prior determination (its price), but it cannot realise this value if it is not exchanged for. what prevails thus are "market conditions", namely, supply and demand, in valuation. value, is a social, not natural, fact of things, or as marx says here,
>"the value of commodities has a purely social reality […] value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
hopefully this puts the "debate" to rest. a commodity's value has determination in production (its cost), but is only realised in this value by exchange (its sale). therefore, if a 'commodity' is not sold, it has no value, since it serves no use for anybody. this makes "value" a retroactive category, since it realises its determination *after* sale, the same way wages depend on profits;
<"Realisation of the surplus-value necessarily carries with it the refunding of the value that was advanced [vol. 1, ch. 12]"
or as marx otherwise states, labour-power is exploited since it is effectively "rented" as a commodity and so achieves its value after its use, like how workers are paid weekly/monthly, and so are paid after they have already worked. this allows for the mechanism of exploitation, since the total product appears as paid labour,
<"There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer. [vol. 1, ch. 19]"
wages then depend on a subtraction from profits after sale, since paid labour entails unpaid labour. so, values are retroactive in every sense, as being realised in exchange from prior determinations.
prices precede values, like A precedes not-A.

>>2202621
>"This is vulgarised still more by those who pass from the general determination of value over to the realisation of the value of a specific commodity. Every commodity can realise its value only in the process of circulation, and whether it realises its value, or to what extent it does so, depends on prevailing market conditions."
It says the commodity realises its value. Can this be intended to mean exactly the same as the value becomes real in exchange… but if so saying to what extent it does so seems rather strange. Sounds like some substance that is already there as a potential before the sale that becomes "activated" in the sale. A couple paragraphs earlier he is talking about producing a quantity that is too high.

>"What competition does not show, however, is the determination of value, which dominates the movement of production; and the values that lie beneath the prices of production and that determine them in the last instance. [vol. 3, ch. 12]"
According to Marx, competition does not approximate value ratios in prices as well as it approximates the ratios of prices of production. His reasoning: Capitalists flee from industries with low profits and seek industries with high profits, leveling the profit rates between industries as a tendency. Price ratios close to values would scare away capitalists from investing in high-capital industries, lowering the competition there, thus making the prices in these industries systematically higher relative to industries with low capital investment compared to value ratios.

>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another
As was shown earlier ITT the quote is in the big-picture context of corn becoming a commodity historically, not a zoomed-in view of an item sitting on the shelf and then getting sold.

>it is clear to conclude thus that a commodity's value has a prior determination (its price), but it cannot realise this value if it is not exchanged for.
But exchange value isn't value.

>hopefully this puts the "debate" to rest.
Good luck with that :P

>>2202780
>Sounds like some substance that is already there as a potential before the sale that becomes "activated" in the sale.
yes, but this value only gains determination in realisation. the paradox is that a commodity is presupposed as having a use-value and exchange-value, meaning that a commodity is a good that has already been sold, hence marx's preliminary comments,
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange…"
to "become" a commodity he says, which means that a mere "product" which is useless by means of being unsold is not a commodity. this is the same extrapolation he makes earlier in the same paragraph that an object can have a use-value without being a value. so as he plainly says, an unsold product is not a commodity and therefore has no value. a comment you keep omitting, but lets see it again;
>"If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value."
therefore, an unsold product possesses no value.
>competition does not approximate value ratios in prices as well as it approximates the ratios of prices of production
that is presupposed in the notion of value
>As was shown earlier ITT the quote is in the big-picture context of corn becoming a commodity historically
this is pure deception. marx's point is that a product can be given to people without it being a value. he then goes on,
>"But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange"
this is why to marx, value only exists in commodity-exchange, not social labour as such. there's a big difference, otherwise post-capitalism would inevitably reproduce value formations.
>But exchange value isn't value.
it is the form of appearance of value: the "value form", translated into exchange-ratios, or prices. yet prices can exist without values also, which is why its easier to look at the cost of production. also, i am generalising the logic of value, by showing how a price-form designates the worth of a potential commodity, without itself being achieved. when we see prices, we see what a product *could* be worth if we bought it. this determination is the orientation of value in society, which is why in market dynamics, a cheaper commodity is more often capable of realising value. so to say, prices determine values, since one purchases a commodity for a certain price.

>>2202780
>couple paragraphs earlier
yeah thats why i dont think quote sniping is useful. if you take it out of context you cant tell if hes using value in a technical capacity or just a colloquial version of it. some might consider it careless and others poetic license but i dont think it matters. its not actually difficult to parse people are just searching for gotchas instead of understanding.

>>2202796
if im wrong, then prove me wrong
its very simple

>>2202789
>marx's preliminary comments,
>>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange…"
Again: When you look at the quote (it's an addition by Engels btw.) in its context, you will see that the statement is in reference to the historical change of the social embedding of the production of an agricultural product, from feudalism to capitalism. Not the change of an item going from shelf to customer.

>>But exchange value isn't value.
>it is the form of appearance of value: the "value form", translated into exchange-ratios, or prices. yet prices can exist without values also, which is why its easier to look at the cost of production. also, i am generalising the logic of value, by showing how a price-form designates the worth of a potential commodity, without itself being achieved. when we see prices, we see what a product *could* be worth if we bought it. this determination is the orientation of value in society…
An individual can set the price of something he owns at whatever level if he isn't particularly bothered by not being able to sell it. Since that individual can choose arbitrarily, staring at that individual's price-setting antics regarding said item is not something I would call "generalising the logic of value".

>>2202807
i mean i already did multiple times in specific detail but this really goes back to the other thread last month when i told you that he uses the same words at different levels of abstraction to mean different things at different points as he develops the dialectic which is why taking quotes twelve chapters apart and pretending like they contradict doesn't make any sense. and you know this but just saying you think dialectics isn't real isn't a good argument so you keep going back to this quote spamming instead.

anyway, didn't you say that ethics was a potential solution to capitalism? what was it that kant said about ethics?

>>2202818
>it's an addition by Engels btw
yes, and when we look at the footnote we find this explanation by him,
>"I am inserting the parenthesis because its omission has often given rise to the misunderstanding that every product that is consumed by some one other than its producer is considered in Marx a commodity"
this is to show that "social use values" are not commodities in themselves. the entire paragraph is a progressive demonstration of the commodity form. first are natural utilities, then use-values, then social use-values, then commodities (exchange). the common thread then, like in hegel's basic logical system, is to show how the quality of being (use-value) determines quantities (exchange-values) by which they find their measure/unity (the commodity). therefrom in the following section, the commodity undergoes its modes of self-relation in the value form, until equivalence, which is the "universal commodity" of money (ch. 2). in chapter 3, money progresses into world-money, then in 4-6 commodity circulation goes to capital accumulation. this is the progressive structure of marx's work, and it all ties together by the utility of natural wealth.
>you will see that the statement is in reference to the historical change of the social embedding of the production of an agricultural product, from feudalism to capitalism
youre either lying or misunderstanding. the purpose is to show how social use values become commodities in exchange, not by mere distribution. read engels' footnote to get the context.
>is not something I would call "generalising the logic of value"
a commodity can only sell at a certain price, therefore price is not an "arbitrary" factor, but a necessary factor in realising values. prices are regulated by costs of production, so they find determination in wages (prices of labour). this is proven by how markets orient prices around average income in different locations. simple stuff.

>>2202823
>>2202823
>which is why taking quotes twelve chapters apart and pretending like they contradict doesn't make any sense
where do i claim marx contradicts himself you illiterate fool? i am actually just demonstrating marx's internal system to supposed "marxists" and getting heckled for it. all you have are baseless accusations, never any proof of my incorrectness, since you'd just be blaspheming against st. marx himself.
>you keep going back to this quote spamming instead.
its called citation lol. you just make things up without evidence so the concept is alien to you. maybe its just my problematic "empiricism" that keeps me honest against so-called "scientific socialists".
>anyway, didn't you say that ethics was a potential solution to capitalism?
no, my claim was that "capitalism" is unethical, and that this is a popular notion for a reason. inb4 marxoid retards spam about "moralism". idc about your pedestrian nihilism or your dogmatic dialectics. i dont have to be a communist cultist to be an anti-capitalist. that is a faustian pact you construct to posture radicality in place of measured contemplation. most people dont care about your religion and never will. get over it.

>>2203765
Moralist

>>2202818
>When you look at the quote (it's an addition by Engels btw.) in its context, you will see that the statement is in reference to the historical change of the social embedding of the production of an agricultural product, from feudalism to capitalism. Not the change of an item going from shelf to customer.
>>2203762
>youre either lying or misunderstanding.
Who is in the right here? Let's look again (sigh) at the quote you are spamming in context. This is literally the sentence before it:
<The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others.

>>2203784
>This is literally the sentence before it:
<But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others.
yes… and?! you are just repeating my point. the corn is a social use value, not yet a commodity, since, as it said,
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange"
it is the mediated exchange which constitutes the act of commodification, since value is abstracted as an exchange-value for the seller as opposed to the use-value for the buyer. your nonsense is to conjecture this as an historical point rather than a basic theoretical point as to the difference between distribution and exchange.

>>2203765
>you keep going back to this quote spamming instead.
<its called citation lol. you just make things up without evidence so the concept is alien to you.
I've been there, buddy. Some people just wanna re-enact the boilerplate and get confused when ya interrupt that.

>>2203765
>my position then does not necessitate freedom, but only ethics.
you are supposed to wait until your previous position gets bump saged off the board before you start changing it lol. you are so bad at this

>>2203802
what has exactly changed in my position?

>>2203765
>am actually just demonstrating marx's internal system to supposed "marxists" and getting heckled for it.
Constantly repeating that price=value is not "marx's internal system". The problem is not that you disagree with Marx its that you disingenuously misrepresent him. If you were presenting Smith as Smith instead of Marx as a mishmash of shit you made up it wouldn't be a big deal.

>>2203807
>>2203807
>Constantly repeating that price=value is not "marx's internal system"
where do i say that to marx, price = value?
once more, you are hallucinating
>The problem is not that you disagree with Marx its that you disingenuously misrepresent him
yet you will never provide evidence of this.
as i say, if im wrong, prove me wrong.

and ultimately the difference between Marx and what you are presenting, as previously stated, is not a difference of epistemology or evidence or philosophy, its a political question related to action. like i said before, if your object of study is different then Marx, like how to efficiently make the most profit, instead of how to free the working class, then obviously Marx's analysis isn't going to be useful. how you choose your focus is not neutral its ideological, and choosing to focus on price is a political decision to endorse bourgeois ideology. if you want to actually overcome capitalism and not just reform it Marx is the conclusive answer.

>>2203809
its all over the entire thread. and im really bad at recognizing anons so if i can see it everyone else can too. your posting is incredibly distinct

>>2203814
>choosing to focus on price is a political decision to endorse bourgeois ideology
you can measure prices. thats what makes them a useful quantity to consider.
>marx is the answer
he's not my answer.
>its all over the entire thread
yet you cannot provide a single example.

>>2203822
>yet you cannot provide a single example.
because you aren't actually looking for an example you want to use it as a hook back into debate. the only thing you have succeeded in doing so far is ruining another thread and forcing people to ignore it out of frustration while creating an echo chamber which at this point seems to be your only objective.

>>2203848
anon just give him an example ffs

>>2203853
no lol. i was engaging with him in good faith for way longer than i should have before i realized he is the nazi apologist from another thread that i also will not link because he is not actually trying to have a conversation but trying to meta game a consensus crack by flooding the board with garbage and exposing his flaws only helps him to correct them. its much better to just let him continue to discredit himself with statements like
>i dont have to be a communist cultist to be an anti-capitalist

>>2203786
>your nonsense is to conjecture this as an historical point
Let's take in a just bit more context:
<In order to produce the latter, he must not only produce use values, but use values for others, social use values. (And not only for others, without more. The mediaeval peasant produced quit-rent-corn for his feudal lord and tithe-corn for his parson. But neither the quit-rent-corn nor the tithe-corn became commodities by reason of the fact that they had been produced for others. To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.)
Is it really that far-fetched to look at this section as being about historical change and not one item on a shelf becoming a commodity at the moment it is sold? And it is it really that obvious to you that the product that must transfer by exchange is the individual item and Marx & Engels are not talking about the product in broad strokes as produced for market exchange?

Giving now a truckload of more context:
Capital Volume I is different from Capital III because Capital I (for the most part) assumes counterfactual equal organic composition of capital across industries whereas Capital III does not. This simplification in Capital I works because Capital I is about the big picture and Marx takes the sum of the exchange values with counterfactual equal organic composition across industries to be the same as the sum with factually different organic compositions. Capital I is the introduction for the rest and we are at an early part of Capital I here. Broad strokes.

You make so much of the individual unit of the commodity selling or not. But does Marx? If so, why even make a difference between exchange value and value.

>>2203848
>>2203862
>because you aren't actually looking for an example you want to use it as a hook back into debate.
when you call somebody wrong, are they supposed to just accept it? and if you dont want to debate, stop responding to me.
>no lol
you finally admit that you literally cannot give me an example of me being incorrect despite it "being all over the thread". your deception speaks for itself.
>i realized he is the nazi apologist from another thread
🤣 now i am a nazi? how childish are you willing to be? and you wont give evidence of this either. how pathetic.
>>2203907
>Is it really that far-fetched to look at this section as being about historical change and not one item on a shelf becoming a commodity at the moment it is sold?
you can read it that way if you want, but that doesnt disprove the very basic fact that a commodity's value is realised in exchange. why are you fighting this truism? it is literally written in plain english.
>You make so much of the individual unit of the commodity selling or not
because that is the basis of the economy. value to marx is determined by the general rate of profit (according from organic composition), but as we've already discussed, "market values" are also dependent on "individual values" as marx puts it. the general rate is by definition the mean of individual sales. at some point a product becomes a commodity. you might say this is when a product is made to express its value *as* a commodity, and i dont disagree (since commodity exchange implies use for the buyer and money for the seller). we dont have to disagree if you just accept that it is exchange which realises value in a commodity. after all, can a man profit if he makes no sales?

>>2204356
The difference between precapitalist production and commodity production is that commodities are produced for exchange instead of for use. Something doesn't have to be sold for it to be a commodity, it just has to be made with the expectation of being sold. Its not about the individual product but about the system, its incentives and limitations.

>>2204356
not the anon, I have a question. a commodity is sold several times. First it is sold from the manufacturer to the wholesaler, then from the wholesaler to the retailer, then from the retailer to the consumer. Is it only the last sale that counts?

Also what about when the raw materials are sold to the manufacturer before the commodity is even made? Aren't its constintuent parts (and the labor power which assembles them) sold before the commodity is constructed? So isn't the value getting realized at every stage, incuding before the thing itself is made?

These aren't meant to be gotchas. Just wondering.

>>2204375
>The difference between precapitalist production and commodity production
hold it! commodities to marx are transhistorical, not just capitalist. from the "elementary value form" (barter) to the "money form" of value, commodities are still what are exchanged.
>Something doesn't have to be sold for it to be a commodity
lets read this one more time,
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange"
lets also read the concluding words of chapter 1,
>"the use value of objects is realised without exchange, by means of a direct relation between the objects and man, while, on the other hand, their value is realised only by exchange"
hmm.
>Its not about the individual product but about the system
yes, and all systems of value creation are systems of commodity production and exchange.
>>2204392
>Is it only the last sale that counts?
no, since the value is being continually transferred to different people. what matters is very practical. if i make things and a wholesaler buys them, then i have realised the values of my products - its then up to the wholesaler to circulate that value. put most simply, if money exchanges for commodities, then value is realised. this realisation typically terminates in a final consumption, namely, in the proletariat who are buying back their social product.
>Also what about when the raw materials are sold to the manufacturer before the commodity is even made?
what about them? to marx, raw materials are a form of constant capital, like means of production, therefore its up to the capitalist to use them to produce surplus value.
>isn't the value getting realized at every stage, incuding before the thing itself is made?
yes, if money changes hands. in capitalist society, basically everything is a commodity, so if it is exchanged for, it is presumably realising its value. if i buy screws though, the screws are never sold individually, but their general value is sold in wholesale form (i.e. 100 screws per box). this generalisation of value is also the macroeconomic task of large businesses to make a profit by selling over and under the cost of production by proportion. the "net profits" are considered over individual profits.

>>2204451
>commodities to marx are transhistorical
Nope.
>all systems of value creation
Capitalism is the only system that creates value in the sense that Marx is using it. You are conflating the difference in a way that shows capitalism as natural extension of trade barter, which is ahistorical and unscientific.

>>2204451
Value (as a social relation determined by abstract labor and expressed through generalized commodity exchange) did not exist prior to capitalism. Value, for Marx, is a historically specific category that emerges only when labor is systematically organized for market exchange, commodities dominate social production, and labor is reduced to abstract labor (quantified as socially necessary labor time).

Value as a social relation rooted in abstract labor, commodity production, and profit-driven exchange—is specific to capitalism. Before capitalism, societies had use-values, labor, and sporadic exchange, but not value in Marx’s sense. Recognizing this distinction is key to understanding capitalism’s exploitative core and its historical contingency.

For Marx, commodities are not transhistorical. They emerge under capitalism as products of labor subordinated to exchange-value, governed by abstract labor and profit. While trade and goods existed in prior societies, the commodity-form as a dominant social relation is unique to capitalism. Marx explicitly rejects the notion that commodities are transhistorical. For Marx, the commodity-form—as a product of labor that embodies both use-value and exchange-value—is specific to capitalist society and arises under particular historical conditions.

>>2203786
>it is the mediated exchange which constitutes the act of commodification

For Marx, a commodity is defined by its production for exchange within capitalist social relations. The intention to sell (embedded in the system) establishes its commodity status, while the act of selling realizes its value. The distinction highlights capitalism’s inherent tension between production for profit and the uncertainty of market validation.

Marx’s analysis focuses on systemic logic, not individual acts of exchange. If a commodity remains unsold, it represents a failure of realization (a crisis of overproduction), but it does not retroactively lose its commodity status. Unsold commodities still embody the social relations of capitalism (production for profit) and reflect the contradictions of the system.

A product becomes a commodity the moment it is produced for the market, regardless of whether it is ultimately sold. Its status as a commodity arises from its role in capitalist social relations, where labor is generalized as abstract labor. Thus, the intention (production for exchange) defines it as a commodity, while the sale actualizes its value.

Marx emphasizes that a commodity is produced for exchange, not for the direct use of the producer. This intention is embedded in the social relations of capitalism, where production is organized for market exchange and profit. A commodity is defined by its social purpose within capitalist production relations, not strictly by whether it is successfully sold.

>>2204452
>Nope
wait, so you think commodities didnt exist before capitalism?
>"It therefore follows that the elementary value form [barter] 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. [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
if only you actually read marx…
>Capitalism is the only system that creates value in the sense that Marx is using it
no, to marx, only capitalism produces *surplus-value*, but not value as such.
>capitalism as natural extension of trade barter
that is marx's perspective. read section 3 of capital vol. 1, chapter 1, on the value form. there are 4 value forms to marx;
(A) elementary value form (barter)
(B) expanded value form
(C) general value form (universal equivalent)
(D) money form
this proceeds in a progressive manner. again, read marx for yourself instead of lying to yourself and others.
>>2204456
>Value (as a social relation determined by abstract labor and expressed through generalized commodity exchange) did not exist prior to capitalism.
>For Marx, commodities are not transhistorical
again, what does this quote mean to you?
>"It therefore follows that the elementary value form [barter] is also the primitive form under which a product of labour appears historically as a commodity [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
>>2204464
>Unsold commodities
<"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
<"All commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this change of hands is what constitutes their exchange, and the latter puts them in relation with each other as values, and realises them as values. [vol. 1, ch. 2]"
notice how i am the one actually directly referencing marx?

>>2204451
>>lets read this one more time,
>"To become a commodity a product must be transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange"
Let's read it again, with context, and in the German original this time, because we like to suffer:
<Der mittelalterliche Bauer producirte das Zinskorn für den Feudalherrn, das Zehntkorn für den Pfaffen. Aber weder Zinskorn noch Zehntkorn wurden dadurch Waare, dass sie für andre producirt waren. Um Waare zu werden, muss das Produkt dem andern, dem es als Gebrauchswerth dient, durch den Austausch übertragen werden.
As you can see, "a product" is not the right translation, it's "the product". And the product refers here to the farmer's product in different historical-economical contexts and certainly not one unit of some item.

>>2204456
>Value (as a social relation determined by abstract labor and expressed through generalized commodity exchange) did not exist prior to capitalism. Value, for Marx, is a historically specific category that emerges only when labor is systematically organized for market exchange, commodities dominate social production, and labor is reduced to abstract labor (quantified as socially necessary labor time).
Overstating it. Value becomes dominant in society with capitalism. It doesn't just go from off to TADAAH VALUE DOMINATES. Here is Marx stating in Capital's preface the value-form is very old:
<The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
And that means value predates capitalism. Capitalism is like a pandemic, value is like the virus making the pandemic. The virus of value can persist through small circulation for centuries before capitalism breaks out.

>>2204547
>Value (as a social relation determined by abstract labor and expressed through generalized commodity exchange) did not exist prior to capitalism.
no point in responding if you are just going to ignore it to repeat the same wrong argument

>>2204547
>the product refers here to the farmer's product in different historical-economical contexts and certainly not one unit of some item.
right, so individual commodities are sold as part of total produce. we are not disagreeing. the point still stands however that general rates of profit must be determined by what is sold in particular, since the general rate is made up of individual sales. the general and particular include each other's concept. individual consumption comes from generalised production; i think we find agreement here.
>>2204563
who is wrong here? this is from your original post:
>For Marx, commodities are not transhistorical
>Before capitalism, societies had use-values, labor, and sporadic exchange, but not value in Marx’s sense.
>Marx explicitly rejects the notion that commodities are transhistorical.
yet you have been shown the error of your ways. have some humility.

>>2204568
You already demonstrated your capability to understand context and nuance >>2200829
pretending to be severely autistic is not going to work anymore you need to move on.