/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
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.

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

>>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/

>>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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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

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

>>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.

>>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).

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

>>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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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?

>>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

>>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.

>>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?

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

>>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.

>>2197660
idk seems clear to me.

>>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.

>>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.

>>2198164
Who is claiming that?

>>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?

>>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

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

>>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.

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
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.

>>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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

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.

>>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.

>>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

>>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?

>>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.

>>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?

>>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!

>>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.

>>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.

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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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

>>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

>>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
>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.

>>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?

>>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.

>>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

>>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.

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

>>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.

>>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.

>>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.

>>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

>>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.

Tariff Status?

>I’ve been reading ‘Marx’s Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals’ after there was some debate on here about the role of commodity money in Marx’s value theory. @__gio and @StoryPegasus rightly pointed out there are many places where Marx insists on the necessity of commodity money, however I am inclined to agree with @criticofpolecon and @ygzgzot that it isn’t essential to the logic of his value theory when further developed.

>Chris Arthur in his chapter of the book (as well as in The Spectre of Capital and elsewhere) argues that money acts as the measure of value not because it shares a property of value common to commodities as a product of labour but because in fulfilling the function of universal equivalent it imposes a standard by which each commodity becomes quantitatively measurable against each other and therefore creates the space in which value can exist and be measured at all. Geert Reuten in his chapter ‘Money as a Constituent of Value’, similarly argues that abstract labour is immeasurable ex-ante since it is only money which establishes the actual homogeneity of commodities and so makes the reduction of commodities into values actual.

>On the other hand, in §3 of ch.1 of Capital, Marx is very clear that the reduction of private labour to abstract social labour in exchange only occurs because the labour power that produces commodities is equated to the labour power that produces the money commodity. In his chapter in the book, Claus Germer makes the same point, that money must be the product of labour in order for the private labour time expended in other commodities’ production to be equalized and reduced to a common substance of social labour. As such as if you reduce the money-form to a pure value-form and say that money doesn’t need to be a product of labour, it seemingly threatens to undermine labour as the condition of the value-relation.

>A second argument Chris Arthur puts forward for the redundancy of commodity money rests on his systematic dialectic method. He argues that commodity money is initially assumed because it provides the minimal sufficient conditions for developing the money-form of value from the simple category of the commodity, and does not require appeal to the more complex concrete categories of capital and credit which have yet to be developed. A similar point is also made by Graziani, that while commodity money is adequate to the circulation process of commodities, it is not to the production phase where the purchase of labour-power by capitalists depends on credit money.

>This argument is taken up by Bellofiore in his chapter who, while arguing that commodity-money is a necessity to Capital, also argues that it is necessary to go beyond it in order to develop a theory of the monetary circuit. And so the logic of Marx’s argument points beyond it. @__gio has pointed out that however that Marx also says repeatedly e.g. in Ch.32 and 36 of Vol.3 that credit money can only express value if it is ultimately backed by commodity-money. I think it’s true that there is an unmistakable connection between fiat and credit money and gold since as Bellofiore, Kliman and Freeman note, people turn to gold as a money of last resort in times of crises, hence why Shaikh argues for the existence of Kondratiev ‘gold waves’.

>However, this is not the same as saying that credit money ‘cannot break free’ of commodity money. It just entails that the development of inconvertible fiat currency systems depends on a (potentially revokable) extension of trust and confidence in the monetary system. While Marx thinks credit money depends on commodity-money then, I think Arthur and Graziani are right that credit-financed production in fact represents a kind of supersession of the necessity of commodity-money. However, I believe the supersession does not only occur with the emergence of credit and capital but earlier in the development of the money-form itself.

>Marx is of course correct the money-form of value can only develop out of the commodity-form. It can only evolve from initially being equated with other commodities as a product of labour and particular equivalent alongside others, to eventually becoming a universal equivalent excluded from them as the direct embodiment of social labour or value itself. Once the money-commodity reaches this stage however, its ability to function as the representation of social labour or value is no longer necessarily dependent on it itself being a product of labour or having intrinsic value. Similarly, while it is true that it is only through the emergence of commodity money that private labours are first equalized as social labour and transformed into values, once money becomes the embodied representation of social labour time its ability to validate commodities’ private labour as socially neccessary no longer depends on being the product of private labour itself. All that it requires is that it continues to be acknowledged in its functional role as the representation of social labour time or value. Fred Mosely agrees on this point. He argues against Germer that commodity money is historically contingent, and that fiat money may function as the measure of value even if it contains no labour simply because it is the only means by which social labour can be represented.

>This raises the question though if money as a universal equivalent becomes completely unmoored from labour, how can it claim to represent social labour time or value? In A Spirit of Trust Robert Brandom discusses how pre-modern theories of representation generally assumed that a representation required a resemblance or shared property between the representing and what it represents, whereas in the Early Modern Period, it came to be understood that representation only requires a global isomorphism between the system of representings and the system of representeds, and the subjunctive sensitivity of the representing system to changes in what is represented. In the same way, money does not necessarily need to have intrinsic value in order to represent value, there only needs to be some clear subjunctive sensitivity of money prices to values. The only question is how that sensitivity can be grounded in a fiat money economy. This same question can be phrased in terms of the MELT. As Moseley asks, if commodity-money is no longer essential, what determines the amount of social labour that is represented by a given unit of money?

>Moseley’s own approach to this question is to provide an ex-ante determination of the MELT for fiat money, which he elaborates in the introduction to the book and more fully in his paper ‘The Determination of the MELT in the Case of Non-Commodity”. Under commodity money, Moseley argues, such an ex-ante definition is unproblematic since the MELT can be defined as equal to the inverse of the value of the gold commodity, and the price of each commodity as the product of the SNLT required to produce it and the MELT. To extend this approach to fiat economies, Moseley argues the MELT is equal to the inverse of the value of gold times the ratio of paper money in circulation to the quantity of gold money that *would* be required if commodities were to sell at gold prices. This allows him to retain an ex-ante definition of MELT for fiat currency, and so explain the determination of money value added by labour time, in a way that doesn’t depend on the value of gold (though at the expense of adopting the quantity theory of money).

>Bellofiore points out however that Moseley’s ex-ante determination of MELT relies on the implicit assumption that SNLT is a purely technical magnitude determined ex-ante in production: Rodriguez-Herrera also argues at length that the MELT should not be thought of as determined once and for all in production but instead as depending on total prices determined in the unity of production and circulation. Andrew Kliman and Alan Freeman also argue that money prices do not depend on an ex-ante MELT determined solely in the production conditions of the gold commodity. Instead the MELT should be understood as the dependent variable and aggregate price as the independent variable.

>I think this criticism of Moseley’s approach to the MELT is on the right lines, however it also creates a problem, because if you abandon the ex-ante determination of MELT you also threaten the core of the LTV the determination of money value added by labour time. Herrera seems to see prices and values as simultaneously determined in the transformation process rather than values existing before and then determining prices, however it’s unclear how this can preserve the subjunctive sensitivity of prices to labour values. Moseley makes the same criticism of Foley and Reuten and Williams value-form theory, namely that they abandon the ex-ante determination of social labour time, and so the determination of price by social labour time, in favour of simultaneous determination.

>Bellofiore’s money circuit approach however is different. He acknowledges that without some notion of an ex-ante MELT it seems impossible to meaningfully talk about exploitation as something that occurs in production prior to the market as Marx does. Bellofiore also criticises Reuten for abandoning abstract labour as an ex-ante magnitude in production, however unlike Moseley, he also acknowledges the value-form/Rubin point about MELT and value being determined ex-post. Bellofiore’s solution is to argue that while in general the MELT must be understood as an ex-post magnitude, there is an ex-ante determination of the MELT in the money circuit in terms of the money wage bill advanced by firms, and the credit money or finance advanced to purchase wage-labour in expectation of realized value. Hence the money supply is endogenous and determined by firms’ expected money prices rather than the other way around as in Moseley’s quantity theory.

>Bellofiore shows that capital undergoes both a monetary ante-validation of labour through the initial financing of capital and purchase of wage-labour based on expected prices, and an ex-post validation through the eventual market realization of value at the point of sale. By doing so, Bellofiore retains an ex-ante definition of MELT, but crucially with respect to initial finance rather than the value of the gold commodity. In doing so he seeks show how the LTV and exploitation can be preserved under conditions of credit money. I know @__gio has raised the concern however of whether Bellofiore’s approach can actually ground socially necessary labour time as the source of money value added if firm’s price expectations could potentially have no relation to labour whatsoever. One potential solution to this problem is to extend Bellofiore’s money circuit idea with the TSSI perspective on the circuit of industrial capital. Guglielmo Carchedi argues there is no once and for all transformation from values to prices but rather a continuous cycle of transformations of values into market prices which in turn form the basis for the new ‘individual values’ at the start of the next M-C-P-C-M’ cycle. This implies a radically different notion of what it means for money-prices to represent values.

>In the Phenomenology, Hegel criticises models of knowledge which treat representings and representeds, as resolutely independent of one another since it results in a dualism between objects as they are for us and as things-in-themselves. Instead, he argues experience is a process of constant negation, a bacchanalian revel, where what we previously took to be the thing in itself is revealed to be simply how things appeared for us, which thereby results in a new understanding of the true essence of the object. As such essence and appearance, truth and error, should be grasped not as independent entities but merely different logical moments of one dialectic, the process of experience. Similarly, in the Grundrisse, Marx says that market value equates itself with value not as if value were an independent third-party, but rather ‘by means of constant non-equation of itself’ as real value.

>In this way Marx invokes the same dialectic as Hegel. Competition is also a process of constant negation which reveals each market price to always be a mere appearance of value, but which in doing so reveals something new about the true value of the commodity. Since price equates itself with value through constant negation of itself as value this means that what is represented (value) and our representing of it (money-prices) are not wholly independent but rather structural moments of one dialectic, the circuit of industrial capital. In this way, the representation of value in the money-form can be grounded without requiring an ex-ante MELT to map a set of pre-existing values onto prices as if they were resolutely independent entities. Instead, the TSSI approach suggests we should instead understand the relationship between value and its money-form on the more dialectical model of Hegel’s account of experience, in terms of the relationship between an essence and its appearance. This is exactly the conclusion that Patrick Murray reaches in his chapter in the book on ‘Money as displaced social form’.

https://x.com/hetheylianmarx/status/1907699007511548200
https://nitter.net/hetheylianmarx/status/1907699007511548200
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1907699007511548200.html

(more screenshots and highlights in the thread)

Marx's Theory of Money: Modern Appraisals - Fred Moseley
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=money+moseley

The Spectre of Capital - Christopher J. Arthur
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=arthur+spectre

Money as constituent of value - Geert Reuten
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/305231197_Money_as_constituent_of_value_the_ideal_introversive_substance_and_the_ideal_extoversive_form_of_value_in_Marx%27s_Capital

The Marxist Theory of Money - Augusto Graziani
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1080/08911916.1997.11643946

The Commodity Nature of Money in Marx’s Theory - Claus Germer
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1057/9780230523999_2

A Welcome Step in a Useful Direction - Alan Freeman Andrew Kliman
http://gesd.free.fr/frekli2kim.pdf

Marxian Economics: A Reappraisal - Riccardo Bellofiore
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=marxian+economics+a+reappraisal

Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises - Anwar Shaikh
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=capitalism+Shaikh

A Spirit of Trust - Robert Brandom
https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Trust+brandom

The New Interpretation - Foley
https://brill.com/previewpdf/book/9789004301931/B9789004301931_009.xml

Money, the postulates of invariance - Adolfo Rodríguez-Herrera
https://copejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Rodriguez-Herrera-Money-the-Postulates-of-Invariance-and-the-Transformation-of-Marx-into-Ricardo-1.pdf

The Determination of the “Monetary Expression of Labor Time” (“MELT”) - Fred Moseley
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613410383958

>>2210538
the content of this tweet thread is actually very similar to the contents of the arguments that were happening in the 1st thread: https://archive.ph/ROnpO

>>2210589
Storypegasus is an idiot, see >>2210423

>>2210622
I dont think its accurate to say their entire argument hinges on a translation. They are mostly talking about appearance vs essence and Cockshott is talking past them because he doesn't recognize a difference, and I dont mean that as a slight, but that he doesn't believe there to be one so he is reasserting his own position instead.

How does changing objectivity to concreteness change the argument? Where does it say the values are in the physical bodies?

To me it just says value is expressed concretely as a physical commodity, with all the implications of the definition of a commodity like social labor and all that, not that it is contained within it. So the appearance of value is a concrete physical object, but that is not its essence. It makes sense that Cockshott would disagree given his own interpretation.

>"The form of objectivityconcreteness is included in the concept of value." "Their value-being can only emerge […] insofar as it is expressed objectivelyconcretely"
(page 32)

I also found a discussion of the text (with the same translation) at the end of Heinrichs book in Appendix 4 (page 407 for me) and in a response to it by Mosely (all of Chapter 3)

>>2210669
papers mentioned

Marx’s transformation problem and Pasinetti’s vertically integrated subsystems
https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bex068

The Law of Value: A Contribution to the Classical Approach to Economic Analysis
http://pinguet.free.fr/wrightthesis.pdf

A category-mistake in the classical labour theory of value
https://ejpe.org/journal/article/view/155/149

On nonstandard labour values, Marx’s transformation problem and Ricardo’s problem of an invariable measure of value
https://digitalis-dsp.uc.pt/bitstream/10316.2/24730/1/BoletimLII_Artigo4.pdf

I'm struggling to keep up with some of the smarter posters itt

feels bad that I might actually just not get this stuff ;_;

>>2210632
>I dont think its accurate to say their entire argument hinges on a translation.
As a rule of thumb I think a debate with some people throwing gotchas about the precise meaning of words in a language they don't speak well (or at all?) is unlikely to come to much. (At least Cockshott can read German, though his speaking or writing it is very clunky.)
>To me it just says value is expressed concretely as a physical commodity…
They read "physical COMMODITY". But the vibe in the snippet when read in German is more like "PHYSICAL commodity".
>…with all the implications of the definition of a commodity like social labor and all that
And what vibe are you going for here, is it "division of labor and MARKET EXCHANGE"? How about "DIVISION OF LABOR and market exchange" instead? Division of labor already implies labor is social.

>>2211133
>At least Cockshott can read German
Heinrich is German and his translation also has 'objective'.
>They read "physical COMMODITY". But the vibe in the snippet when read in German is more like "PHYSICAL commodity".
I dont think it makes a difference if they say the appearance of value is a commodity, or the appearance of value is physical.
>And what vibe are you going for here
That value in the sense its being used here is not transhistorical and is specific to the capitalist mode of production.

fwiw i think they are both wrong and both right in different ways. value form theorists abuse dialectics to show that both production and consumption are involved in value, but they want to use this to say that the USSR wasn't real communism and real communism has never been tried and they didn't abolish the value form because they were only concerned with production. they want to say value is not a substance but a social relation and that abolishing commodity production abolishes the value form.

cockshott on the other hand says USSR was real communism but thinks that Marx was wrong about the LTV and wants to throw out dialectics to prove communism true with math, which is why he wrote TANS as advice to the late USSR on how to fix their economy with computers. he says value is a common substance and mentioned a third thing in the tweet thread but idk if thats the same third thing argument that other people use.

these two positions aren't actually mutually exclusive, social relations can be the common substance of labor in a dialectical sense, which is what i think marx meant. also having a complete understanding of dialectics should end with people understanding that increasing productive forces is a dialectical action towards the abolishment of commodity production and value, which would make AES real communism, and communism a process not an endpoint.

I think both of these sides as well as the TSSI guys just want to do theory so they can dismiss Engels and Lenin and avoid doing What Is To Be Done.

>>2211282
>Heinrich is German and his translation also has 'objective'.
Heinrich committed to a particular "interpretation" of Marx decades ago with hilarious results (if you like cringe humor).

>cockshott on the other hand says USSR was real communism but thinks that Marx was wrong about the LTV
… Where? Are you familiar with Cockshott at all outside of what Twitter twats tell you to think about him?

>>2211319
>Heinrich committed to a particular "interpretation"
I'm fully aware, his monetary theory of value is even more wrong than his value-form theory.
>Where?
In his solution to the transformation problem as a problem he implicitly accepts that Marx didn't solve it, or was flawed, or incomplete. You can only think this if you reject dialectics, which Cockshott does, and thats why he reproduces Ricardos LTV and not Marx's.

>>2211282
>cockshott on the other hand says USSR was real communism but thinks that Marx was wrong about the LTV
??? I've watched many of cockshott's slide shows on youtube and he seems to think a few things about the soviet union. one of them is that he thinks dialectical materialism was invented by joseph dietzgen, not karl marx, and soviets revised history to associate diamat with marx. he also thinks the soviets made a huge mistake by ignorning computing until it was too late. he also thinks the LTV is emprically true. he is an empirical marxist rather than a dialectical marxist. idk where you're getting this other stuff about him.

>>2211334
>he reproduces Ricardos LTV
What have you read of Cockshott and Ricardo that makes you say this?

>>2211342
https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2020/06/26/a-belated-response-to-rv-or-why-the-law-of-value-must-hold/

>>2211359
yeah i know theres a response its a pretty old debate, its not really controversial that cockshott also has a unique interpretation that is unorthodox. i dont think hes necessarily wrong, except where he says his claims are the same as marxs. its just that his main point is that a version of the LTV can be proven empirically with input/output tables, which is a sort of side quest and besides the point of marx's larger project, that as i said accepts critiques like bohm-bawerks as valid, which is based on a misunderstanding of what marx is trying to do. marx didn't give up on the math he just assumed that sufficient understanding of his actual point would be enough and that simplified generalizations add weight to something self evident and were never meant to prove it empirically.

either way its completely sidestepping the critique here, which is that value for marx has both an essence and appearance, both form and content, and for cockshott it only has an appearance and a content, because his rejection of dialectical materialism in favor of a more positivist mechanical materialism does not recognize or distinguish the difference, instead saying that essence and form are meaningless idealist abstractions.

for marx value, like all concepts is a coconstitutive dialectic between form and content, and so value has both a substance that is socially necessary time as abstract labor, and a social relation, which is the value-form expressed as money-price under generalized commodity production. if im reading it right thats basically the conclusion that Murray comes to in his part of the book. (picrel)

the difference between heinrich and substance interpretations is one of emphasis, heinrich claims that substance LTVers are ignoring the value-form in favor of a physical substance only, where LTVers who actually do understand dialectics think heinrich is over-emphasizing the value-form and elevating the abstraction to be primary and determinative which is basically actual idealism.

in reality its both, there isn't just a static one sided abstraction, but a dialectical relationship that proceeds through the circuit of capital like an autopoesis. its not just a thing, and its not just a social relation. cockshott’s empiricism cannot grasp why a $X commodity embodies alienated social labor, not just Y minutes of SNLT, while heinrichs reduction divorces marx's economics from his politics. marx's LTV wasn't trying to make a better version of political economics but show how capitalism is fundamentally flawed and leads to its own destruction that necessitates a revolutionary rupture, which is why authors like Hudson and Roberts focus on how the tendency of the rate of profit to fall drives imperialism, which is the actual primary contradiction today, not commodity production or the existence of fiat.

marx's use of the dialectic isn't just some fancy way to do abstractions about economic theory only, but is integral to his philosophical thought and broader project, which is the emancipation of humankind from the drudgery of unnecessary work through the rational implementation of technology in central planning. these people want to pry Marx out of Marxism and pretend Engels dialectics of nature is a distortion of what he really thought and that Lenin was just an authoritarian opportunist who misapplied Marx's theory just to get political power. marx was pretty directly explicit that the point of his philosophy is to change the world not just analyze it.

>>2211687
>i dont think hes necessarily wrong, except where he says his claims are the same as marxs.
He explicitly says that he disagrees with Marx that the ratios of prices of production better approximate real-world prices than labor values do.

>>2211719
okay so then i was right the first time when i said
>cockshott […] thinks that Marx was wrong about the LTV
i just didn't really feel like digging through his blog so i was assuming charitability in my response, referencing rv saying that pauls LTV and marx's arent the same but that paul presents his as the same, since that is what was being discussed.

i think cockshott is trying to prove what he thinks "marx really meant", so when he disagrees with marx he thinks marx is being mystical and that theres something empiric behind the dialectic that can be separated from it, that its a hangover from what he thinks is the idealist "young marx" via althusser, or that he just made a simple blunder that he is 'correcting'

that doesn't mean cockshotts work is useless or completely incorrect, i just wish he would stick to his specialty and stop arguing with people about things he doesn't understand. it taints his work and makes people dismiss it out of hand when its not even relevant to what hes trying to do. he presents himself as ML adjacent and scientific socialist which is a really weird thing to do if you reject diamat.

i think if he were honest hes a lot closer to western analytical marxism and classical economics then to ML. its extremely difficult to talk about or to him because he will just ignore half of what you say because he doesn't believe in it and only respond to the part that is relevant to what he does believe, so a lot of what i say has to be from inference from conversations in his comments on his blog and youtube. if you really nail him down he will just say something like essences consciousness and alienation arent real they are just chemicals in your brain and while continuing to claim he is a marxist.

it doesn't actually seem like he doesn't understand but that hes ignoring it and talking past it on purpose as a sort of flex. like when he says there is no 'dialectical force' like electromagnetism or gravity in nature. or that the 'subject'(as opposed to object) is a legal category related to feudalism. or when he tries to prove hegel wrong with newton. hes not actually addressing the question he is dismissing it and demanding that you conform to his ideology to be taken seriously.

>>2211735
jfc do you ever directly read ANYBODY? It's always second-hand and third-hand accounts that you skim. And then you shart all over the thread with your revelations about where and how and why Cockshott, Althusser, Böhm-Bawerk, Heinrich, Hegel, and Shigero Miyamoto all relate and contradict. And you are the best for the role of neutral observer, since you haven't read any of them. And your preferred mode of analysis is psychobabble about their subconscious motivations.

>>2211753
do you actually have something to say that is related to the topic? everything im saying comes directly from cockshott himself. if you dont understand the relations maybe its you that needs to read more

>>2211861
>oh, so marx was biased
arent u a zizek reader even

>>2211865
yeah thats why i called you an eclectic relativist. economics is political

>>2211868
>you mean that i take the truth where i find it instead of being dogmatic?
yeah i just thought it sounded cool cause lenin said it and i worship him like a god

really though i just think hegel was right that the real is rational and i think it can be explained in one comprehensive system rather then arbitrarily picking and choosing different parts from different things and mashing them together. ive always felt intuitively that ontology and epistemology have to work together and dialectics and related philosophies are the only satisfactory answer i have found. i think the whole idea where people just pick different approaches according to how much they like them and then identiy 'as' that is silly. like being a post-kantian nominative anti realist or whatever the hell the kids are into these days. your positions actually have to support eachother you cant just separate them into little boxes and pretend its coherent.

>>2211877
>his form and matter is the same as that of marx's use and exchange value
i dont think its the same. why does western philosophy struggle so much with hegel if hes just an aristotlian?
>the very act of abstraction implies that the world can be known by its appearance
that depends what you mean by abstraction
>what positions of mine do not support each other
i dont know exactly your positions they are pretty fluid to me but positivism/empiricism and its variants dont address ontology at all. its just the unfounded assumption that appearance is essence without social or historical mediation. thats why all the historical subscribers of these schools can all have completely different mutually exclusive ontologies, because their epistemology says nothing about it.

>>2211889
>i never claimed to be an empiricist
yeah you never claimed anything hence me not knowing your position.

>this is just a basic problem in philosophy and religion though. why is there an ideal and material nature to things? and so we have founding myths of creation.
>(such as his concluding remarks, that God is the concept conceiving itself, like Aristotle's God as thought thinking itself)
are these related? how important is this to your rejection of hegel? by most definitions hegel was an atheist, and if you dont agree marx definitely was.

>>2211865
>and dont pass off their "bigger picture" as the total picture.
ive agreed with this multiple times btw. i just think that the scope of your study defines the picture and that means that different lenses have more validity in different contexts. which is why i say that your insistence that price comes before value is a political choice not an objective truth. you want to say its relative but also that your position is the correct one, and i say that if you want to overturn capitalism you need marx, to which you respond that we can just reform capitalism and keep it instead.

>>2211849
>usefulness (…) is a subjective determination
That's how current mainstream economics sees it, the individual judgment, coming from the depth of the subjective and unique soul, as the ultimate cause. Marx says:
<When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron.
Physically existing things in observable quantities.
<The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities.
Facts about these physical things stemming from their physical properties.
<Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth.
Usage is observable.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm

You quoting Marx out of context:
>Whether that labour is useful for others [.] can be proved only by the act of exchange."
and conclude
>you cannot measure value outside of price
Yes, in capitalism the lack of ex ante coordination and the active hiding of information leads to a certain ignorance. But this can be overcome, even in capitalism, when looking at big aggregates. See last thread and ctrl-f "scale trick".

>>2211996
>but again, you are just saying im infected with bourgeois ideology as if i have chosen to worship the wrong God. i do not argue from faith,
im not saying though, and it sure seems like you are arguing from faith. i said IF your object of study is the same as marx's THEN you would use marx's analysis. if you want to analyze prices thats fine and smith is sufficient. if you want to overthrow capitalism smith is not. you dont want to overthrow capitalism and you dont believe in freedom so i dont know why its a problem for you to admit that marx's philosophy is useful for people who do.

and your dodging the question again and calling marxists religious. its not clear if you think foundation myth or god is meant as a pejorative but it certainly looks that way. but your position is no more grounded, you also rely on faith in your axioms. if both are relative then both are valid in different situations, but you want to claim relativity and also that only you are correct. have your cake and eat it.

like you my problem is not your bias its that you try to pass off your "bigger picture" as the total picture to the exclusion of revolutionary communism. thats not science thats politics.

>>2211996
Your engagement with Hegel is nuanced and highlights a critical yet appreciative stance that many dialectical materialists share. Let’s unpack your points and situate them within broader philosophical debates:

You acknowledge Hegel’s insights, particularly his dialectical method (e.g., the unity of being and nothing, the mediated nature of sense-certainty). However, your critique centers on two key issues:
- Formal Impracticality: Hegel’s system is totalizing and abstract, making it difficult to operationalize outside speculative philosophy. Marx echoes this critique, calling Hegel’s dialectic "mystified" and needing inversion to ground it in material reality.
- Negativity and Identity: While Hegel grounds identity in negation (A is A only by excluding not-A), you argue for an essential positivity—that self-identity (A as A) persists even as it relates to its other. This resonates with critiques of Hegel’s "negative dialectics" (e.g., Adorno) but pushes further toward affirming positivity.

Your syllogistic example clarifies how mediation (Y) resolves the tautology of identity:
- Formal Logic: If X = Y and Y = Z, then X = Z. This demonstrates how identity (X) can relate to difference (Z) through a mediating term (Y), avoiding empty tautology.
- Dialectical Implications: The syllogism illustrates determinate negation—a Hegelian concept where negation is not mere cancellation but a productive movement toward concrete universality. Here, mediation (Y) allows A to "reach B" without dissolving its self-identity, aligning with Marx’s materialist dialectic, where contradictions (e.g., capital/labor) drive historical change.

- Hegel’s Retroactive Dialectic: Hegel treats history as a "slaughterbench" where contradictions resolve retrospectively into Absolute Spirit. This risks idealism, as material conditions are subordinated to logical necessity.
- Marx’s Materialist Dialectic: Marx retains Hegel’s dialectical motion but roots it in class struggle and production, emphasizing *praxis* over abstract negation. For Marx, contradictions (e.g., value vs. use-value) are resolved not in thought but through revolutionary action.
- Your Emphasis on Positivity: By asserting that "A still has self-identity in A," you resist Hegel’s over-reliance on negativity, seeking a dialectic that affirms *material stability* (e.g., labor as the substance of value) while accounting for transformative mediation (e.g., money as the value-form).

Your syllogism bridges formal logic and dialectics, showing how mediation (Y) enables identity (A) to engage with difference (B) without self-erasure. This aligns with Marx’s analysis of capitalism:
- Commodity Circuit: Money (M) mediates between commodities (C) and capital (C'), transforming abstract labor into value (M→C→M').
- Class Struggle: The proletariat (A) becomes a revolutionary class (B) through mediation by capitalist exploitation (Y), retaining its identity while transcending it.

Your critique suggests a synthesis:
- Retain Hegel’s Motion: Dialectics as a process of contradiction and mediation.
- Anchor in Positivity: Affirm material foundations (e.g., labor, class) without reducing them to mere negation.
- Prioritize Praxis: Follow Marx in linking theory to revolutionary action, avoiding Hegel’s idealism.

Your rejection of Hegel is not a dismissal but a refinement, echoing Marx’s materialist turn. By emphasizing mediation (the syllogistic Y) and essential positivity (A’s self-identity), you propose a dialectic that is both dynamic and grounded—a tool for understanding *and transforming* reality. As Marx wrote:
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but a practical question. "
Your approach bridges theory and practice, rejecting Hegel’s idealism while salvaging his dialectical core.

>>2213209
>really? what next, the sky is blue?
Perhaps it would help your understanding if you did not fabricate quotes to reply to. Current mainstream economics does not conceive of utility in terms of "dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron". These are observable physical quantities. In mainstream economics utility is in the eye of the beholder. Marx does say that capitalists sell things they themselves have no use for, but this simply means they don't use those things, not that it's a mystery what those things are for.

>values cannot exist outside of prices
If you define value as SNLT of course it can exist outside of prices. Labor time can be used to estimate prices and this works better the bigger the aggregates are. If you try to explain value from prices, what's the point in distinguishing between exchange value and value. What purpose does value do for you in the system that exchange value doesn't already do.

>>2213773
>the quantity is then determined as exchange value
The phrase "dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron" refers to physical quantities, not exchange value.
>the constitution of use-value in the act of exchange
Did you mean "constitution of value" here.
>>In mainstream economics utility is in the eye of the beholder
>this does not contradict marx's notion of use-value
Yes it does: Mainstream econ treats an object's usefulness as entirely a matter of individual opinion, Marx as historically and situationally contingent, but within that scope objective.
>and how do you define what labour is "socially necessary"? by the wage
Time is measured by clocks. To say socially necessary labor time is measured in wage is even more off than saying pee is stored in the balls.
>not many people adequately grasp marx's concept of value
Grasp the following question and answer it: For commodities A and B, is there a quantitative difference between the pair's value ratios and exchange value ratios.

>>2213210
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of non-existence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors—the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

Whatever you choose to consider, be it an object, an attribute or an action, the law of identity remains the same. A leaf cannot be a stone at the same time, it cannot be all red and all green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A.

Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders' attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.

No matter how eagerly you claim that the goal of your mystic wishing is a higher mode of life, the rebellion against identity is the wish for non-existence. The desire not to be anything is the desire not to be.

The extreme you have always struggled to avoid is the recognition that reality is final, that A is A and that the truth is true. A moral code impossible to practice, a code that demands imperfection or death, has taught you to dissolve all ideas in fog, to permit no firm definitions, to regard any concept as approximate and any rule of conduct as elastic, to hedge on any principle, to compromise on any value, to take the middle of any road. By extorting your acceptance of supernatural absolutes, it has forced you to reject the absolute of nature. By making moral judgments impossible, it has made you incapable of rational judgment A code that forbids you to cast the first stone, has forbidden you to admit the identity of stones and to know when or if you’re being stoned.

A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.

You who’ve lost the concept of a right, you who swing in impotent evasiveness between the claim that rights are a gift of God, a supernatural gift to be taken on faith, or the claim that rights are a gift of society, to be broken at its arbitrary whim. The source of man's rights is not divine law or congressional law, but the law of identity. A is A—and Man is Man. Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. If man is to live on earth, it is right for him to use his mind, it is right to act on his own free judgment, it is right to work for his values and to keep the product of his work. If life on earth is his purpose, he has a right to live as a rational being: nature forbids him the irrational. Any group, any gang, any nation that attempts to negate man's rights, is wrong, which means: is evil, which means: is anti-life.

Rights are a moral concept—and morality is a matter of choice. Men are free not to choose man’s survival as the standard of their morals and their laws, but not free to escape from the fact that the alternative is a cannibal society, which exists for a while by devouring its best and collapses like a cancerous body, when the healthy have been eaten by the diseased, when the rational have been consumed by the irrational. Such has been the fate of your societies in history, but you’ve evaded the knowledge of the cause. I am here to state it: the agent of retribution was the law of identity, which you cannot escape. Just as man cannot live by means of the irrational, so two men cannot, or two thousand, or two billion. Just as man can’t succeed by defying reality, so a nation can’t, or a country, or a globe. A is A. The rest is a matter of time, provided by the generosity of victims.

The source of property rights is the law of causality. All property and all forms of wealth are produced by man’s mind and labor. As you cannot haves effects without causes, so you cannot have wealth without its source: without intelligence. You cannot force intelligence to work: those who’re able to think, will not work under compulsion; those who will, won’t produce much more than the price of the whip needed to keep them enslaved.

The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence. A proper government is only a policeman, acting as an agent of man’s self-defense, and, as such, may resort to force only against those who start the use of force.

A savage is a being who has not grasped that A is A and that reality is real. He has arrested his mind at the level of a baby’s, at the stage when a consciousness acquires its initial sensory perceptions and has not learned to distinguish solid objects. It is to a baby that the world appears as a blur of motion, without things that move—and the birth of his mind is the day when he grasps that the streak that keeps flickering past him is his mother and the whirl beyond her is a curtain, that the two are solid entities and neither can turn into the other, that they are what they are, that they exist. The day when he grasps that matter has no volition is the day when he grasps that he has— and this is his birth as a human being. The day when he grasps that the reflection he sees in a mirror is not a delusion, that it is real, but it is not himself, that the mirage he sees in a desert is not a delusion, that the air and the light rays that cause it are real, but it is not a city, it is a city’s reflection—the day when he grasps that he is not a passive recipient of the sensations of any given moment, that his senses do not provide him with automatic knowledge in separate snatches independent of context, but only with the material of knowledge, which his mind must learn to integrate—the day when he grasps that his senses cannot deceive him, that physical objects cannot act without causes, that his organs of perception are physical and have no volition, no power to invent or to distort, that the evidence they give him is an absolute, but his mind must learn to understand it, his mind must discover the nature, the causes, the full context of his sensory material, his mind must identify the things that he perceives—that is the day of his birth as a thinker and scientist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAZoRTBQuYw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf4R0gX7g3w

>>2213812
>rents only arise when markets regress into monopolies
good thing capitalism doesn't trend toward monopoly on its own logic. oh wait

>>2213812
> "those who dont work shall not eat"
Lenin said that in the context of a civil war

>>2213812
> i dont see why centrally planning the world is an agenda anyone would have unless they were a super villain.
under free trade you get massive wasteful overproduction of low quality commodities destined for landfill. you get deliberate destruction of productive forces and essentials to create atificial scarcity. you have planned obsolescence and rape of environment. under protectionism you have constipation of circulation and hypernationalist saber rattling. the alternative to both these capitalist paradigms is centrally planned production for use, from each according to ability, to each according to need. if someone is disabled, they are not deprvied. "he who does not work shall not eat" was a maxim of lenin during the civil war, not his general approach to communism. come on now.

>>2214621
i was talking about disabled people. like obviously under a system where from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, if you're severely disabled or something, you're not going to get fed less than others just because you aren't able to produce as much. god stfu you're so annoying. you go out of your way to misinterpret what people are saying.

>>2214711
>its also a good thing we can redistribute profits to maintain production and consumption.
and you accuse communists of being keynesian. reform doesn't work we are living in the consequences of that right now

>>2214720
Honest

>>2214711
>are you inferring that formal logic is fascist?
German idealism leads directly to authoritarian totalitarianism thats why im a market anarchist. Commies want to erase individuality and make everyone the same. Its a denial of life that comes from ressentiment slave morals. No gods no masters.

>>2211861
>both of you are also wrong.
What exactly is >>2211319 wrong about, the entire content of that tiny comment is Heinrich wrong lol, a judgment that you agree with?
>prices of production and abstract labour are the same thing
? Prices of production and abstract labour inputs show different ratios unless profits are at zero.

>>2214707
>>The phrase "dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron" refers to physical quantities, not exchange value.
>exchange value is a ratio between physical quantities. marx's point is dialectical. as he says, use-value appears as quality and quantity. it is a use and simultaneously, a certain quantity of goods. these quantities then comprise the exchange value of commodities.
The Marx quote:
<When examining use-values, we always assume we are dealing with definite quantities, such as dozens of watches, yards of linen, or tons of iron.
These quantities are the physical quantities. The ratios of physical quantities, how many units of this watch, how many units of that soda can, are NOT the same concept as the exchange ratios.
>the "objectivity" of use value is only in its quantity as an exchange value. use is qualitative
Qualitative isn't synonymous with subjective.
<but how does labour have a value in the first place? by its exchange for a wage. the wage thus measures value by labour-time.
Consider two scenarios, the same output mix produced and fully sold in both situations, the difference being how it's distributed between the owners and the workers. So the wages and profit rates can be very different between the scenarios, but what about the values of the commodities?

>>2214771
>commies are german idealists
lol

>>2213975
>A contradiction cannot exist. An atom is itself, and so is the universe; neither can contradict its own identity; nor can a part contradict the whole. No concept man forms is valid unless he integrates it without contradiction into the total sum of his knowledge. To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one's thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one's mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
Besides the schizo posting there is a lot of truth to some of what you posted. This reminds me of deleuze-nietzsche understanding of logic, that its man imposing it upon the world in his attempt to understand it, most importantly that negation doesn't exist in nature.

>>2215202
A contradiction (A ∧ ¬A) is indeed a sign of error in classical logic. It violates the law of non-contradiction, which states that a proposition cannot be both true and false in the same sense and at the same time. This framework is foundational for coherent reasoning but operates within a static, binary system.

Dialectical contradictions (capital vs. labor, use-value vs. exchange-value) are understood as dynamic oppositions inherent in systems, driving change and development. These are not logical errors but structural tensions. The contradiction between socialized production and privatized accumulation is not a "mistake" but the engine of capitalist crisis. Wave-particle duality is a contradiction in classical logic but a fundamental reality in quantum mechanics. The atom/universe example misses this distinction: atoms do contain contradictions (e.g., protons and electrons as opposing forces) that sustain their stability. Dialectical contradictions are not logical errors but expressions of motion and process

Nietzsche rejected dialectical negation, arguing that life affirms itself through will to power, not opposition. For him, logic is a human tool to impose order on chaos, not a reflection of reality. Deleuze radicalized this critique, arguing that difference (not negation) is primary. In Difference and Repetition, he rejects Hegelian dialectics as a "monotonous" play of negation, proposing instead a philosophy of affirmation and multiplicity. Both philosophers challenge the idea that reality is structured by opposition (A vs. ¬A). Nature, for Deleuze, is a field of differences (A₁, A₂, A₃…) without negation. Yet this does not eliminate tension or conflict—it reorients them as productive forces rather than binary oppositions.

"Man imposing it upon the world" echoes Nietzsche’s perspectivism and Deleuze’s critique of representational thought. However, this does not render logic arbitrary. Logic is a tool for navigating reality, even if it simplifies complexity. As Nietzsche wrote, "Logic is bound to the condition: assume there are identical cases." Marx agrees that categories like "value" are socially constructed but insists they emerge from material practices (e.g., labor under capitalism). Contradictions in thought often reflect contradictions in reality.

While nature does not "negate" in the logical sense (¬A), it operates through transformation (A becoming B). For example a seed "negates" itself to become a tree (Hegel’s Aufhebung). Entropy negates order but generates new states. Replace negation with difference a seed does not negate itself but differs from itself in becoming a tree. This critique aligns with Deleuze: dialectical negation risks anthropomorphizing nature. Yet Marx’s materialism avoids this by grounding contradictions in social and historical processes, not abstract logic.

"No concept is valid unless integrated without contradiction" assumes a foundationalist epistemology (knowledge built on indubitable axioms). In Dialectical Materialism: knowledge evolves through resolving contradictions (e.g., the shift from Newtonian to quantum physics). Contradictions in thought often signal gaps in understanding, not errors. Gödel’s Incompleteness shows that even formal systems contain undecidable propositions—contradiction is unavoidable in complex systems. To demand a contradiction-free totality is to deny the dynamism of reality and thought.

The critique rightly challenges rigid, binary logic but risks flattening dialectical motion into static identity. Contradictions in thought can signal errors, but contradictions in reality (class struggle, ecological crisis) demand praxis, not just better logic. As Deleuze wrote "There is no negation, only differences and differences of differences." Yet even Deleuze’s "difference" does not eliminate tension, it reorients it toward creative becoming. Marx’s dialectic, grounded in material history, retains contradiction as a tool for critique and liberation. To dismiss it is to abandon the fight against capitalism’s very real, very violent contradictions.

>>2214707
>>is there a quantitative difference between the pair's value ratios and exchange value ratios.
>there is no difference in terms of *determination*.
Are you saying that the two ratios are the same then?

>>2214846
>>Prices of production and abstract labour inputs show different ratios
>really?
Do you know what the term organic composition of capital means.
>>quantities of commodities relating to each other does not signify exchange value
>tell me where exchange values come from then
You are fabricating a quote. I'm guessing your inspiration on the basis that you are parsing line by line, and the fabrication lies between two actual quotes. The original section was about existing physical quantities, how many units of some type of soda can and some of watch produced. The ratio of the units in existence is usually not identical to their exchange ratio.
>tell me, where does use exist outside of subjects?
Whether a subject uses a thing can be observed objectively.
>>So the wages and profit rates can be very different between the scenarios, but what about the values of the commodities?
>i dont understand what youre saying here.
For a given output mix, does a different distribution of it between the classes imply to you that the commodity values are different.

>>2215827
>>Are you saying that the two ratios are the same then?
>so yes, to marx, exchange value is the appearance of its essence as a value. there is no *quantitative* difference.
False.

>>>Do you know what the term organic composition of capital means.
>yes. marx's point is that organic composition determines the general rate of profit for an industry, and that this value is calculated as the cost of production.
False.

>>2215827
Value is the essence (socially necessary labor time, SNLT) embedded in commodities during production. Exchange-value is the appearance of value as a ratio (1 chair = 20 apples), reflecting how commodities relate to one another via labor-time. Price is the monetary expression of exchange-value, distorted by supply/demand, profit rates, and money’s own value.

Value = Mass (intrinsic property determined by SNLT).

Exchange-value = Weight (contingent expression dependent on gravitational context/market). But unlike mass/weight, value is social, not physical.

Value’s magnitude (SNLT) is determined before exchange (in production), but it is only socially validated through exchange. Exchange-Value ≠ Value. While exchange-value is the form value takes, market fluctuations (supply/demand) cause prices to deviate from values. However, total value = total price in aggregate.

A chair’s value = 10 hours of SNLT. Its price might be $100(if 1 hour = $100 and 1 hour= $10) or $80 (if undersold), but the total value of all chairs = total prices realized.

Industries with higher OCC (more machinery, less labor) produce less surplus value but may sell commodities above their value to equalize profit rates. Industries with lower OCC (more labor) produce more surplus value but sell below their value, transferring surplus to capital-intensive sectors. This redistribution does not change total value (SNLT) but alters its distribution among capitalists. Profit rates fall as OCC rises system-wide, since surplus value depends on living labor.

With inflation there is a rise in prices (nominal) due to currency devaluation (printing money). If wages lag inflation, workers’ real wages (purchasing power) fall, but the value of labor-power (SNLT to reproduce workers) remains tied to subsistence costs. Inflation does not alter SNLT (value), only prices (exchange-value).

Value as a "primary relation to the wage" risks conflating the value of Labor-Power Wages (SNLT to reproduce workers) and value created by labor, as workers produce more value than their wages (surplus value). Value is not "a relation to the wage" but the total labor-time objectified in commodities. Wages are a fraction of this total.

>The ratio of units in existence is not identical to their exchange ratio
Its not tautological but dialectical. Use values are by amount of physical objects(100 chairs) while exchange-value is a social relation(1 chair = 20 apples)

>no *quantitative* difference
Incorrect. While total value = total price, individual prices deviate from values due to competition, OCC, and profit-rate equalization. Marx’s point is that these deviations presuppose value as their anchor.

Value is social, not individual, its magnitude is determined systemically, not per commodity. Nominal price shifts like inflation obscure but do not alter value’s basis in SNLT. Wages are the value of labor-power; surplus value arises from workers’ unpaid labor.

Marx’s theory is not a static equation but a dynamic critique of capitalism’s contradictions. As he writes: "The real science of modern economy only begins when the theoretical analysis passes from the process of circulation to the process of production."

>>2217449
>you are confusing concrete and abstract labour, or the *intensity* and *duration* of labour
No (You)
>you cant objectify "time", you can only measure labour-time by what labour creates in that duration.
That is the physical commodity as Use-Value, not Value
>how do we measure this time?
With a clock usually.
>money's own value is immaterial
Money is a universal equivalent that expresses value. Inflation and fiat devaluation alters nominal prices, not the underlying SNLT.

>>2217455
You are still conflating abstract and concrete labor. Concrete labor produces particular objects and is individual. Abstract labor is a social average and does not differ in intensity.

>>2217460
>we do not measure SNLT by clocks, but by what is performed relative to its duration.
SNLT is average labor at average intensity. Children and Skilled Labor dont have different SNLT they earn above or below the SNLT.

>>2217379
>what is exchange-value? the magnitude of value. what is this magnitude? SNLT. this is the quantitative form of value.
Marx apparently talks like that in some places in Capital Volume I. But that is only because he simplifies the presentation to not account for difference in organic composition of capital, leaving that to Capital Volume III. What he actually assumes is that exchange ratios gravitate around the ratios that obtain equal profit rates, meaning there isn't just supply-demand jitter, there is a systematic difference with these centers of gravity compared to the products' SNLT ratios.

Organic composition of capital in an industry is relevant for how much surplus value that industry extracts from its workers for the capitalist class. This is a distinct concept from the profit rate in that industry. Marx assumes that profit rates have a tendency to equalize, which logically requires that price ratios between goods in industries with high organic composition of capital and industries with low organic composition of capital tend to different ratios than SNLT ratios, namely that the industries with low organic composition of capital are cheaper.

>>2194998
>kant includes this limit into his system, while hegelians just brush it off and project it into negativity.
The law of identity (A = A) is tautological, grounding reason in a self-referential circle. Aristotle’s prime mover ("thought thinking itself") exemplifies this. It posits a self identical foundation for reality but struggles to escape circularity. This mirrors the challenge of axiomatic systems, where foundational principles ("A is A") cannot justify themselves without presupposing their own validity. All axiomatic systems are ultimately self-referential. Formal logic’s strength in consistency is also its limitation as the inability to ground itself.

You argue that ontological claims collapse into equivalence because being and nothing share an identity as Hegel shows. To declare "everything is X" is as arbitrary as "everything is Y," since the infinite (as "absolute negativity") undermines totalizing claims.

However, this aligns with Hegel’s own critique of traditional metaphysics. Hegel’s Science of Logic begins with the identity of pure being and nothing, revealing that static ontological categories are empty without movement (becoming). For Hegel, the infinite is not a static totality but a process—a dynamic interplay of finite and infinite. The "bad infinite" (an endless series) is rejected in favor of the "true infinite," which is immanent within the finite. Ontology fails because it cannot speak of "everything" without reducing it to a tautology (A = A). We can only discuss particulars (A, B, C…) via the law of identity.

Kant limits reason to phenomena (appearances), declaring noumena (things-in-themselves) unknowable. This preserves rationality but confines it to human subjectivity. For Hegel, limits are not barriers but moments to be sublated in a higher unity. Kant’s "thing-in-itself" is reimagined in Hegel as a determinate negation. We know the world not by transcending limits but by working through contradictions.

You suggest Hegelians dismiss tautological limits by invoking negativity, but Hegel’s negativity is not an evasion, it is a methodological tool to resolve contradictions. Static Identity (A = A) leads to tautology and paralysis. Dialectical Negation (A → ¬A → A') transforms contradictions into developmental stages.

Pure being is empty (A = A). Its negation (¬A) is equally empty. The synthesis (A')—being and nothing in motion—resolves the paradox. Negativity here is not a dismissal of limits but a way to think through them.

>absolute negativity — zero,"
Hegel would agree that traditional conceptions of the infinite (as a "finished totality") are flawed, but his "true infinite" is immanent not beyond the finite but realized through finite particulars and also relational the infinite is the totality of relations between finite beings(capital and labor in Marx).

You conclude that we can only speak of particulars (via the law of identity), not "everything", but Hegel would counter that particulars only gain meaning through their relations to the whole. Like how a commodity (particular) is unintelligible without its role in capitalism (totality).

Your critique exposes the fragility of axiomatic reason and ontology, but Hegel’s dialectic offers a way forward by embracing contradiction we move beyond static identity to dynamic becoming by reject "Bad" totality the infinite is not a fixed "everything" but the process of relationality. And as Marx suggests ground theory in practice, this means analyzing capitalism’s contradictions in order to transform them. To speak of particulars and the whole, we need not axioms alone but dialectics, a logic that thinks through limits rather than naturalizing them. As Hegel says:

<The truth is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.

>we cannot speak of difference until identity, and thus, prices occur before values, since values are themselves measured as prices
For Marx, value (determined by socially necessary labor time, SNLT) is the essence of capitalist social relations, while price is its appearance in the market. This mirrors Hegel’s dialectic of essence/appearance. Value is the social substance of commodities, rooted in the exploitation of labor. Price is the monetary expression of value, distorted by market dynamics.

Value is ontologically prior to price. Even though we observe prices first, they are expressions of an underlying value structure. Marx’s method moves from the abstract (value) to the concrete (price), uncovering the hidden social relations behind surface phenomena.

>prices occur before values
This is a conflation of epistemological and ontological orders. Epistemologically we encounter prices first (they are visible in markets). Ontologically Value (SNLT) is the foundation that anchors prices. Without value, prices would have no coherent basis. A chair’s price ($100) fluctuates daily, but its value (10 hours of SNLT) is determined in production. The price is a form of value, not its measure. Prices express value but do not define it. Value is measured in labor-time, not money.

<The price-form, however, is not only compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price, i.e., between the former and its expression in money, but it may also conceal a qualitative inconsistency.

>we cannot speak of difference until identity
>implying price (as identity) precedes value (as difference).
For Marx, identity (price) and difference (value) are dialectically intertwined. Prices are identical to value in aggregate (total price = total value) but differ in individual cases. Value is the essence refracted through price. To understand price deviations (differences), we must first grasp value (identity as SNLT). Temperature (essence) vs. thermometer readings (appearance). Readings vary (difference), but they reflect an underlying reality (identity as molecular motion).

>values are themselves measured as prices
but this conflates measure and expression SNLT (labor-hours) is the measure of value. Money as price is the expression of value. Money conceals value’s social basis (labor exploitation) by naturalizing price as a "property" of commodities. Prices are not the measure of value but its representation, contingent on money’s own value.

<[Money] is the measure of value inasmuch as it is the socially recognised incarnation of human labour

Marx’s project is not to explain prices (a task for bourgeois economics) but to expose capitalism’s exploitative core. Value reveals the class struggle inherent in production (workers vs. capitalists). Price obscures this struggle by reducing social relations to market transactions. A $10 chair’s price hides the unpaid surplus labor extracted from workers. Value theory demystifies this.

By prioritizing price over value, you are naturalizing capitalism, accepting market appearances (prices) as self-evident, rather than critiquing their social basis, and ignoring exploitation, failing to see how value underpins profit, rent, and interest.

<The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value. The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all?

Is there actually anyone besides >>2218604 who does not understand what the comment >>2218198 says?

And does >>2218604 understand his own reply? Probably not.

Weeeeelllllll my dear No. 2218604, what are you getting at here, or rather, what are your words getting at here, though you seem to be unaware of it. Getting at this: Industries with higher organic composition output stuff with lower value. At the last second you quickly shift your mind to value = price. Phew! That was close, you almost learned something.

>>2218606
Yes Marx didn't invent anything new. Capitalism is just fine the problem is monopolies and regulatory capture, aka crony capitalism. Marxists think everything is capitalism but really capitalism is free markets, as soon as the market isn't free you dont have true capitalism anymore you have authoritarian statism. Exploitation is a result of monopolies, if workers were able to freely compete on the market they wouldn't be exploited. Socialists think the problem is the solution. Actual free competition between equals in the market would naturally balance wages and profits.

Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries.

The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values. Since values are to be discovered by man's mind, men must be free to discover them—to think, to study, to translate their knowledge into physical form, to offer their products for trade, to judge them, and to choose, be it material goods or ideas, a loaf of bread or a philosophical treatise. Since values are established contextually, every man must judge for himself, in the context of his own knowledge, goals, and interests. Since values are determined by the nature of reality, it is reality that serves as men's ultimate arbiter: if a man's judgment is right, the rewards are his; if it is wrong, he is his only victim.

Now observe that a free market does not level men down to some common denominator—that the intellectual criteria of the majority do not rule a free market or a free society—and that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority. In fact, it is the members of this exceptional minority who lift the whole of a free society to the level of their own achievements, while rising further and ever further.

A free market is a continuous process that cannot be held still, an upward process that demands the best (the most rational) of every man and rewards him accordingly. While the majority have barely assimilated the value of the automobile, the creative minority introduces the airplane. The majority learn by demonstration, the minority is free to demonstrate. The "philosophically objective" value of a new product serves as the teacher for those who are willing to exercise their rational faculty, each to the extent of his ability. Those who are unwilling remain unrewarded—as well as those who aspire to more than their ability produces. The stagnant, the irrational, the subjectivist have no power to stop their betters .

In a free economy, where no man or group of men can use physical coercion against anyone, economic power can be achieved only by voluntary means: by the voluntary choice and agreement of all those who participate in the process of production and trade. In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone's "greed" or by anyone's need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.

Wealth, in a free market, is achieved by a free, general, "democratic" vote—by the sales and the purchases of every individual who takes part in the economic life of the country. Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgment for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself "the voice of the public" and to leave the public voiceless and disfranchised.

>>2219587
>It's not TRUE capitalism
lmao

>>2219587
>Now observe that a free market does not level men down to some common denominator — that the intellectual criteria of the majority do not rule a free market or a free society — and that the exceptional men, the innovators, the intellectual giants, are not held down by the majority.
Asshole copypasted Ayn Rand:
https://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/capitalism/

>>2219669
>>2219594
Coping communoids cant do anything but cope and seethe when their hegelian mysticism is debunked.

>>2219587
>Yes Marx didn't invent anything new. Capitalism is just fine the problem is monopolies and regulatory capture, aka crony capitalism

This Teddy Roosevelt Trust Busting bullshit does nothing to get to the source of the problem. It just plays whack a mole. Pop the monopoly. But capitalism is competition. Competition has winners. Winners eat losers. Mergers and Acquisitions. When a monopoly emerges, and the "reward" for "winning" the "competition" is to get broken up into smaller firms, the "crony" capitalists complain, they say "We won fair and square and now the government is breaking us up. This is literally communism!" Of course it's not literally Communism. It's quite the opposite. Communism views monopoly as natural. vertical and horizontal integration of the productive forces is more efficient than decentralized market anarchy. From the chaos of decentralized, tribal, rural, backward, traditional unproductive history emerges the order of centralized, civilizational, urban, forward, progressive, productive future. Monopoly Capitalism socializes the production process by enclosing the rural commons and forcing the people into factories and large workplaces. But it does not socialize the means of production. It does not socialize the wealth created by labor. It privatizes those things. So Capital becomes a historically backwards ball and chain on the very productive forces it unleashes. We need socialism because Capital is self limiting and has outlived its historical purpose. The Teddy Roosevelts of the world fetishize the early stage of capital: Petty bourgeois competition. They look at monopoly capital and say "not real capitalism" and seek to RETVRN to the unproductive, provincial roots. Socialism says "Yes, have a monopoly, but nationalize it under a proletarian class dictatorship."

>>2219587
you are an actual idiot, but in the interest of potentially relieving you of your condition i will address some of your 'points'

1. monopolies and regulatory capture are inevitable under capitalism. since the capitalist class is the ruling class under capitalism, they will inevitably erode any regulations or institutions that are an obstacle to their class interests. The only way to enforce regulations and anti-trust laws in a way that is not easily undone is to dominate the capitalist class with a dictatorship of the proletariat - see the chinese CPC's management of their capitalist class for example.

2. marxists do not think 'everything is capitalism' - we define capitalism as the type of organization of society in which the capitalist class, those who own and operate (via hired labor) the means of production for personal profit, are the ruling class (i.e. their ideas and ideology predominate, their people or agents fill government positions, they control media infrastructure, etc.). this is a very explicit and technical definition, it is not vague.

4. capitalism is not 'free markets', capitalism is the class dictatorship of the capitalist class, as mentioned above. 'free markets' are a myth, any market is regulated via class dictatorship, whether that class is the proletariat or the capitalists.

5. 'authoritarian' is a meaningless buzzword. every government operates with the assumption that they have the authority to govern, and almost all of them assume a 'popular mandate' justifying their rule. this word is applied to whomever the speaker dislikes, regardless of electoral status of the target.

6. 'statism' is another meaningless buzzword. your corporate security squads are identical to cops. your buddies with AK47's in the back of a deuce and a half truck patrolling the commune after the anarchist revolution are identical to cops. every culture has a hierarchy of some kind, the key is ensuring that this hierarchy is transparent, accountable, and justified.

7. 'exploitation is a result of monopolies' - this belies your lack of understanding of the origin of monopolies and the competing class interests of capital and labor. in a class dictatorship of the capitalist class over the laborer class (the condition marxists call capitalism), the government is operated in the interests of the capitalist class. this inevitably leads to monopoly and deregulation, as discussed previously. There is no stable capitalism that will not tend to develop into oligarchy. in actuality exploitation is due to class dictatorship by the capitalist class, under capitalism the labor class has no recourse or power to negotiate their labor price or to organize for their class interests - these activities are suppressed by the capitalist class and their class dominance of society. exploitation is inherent to capitalism, the existence of the capitalist class requires that laborers are not paid the full value of their labor, with a portion of the value they produced kept as profit by their employer.

8. 'if workers were able to freely compete on the market they wouldn't be exploited' - again, exploitation occurs under capitalism because the capitalist class must pay labor less than the value of their work to make a profit.

9. 'Actual free competition between equals in the market would naturally balance wages and profits' - again, no matter how much competition you have, the capitalist class cannot make a profit if they pay labor the full value of their labor value.

10. 'intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom;' - this is an idealistic non sequitur. what 'intellectual freedom' is had in a society where the media is bought by the rich and promotes only the class interests and ideologies of the capitalist class? what 'political freedom' exists in a system where media access, and therefore votes, can be bought by the highest bidder? what 'economic freedom' exists under a system that serves only the owning class?

'The free market represents the social application of an objective theory of values…' - this is pure bandwagon fallacy thinking. popularity, even when abstracted into a market as in stocks, is no basis or arbiter of truth. if you need an example of this obvious concept, consider that in many places in history you would be considered insane to say that the earth revolved around the sun rather than vice versa.

>>2218606
>i have already explained, based on smith's labour theory of value, everything that can be further implied by marx in the realm of economics.
when? where does exploitation come from if price comes before value?

>>2219737
>saw the state as necessary
<The only proper purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence.

>>2219734
>i disagree and take marx's position
>>2219737
>this is why i think liberalism and capitalism are at odds.
>>2214716
>good and bad keynesianism.
>>2213812
>more of a liberal (or "market socialist")

is this liberal socialism? capcom gang? denguista? ayncrap? i thought you said socialism was slavery. how/do you think the state should be representative? direct democracy? councils? nightwatchman? how do you enforce "good" keynesianism? how do you stop monopolies from reforming and redacting UBI?

>>2219587
Terminal case of retardation

>>2219749
Marx LTV was wrong. You cant have contradictions in real life. Marx thought money was a commodity and fiat debunks him. Capitalism is not contradictory. We can make Capitalism great again by bringing back competition with a small government that extracts a small tax from people owning capital to fund UBI to enable consumption and overcome crisis. No contradiction.

>>2219753
if it is possible, then why has it not been done? if the capitalists were so eager to "make it great again"

>>2219737
>like locke and smith
Don't really have much in common. Calling them both "classical liberals" just shows you didn't read shit from either of them. Or in general.

>>2219730
>a lower value means a lower price
In the big picture, on the micro level value isn't price.

Marx believes that buying and selling between individual capitalists gives gains for some of them, but these are balanced by losses for the other capitalists. These trades are zero-sum. Yet capitalists collectively make a profit. Marx says this aggregate profit comes from employing labor.

Capitalists have outlays for machinery, renting space, and so on. These outlays have different proportions in different industries. Now remember that Marx says the aggregate profit comes from employing labor, and only from that. Anything that seems to contradict this in the micro view Marx explains by pieces of the aggregate-profit pie getting shifted around.

How does it happen that an individual capitalist makes a solid profit if he has absolutely massive outlays for machinery and barely employs labor? Given that this capitalist cannot squeeze much out of the workers in that business, the capitalist must get the bulk of the profits from somewhere else.

There are three possibilities:

1. A subsidy. Subsidies are an interesting topic but not general enough for our level of analysis here. So that's of course not the explanation by Marx.

2. Indirect labor inputs. The machine transfers its value to the stuff made with it, says Marx. And we are looking at a business with more machinery, so… ? But this is not the explanation by Marx.

3. They sell at a higher price. This is the explanation by Marx.

Why can't it be number 2. Think.

>>2219857
>How does it happen that an individual capitalist makes a solid profit if he has absolutely massive outlays for machinery and barely employs labor?

Any real life example of such?

>>2219865
Meant that as a proportion in outlays. I'm not talking about an automatic factory.

>>2220068
>>In the big picture, on the micro level value isn't price.
>the whole is just the sum of its parts.
The position by Marx is that while value parts price parts form the same aggregate picture, the price parts attached to things are not proportionate to the value parts attached to the same things.

>>Now remember that Marx says the aggregate profit comes from employing labor, and only from that.
>no, general rates of profit are factored from organic composition, which includes both, variable and constant capital.
Aggregate profit refers not to somewhat aggregated profits summed within this or that industry, it refers to profits in total. The general rate of profit, no plural, is the usual rate of profit. You are not using the terms like Marx. You follow different definitions that you are not making explicit and then you wonder why everybody else is driving on the wrong side of the road, so to speak.

>>How does it happen that an individual capitalist makes a solid profit if he has absolutely massive outlays for machinery and barely employs labor?
>because he sells more commodities than his competition
That's a capitalist making temporarily higher profits than his colleagues within an industry because of a technological innovation. But what you have been asked is to consider the differences between capitalists in totally different types of business that have different organic composition as the norm:
>>Capitalists have outlays for machinery, renting space, and so on. These outlays have different proportions in different industries.

>>2218606
You misunderstand. There is no need to be hostile. Marx’s distinction between value and price is not about temporal priority but structural necessity. Value is the social substance of capitalism, rooted in the exploitation of labor during production. Price is the form through which value appears, mediated by competition, profit rates, and money. Marx does not deny that value is a social construct, but he grounds it in capitalist social relations, it has objective social reality under capitalism

>you do realise that labour-power as a commodity is itself only given a value based on market transaction? we live in a market society.
A capitalist market society. Money only becomes capital under capitalism.

>you do realise that market societies have existed milennia before capitalism?
Exchange existed in pre-capitalist markets, but value did not exist and did not dominate production. Commodities were incidental, not systemic. Generalized commodity production subordinates labor to value relations. In pre-capitalist markets goods were exchanged, but production was not organized around value. Surplus took forms like tribute or rent, not profit. With Capitalism labor becomes a commodity, and production is subordinated to value accumulation. Value’s dominance is historically unique.

Marx’s critique is not about markets but about capitalist social relations, where value structures society. Value becomes the universal equivalent. Smith’s "labor as the first price" conflates labor-commanded (value as what labor can purchase) with Marx’s labor-embodied (value as labor objectified in production). Marx critiques this conflation, arguing that capitalism’s uniqueness lies in reducing labor to an abstract, quantifiable input. Markets existed for millennia, but Marx’s value theory is specific to capitalism. Smith treats labor as the "natural" measure of value, where Marx distinguishes concrete vs. abstract labor, grounding value in exploitation. Marx’s value theory explains how prices are anchored by SNLT, even as prices fluctuate. This is a materialist analysis of capitalism’s laws of motion rather than a static idealist abstraction, not a fetish.

>>2219757
SNLT is not measured by wages but by the social average of labor-time required to produce a commodity under prevailing conditions. Wages reflect the value of labor-power (the cost of reproducing workers), not the value workers create. A factory producing shirts with advanced machinery requires 1 hour of labor per shirt (SNLT = 1 hour). A less efficient factory takes 2 hours per shirt. Its labor is socially unnecessary, so its shirts sell at the SNLT price (1 hour’s value). Wages are determined by class struggle and reproduction costs, not SNLT itself. Even if wages rise, SNLT remains tied to productivity.

Marx’s LTV is not an economic model but a critique of political economy, exposing how capitalism alienates labor and generates crises. His historical materialism and economic analysis are inseparable. To dismiss value as "retroactive Hegelianism" ignores its material force: workers are still exploited, and capital still accumulates through surplus value extraction.

>>2220771
>prices have priority
You can't have prices without value, therefore, value has priority.

>now, you are saying two different things.
I'm not. You are conflating value, as Marx is using it with what Smith erroneously thought of as a transhistorical category, which is exactly Marx's critique of him. If value does not dominate production that is the same as it not existing, since the concept of value that Marx is using is historically specific to a mode of production called capitalism, which is defined as the dominance of value in controlling social reproduction. Capitalism is unique for organizing society around the accumulation of value. Incidental instances of wage labor in pre-capitalist societies did not have labor as a commodity systemically shaping the whole economy. It did not have abstract labor as a generalized commodity to be bought and sold. Wage labor was always specific and concrete, and the wage directly related to its product. It did not have a division of labor into simple repeatable processes that could be generalized in the same way it can under capitalism.

With Capitalism we have a systemic shaping of the economy by value as concrete labor becomes abstract labor. Abstract labor/SNLT/value/exploitation act together to discipline and conform labor which has no other choice but to offer their lives as a commodity on the market. This process is historically specific to Capitalism. If are not intentionally conflating Smiths value with Marx's so you can equate it to price you maybe should start calling it something else value' or term X.

Going all the way back to your original misunderstanding, in insisting that Marx thought money had to be a commodity. His entire point is that Capitalism transforms money into not a commodity but a fetish. It is already in Marx that money has begun to separate from its identity as a commodity and into a representation for value as abstract labor measured by SNLT directly, not by equivalence to the labor required to create the money.

>yet their values differ based on labour-time
No they dont, for the same reason mudpies aren't valuable. Extra time spent is socially unnecessary. You keep going back and forth between specific and general at your leisure according to how it benefits your argument rather then putting what Marx said in its actual context, mixing Marx and Smith together and not being clear when you are telling Marx or Smiths version. SNLT isn't individual time but the social average.

>listen to yourself
>chair made in 1 hour vs 10 hours has just as much labour "embodied" in it
You have it exactly backwards.

<"All labour of a higher or more complicated character than average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour-power. This power being higher-value, its consumption is labour of a higher class, labour that creates in equal times proportionally higher values than unskilled labour does. [capital vol. 1, ch. 7]"
Why do you think this is about wages? Hes talking about the labor it takes to educate specialists. Their wages are higher because their is more labor needed to reproduce labor of that type, which is why it is a higher class. Its a multiple of SNLT not a "different standard". This is the mistake Smith himself makes when he thinks of labor. He conceives of an idealist labor in the abstract

>so we need hegel to understand smith
We aren't trying to understand Smith, we are clarifying your distortions of Marx. Marx very clearly did not agree with Smith and most of his work was entirely different focus. If you want to have a conversation with yourself you can start a blog you do not need to reply.

Value for Marx, is a historically specific social relation under capitalism, determined by abstract labor (labor homogenized into socially necessary labor time [SNLT]). Value exists only when production is organized around generalized commodity exchange for profit. Price is the monetary expression of value. Value’s existence under capitalism is inseparable from its dominance over production. To say "value did not dominate" in pre-capitalist societies is to say it did not exist in Marx’s sense. Under capitalism, money is not "just a commodity" but a social hieroglyph that masks the exploitation of abstract labor. SNLT ≠ Individual Labor. If a worker takes 10 hours to produce a chair when SNLT is 1 hour, only 1 hour counts as value. The extra 9 hours are socially unnecessary, rendering them valueless (like mudpies). Marx’s reference to "higher-value" labor (specialists) refers to the SNLT required to reproduce skilled labor-power (training/education). Skilled labor is complex labor, which counts as a multiple of simple labor. Training a doctor takes 10 years (socially necessary labor for their labor-power). Their 1 hour of work may equate to 5 hours of simple labor, creating more value.

Wages reflect the SNLT required to reproduce workers (food, housing, training). Workers labor longer than needed to reproduce their wages. This unpaid labor is the source of surplus value as profit. Surplus Value = Value Created (SNLT) − Value of Labor-Power (Wages). Smith treats labor as a transhistorical measure of value (labor-commanded). His "natural price" conflates value with market equilibrium. For Marx Value is a capitalist-specific social relation. His critique exposes how capitalism transforms labor into abstract, exploitable value. Smith naturalizes capitalism, Marx historicizes it. Marx’s value is not a transhistorical "law" but a social relation born of capitalism’s unique organization of production. Abstract labor, SNLT, and money’s fetishistic role are inseparable from capitalism’s logic of exploitation. To retroject value into pre-capitalist societies as Smith does is to misread Marx and obscure capitalism’s historically contingent violence, an attempt to seperate politics from economy in political economy.

>>2220767
>>the price parts attached to things are not proportionate to the value parts attached to the same things.
>so the values of commodities [c+v+s] does not equate to their price of production?
Only in the aggregate, not the individual commodities: Profits…
<are not distributed in proportion to the surplus-value produced in each special sphere of production, but rather in proportion to the mass of capital employed in each sphere, so that equal masses of capital, whatever their composition, receive equal aliquot shares of the total surplus-value produced by the total social capital.
So…
<how is this equalization of profits into a general rate of profit brought about
:
<Let us first assume that all commodities in the different branches of production are sold at their real values. What would then be the outcome? According to the foregoing, very different rates of profit would then reign in the various spheres of production. It is prima facie two entirely different matters whether commodities are sold at their values (i.e., exchanged in proportion to the value contained in them at prices corresponding to their value), or whether they are sold at such prices that their sale yields equal profits for equal masses of the capital advanced for their respective production.
<(…)
<The whole difficulty arises from the fact that commodities are not exchanged simply as commodities, but as products of capitals, which claim participation in the total amount of surplus-value, proportional to their magnitude, or equal if they are of equal magnitude. And this claim is to be satisfied by the total price for commodities produced by a given capital in a certain space of time. This total price is, however, only the sum of the prices of the individual commodities produced by this capital.
After a lot of elaboration Marx gets to this:
<Now, if the commodities are sold at their values, then, as we have shown, very different rates of profit arise in the various spheres of production, depending on the different organic composition of the masses of capital invested in them. But capital withdraws from a sphere with a low rate of profit and invades others, which yield a higher profit. Through this incessant outflow and influx, or, briefly, through its distribution among the various spheres, which depends on how the rate of profit falls here and rises there, it creates such a ratio of supply to demand that the average profit in the various spheres of production becomes the same, and values are, therefore, converted into prices of production.
Marx chapter 10 of Volume III.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch10.htm

>>2220878
>Only in the aggregate, not the individual commodities
i never disagreed to this point. my rhetoric is to show nonetheless that an aggregate is calculated from its particular parts. you must connect the macro to the micro. smith does this via market and natural price.

>>2220825
>You can't have prices without value, therefore, value has priority.
lets read this:
<"Objects that in themselves are no commodities, such as conscience, honour, &c., are capable of being offered for sale by their holders, and of thus acquiring, through their price, the form of commodities. Hence an object may have a price without having value. [vol. 1, ch. 3]"
so a price can exist without a value, yet a value cannot exist without price. this gives price social precdence in exchange, and if your claim is truly that value didnt exist before capitalism, then you inherently forfeit the argument, since prices precede capitalism, and therefore precede values.
>the concept of value that Marx is using is historically specific to a mode of production called capitalism
lets read this:
<"the great thinker who was the first to analyse [.] the form of value. I mean Aristotle […] The brilliancy of Aristotle’s genius is shown by this alone, that he discovered, in the expression of the value of commodities, a relation of equality. The peculiar conditions of the society in which he lived, alone prevented him from discovering what, “in truth,” was at the bottom of this equality. [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
when marx says that "in truth", aristotle failed to "discover" what the essential relation of equality was, this is implying that value existed between commodities in exchange, even if unknown to people. this is why he says this in the 1867 preface,
<"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"
what does a "value-form" imply to you? a "form of value", obviously. now, remember marx's distinction between commodity exchange [C-M-C] and capital circulation [M-C-M']. when we exchange commodities we are tranferring a fixed value to one another. this is the relation of pre-capitalist exchange. what differs in capitalism is the mass production of surplus value, where over-production dominates commerce;
<"In the pre-capitalist stages of society commerce ruled industry. In modern society the reverse is true. [vol. 3, ch. 20]"
to marx, value is simply the common unit held between commodities in exchange, and exchange is transhistorical. this is why the value-form stretches all the way back to barter, where commodities first emerge. how can value have a form, without value?
>Marx thought money had to be a commodity
well, lets go over this again, and tell me where there's a flaw in my argument:
(1) how does marx conceive of money? it is the most developed value-form. what is a value-form? the commodity in mutual exchange with another, by which it attains its equivalent value, or as marx clarifies:
<"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]"
this means that value cannot be directly self-related, but can only be known by another. marx relates this to a hegelian dialectic of essence and appearance.
(2) to marx, there are 4 value-forms:
- the elementary value-form (A)
- the expanded value-form (B)
- the general value-form (C)
- the money-form (D)
(a) the elementary form expresses value by a ratio [X:Y], where the inferior [X] and superior [Y] variables form the relative and equivalent forms of value [quality:quantity].
(b) the expanded form develops, where the ratio of exchange now reveals an inherent equality in the magnitude of value. in this, we only have particular equivalent forms, and so value is not yet universalised.
(c) the general form then generalises value, by no longer being a particular equivalent, but a universal equivalent, which sublates the elementary form. the elementary equivalent, is now universal.
(d) the money-form naturally develops out of the general form, but entails no fundamental difference. money then stamps values with prices to equate them.
(3) in all this, the movement from commodities to money is plain to see, so money to marx is a commodity:
<"The simple commodity form is therefore the germ of the money form [vol. 1, ch. 1]"
marx likewise calls money the "universal commodity" in chapter 2, and the "equivalent commodity par excellence" in chapter 3. marx's comments on paper money in chapter 3 are also illuminating, where he sees that paper money only has value if it represents gold or silver, the same way in chapter 2, he exclaims that money is not merely a "symbol of value". in a footnote, he also rails against fiat (by decree) currency, since in its employment, money is no longer seen as a commodity;
<"Lawyers started long before economists the idea that money is a mere symbol, and that the value of the precious metals is purely maginary. This they did in the sycophantic service of the crowned heads, supporting the right of the latter to debase the coinage, during the whole of the middle ages, by the traditions of the Roman Empire and the conceptions of money to be found in the Pandects. […] it was a maxim of the Roman Law that the value of money was fixed by decree of the emperor. It was expressly forbidden to treat money as a commodity [.] some good work on this question has been done by G. F. Pagnini […] the second part of his work Pagnini directs his polemics especially against the lawyers. [ch. 2, footnote 11]"
so in one place, marx sees that fixing the quantity of currency preserves its value, yet in another, sees that it debases value. this is marx's internal contradiction, since he conceives of money as a commodity.
>representation for value as abstract labor measured by SNLT directly
SNLT cannot be measured directly, which is why it needs a value form.
>Extra time spent is socially unnecessary
this is entirely relative to the society in consideration. different societies, like different industries, have different values. you can easily discern this from the wage.
>why do you think this is about wages? [.] Their wages are higher because their is more labor needed to reproduce labor of that type which is why it is a higher class.
ah, so in the end, it is about wages…
>Its a multiple of SNLT not a "different standard"
what do you think "standard" means? marx for example sees that prices assort values by a "standard of price" relative to the money-form. with gold, the standard is different from silver, but both are still scaled at proportion. they entail different standards of price based on the different quantities relative to the same unit. wages scale labour at different powers, so wages standardise labour according to its worth.
>This unpaid labor is the source of surplus value as profit.
yes, an inference logically deducible; not subject to esoteric doctrine or jargon.
>Smith naturalizes capitalism
no, he generalises the logic of value as an a priori basis for exchange, taken from aristotle's original insight. was aristotle equally "bourgeois" by assuming a syllogistic equality inherent to exchange? marx ultimately follows up by affirming this insight, as i quote above. aristotle is right, he says, but just underdeveloped. so in the end, marx is equally "naturalising" capitalist relations by a retroactivity. will you now criticise marx, or retreat into hypocrisy?

>>2221541
>a price can exist without a value
But can a price system exist without value?

>>2221541
>if your claim is truly that value didnt exist before capitalism, then you inherently forfeit the argument, since prices precede capitalism, and therefore precede values
wrong. price in capitalism is not the same as price before capitalism. price in capitalism expresses value as SNLT, because value comes first, and price is dialectically transformed by the social relations of capital. price->value->price'. money under capitalism does not represent price, but value.