>>2550330(sorry I got distracted by something before completing my previous reply which was
>>2550359)
>okay, so they are different things and so can be spoken of separately.yet they interpenetrate, interconnect, and have ambiguity, and shouldn't be thought of as completely separate and not affecting one another. Recall that the stimulus behind this conversation was the following remark:
>>2548414<politics and economics are not the same thing.>how many self-proclaimed marxists would you estimate have actually read marx? how many anti-marxists do you think have actually read marx? see?Not enough of either, evidently, but it never surprises me anymore when people don't do the reading because people are the products of an alienating environment rife with burdens, exploitation, and distractions.
>her policies were a one-sided class war against the workers, including social conservatism, which limits individual freedom.When I hear "individual freedom" my first instinct is to question what that means for the person using the phrase. For someone like you, you would probably include freedom from exploitation as well as freedom to live as you please provided it does not harm anyone else. But for the bourgeoisie, "individual freedom" means the freedom of the individuals in the ruling class to exploit others. So there are mutually contradictory sorts of freedom. The freedom to exploit and the freedom from exploitation mutually exclude one another. The more people are free from being exploited, the fewer people are free to exploit. So you have to decide what kind of freedom, freedom to X, or freedom from X, you want to be available in society.
>you see the same contradiction in thatcher's mentor, friedman, who is a voluntarist until it comes to labour unions. the capitalist cant believe in the political power of the individual even if they ontologise them as slaves. the claim that society is only a series of individuals is also rhetorically used in rothbard's "for a new liberty" (1973) to prove that blaming "society" simply means blaming everybody else except yourself, which is true. Not necessarily, the individual is part of the society in the same way that the heart is part of the body. If the body takes in a lot of endotoxins and the body goes into septic shock from low blood pressure and poor circulation, it's not the heart's fault, the heart is just embedded in a context where it becomes less effective than usual. What uses is there in the heart "blaming itself" for being in a body that has taken in a bunch of endotoxins? Similarly if society is structured in such a way that poverty is endemic, there is not much use in the impoverished individuals blaming themselves. I suppose particularly talented individuals can escape a statistically likely situation, but even having "natural" talent or having the time and resources to cultivate talent through practice is largely the result of luck. People start off as helpless infants long before they reach a point where they are capable of changing society, and once they are capable of changing society, society has already turned them into a product. So there is reciprocal action between the individual and society, but very asymmetrical reciprocal action, and it is a very rare thing that one individual is put in a position to change society a lot, and usually only because they are, by chance, at the center of a powerful network of other individuals, rather than because they are particularly special.
> as smith also says, the self-interest of the citizen is substituted with the class interest of capitalists, as "wealth" is falsely identified with profit. wealth means higher wages, not profits. engels also says that "national wealth" (e.g. GDP) is a contradictory metric for the same reason.I agree with this and have no comments.
>we desire things that dont exist all the time. you are again confusing desire for demand. if you dont think that demand constitutes supply, take it up with marx.OK. no comment.
>>2550387>the natural price is itself a market price, as smith says:the natural price is the market price where the cost of production (labor inputs) are sufficient to explain the price itself. You only need supply and demand to explain deviations, or disequilibrium from that cost of production.
>again, if we qualify cost as labour, then we are ambiguous in what is quantified. its here that someone can claim that superintendence adds "labour" to the product for examplesuperintedence does add labour, but the capitalist is compensated not for that labour. Rather they are compensated through unpaid wages called profit, which they disguise by saying they are merely performing the superior task of superintending. In slavery, for example, we enslaved overseers performing labor of superintendence without compensation. They are more privileged than other slaves usually, but that is a consequence of a tiered hierarchy where they are the minority, rather than their labor-power (which costs their subsistence) being somehow more valuable.
>and its all indeterminate until we account for these factors by component prices (i.e. wages, rents, profits)If you restructure society in a revolutionary manner to no longer allow for rent, profit, or interest, and make what would have been become rent and profit as a collectively owned surplus kept aside for emergencies or for planned expansion of production based on projected population growth, you would, in my estimation, have achieved at least something like a lower stage of socialism. This is me talking, not Marx or Smith. As for the abolition of wages, you would just guarantee people have their needs met. Whether this is through a system of labor vouchers or something more modern is besides the point I think, though implementation details would matter in practice insofar as they could be gamed in a way to reintroduce exploitation. This is all possible insofar as people already produce through their labor, on average, more than they themselves need, at least as long as the sun continues to send Earth its energy. This is why surplus labor was exploited even in slavery and serfdom. Who fed the feudal lord's armies? "His" peasants.
>if we substitute "productiveness" for "intensity" then we have the exact same terms as jevons, and thus labour can be measured by its finished product. in the same way, jevons and marx perceive profit over wages to be a result of the duration of labour, and thus marginal product meeting lesser duration equates at higher wages. i have discussed all this before:OK. No remarks yet. I'll think about that for a while.
>(1) Cost of production determines supply.>(2) Supply determines final degree of utility.>(3) Final degree of utility determines value.>this simply appears to be the proper formulation of it.There is something which determines cost of production, and it is
<The amount of labor time required to produce a commodity under normal conditions of production, with the average degree of skill and intensity of labor prevalent in a given society.This is SNLT. And technology plays a central role in determining SNLT because it changes the average productivity of labor across society.