/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>2365793
>a price on the market depends on a relationship of supply to demand. marx himself admits to this fact, since it is a self-evident reality.

And whole of this price consists of labor. Duh.

Come on, you should be able to understand it. So many people had, after all

>the most expensive items on the market are luxuries, not necessities.

Are you arguing against marginal utility now?

>this is because the west has become a sort of feudal power which outsources labor and eats up its existing resources

Feudal? Really now?

>we have regulations in the west as well

Regulations written by the capitalists for capitalists. Democracy under capitalism is a commonwealth for the wealthy, however many lower class voters there are. In comparison, democracy under socialism is a commonwealth for the working class, and therefore regulation laws are aimed not at enriching the already rich (what you hilariously call feudalism) but rather at developing the country and improving wages

That's NOT capitalism. Capitalist democracy CANNOT go against the interests of it's stakeholders

>b-but regulations

Wow, capitalists have contradictions, and they murder, backstab, eat up each other?!?!?! And therefore need rules of conduct to make sure mutually assured destruction doesn't happen????? Cannot be!!!1

Again, China's SOEs are LITERALLY SOEs, not fake "government owns a golden share" state companies. SOEs literally have to follow the will of the local government and 5-Year Plans, like some kind of a municipal company or a hospital. How is this capitalist?

>>2365802
>And whole of this price consists of labor.
no, since with a demand/supply disequilibrium, you are always either paying over/under the production costs. t
>Are you arguing against marginal utility now?
well, this is where utility theories can differ. some imagine that utility can be quantified, so production costs confer an accumulated utility to the final product (justifying high costs), but this is contradictory since an accumulated utility in itself begs demand, so its akin to the marxist error of imagining an inert value in the products of labor. others say that what makes luxuries expensive then is merely a function of their scarcity, but scarcity in itself is not valuable either. so the ambiguity about this is that more money entails a greater claim to marginal demand in a market, such that it can be afforded. the marginality of utility is thus proportional to one's purchasing power. keynesians might well accept this and say that we need redistribution to increase general utility (or "aggregrage demand"), which is at least a fair conclusion; at least against monopolists. you might say that extreme income inequality creates a dichotomy between marginal and general utility.
>Feudal?
yes. the ruling class is extractive, not productive.
>Regulations written by the capitalists for capitalists.
so you agree that certain regulations like marginal income tax are instituted by monopolists to erase the middle class?
>china is not capitalist
so what is the essential difference to you?

>>2365745
The literal definition of "capital" is wealth deployed in production. That's why a "capitalist" can be anything relevant, rather than being just another guy with a large hoard of gold. I didn't think I had to explain this to you, but apparently I do.

If you stamp around like a retard and insist people must respect your shinies, no one has any reason to regard that simply because you say so. That's why I had to say my bit about Germanic retardation, because that's the entire war strategy their ideology tells them to keep doing, because that's what German feudal rats did to start bullshit wars to cull their own population, with their favorite enemy in war being other Germans. I am so over this idea that we have to "respect" any part of that. Germans should be crushed under a boot, and if that means the Empire wins, so be it.

Anyway with that said, it's interesting that "entrepeneur" marketing faggotry is being promoted. What did the Soviet Union call their state-managed firms? Enterprises. This was mostly an invention from Khrushchev on, but the USSR's arrangement was understood at the time to be a state capitalist formation. The Party asserted command over capitalist activity and said explicitly "we are not producing for profit or shareholders", but workers were disciplined and their effectiveness judged by how competitive they were in the Soviet internal market and in Soviet trade with the rest of the world. I thought it's interesting because this "entrepeneur" line has been going around for a while and its origins were in Marxist-Leninist rebranding, specifically during the 1980s where the Party openly abandoned communism and the people were left holding the bag. If you listen to Party politicians in the 1980s, they sounded like Reaganites, and the people were aghast at what was being done to them but couldn't really do anything. So much of what has happened since has been playing what they did with Gorbachev on repeat, believing "this always works". The same people who cannibalized the USSR, some of them the exact same people just 30 years later, are cannibalizing the US.

>>2365824
>no, since with a demand/supply disequilibrium, you are always either paying over/under the production costs

Whole of this consists of labor. You were sooooo trigger happy to invoke Marx, how he le admitted to supply and demand, but now, when you get explained to you how it works, get all pissy and in denial

If you really want to, you can consider supply-demand as the upper limit on value, and labor as the actual value. Again, exchange happens between equal values, regardless of utility-shmutility

>muh utility spiel

It means that your theory is shit because it doesn't fit into reality

>ruling class is extractive, not productive.

Riiiight. More examples of redefining words to mean stuff it didn't mean before

It's not "feudal", then, it's rentier. Feudalism was productive back in the day, too, especially when compared to slavery

>certain regulations like marginal income tax are instituted by monopolists to erase the middle class?

That's a non-sequitur, but yeah, Hitler, for example, for his capitalists, straight up instituted a dissolution of enterprises below a threshold, because capitalists were experiencing labor shortages. In regards to USA, though, what you have is not some malicious plot but rather the rest of the world catching up and eviscerating US economic advantages, such as usurping all the banking-managerial jobs (barbarians had to use American services) or heavy industrial jobs (when Americans had technological advantage). Without those, service ecomony at home gets really low wage

>so what is the essential difference to you?

Ruling class. Classes have different interests, and working class is more progressive than capitalist class. In bourgeois economist terms, it means that a socialist state has better, more sustainable economic growth

Again, you are ignoring Chinese SOEs and 5-Year Plans. It is really reminiscent of how fascoids were collectively pretending that Nazis' 4-Year Plan, built not on the SOEs but on subcontracting state tasks to big bourgeois boys, wasn't a failure, and was better than Soviet 5-Year Plan.

>>2365860
>you can consider supply-demand as the upper limit on value, and labor as the actual value.
actual value to whom? value is subjective
>Again, exchange happens between equal values
no, exchange necessarily occurs between unequal values. marx makes a similar point; that exchange entails the trade of a use value for an exchange value.
>it doesn't fit into reality
if i have more money, i can buy things with a greater marginal utility. its a self-evident truism.
>It's not "feudal", then, it's rentier.
whats the difference?
>That's a non-sequitur, but yeah
okay, so we're agreed. the real class struggle is the people vs the monopolist state.
>working class is more progressive than capitalist class
what does that mean? as far as i can see, the current rulers are totalitarian, while workers are more liberal in their sentiments.
>In bourgeois economist terms, it means that a socialist state has better, more sustainable economic growth
a worker's state is an anti-communist state, as i have explained. thats why intellectuals always try and manipulate the masses into conforming to their dogma. thats why the left have largely abandoned the working class in search for new revolutionary subjects

>>2365880
>actual value to whom? value is subjective

????????????????????????????????????

"A pair of boots = 10 loaves of bread" kind of value. It's actual value instead of word salad nonsense

Sorry not sorry, but i'm done with this. You are too dumb and opinionated, lol

>>2366049
>"A pair of boots = 10 loaves of bread" kind of value
you mean its price, or exchange value? marx's fully developed value form is also just a monetary relation, so you should be expressing value likewise: "$1 = x,y,z". even to marx however, value is not just how much SNLT goes into an object, but the abstract labor realized in exchange between commodities, where use value and exchange value unify with each other (in the act of commodity exchange itself). so to marx, value depends upon demand, and without this, SNLT is annihilated:
>Lastly nothing can have value, without being an object of utility. If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
this makes more sense in practical terms when we remember that to marx, trade entails the transfer of exchange values for use values. marx is not far from the austrian perspective here, then. relatedly, hoppe even praises marx's historical materialism as "essentially correct" in this 1988 lecture:
>Dr. Hoppe sees some “intellectual affinities” between Austrianism and Marxism, in the way that each identifies exploitation among a ruling class. Of course, for Austrians, we identify that it is the state — not the bourgeois — that is the threat to the masses.
https://mises.org/podcasts/human-action-podcast/hans-hermann-hoppe-what-marx-gets-right
>It's actual value instead of word salad nonsense
the only nonsense is presuming that economic value exists outside of exchange. the only difference between a valuable and non-valuable commodity is its rate of demand according from its utility. therefore, a thing's value is its utility. you cannot quantify utility however, so what sets the price? supply and demand.

woah has it been three weeks already?

>>2365745
> capital only has a claim to production once we get into the most sophisticated machines, but even then, their productive capacity can be categorised as a type of labor rather than capital, in the strict sense
ownership of means of production is not a form of labor. if you mean labor of superintendence of task delegation, that does not require ownership of stock or exorbitant pay to perform.

>>2367916
no, i am saying that once you have robots that perforn the same work as humans held as capital stock, then capital and labor become conceptualy intermingled. can means of production become autoproductive? the value which the capitalist brings is not superintendence, but the capital stock itself; thats why there is always incentive for investment. keynes also concurs that capital itself has marginal utility, meaning that at a certain gradient, too much money invested leads to diminished returns (this is also why government money holes dont fix problems, because the capital they invest is largely unproductive).

>>2367916
>>2367924
marx's crisis theory of capital is technically correct therefore; that the business cycle occurs due to the diminished returns on capital, leading to overproduction, or underconsumption. as marx also notes, this is only possible with monopoly and/or state partnership in business. when capital concentrares, it outcompetes labor, leading to unemployment. this is a sustauned disequilibrium.

smithanon here. i just wanted to share some further classicism in marx, which you might find interesting:

marx speaks of an idea of "productive consumption" in the grundrisse (1857-58), whereby the syllogism of production is realised in its concept by the determinate negation of value's self-becoming. i just peeped james mill's "elements of political economy" (1821) and he seems to have originally described the idea, in more responsible language. in his own words:
<"productive consumption is itself a means; it is a means to production […] if one thing is destroyed, another is by that means produced." [elements, ch. 4, sct. 1]
we may compare this to marx's own writing:
<"Production as directly identical with consumption, and consumption as directly coincident with production, is termed by them productive consumption. This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza’s thesis: determinatio est negatio" [grundrisse, introduction]
this completes the syllogism of production to marx:
<"production, distribution, exchange and consumption form a regular syllogism; production is the generality [universal], distribution and exchange the particularity, and consumption the singularity in which the whole is joined together." [grundrisse, introduction]
because the universal is able to connect to the singular by the mediated particular. this further relates to mill, for mill also discusses "unproductive consumption" (whereby consumption becomes an end in-itself), and so marx sees how unproductive consumption links to unproductive labour within its own notional chain of economic activity; extending adam smith's distinction between the two categories of labour (and thus of value), within the domain of spirit. this manner of analysis by marx also makes sense for why in capital vol. 1, he begins with the single commodity, to eventually rise into the generality of social production.
<"The truth is the whole. The whole, however, is merely the essential nature reaching its completeness through the process of its own development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only at the end is it what it is in very truth; and just in that consists its nature, which is to be actual, subject, or self-becoming" [phenomenology, §20]

a criticism of sir james steuart, by a simultaneous critique of the critique of political economy:

it appears that sir james steuart in his "principles of political economy" (1767) hits upon the distinction between value in use and value in exchange 9 years before adam smith, but as yet, deals with the matter uncritically, for he associates the rate of usefulness correlatively, rather than inverse, to the cost of the product:
<"The use of a thing, in political economy, means its capacity to satisfy a desire, or serve a purpose. Diamonds have this capacity in a high degree, and, unless they had it, would not bear any price." [principles, ch. 3, §1]
he affirms this by citing the contradiction of a thing's cost exceeding its utility:
<"The exchange value of a thing may fall short, to any amount, of its value in use; but that it can ever exceed the value in use implies a contradiction; it supposes that persons will give, to possess a thing, more than the utmost value which they themselves put upon it, as a means of gratifying their inclinations." [principles, ch. 3, §1]
here, james steuart does not quite grasp the counterintuitive logic of economic exchange, and so in effect, reproduces aristotle's same error, in his own division of value, between its utility and its cost:
<"what is rare is a greater good than what is plentiful. Thus gold is a better thing than iron, though less useful: it is harder to get, and therefore more worth getting. In another way, the plentiful is a better thing than the rare, because we can make more use of it. For what is often useful surpasses what is seldom useful, whence the saying The best of things is water." [aristotle - rhetoric, 1.7]
what is at least immanent to aristotle's perspective however, is his view of contradiction immanent to the terms employed. he also identifies the source of gold's value in this manner:
<"it is harder to get, and therefore more worth getting."
so aristotle at least sees that gold is useless in proportion to its cost, which is a result of its labour to extract. steuart and smith use the example of the diamond, while ricardo reverts back to the gold:
<"Water and air are abundantly useful; they are indeed indispensable to existence, yet, under ordinary circumstances, nothing can be obtained in exchange for them. Gold, on the contrary, though of little use compared with air or water, will exchange for a great quantity of other goods." [principles, ch. 1]
steuart then regresses from aristotle's original position, by assuming a utility which necessarily supersedes costs. this same failure is reproduced by the austrian school later on. the first lesson of political economy then, is to view the inherent deficit in its dynamics, which ultimately relate to the centring of debt in society. we are alienated (mediated) by the abstract parasite of economic value. i would say that a utopian thinker imagines that we can overcome this, while a realistic thinker strives to conceive of its necessity. we are sacrificial animals, accumulating dead labour. the only question then concerns the subjectivity of the form of value, not its termination. as amadeo bordiga cites, for example:
<"If under the guise of the squalid Catholic saints the most ancient form of a not-inhuman divinity, like the Sun, continues to live, this brings to mind what knowledge we have — all too often a travesty! — of the Incan civilization that Marx admired. It is not that they were primitive and ferocious enough to sacrifice the most beautiful specimens of their young to the Sun who cried out for human blood, but that such a community, magnificent and powerfully intuitive, recognised the flow of life in that same energy which the Sun radiates on the planet and which flows through the arteries of a living man, and which becomes unity and love in the whole species, which, until it falls into the superstition of an individual soul with its sanctimonious balance sheet of give and take, the superstructure of monetary venality, does not fear death and knows personal death as nothing other than a hymn of joy and a fecund contribution to the life of humanity." [In Janitzio Death is not Scary, 1961]
capital then, is just another god, and in the future, we will have new gods to worship. culture is a construct of value, and value is the logic of history.

anyone here has some bibliography on ancient economy? anything goes for me, from bronze age to late roman empire, as long as it is in the eurasian region, especially regarding the hegemonic empires (persian, hellenistic, roman, egyptian, even in the indian subcontinent or china).
I can't seem to find any recent material that is not based on bourgeois economics, and the typical ancient history textbooks are not rigorous enough in socioeconomic matters (i.e. they don't have a marxist lens so to say).

>>2374327
>marx speaks of an idea of "productive consumption" in the grundrisse
also volume 2

>>2376029
Cockshott's How the World Works is a good historical overview that should have a chapter on it

Any good MODERN book about political economy, writing in this century and not on the XIX or XX?

>>2376201
21st century is utterly barren of any and all intellectual content. Nothing is allowed to be written except recapitulations of the same ruinous ideas that brought us to this sad situation. Political economy has been pretty thoroughly gutted.

There are books in the current century that refer to political economy and history, and they are surprisingly competent. So far as I know though, there is nowhere a serious re-evaluation of political economy or economics, and no such book is likely coming any time soon. The dominant ideas of the current century are not economic ones, and the political ideas that are permitted are entirely invested in management rather than what political knowledge was throughout history. Political thought has been steadily eroded to the point where we are back to the most base political expressions as the only expressions of "politics" as such. This is in part because at the highest level, politics is a solved game and settled law. There is one Empire, nothing against it in the whole world, and not any serious suggestion that it could or should be any different. The only book on the topic I could conceive of is a book that affirms what is effectively the final state of human society, or at least its final state barring some unanswerable weapon that makes the present society and its pretenses entirely intolerable to allow any further. Since the current ruling ideas seek this unanswerable weapon and believe they can predict the outcome of any and all conflicts, there is an unspoken rule that if the most effective unanswerable weapon were discovered, it must never be built or even used as an overt threat, since it would make clear the folly of continuing this arrangement and thus the interests of those who hold power. The only way such a weapon could be released to public knowledge and circulation is if the rulers are suicidal and intend to end humanity for good, and they believe they will deploy such a weapon towards that end only. Once circulated, there would be nothing in history and human society that could prevent the weapon's deployment, and it would not be possible to use the weapon in a limited manner as a "warning" or "event" to terrorize humanity into further submission. The game would be revealed immediately and no more pretenses could be maintained.

If there is a serious book about ANYTHING in this time, it is not written for public consumption. The public, the people, will only be lied to. Open contempt for the public is so ingrained in the intellectuals that I never hear any one of them seriously consider any other attitude, or even acknowledge what was done to us. We all know what was done to us, what will continue to be done to us, and that there is no going back from a decision made around 1970. Never. So, I do not expect any publicly distributed literature to be up to the task, even if someone worked entirely outside of the intellectual class and published the writing for free.

Even the books that do refer to reality and genuine politics are written to advance an angle and the careers of those who write them, so they build up a reputation as a guru or talking head. Take Michael Hudson. He's a serious political economist of the old type, and no one can seriously fault his findings, but he has an angle and has to maintain that angle, and he's never going to bite the hands that feed him.

>>2376029
A problem with this request is that historians and those who ask the question really don't know how the Romans did things, because the Romans never left behind a readily identifiable text concerning economics or market activity as the central topic. Assumptions are made about the political writings of the ancients and commentaries on them by Romans, but they assumed the interests and biases of the aristocracy, all of whom disdained commerce and delegated mercantile activity to subordinates. There was a class of merchants and financial interests, a profession of bankers and companies that handled tax collection and various commercial and financial functions, but what they exactly did isn't known… only that in the Roman system there was a name for the professions dealing with certain financial transactions, like the argentarii, and the fortunes of especially rich houses would extend lines of credit and had ambitions like Crassus did. In all of the ways that matter, Romans had money, saw economic activity primarily as the activity of coin or things that could be turned into coin, and understood some things about a price-setting market that estates sold to. Nowhere does "capital" as we understand it today exist, because there wasn't a condition where the capitalist could aspire to be anything or succeed. If a Roman wanted to get rich and turn wealth into power, he wanted to extract rent and clear out the failed, and make other free men into his clients. Rome being what it was, there was no path from wealth to power before running into the unbeatable fortunes and armies of the Emperor and those in the Emperor's favor. So, if any merchant got too big and didn't play ball, he was liquidated in short order. After the Caesars took over, there was never a serious attempt to restore the republican power-sharing and a certain disgust at the mention of the republic. The republic led to the system of monopoly and the Caesars by its own presumptions and actions, so why would the prime contributor to the problem be the solution?

What happened in modern times to create the "capitalist", the inventor of technology and that which led to the dominance of technology that never existed before then, was a singular event particularly to a stage of history where technology could claim something that no technology could. In the past, whatever the condition of technology, it made remarkably little difference for succeeding in battle, and new technology rarely favored more productivity, nor was productivity a goal the Romans cared about.

This often gets reduced to a claim that Romans had no notion of "economics" or didn't know how money worked, or that their economy is "slave society" and there were no free workers or concept of such, both of which are thoroughly modern conceits that serve modern bigotries. For one, humanity never did abandon slavery in principle, and as the theory of "slave society" goes around, the African slave trade is still going and becomes a great contentious issue in the Americas, and there are certain people who love to naturalize slavery for various reasons, or justify slavery as an absolute rule of history and an "economic necessity", which it never was. Slaves are always external to the society that enslaves them, and every slave system expected the slaves to be wholly expendable, their product largely irrelevant and in any event the slave labor substitutes for things that would otherwise be done by free labor or some form of peonage. The states of history usually could mobilize whatever labor-power they could attain, but usually had no pressing "work" to be done. The states of history were primarily concerned with the stability of the ruling order rather than an abstract notion of making society efficient, and they were willing to abandon efficiencies so that the familiar ordering of society would remain in place. Only when technology made a much more thorough mass mobilization effective, and there were far more things of importance to produce, did you have the industrial revolution and the mass army formations of the 19th century. Once established, the obsession of the ruling order was to neutralize these mass army formations, looking forward to the day where they could march poor people into chemical gas attacks and laugh as they die, die, die.

My guess on ancient economics and why you didn't read much about it is that money was a subject of great superstition and religious significance. Religious temples were the first banks and financial institutions. If you look at Carthage, where political status was premised on wealth, the political class were also required to assume religious offices. Religion and money were in that case tied closely. It was similar for the Romans, except the Roman civic values disdained commerce and promoted soldiers and administrators, while drawing on farmer-soldiers for the core of the legions.

>>2376029
https://www.marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/pe-ch02.htm
General overview of ancient economiKKK

The shanghai version refutes ahistorical notions that slave economy did not exist in China. https://redstarpublishers.org/RJFundamentals.pdf

>>2376029
i could write more on this subject, but i will give you the basic bibliography as you request. it took a long time to make, so i hope you find it useful. 🙂
a word from friedrich engels is required, however:
<"the exchange of commodities dates from a time before all written history – which in Egypt goes back to at least 2500 B.C., and perhaps 5000 B.C., and in Babylon to 4000 B.C., perhaps to 6000 B.C.; thus, the law of value has prevailed during a period of from five to seven thousand years." [capital vol. 3, supplement]
economic practice thus precedes economic theory. we may now read primary sources of ancient economy:
>homer, the iliad (800 B.C.)
<book 1, lines 155-170
achilles rebukes agamemnon for exploiting his labour, as it is directly written in the thomas hobbes translation (1676), the samuel butler translation (1898) and the robert fitzgerald translation (1974).
<book 3, lines 60-61
cross-referenced between the translations of richmond lattimore, robert fitzgerald and peter green (with greek sources from alexandros pallis), we can see how paris explains a notion of labour "power" to hektor directly. here is pallis' greek text:
<"Πάντα η καρδιά σου 'ναι σκληρή σαν το μπαλτά όταν σκίζει λέφκας κορμό, και την ορμή πληθαίνει του τεχνίτη" [3.60-61]
"ορμή" is connotative of the term "power".
<book 21, lines 410-425
neptune reminds apollo of the denial of their wage by laomedon. this concords between the samuel butler and thomas hobbes translations. other spurious references are the trading of diomedes' bronze armour with glaucus' gold armour (book 6, lines 225-236), of which it is said that it was worth 100 oxen, over 9. this is even referenced by adam smith:
<"In the rude ages of society, cattle are said to have been the common instrument of commerce [.] The armour of Diomede, says Homer, cost only nine oxen; but that of Glaucus cost an hundred oxen" [wealth of nations, ch. 4]
marx makes reference to the iliad also:
<"In Homer, for instance, the value of an article is expressed in a series of different things. Iliad. VII. 472-475." [capital vol. 1, ch. 1, footnote 24]
this describes how wine was exchanged for different items, and so suffices to express the elementary form of value.

following from homer, we have another greek poet, hesiod, who is treated by some as the first to speak on economic matters:
>hesiod, works and days (700 B.C.)
<lines 11-24
here, hesiod describes two forms of strife; cruel strife and wholesome strife. one causes war, the other, social competition, with emphasis on economic competition.
<lines 42-105
hesiod describes man's fall into his curse of toil by pandora's box, seeming to mirror the biblical myth: (genesis 3:17-19).
<lines 106-201
hesiod describes the decline of man from the golden age of cronos to the iron age. man's paradise was free from toil, but today, man suffers this curse (the trojan war is described as taking place in the bronze age, which is conferred by homer's description of unnaturally strong men).
<lines 293-341
despite labour's curse, hesiod still glorifies it as a virtue which brings wealth, countering the idle man who grows envious of riches. for this sake, he also speaks against theft in all cases, but still promotes gifting.
<lines 370-372
wages are discussed, and are said to best be fixed by a friend, in sight of a witness.
<lines 405-413
hesiod speaks of a proper household being one in which a man has a woman and ox for a slave. aristotle references this later on (oikonomia 1.2). the rest of the work is largely astrological codes for production, which in a sense, still exists today, such as our "holi-days" (holy days) where we take off work. the sabbath is also conjoined to the weekend, which is an explicitly religious motif, of God's own rest. what is to be said then, is that in this time, both slaves and wage labourers existed.

after the poets came the philosophers. david graeber in "debt: the first 5000 years" (2011) uses richard seaford's work to give an exposition for this cultural change, in chapter 9, on the milesian school, where the minting of coins (600 B.C.) leads to the contemplation of an abstract materialism (as per the abstract materiality of money). the materialism of the presocratics is also commented upon by aristotle (metaphysics, book 1). marx makes a relevant comment in this respect:
<"The monetary system is essentially a Catholic institution, the credit system essentially Protestant. “The Scotch hate gold.” In the form of paper the monetary existence of commodities is only a social one. It is Faith that brings salvation." [capital vol. 3, ch. 35]
which links to graebers comments in chapter 12, that debt-imperialism is correlative with religious fanaticism, showing how metal money dominates in times of materialism, while credit money dominates in times of idealism. its perhaps for this reason that joseph schumpeter speaks on plato (the father of idealism) as an early theorist of credit money in "history of economic analysis" (1954), chapter 1. the term "σύμβολον" is translated as "symbol [of exchange]", from line 371b of plato's republic. in paul shorey's translation, this line is footnoted by an addition which reads:
<"Aristotle ads that the medium of exchange must of itself have value (Politics 1257 a 36)".
this is also affirmed by schumpeter; that aristotle and plato had opposite monetary perspectives. marx decidedly takes the 'physicalist' side, speaking against money's symbolisation (capital, vol. 1, chapter 2), yet aristotle shows no special protest in his wtitings, and can be quoted from paul shorey's reference:
<"iron, silver, and the like. Of this the value was at first measured simply by size and weight, but in process of time they put a stamp upon it, to save the trouble of weighing and to mark the value." [politics, 2257a 36]
this is in accordance with aristotle's stated chartalism (as we will get to later)… after these preliminaries, we may now approach the philosophy of economy:

a contemporary of plato and enthusiast of economic thought was xenophon:
>xenophon, the economist (362 B.C.)
<book 1, lines 7-12
the dialogue is between critobulus and socrates. "economist" in the first place comes from the greek "οἰκονομία" meaning "household management". my first citation comes at the point where wealth is being described as a particular form of property. one may possess land, yet it may cause loss rather than wealth. we see then that wealth is based in either utility or exchangeability - at this early stage then, we see the paradox of value at work, which is later developed by aristotle.
<chapter 1, lines 13-16
at this point, socrates has deconstructed critobulus' view to even admitting that to possess money, without knowledge of how best to use it, means a lack of wealth, for it also comprises an unprofitable property.
<chapter 2, line 4
socrates explains that wealth is entirely relative to what should satisfy a man. a poor man may nonetheless be wealthy. the paradox of value is reproduced, therefore.
<chapter 3, lines 1-2
more comments on the paradox of value.
<chapter 3, lines 10-15
socrates declares that good workers depend upon a good leader, like a good wife depends upon a good husband.
<chapter 5, lines 1-17
general compliments are given to farming in a physiocratic manner. the land itself is cited as the source of wealth, rather than labour. husbandry is seen as a moral act.
<chapter 7, line 22
socrates says that men and women are divided in their labours; outside/inside
<chapter 11, lines 10-13
socrates affirms that the increase of wealth is a consequence of one's ideal actions in every station of his life, affirming hesiod's praise of riches and criticism of poverty. this also connects to earlier comments on husbandry as a universal form of labour and wealth.
<chapter 13, line 9
slaves are compared to animals in their form of discipline by appeasement. the rest of the dialogue is a reminiscence by socrates of what ischomachus taught him about agriculture. we may conclude thus:
<chapter 21, lines 1-4, 12
a justification for a divine right of authority is given over all hierarchies in society.

xenophon wrote another economic manuscript, typically titled, "on revenues":
>xenophon, on revenues (355 B.C.)
<chapter 1, lines 1-6
xenophon is once more citing the source of wealth in the land of attica itself.
<chapter 2, lines 1-12
xenophon says that natural wealth may be added to, and particularly cites the "staple" immigrants in his land, including lydians, phrygians and syrians. he further says that offering them civic opportunities may lead to mutual benefit for the city. he further says that land should be developed to help house foreigners for the sake of expanding their residence, to increase revenues.
<chapter 3, lines 1-8
he says that shipping and mercantile trade should be promoted as much as possible
<chapter 3, line 9
more visitors means rent and commerce
<chapter 4, line 9
xenophon describes the depreciation of gold as its inflated supply within a silver economy. value is then a relative affair and that the money supply must increase at the same rate of commodity production to ensure a preservation of its value.
<chapter 4, lines 18-21
xenophon suggests a public sector to correspond to the private sector (in the purchase of slaves), for the principle cause of mining silver.
<chapter 4, lines 26-28
xenophon suggests an original investment of 1,200 slaves, which over 6 years, should rise to 6,000, and eventually to 10,000. he sees that this will increase revenues.
<chapter 4, lines 35-39
xenophon suggests distributing the slaves equally between the 10 athenian tribes.
<chapter 5, lines 1-7
xenophon sees that prosperity comes from peace, so suggests "guardians" be appointed, such as those spoken of in plato's republic (375 B.C.)
<chapter 5, lines 18-21
xenophon explains how in peace, riches are stored up, and in war, they are spent.

>>2376029
>>2378214
graduating on from xenophon, we can move onto aristotle (plato has various comments on economic matters, such as the necessity of a division of labour, his ideas of common property, etc. but his work is rather undeveloped, in light of his student, aristotle, who is the most sourced ancient writer on economics):
>aristotle, economics (~350 B.C.)
<book 1, section 1343a
aristotle makes initial distinction between economics (oικονομικά) and politics (πολιτική). he explains that politics concerns the rule of a city, so may take many forms, but economics concerns the rule of the household, so is a monarchy. he sees that a city is made of many households, so likewise concludes that economics precedes politics in formation. he also references hesiod's division of a household's property, between his wife, livestock and slaves.
<book 1, section 1343b
aristotle mimics xenophon's socratic dialogue by praising husbandry as against the "illiberal arts" of the idle. he speaks of reproduction as a form of investment for future payment by children, so you could say that he relates the family structure to a relationship of creditor to debtor (david graeber sees many cultures promote this).
<book 1, section 1344a
aristotle further appears to reference xenophon, by speaking of the sexual division of labour, between the internal and external roles of the household. he then speaks on slaves being best possessions. he divides the slave's role in these terms:
<"Three things make up the life of a slave, work, punishment, and food."
which he brings into proper proportion.
<book 2, sections 1345b-1346a
aristotle speaks of 4 kinds of economy:
<"that of the king [royal economy], that of the provincial governor [satrapic economy], that of the city [political economy], and that of the individual [household]."
each have their roles to one another, and are mediated by various revenues;
<"Let us therefore examine royal economy first. It is universal in its scope, but has four special departments—the coinage, exports, imports, and expenditure […] Let us next take satrapic economy. Here we find six kinds of revenue—[from land, from the peculiar products of the district, from merchandise, from taxes, from cattle, and from all other sources] […] Thirdly, let us examine the economy of the city. Here the most important source of revenue is from the peculiar products of the country, next comes that derived from merchandise and customs, and lastly that which comes from the ordinary taxes. Fourthly and lastly, let us take individual economy. Here we find wide divergences, because economy is not necessarily always practised with one aim in view. It is the least important kind of economy, because the incomings and expenses are small. Here the main source of revenue is the land, next other kinds of regular activity, and thirdly investments of money. Further, there is a consideration which is common to all branches of economy and which calls for the most careful attention, especially in individual economy, namely, that the expenditure must not exceed the income."
the rest of the book is a series of surveys on different cities. we may then move on:

>aristotle, nicomachaen ethics (~350 B.C.)
<book 5, chapter 5, lines 1-19
aristotle describes the notion of reciprocity in terms of commodity exchange. he begins by presupposing a division of labour, which allows men to trade their particular commodities with others on the basis of a proportion which grants equality. this equality, he stipulates, must be a condition of commensurability, which he assigns to money. money grants equality to unequal things. money, he says, represents the demand for goods, and sees that supply and demand determine prices, which allow exchange. he also sees that money is a creation of the state, so is an early "chartalist" theorist of money. this passage has equally confused karl marx (capital, vol. 1, ch. 1, sct. 3) and murray rothbard (history of economic thought, vol. 1, ch. 1, sct. 3), yet aristotle's meaning is quite clear to any honest reader.
>aristotle, rhetoric (350-330 B.C.)
<book 1, chapter 7, lines 14-15
here, aristotle describes the paradox of value, or the inverse proportion between a commodity's value in use and exchange. he identifies this, but reverses its cause, basing the quantity labour in demand for scarcity, rather than the opposite relation.
>aristotle, politics (335-323 B.C.)
<book 1, sections 1256a-1258b
we see in this first place, that aristotle is separating the "economic" (οἰκονομικῇ) from "wealth-getting" (χρηματιστικῇ) or "chrematistics". the economic, aristotle considers natural and necessary, while of chrematistics, he considers this unnatural and unnecessary. marx explicitly signifies these modes of activity as the respective circuits of commerce: C-M-C and M-C-M:
>zur kritik der politischen ökonomie, chapter 3, section a, footnote 17
>capital, vol. 1, chapter 4, footnote 6
aristotle further associates χρηματιστικῇ (what can otherwise be translated as "finance") with usury, which he says is the most hated form of wealth-getting. this line of thought apparently massively inspired medieval thinking (e.g. thomism).

aristotle further envisions that the cause of civic strife, crime and revolution is wealth inequality, or class contradiction, so seeks to mediate conflict by expanding the middle class (a strategy as old as time):
>aristotle, politics (335-323 B.C.)
<book 4, sections 1295b-1296a
he associates the [golden] mean between rich and poor a rational principle, based in moderation (which he carries into ethics).
<book 5, section 1308b
as a solution to class inequality therefore, aristotle suggests a manner of redistribution, where the rich and poor are collapsed into the same middle class. this is also part of his ethics of friendship. a friendship involves sharing between members, and the friendship is more ideal than the romance (as we may read from plato's "lysis", where the term "platonic relationship" originates, as a mode of intimacy greater than any other, because it isnt corrupted by unnecessary desires). aristotle is not advocating for common ownership, like plato's guardians however, but still retains the right to private property:
<book 2, section 1263a
aristotle promotes the ideal of friendship in the view of property, that man should possess his own, but also share it:
<"Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when everyone has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because everyone will be attending to his own business […] For, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use with them [.] It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition."
aristotle's conception then is a society of friends. there is one glaring unconscious to all this sentimentality however:
<"For, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use with them. The Lacedaemonians, for example, use one another’s slaves, and horses, and dogs, as if they were their own; and when they lack provisions on a journey, they appropriate what they find in the fields throughout the country."
aristotle conceives of freedom and equality, but only exclusively to the free. of slavery, he necessarily justifies it as part of his worldview. this then shows the limits of aristotle's thoughts on the matter.

this concludes my ancient bibliography. 🙂

>>2378214
>>2378239
>>2377350
>>2377328

i have no words to thank your efforts, anons, this was much more than i ever expected.

I have made a thread about ancient economy, if anyone would like to add something to this discussion i recommend to go there, see the catalogue.

>>2377350
>What happened in modern times to create the "capitalist", the inventor of technology and that which led to the dominance of technology that never existed before then, was a singular event particularly to a stage of history where technology could claim something that no technology could.
yes and no. the ancients had extremely sophisticated machines. myths of hephaestus even tell us that he created androids, so the technical consciousness was there, it was just subordinate to other areas of life. today it is reversed; even our leaders are subordinate to capital. capital, therefore, is the social subject, while in previous epochs, it was political power. it depends on your sense of causation, but capitalism and the protestant reformation came out of the same birth, and the protestant empires conquered the world. is capitalism then a form of protestant worship, or is protestantism the religion of capitalism? marx makes comment:
<"The cult of money has its asceticism, its self-denial, its self-sacrifice – economy and frugality, contempt for mundane, temporal and fleeting pleasures; the chase after the eternal treasure. Hence the connection between English Puritanism, or also Dutch Protestantism, and money-making." [grundrisse, notebook 2, on money, cont.]
<"for such a [capitalist] society, Christianity with its cultus of abstract man, more especially in its bourgeois developments, Protestantism, Deism, &c., is the most fitting form of religion" [capital vol. 1, ch. 1, sct. 4]
murray rothbard also sees the relation between bourgeois economics and a protestant notion of labour's value, as against a catholic concept of "just price":
<"Great Britain, heavily influenced by Calvinist thought and culture, and its glorification of the mere exertion of labour, came to develop a labour theory of value, while France and Italy, still influenced by Aristotelian and Thomist concepts, continued the scholastic emphasis on the consumer and his subjective valuation as the source of economic value." [history of economic thought, vol. 1, ch. 5, sct. 4]
rothbard also correctly identifies many other facets of modernity as essentially "protestant", as opposed to catholic.
>their economy is "slave society" and there were no free workers or concept of such, both of which are thoroughly modern conceits that serve modern bigotries.
i completely agree, and according from your following comments, we might even see how there has literally never been more slavery in human history than today, not just figuratively. also, as many note, wage workers give more labour today than serfs ever did. this is why a linear "historical materialist" outlook is inherently corrupted in my opinion. as for justifying slavery, engels does this in anti-duhring:
<"We should never forget that our whole economic, political and intellectual development presupposes a state of things in which slavery was as necessary as it was universally recognised. In this sense we are entitled to say: Without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism." [anti-duhring, part 2, chapter 4]
if we look at contemporary anthropology, we of course see that majesties like the great pyramids were created by skilled wage workers, not slaves. what then is the cause of slavery? certainly not an imperative to production, lest capital would request slave labour as its means. the issue with economistic thinking is imagining everything as a means to an end, rather than seeing that some things as ends in themselves.

>>2379497
>what then is the cause of slavery?
The only way to answer that is that slavery must have to do with what you said about political power being the social subject

>>2379758
in the indian caste system for example, "caste" (वर्ण) can be transliterated as varṇa, which means "colour". the 4 castes are then based on this order (e.g. manusmirti). there is a material basis, but the division of labour itself is contingent on prejudicial factors (the same caste system is promoted by plato in "republic", based on "metals" within a person's soul). its the same way that what we call "capitalism" is in some way inherently "western", even if a global system. thats why as henry ford writes in "the international jew", that jews excel in mercanrile affairs, so are adaptive to capitalism, yet its for this very cause that they are hated, like any immigrant who "takes" a person's job. to over-conform to expectations is to encounter an exclusion based on inclusion, so this speaks to something more. why can you never eradicate racism from capitalism? if youre poor, they blame your race, if you are rich, they blame your race. as far as i see, there is no great difference between class and race; so then, is capitalism a caste system? i would say so. its this irreducible element which then makes class position a contingency rather than necessity.

this song by john lennon, "working class hero" also gives us the truth; that class is a reality most internalised by those most subject to it; "they hate you if youre clever, and despise a fool". class means you are guilty either way. this is why i think there will never be a working class revolution either, because once you believe in the identity, you become bound by it. stalin's enslaving notions of "proletarianisation" highlight this fact. the best servant is a proud servant. this is all you get on the bottom; bragging rights for how much you break your back for your masters.

>>2379497
You know absolutely nothing about reality and technology, having replaced it with ideology and the most insane Germanic conceits. For one, the ancients certainly did not build androids, and only had the vaguest conception of such a machine.
One thing that should be kept in mind is that the writing that comes down did not have a genre of "science" or "science fiction" or "applied sciences" as we have it today. The naturalist was in part a philosopher and another part a polymath that integrated what we know as physics, chemistry, biology, anatomy, zoology, and various other disciplines that would today be conflated as "Earth sciences". There were also very few people who became naturalists, since it wasn't a field of writing that produced obvious benefits or outcomes. The kind of writing that would lead to mechanization and the production of machines was something for the lower classes to work out, none of which survives and only fragments of which were present in the rare engineer or philosopher who was really important like Archimedes. You can see in Archimedes mechanical knowledge that wouldn't be reproduced for centuries, but it was all in this one guy who was too busy building those machines to take on students or create a school. There is also nothing like our concept of schooling or the university. The only thing that is sort of like that is Plato's Academy, whose function was really to reproduce an aristocratic faction rather than the functions universities took on.

>what then is the cause of slavery?
Slavery as a practice can be found in very primitive societies. It was known to the American Indians of North America, and very prevalent among the Maya, Aztec, and Inca who left behind records and saying regarding slavery as an institution. The institution of slavery is necessary for slavery as a practice to persist and be valued as anything other than an ad hoc domination of some person by another. The dominance of wives by the men is only realized by institutions upholding patriarchal society, and without that, patriarchy as a sentiment or a "just so fact" has little going for it.

If your argument is that only "bad" people would enslave others, or that there was some primordial sin that allowed slavery to exist in the world, you do not understand slavery as a situation, let alone as an institution. Germanics use this language to confuse deliberately everything about slavery, because they hold freedom in the genuine sense in the utmost contempt.

So far as there is a "singular origin" of the slave power, which is to say the institution of slavery, it originates in ritual sacrifice and the exultant celebration of such. There are no slaves without a lowest class subjected to the utmost depravities humans are capable of. Without a lowest class, there is nothing real to enforce the status of slavery that is clear and present. Slavery as a story or narrative has no substance, and in practice, if a slave is to be employed in an useful work, the slave requires enough autonomy to be allowed to do the thing the master wants. This meant that unless you were one of the slaves selected to be tortured for the amusement of the master, or a slave punished severely to set the example which was the moral education of slaves, you had some existence apart from the master, and it wasn't necessary or desirable for the master to invade that space for the sake of feeling "bigga". The Germanic only understands "bigga", because the Germanic is the dumbest of animals and a natural slave to their conceits. This came about because the Germans were never great slavers, never great conquerors, and envied the empires that did conquer and have slaves, colonies, and effective models of exploitation. The only thing Germans understand is drinking, raping, killing, fomenting bullshit religious wars as an excuse for those things, and arranging famines and ritual sacrifices of their own people because their stupid race can't stop themselves from killing each other before they decided to shit up all of Europe and then the world. Every aspect of their verbiage is disgusting and I can't stand their stupid smugness and insistence to lecture other cultures about things members within those cultures understand very well in their own history and knowledge handed down by their families. They do this to everyone and it's the most insulting garbage, yet they're getting away with it because they installed themselves in the institutions. What an insidious and disgusting race.

Anyway, there wasn't an ulterior motive or necessity to slavery, like the master would surely die if they didn't have a slave contract to feel like they're in charge. Most societies didn't have nearly enough slaves to do all of the labor to be done, and Rome was not exceptional on this. The Romans employed the freedman who was a former slave but had legal status, and freeborn citizens worked all of the time on various projects, typically disregarded by history since there wasn't a whole lot for them to produce. In every society that practiced slavery, the slaves were an alien population that was in excess of what they considered the actual society, and in principle all of the slaves could be exterminated and life would continue much as it had before. The slaves were a claim on wealth and value that masters had no reason to exterminate so wantonly, and the openly democidal aims of the later eugenic creed were both impossible to implement and too monstrous to consider even for the regularly brutal ancients. It may be odd to someone who is Germanic brained, but most humans do not particularly enjoy the torture and extermination of other humans, and find it even harder without having a particularly good reason—an ACTUAL reason—for such a course of action, which would have to be done manually and for no apparent benefit. The slaves are not going to rebel most of the time, and have nothing but their own bodies to rebel with, with no notion of what a society without slavery meant. It really starts not even with eugenics or the technical possibility of exterminating large numbers of humans quickly with no possibility of hiding, but with this Germanic philosophy that intended the democidal, Absolute impulse not just for slaves but for all of the world, all humans, against any concept of humanism civilization might have held. The eugenists took this philosophy, saw how it could be purposed for their mission, and intensified all of its monstrosities to the maximum. Then their religion was purified in the late 20th century, and we're presently living through the results of that. What is happening today is a very new thing, unprecedented in human history, and that is one reason why the ruling ideas violently shout that nothing new is possible and insist that we must relitigate 1914 forever until "history is corrected".

Anyway my point wasn't that the ancients had no thought about money (I said the exact opposite), but that they had no equivalent of "economics" because technology remained mostly stable. The things you would purchase with money remained crops, swords, armor, buildings, the salaries of officers and bureaucrats, and so on. There wasn't any sense of investing in "technology" as a going concern of the state or the empire. At most the Empire considered surplus on the arts and letters a distraction or a way to pay off elites to write whatever they liked. That is still at core what science and university funding is; a way to distribute largesse to elites. The real difference is that in modernity, technological advance made a vast difference in what forces a state could bring to bear, in conflict, in production, and in how the subjects lived their daily life. These things changed very little over the centuries in the ancient world, and when they did change, the history emphasized which wars were fought, which men claimed power, and the particular policy of the ruler which was a response to the events of their reign. There wasn't the same thinking about a "system", in the way there were various "American systems" during the 19th century or the "systems" of modern commonwealths to manage these affairs in a new manner. There was a sense rulers had about how their society was arranged and what they had to do to continue the arrangement, but the overall aims of the system were constant because the Empire couldn't conceive of being much different than it was. What the Empire looked for was how to win their wars, and their foresight only could see more wars until the whole world was conquered, which was so far into the future that it was highly speculative to say what would change. Where there were speculations about such a situation, they were primarily philosophical or religious texts, which is what Republic is. Nothing like that society was anywhere near realization, and that wasn't the point of the book. The reality of human existence is that regardless of the "system" in place, the lives of human beings were the same. They still needed the same things, ate the same type of food, fought with weapons and tactics that advanced more by contact with rivals than any notion of technological progress, and the lives of most people were consigned to some type of slavery and no real purpose to existence. The thought and activity that corresponded to today's zeal for technological progress was found in religion, and Christianity is basically the religious form of Plato's Republic plus commentaries on it.

>>2383364
>the ancients certainly did not build androids, and only had the vaguest conception of such a machine.
hephaestus was a god of arts and crafts. it is said by hesiod that he even created woman herself. the notion of mechanical humanoids is also communicated in homers' iliad. my point is that to even have the concept of automaton speaks to a technical consciousness in the people. also, you are implicitly devaluing the magnificent work of the ancients based in modernist prejudice. if you sent back iphones to ancient greece, it wouldnt be as alien as you imagine, even if technically incomprehensible, the same way the automoble is just an improvement on the chariot.
>The naturalist was in part a philosopher
its no different today. there is no "pure" scientific research.
>There is also nothing like our concept of schooling or the university. The only thing that is sort of like that is Plato's Academy, whose function was really to reproduce an aristocratic faction rather than the functions universities took on.
are you this naive? look up "skull and bones society members", or better yet, look at the entrance fee for harvard. there is nothing "universal" in university.
>If your argument is that only "bad" people would enslave others, or that there was some primordial sin that allowed slavery to exist in the world, you do not understand slavery as a situation, let alone as an institution.
slavery always employed unskilled labour, so there was no material necessity for slavery; thats my argument. wage labour has always existed alongside slavery also, which depletes the marxist sophistics that in the past, all labour has been an object, rather than subject.
>There are no slaves without a lowest class subjected to the utmost depravities humans are capable of.
reading ancients speak of slaves doesnt come across as class domination, but objectification, or dehumanisation. thats why aristotle can speak of the injustices of poverty, while taking slavery for granted. its not a class concept, but a natural concept. also, reading homer, the only brutality inflicted against people is soldiers against soldiers, besides achilles' furious human sacrifice of 12 young boys to patrocles.
>So far as there is a "singular origin" of the slave power, which is to say the institution of slavery, it originates in ritual sacrifice and the exultant celebration of such.
not from what ive read. slavery appears to originate from debts, hence the term "debt slave". this was also the charge given against negroes in america. in "robinson crusoe", robinson is originally freed by portugese sailors, who acquire a negro slave from him, and claim that he may be freed given a certain amount of penance (i.e. 10 years). this is also in the bible, where jacob acts as a slave for 7 years, consecutively. so slavery has always had these sorts of conditions, like we may read in charlotte bronte's "jane eyre", where a maidservant was hired for a fixed time, only receiving allowances, besides the wage granted her for thr fulfilment of the term. in another english novel, frances hodgson's "the secret garden", we see in the master's joyful return, to give the peasants on his land a gold coin. they are not pardoned from a debt, but only temporarily immune. so slavery begins by this manner of dependence, which incurs a debt (which in feudalism, was actually payable, but today is not). if the ancients saw mortgage plans, they would say that this is literally slavery, for example.

>>2383418
>The thought and activity that corresponded to today's zeal for technological progress was found in religion, and Christianity is basically the religious form of Plato's Republic plus commentaries on it.
so in the end you are forced to agree with me, that capitalism is inherently protestant? lol.

>>2383502
the bants on that vid are legendary

Can someone explain to me the relationship between profit margin and determing the price of an item?

We all know that in "ideal" capitalism the price is set by considering cost of production and consumers willing to pay it. But how does it really work? That is to say: how inflated prices really are compared to their production cost? We saw that during the COVID pandemia prices rose, and afterwards stayed the same even though they should lower again. How does this work? How much profit is artificial?

>>2379497
>hephaestus even tell us that he created androids
lmao
>>2383502
>the same way the automoble is just an improvement on the chariot
yes nothing ever changes in fact change is impossible. zeno confirmed. communism btfo. we should all give up and become liberals. this is of course very serious and not a joke.

>>2384419
>yes nothing ever changes
things change; but the more things change, the more they stay the same. time is the moving image of eternity: λόγος
<"Now it was the [God's] nature to be eternal, but it isn’t possible to bestow eternity fully upon anything that is begotten. And so he began to think of making a moving image of eternity: at the same time as he brought order to the universe, he would make an eternal image, moving according to number, of eternity remaining in unity. This number, of course, is what we now call “time.” [plato - timaeus, 37d]
<"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun." [ecclesiastes 1:9]
>>2384329
>We all know that in "ideal" capitalism the price is set by considering cost of production and consumers willing to pay it. But how does it really work? That is to say: how inflated prices really are compared to their production cost?
adam smith proposes that market prices (determined by supply and demand) equilibrate toward their costs of production (natural price), over a certain period. this is also marx's view, which is a presupposition granted to him by special reference to the ricardian thomas tooke's work "history of prices" in which he attempts to combat the view that prices are determined by the money supply, and looks at the elements of production instead, in order to ground a labour theory of value. if we take this classical understanding then, a commodity's production cost is its "real price" to which everything gravitates. the point on inflation is what keynes wrote; that it exists as a tax, but a tax on whom? keynes generalises the phenomena, but from the market we see all prices rise except the wage. inflation then is not the raising of value, but the diminishing of the value of the wage. if wages were adjusted for inflation for example, prices would level out to a more acceptable level. "artificial" profits then do not occur from over-pricing commodities (which is rent, not profit), but decreasing the value of the wage, or exploiting labour.

Can someone explain what Anwar Shaikh and real economics is about?

>>2384794
as adam smith says,
<"Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only." [wealth of nations, chapter 5]
anwar shaikh maintains this distinction, between "real" and "nominal" value. he makes this argument, which relates to my earlier comment upon inflation lowering the real wage of workers:
<"Finally, if buying prices remained unchanged at pcn= 0.7, pir= 5.25 while sell-ing prices were doubled to pcn= 1.4, pir= 10.50, nominal profits would be boosted because sales would be doubled while costs remained unchanged. If workers are unable to maintain their real wage because they are unable to raise their money wages to match the new higher prices, then the fall in their real wage would expand the surplus product in the next round. This can be important in practice when inflation serves to reduce the real wage […] That is to say, real profits adjusted for inflation would be unchanged [.] The foregoing exercises lead to a simple rule for measuring economic profits. First, derive nominal economic profits by applying the same current-period prices to material and labor inputs as to outputs. Second, derive real economic profits by deflating nominal profits by the general price index, whose level will itself depend on the period chosen to be the base […] As noted, these are adjustments designed to distinguish real economic profit from nominal profit." [anwar shaikh - capitalism: competition, conflict, crises - chapter 6, part 3, section 2-3]
put most simply, the real economy measures the purchasing power of wages. wages can "rise" in price, but have less value; this then shows the difference. anwar also appears to be part of "the new school", which michael hudson is part of.

todd mcgowan explains economic value as a "negative" magnitude expressed as sublimity. the "inutility" or "disutility" of an item is the measure of its value to todd, where the the commodity form itself acts as a lacanian "objet a" or german anstoß, whereby a medium simultaneously impedes an object, as it realises it. the function of packaging for an item thus obscures the use-value content, so in opening a package, the value itself is eradicated. the inacessibility of the object is the conservation of its value, thus. the commodity can therefore be separated between two terms; its pleasure and enjoyment - pleasure to freud is finite, while enjoyment (or "drive") exceeds pleasure (the death drive compels us to self-destruction for example, so value can be understood as a signifier which demands our sacrifice, but is itself only the becoming of its purchase). todd links this to marx's division between "necessary" and "surplus" labour. that which exceeds necessity is a commodity's surplus value, which is expressed as sublime emptiness, to todd. this is realised in consumption, where the capitalist can only realise value by appealing to the unconscious. to todd therefore, there are 3 aspects of the commodity: its being in-itself (use-value), its mediated packaging (objet a) and das ding/empty singularity (value).

todd's message then is that capitalists attempt to sell disutility as utility, which must be recognised in its reversal. this is also where todd criticises marx, as a thinker who constitutes value by a commodity's use (where todd has previously called marx a "right-wing" thinker for attempting to overcome alienation). todd then defends the form of value, but seeks to bring it into social recognition, as a lacking subjectivity. todd's speculative project may then perhaps be a post-capitalist commodity production.

i similarly defend the form of value, but seek to shift its subjectivity, so am sympathetic to todd. capital is the god of the age, but we will have new gods in the future. the error of utopianism is attempting to abolish our alienation in place of immediacy, since in this, there can be no self-conception, and so no knowledge. knowledge depends upon a barrier to knowledge, ironically. the mind is only a medium, therefore.

Any good modern books (made after 2000s) about political economy, economy of socialist society and general economics?

>>2390777
Finally it happened, a poster more deranged than Smith poster has entered the chat.

j.m. keynes mentions silvio gesell with glowing praise in his "general theory" (1936). he says that gesell is the positive thinker who transcends the marxian doctrine:
<"I believe that the future will learn more from the spirit of Gesell than from that of Marx. The preface to The Natural Economic Order will indicate to the reader, if he will refer to it, the moral quality of Gesell.  The answer to Marxism is, I think, to be found along the lines of this preface." [general theory, ch. 23, sct. 6]
gesell himself appears to be an anti-communist proudhonist, promoting "the new economic order" as a "third possibility" between capitalism and state socialism. what then, is this "order"?
<"The economic order here discussed is a natural order only in the sense that it is adapted to the nature of man [.] a man is to be free to act as his nature dictates, religion, custom and law must extend him their protection when, in his economic life, he is guided by justified egoism-when he obeys the impulse of self- preservation given him by nature [.] The Natural Economic Order must, therefore, be founded upon self-interest [.] In the Natural Economic Order founded upon egoism everyone must be assured the full proceeds of his own labour, and must be allowed to dispose of these proceeds as he thinks fit [.] By the Natural Economic Order we mean [that] leadership falls to the fittest, an order in which all privileges are abolished, in which the individual, obeying the impulse of egoism, goes straight for his, aim, undisturbed [.] The Natural Economic Order might also be called the "Manchester System", the economic order which has been the ideal of all true lovers of freedom-an order standing by itself without intervention from outside, an order in which the free play of economic forces would rectify the blunders of State-Socialism and short-sighted official meddling [.] The economists forgot, or did not wish to see, that for a natural development the proletariat must be given the right of reconquering the land with the same weapons by which it was taken from them. Instead of this, the Manchester economists appealed to the State [.] They did not know that money makes interest the condition of its services, that commercial crises, the deficit in the budget of the earning classes and unemployment are simply effects of the traditional form of money. The Manchester ideals and the gold standard are incompatible. In the Natural Economic Order, Free-Land and Free-Money win eliminate the unsightly, disturbing, dangerous concomitants of the Manchester system, and create the conditions necessary for a truly free play of economic forces [.] Natural selection in its full, miraculous effectiveness is then restored […] The Natural Economic Order will be technically superior to the present, or to the communistic order." [the natural economic order, 1918 preface]
gesell's anti-communism is developed here:
<"Bolshevism or communism may be possible in a primitive state of society, such as is still found in rural parts of Russia, but such prehistoric economic forms cannot be applied to a highly developed economic system founded on the division of labour. The European has outgrown the tutelage inseparable from communism. He must be free not alone from capitalistic exploitation, but also from meddling official intervention, which is an integral part of social life based on communism. For this reason we shall experience failure after failure in the present attempts at nationalising industry. The communist, the advocate of the system of common property, stands at the extreme right wing, at the entrance-door of social development. Communism is therefore the most extreme form of reaction. The Natural Economic Order, on the contrary, is the programme of action, of progress, of the fugleman on the extreme left. Transitional stages, merely, lie between. [the new economic order's] ideal is the ideal of the personality responsible for itself alone and liberated from the control of others-the ideal of Schiller, Stirner, Nietzsche and Landauer." [the natural economic order, 1920 preface]
we may then read of his proudhonist anti-marxism:
<"Proudhon, indeed, has not been entirely forgotten, but he has never been properly understood. If his advice had been understood and acted on, there would now be no such thing as capital [.] No capitalist is afraid of [marx's] theory, just as no capitalist is afraid of the Christian doctrine; it is therefore positively an advantage to capital to have Marx and Christ discussed as widely as possible, for Marx can never damage capital." [part 1, introduction]
gesell's economic criticism of marx is from gesell's own perspective; that "surplus-value" is just a form of rent or capital-interest (where he later says that all deductions of rent and interest confer the value from the labour of the capitalist - or in more classical terms, what is derivable as a revenue from the employment of stock - or what is returned from marx's notion of "cost-price"). "profit" to gesell is a superfluous category. this is given from his further comments against marx:
<"Marx succumbs to a popular fallacy and holds that capital consists of material goods. For Proudhon, on the contrary, interest is not the product of material goods, but of an economic situation, a condition of the market. Marx regards surplus-value as spoil resulting from the abuse of a power conferred by ownership. For Proudhon surplus-value is subject to the law of demand and supply. According to Marx, surplus-value must invariably be positive. For Proudhon the possibility of negative surplus-value must be taken into consideration. (Positive surplus-value is surplus-value on the side of supply, that is, of the capitalist, negative surplus-value is surplus-value on the side of labour)." [part 1, introduction]
what gesell appears to be implying is that surplus-value is a relationship created by the circulation of money; that profit is not accumulation, but conditional privation, and therefore monopoly. this indeed is the logic of rents, yet rents cannot command production, but only enforce extraction. this is where the positivity of profit must be understood. gesell's focus on money thus shows how he sees effective demand determining rates of interest and production (where if interest was lowered, production would increase, therefore abolishing surplus, and so capital), which goes toward keynes' point.

keynes reverses the classical postulate that "supply creates its own demand" by seeking to increase this proudhonist "negative surplus" to foster market solutions. as we may even read from william petty's "verbum sapienti" (1665) however, the suggestion for public use of labour (ch. 10) carries the implication that there is a limited supply based in heightened demand - the disequilibrium between supply and demand is even characterised by petty in an outline of increased labour power produced from "arts" (machines). in sharp wit, he says that one man may produce the labour of five, therefore performing the acts vainly sought by polygamy. this shows then that between men's employment and their possibility, there is lacking potential. a difficulty of the capitalist imagination then, is in conceiving of a natural decline in aggregate demand based in sufficient supply of goods. what gesell and keynes really differ with marx on then, is seeing the limits of production as merely the constraints of consumption. over-production is underconsumption. what marx and the austrian school converge on then, is determining the marginal disutility of goods as a metric of equilibrium (keynes precisely sees the marginal disutility of capital producing business cycles, yet wants to expand their utility by heightening aggregate demand through monetary stimulation). gesell's "free money" paired with keynes' aggregate demand calculations then display either a "new liberalism" or "natural economic order", as it distances itself from either state socialism or lasseiz-faire. this is a self-described "third possibility":
<"The abuses of this epoch in the realms of Government are Fascism on the one side and Bolshevism on the other. Socialism offers no middle course, because it also is sprung from the presuppositions of the Era of Abundance, just as much as laissez-faire individualism and the free play of economic forces, before which latter, almost alone amongst men, the City Editors, all bloody and blindfolded, still piteously bow down. The transition from economic anarchy to a regime which deliberately aims at controlling and directing economic forces in the interests of social justice and social stability, will present enormous difficulties both technical and political. I suggest, nevertheless, that the true destiny of New Liberalism is to seek their solution." [j.m. keynes, "am i a liberal?", 1925]
we see a conceptual chain therefore, between a positive notion of value, toward increasing negativity. marx and the classicals locate profit as the fund of capital's expansion and mobilisation (positive supply). with the austrian school, we see value being a determination of diminished returns on produced goods, equalising the market at rates on this scale (decreasing demand). in gesell, we see value as a negative potential, given from the demand of labour against the constriction of money by rent and interest (negative supply). in keynes, we see debt itself become the dominant logic of value, based in deficit spending (accumulated negativity). today, this is how we understand value - as a circulating debt rather than a circulating portion of goods. has "new liberalism" then succeeded by shifting the very ontology of value (by revealing its essence as a negative magnitude)?

>>2391175
here's the true derangement,
i am smithposter 🫢

now, what is interesting in the development of gesell's emphasis on "unearned income" over profit as the source of exploitation, is that it leads to normative, rather than scientific, estimations as to these evils. for this purpose, this anon: >>2343354 correctly intuits the immanent antisemitism which attaches itself to a notion of parasitism via unproductive labour. as a point of exposition, we may read from the foundational text of german national socialism, rudolf jung's "der nationale sozialismus" (1919);
<"Pure-Land-Reformers [henry george, etc.] subscribe to the idea that ground-rent is the source of all present-day social evils; its total or partial confiscation for the benefit of the general public is, for them, sufficient enough to remedy all harm. We, on the other hand, share the view of the Free-Economists (Silvio Gesell) that interest also constitutes a form of unearned income, and deduce from this that a second course of action is still required: the breaking of interest-slavery. This shall be brought about through monetary- or currency-reform." [der nationale sozialismus, "abolition of unearned income", section a]
here, the national socialists expressly attach themselves to the ideas of gesell. if we compare the ideas of "unearned income" to smith's notion of the "necessary" faculty of unproductive labour, the difference becomes clear:
<"The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured [.] Their service, how honourable, how useful, or how necessary soever, produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured." [wealth of nations, book 2, chapter 3]
smith then allows us to conceive of "necessary evil" (contradiction), while the utopianism of gesell and the nazis (and hudson) displays itself as an attempt to resolve contradiction, which seems to lead to disaster. waste, or excess, is then a necessary function of society. in psychoanalysis, this can be called the "unconscious"; a universal negativity which orients us by immanent signification.

In this article, the term ‘industrial policy’ refers to the aggregate of all policies undertaken by the state to influence the development, catch-up, and innovation of specific industries. According to this definition, industrial policy is a selective policy that focuses on specific industries, rather than a universal or functional policy applied broadly to most industries. The origins of this definition can be traced at least as far back as the theory of the developmental state.1

In contrast to this definition, some argue that industrial policy encompasses universal or functional policies such as strengthening infrastructure, promoting human capital investment, maintaining fair competition, and creating an efficient market environment. This alternative definition has two drawbacks: First, it tends to blur the boundaries between industrial policy and other policies such as investment policy, export policy, human resources policy, and even macroeconomic regulation. Second, it is susceptible to being co-opted by (neo)liberal economics, using the guise of universal policies to oppose selective industry policy.

In a 2023 working paper published by the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), several scholars, including the renowned economist Dani Rodrik, defined industrial policy as ‘those government policies that explicitly target the transformation of the structure of economic activity in pursuit of some public goal… a key characteristic is the exercise of choice and discretion by the public authorities, as in “We promote X but not Y”, though the latter part of this statement is typically left implicit’.2

In effect, what these scholars highlight is the role of selective industry policy in reshaping the division of labour within society. Similarly, in a speech delivered at the Brookings Institution in spring 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan interpreted the Biden administration’s industrial and innovation strategy through the lens of selective industry policy: ‘A modern American industrial strategy identifies specific sectors that are foundational to economic growth, strategic from a national security perspective, and where private industry on its own isn’t poised to make the investments needed to secure our national ambitions’.3

The formulation and implementation of industrial policy are critical aspects of economic governance in China’s socialist market economy. Industrial policy is essential in achieving socialist production objectives, addressing market failures, and promoting high-quality economic development….

https://thetricontinental.org/wenhua-zongheng-2025-1-industrial-policy-chinese-characteristics/

Can economics cause mental illness? I have a theory that the Austrian school of economics makes people crazy. Many of its members had problems with depression, anxiety and other disorders. It's no coincidence that we see nutcases like Milei, Moldbug and Thiel emanating from this ideology.

>>2392113
well, the austrian case against the notion of reciprocity in exchange causes them to consider the world in constant disequilibrium (or governed by unequal exchange), which might reflect some imbalance in their subjectivity. the concept of reciprocal exchange is present in the writings of aristotle (nicomachaen ethics 5.5, lines 1-19), where the exchange of goods confers an equality between them, commensurated by the medium of exchange (which represents demand). reciprocity is then understood as an equality predicated on supply and demand to achieve a proportional ratio. aristotle uses the example of "5 beds = 1 house" for example, to show how prices converge by equal values in exchange.

put most simply, if 2 items have the same price, then they exchange for the same value. now, carl menger mischaracterises adam smith (principles of economics, chapter 4), by reproducing his argument, in effect. to smith, men begin exchanging by trading a surplus of one good for another - this is also marx's opinion (capital vol. 1, ch. 2). menger further fails to make the critical leap from mere "value" to the division of value between its contradictory aspects - also theorised by aristotle (topics 1.7) and xenophon (oikonomikos, book 1-3). marx equally sees (capital vol. 1, ch. 2) that trade is facilitated by this distinction. a commodity is then internally contradicted between these two aspects, which form their values in use and exchange. menger only sees commodities as use-values, so cannot bridge the gap. ùse-values are inherently unequal, while exchange-values are inherently equal.

the austrian school then builds itself upon the foundation of inequality, leading to failures to properly abstract social phenomena. keynes is a greater theorist in this way, since he builds from the marginalism of the neoclassical and austrian schools by linking aggregate demand to the relative purchasing power of the public.

steve keen appears to be another academic charlatan. he first admits that he hasn't read marx in over 30 years, and thinks that the grundrisse was inspired by hegel's "phenomenology of right" (which he also admits to never reading). he claims that to marx, the value of money was entirely relative (a false assertion, given marx's value form; michael heinrich also repeats this lie to preserve marxist dogmatism). keen as a professional economist has never read adam smith (the same as warren moseler), so thinks that the division of value between its use and exchange was invented by marx's hegelianism. sourcing from his acclaimed book "debunking economics", he further omits attribution of this dichotomy to smith - but as i have written: >>2374542 sir james steuart already described this dichotomy 9 years before (1767) and aristotle milennia before, with xenophon even earlier. steve keen's monstrous mischaracterisation of marx is also presented here; he says that to marx, profit is the surplus utility of a commodity over its exchange-value, and tries to extrapolate this to machines. his conclusion therefore, is that machines generate profits by surplus utility. of course, marx already dismisses this by drawing from smith's decomposition of value, between capital stock and labour employed. capital cannot add to its own value, yet increases the productivity of men (already discussed by petty in 1665). the decline in the value of commodities is the bounty of their usefulness. keen, in identifying profit with utility, mistakes classical analysis for neoclassical rhetoric. keen's conclusion is that a falling rate of profit means an inability to expand social production, when of course, the rate of profit falls precisely in proportion to expanded rates of production. so keen is amateurish at best and deceptive at worst.