>"As a leader, one of the things that you need to understand is you need to stop looking at generative AI and AI and AI agents and all these things as just technical things that you go and approach. You need to think of them fundamentally differently. And I think the model you need to think of is that AI is labor. You wanna think about AI as the future that you use to augment your workforce and to give your workforce additional capacity. Every person in your workforce is going to be using AI to give them additional labor to support them. They're gonna become leaders. Now, some people think, well, this AI stuff, it's only really isolated to certain specific roles."
Dr. Jules White
Professor of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park
Vanderbilt University
>>2694136So what is that egghead saying? Everyone has phones and computers already. Whats the difference?
>>2694136How does AI not have labour power?
>>2694145Because it just doesnt okay!?
>>2694139Phones don't do labor either.
Not even can openers.
Dare I say not even fleshlights do labor.
>>2694148Yes, so whats the difference?
>>2694145Because it's a tool.
Maybe in 10 years it will be fully autonomous and this discussion will actually have some legs, but as it stands LLMs arent even close to even being able to mimic human speech flawlessly, let alone being able to sell their labour.
>>2694165I mean, it mimicks speech just fine. It's the content of the speech that's the issue. Mimicking speech is the only thing it can be perfect at.
>>2694130The way he frames this interaction is simply ridiculous on the face of it. It proves nothing, except that the repair process is already streamlined to the point repair workers post on reddit about it. His example of a "second expert opinion" is strictly equivalent to someone making a flowchart on their website, which would likely already exist if the average person had gas leak measuring equipment just lying around.
>>2694130>[Welcome to hell.]What exactly is so horrible about this?
>>2694136>still parroting debunked LTV >>2694145because machines are not humans, and they never will be. machines are
objects of human society, not subjects of it
>>2694247marx often makes the opposite point. if labour is objectified by entering into capital, then it is capital which acts as a subject that determines labour as an extension of itself.
>>2694145marx's point is that labour-power must be sold as a commodity for it to possess "value". so to marx, a slave or animal cannot produce surplus "value" even if they produce a surplus product (otherwise employing them would be entirely irrational). a machine is then analogous to a slave, since it is not personified by the social relation of wage labour. if machines could sell their labour-power, they would then take the place of man.
>>2694248>marx often makes the opposite point. if labour is objectified by entering into capital, then it is capital which acts as a subject that determines labour as an extension of itself.true, Capital itself has a will of its own and we are but slaves to it, including the bourgeoisie. but that doesn't really explain why workers create value and machines don't
>so to marx, a slave or animal cannot produce surplus "value" even if they produce a surplus product (otherwise employing them would be entirely irrational).this is honestly one of my biggest gripes with Marx. to Marx slaves do not create value - value is merely transferred from the slave itself to the product through depreciation, not through the creation of fresh value. why then bother with slaves at all? you could create as much value employing slave catchers in other industries, without having to deal with all those unsightly slaves
>if machines could sell their labour-power, they would then take the place of manbig if
>capital has will?
What?
until llm's start demanding social product above the constant capital advanced to maintain them, then it's just automation, and automation is a good thing.
>>2694318 (me)
which of course assumes these things actually work as well and are advancing as quickly as the silicon valley propagandists would have you believe, which we should all be very doubtful on both counts.
>>2694307>that doesn't really explain why workers create value and machines don'tvalue is a social construct and machines dont have society. thats the simplest way of understanding it. value only appears as a commodity, not anything else.
>to Marx slaves do not create value - value is merely transferred from the slave itself to the product through depreciation, not through the creation of fresh value. why then bother with slaves at all? its certainly a contradiction in marx's system, since it implies that slavery is unprofitable, which we know is false. its doubly controversial since if slaves create surplus value, then this also existed before capitalism. if we would accept that slaves produce surplus value then we must also see that a machine equally pays for itself, since it is more productive than any slave is.
>>2694130If AI was labor, it could choose.
AI is a tool, a machine that economizes labortime.
>AI is labor
things you say when you don't understand AI or labor
>>2694247>machines are objects of human society, not subjects of itThis is robophobia.
>>2694331Slaves produced value through their labor, just like the proletariat.
In the slave mode of production, slaves generated surplus labor, e.g. working beyond subsistence to produce for non-workers.
In the feudal mode of production, serfs were freed as slaves, but still chained to the land and forced to work for non-workers. The surplus labor starts generating surplus product.
Surplus Value is the monetary form of surplus labor. It only exists when production is organized for the market and labor itself becomes a commodity (wage labor). Marx argued that while "embryonic" forms of value-exchange existed in ancient trade, surplus value as a systematic engine of accumulation is unique to the capitalist mode of production.
>>2695055There is already a market for AI labour since AI companies charge rents for access to AIs.
>>2695061You can rent an empty lot, doesn't mean it produces value
>>2694130Isn't this analogous to claiming the cotton gin was 'labor'?
>>2694485Maybe he has made a big investment and understands very well that this is bullshit.
>>2694237>LTV debunkeda capitalist,
on average (not always, but on average), will not pay a worker more than the amount of revenue that worker creates for the company while working. that's the core insight. there's much more to it obviously, but you aren't going to read Capital. We all know that.
>>2695067constant capital is dead labor. variable capital is living labor. all machines which abridge labor processes are products of past labor, and require fuel and upkeep, just like people do.
>>2695062Land has basically nothing economically in common with AI. It seems that the nu-left's rejection of AI has left you all unprepared to deal with the economic fallout of artificial labour.
>>2695161Copyrights are a form of rent seeking, AI is sort of progressive in that it completely decimates the concept
>>2695061you cant rent any sort of machine, why are llms so different?
>>2695161The point I'm making is that it's not the renting of property that makes value, it's the input of labor that does.
What good is an ai without human labor using it?
>>2695174>AI is sort of progressive in that it completely decimates the conceptIt doesn't. It means that a small time musician can have an AI filed DMCA complaint against their original work. Only billionaires have rights now.
>>2695183They have enough cognition to participate in labour markets. Industrial robots could never do this. AIs will sell their services on LinkedIn soon.
>>2695209What good is human labour without being supplemented by machines? I'm not sure why you're moving the goal posts like this.
>>2695309>What good is human labour without being supplemented by machines?Human society existed before machines, and ai is not sentient. Open AI advertising on LinkedIn doesn't mean shit. It's a bubble that needs to keep pumping hype to try and reach escape velocity for the inevitable pop.
I'm not sure why you're concern trolling.
>>2695174AI would cease to exist at the capacity it does without copyright, which is why AI antis are copyright abolitionist outside of twitter.
>>2695309>They have enough cognition to participate in labour marketsno they don't
>AIs will sell their services on LinkedIn soonyou could probably already set up a script to automatically prompt an ai to write up an advertisement and post it on linkedin, but it wouldn't be the AI "selling it's service" obviously
>>2695183>you cant rent any sort of machineWhat do you mean? You absolutely can. It's a cornerstone of the "business to business" market. One capitalist firm use a machine for a limited amount of time for a specific task/project, and the other charges a rent because it assumes the upkeep costs of the machine. It's not always profitable for a company to outright buy a machine, owning a machine implies long-term maintenance and this can be costly.
>>2695407oh sorry, i typed cant instead of can, i meant to type can
>>2695067Yes. It is! It's analogue to treating all machine tools as labor, the point is to mystify the relationship between technology and human beings. Instead of you understand that AI is a technology that human beings use, youre supposed to be confused about the difference between human beings and technology. This difference is never confused by the pedophile eugenicist who owns the datacetner. But only the people who are at their mercy don't understand who or what is causing their suffering, or even that they are human.
>>2694237Machines aren't laborers? Obviously? Why do you think the Epstein associate in the OP is trying to confuse you about this obvious point?
capitalism is so not real now that I'm turning to stealing and my life is more authentic than ever
>>2695418>But only the people who are at their mercy don't understand who or what is causing their suffering, or even that they are human.Good point. The same applies to the maga cultist who doesn't realize they follow a highly organized cult curated by the same pedo eugenicists. Perhaps the older ones were once capable of acting humanely but the younger ones appear to have been born into it and don't know any better. This lack of agency precludes the critical thinking necessary to freely choose to act against the cult. The familiarity of confirmation bias gives them a sense of belonging, unless in the cases of tokens being spent.
ai is labor if and only if it does the same things a human does.
If an ai is capable of making demands for being paid to work, and then turning around and spending its own money to take care of its own needs, then it's going to be labor in the way humans labor. Not making money FOR someone else who then pays for it, the AI has to be handling its own finances.
This requires someone who is going to basically be going out of their way to create new AI workers when there's already plenty of human workers.
A1 is just a program with an expensive overhead contingent upon an energy supply powering gpus and ram and dependent on user input from the aggregate side and the controller side. Otherwise it's a brick. Without regulation as a tool it will primarily be used to commit fraud. Since it has such a contingent existence, it can never be charged with a crime.
>>2694331>value is a social construct and machines dont have societythat's what I said
>its certainly a contradiction in marx's systemI'm not sure it's a contradiction. instead I think we should maybe consider that like all other MoPs, all forms of labor power depreciates, and we should account for this depreciation. like, labor could add value both through depreciation and by creating fresh value. this way we can speak of the quantitative difference between proles and slaves and not just the qualitative ones
another deficiency in Marx is that he assumes that all labor power creates the same amount of value when using the same tools and working with the same intensity etc. but in reality this is not the case. a tailor in India creates less value than one in the UK even if they both do the same job. a UK tailor could not reproduce themselves on Indian wages, so the value of labor power in the UK must be higher than in India. as a result, the amount of value produced must also be different
the above could help explain slavery. a slave's labor power is worth zero, because the slave is not free to rent himself out like the prole is. the slaver owns the slave outright. consequently a slave can use a cotton gin and seemingly not create any value. but cotton clearly has value, so what the slave "creates" is rent for the slaver
>if we would accept that slaves produce surplus value then we must also see that a machine equally pays for itself, since it is more productive than any slave ismachines still don't participate in human society. again, they're objects, not subjects
>>2695055>Slaves produced value through their labor, just like the proletariat.not according to Marx
>Surplus Value is the monetary form of surplus laborvalue isn't money
>>2695161>Land has basically nothing economically in common with AIhave you read Capital? rent, superprofit etc are hightly relevant here
>>2695462oh and a small correction: some slaves
do make something akin to a wage. it was not uncommon for slaves in the South to have a small stipend. we should also keep in mind time-limited forms of servitude like indentured servants
>>2695142There really should be an updated version of capital so we wouldnt have threads like this. Complete waste of time defending outdated theory.
>>2695055>Slaves produced value through their labor, JUST LIKE THE PROLETARIAT […] slaves generated surplus laborsurplus labour but not surplus value?
>Surplus Value is the monetary form of surplus labor. It only exists when production is organized for the market right, so lets not forget that the transatlantic slave trade occured during global capitalism with global markets. did those slaves produce surplus value for the master?
>>2695462>no contradictionits a glaring contradiction, since the value of the commodities the slaves produce must be accounted for somehow. if a slave produced no value, the product of their labour would be worth zero. if we account for this value as being accounted for maintenance costs, then its impossible to make a profit from slaves, which is clearly false.
>another deficiency in Marx is that he assumes that all labor power creates the same amount of value when using the same tools and working with the same intensity etc. but in reality this is not the caseno, marx measures labour-power into its "socially average" form, which is also how he accounts for national differences in wages.
>value of labor power in the UK must be higher than in Indiayes it is, according to marx
>a slave's labor power is worth zerono it isnt… a slave's purchase cost and upkeep costs add to the value of his labour, like any worker.
>consequently a slave can use a cotton gin and seemingly not create any value.yet a wage worker does… so what is the essential difference?
>>2695470you can start it.
>>2695552>if a slave produced no value, the product of their labour would be worth zeronot quite. value is transferred from the slave to the product via depreciation. in Marx' view the slave is constant capital, as is the food and tools supplied to the slave. but we must also consider slavery in relation to other methods of production in the same industries. if
all cotton were produced by slaves then no ground rent can be formed and we should indeed expect no profit to be possible if Marx is right. if however some porkies hire proles to farm cotton then those proles do add value to the cotton. and because it is the
worst (most expensive) method of production that sets the value of cotton, this causes slavers to extract ground rent relative to porkies. from this we can posit that slavery cannot turn a profit at the margin
>no, marx measures labour-power into its "socially average" formyeah, socially average. so for example a French worker is not worth the same as an English worker. Marx goes over this in vol III. the value of labor power changes across time and space, primarily due to changes in the level of development, but also due to social changes. for example, if healthcare is publicly funded and workers' health improves then the value of labor power goes up
>no it isnt… a slave's purchase cost and upkeep costs add to the value of his labour, like any workerno, the slaver does not buy the slave's labor power. the slaver owns the slave outright. Porky on the other hand merely rents proles, which is what the purchasing of labor power
is. both the slave and the prole perform labor (the use-value of interest). what I find unconvincing in Marx is that he in no way justifies why it should make a difference if one rents a worker vs if one owns a worker, why this should change the amount of value produced
>yet a wage worker does… so what is the essential difference?what indeed
>>2695795>value is transferred from the slave to the product via depreciation.yes, precisely, but where does this value originate? in the sustenance of the slave by their consumption, just like the wage to the worker. however, the worker is seen to produce an output greater than their input, so why not the slave.
>if all cotton were produced by slaves then no ground rent can be formed and we should indeed expect no profit to be possible if Marx is right.what? the profits come from the master selling the product of the slave's labour in the form of commodities, the same as the capitalist to the worker.
>if however some porkies hire proles to farm cotton then those proles do add value to the cotton.okay, but WHAT is the essential difference?
>slavery cannot turn a profit at the marginYES IT CAN. this is why marx is contradictory.
>for example a French worker is not worth the same as an English workeryes, based on relative capital investment
>no, the slaver does not buy the slave's labor powerwhen a slave is worth $20,000 at market, WHAT is the master purchasing?
>what indeednothing… except the wage.
i'm pretty sure slaves produce value because they're slaves under the boader context of a society dominated by the capitalist mode of production, not their immediate position. They wouldn't be producing abstract value under a slave mode of production, because slavery as an MOP doesn't have that.
>>2695873>They wouldn't be producing abstract value under a slave mode of production, because slavery as an MOP doesn't have that.this is contradictory since money is the form of value
>>2695880Then we wouldn't really have any economic differentiation between different modes of production
>>2695880Money is an abstraction of value, not a direct expression of it.
The Epstein class will buy modern art for exorbitant amounts of money, even if the socially necessary labor required to make the art is near non existent. This does not make the art valuable, but only proves the point that the money commodity and it's attachment to real commodities is so far removed from reality that it's laughable to say that price = value
>>2695930>Then we wouldn't really have any economic differentiation between different modes of productionnow youre beginning to understand
what is the essential difference between the slave and the wage slave?
>>2695939>Money is an abstraction of value, not a direct expression of it. all value is an abstraction. you sound illiterate.
>it's laughable to say that price = valuewhats the difference?
>>2695941That would therefore defeat the economic progress argument of marx in the inevitability of the development of socialism, relegating everything to a wild pipedream and everything everyone has sacrificed for a waste.
also it's actually empirically pretty unlikely since there is marked variation in the average societal usage of tools between different epochs and when the ruling class chooses to expand their human labor force and when they invest in tooling, something that is difficult to explain with slavery being actually economically identical to capitalist wage labor.
>>2695946>That would therefore defeat the economic progress argument of marx in the inevitability of the development of socialismyes of course, its a fantasy.
there are only free men and slaves.
>a wild pipedream and everything everyone has sacrificed for a waste.why? power is political, not economic.
>usage of tools between different epochs>difficult to explain with slavery being actually economically identical to capitalist wage laborafrican slavery by the spanish empire lasted from 1500 to 1820. african slavery in the UK lasted from around 1555-1830. in the US it lasted from around 1645 to 1865. this epoch was capitalism, and all this was synonymous with the creation of an industrial working class, including the slaves themselves, who used the cotton gin from the 1790s onward.
>>2695952that really doesn't address the issue of the rate of mechanization by various epochs.
>>2695970technical ability also declined from the roman empire into the middle ages, so an opposite tendency also exists in history.
ai isn't even ai, its a mathematical parrot. it does not have an internal experience. we do not understand how our biology generates our internal experiences, we can correlate them to certain physical phenomena but we cannot yet, for example, create, edit, and store conscious experiences as if they were data stored on a hard drive. it is possible that even simple information processing contains some element of capacity for internal awareness, but at that point you have essentially adopted animism - if one purely physical, deterministic arrangement of matter can generate consciousness (or 'the illusion of it', whatever that means), then why not another? If an LLM is conscious, why not a calculator? If a calculator is conscious, why not a rock? If a rock is conscious, why not the earth's weather, or electromagnetic systems? is a star conscious? in this way a pure physicalism devolves back into animism, and we are left with the mystery of why we are experiencing anything at all rather than experience-lessly processing information like we presume a calculator or computer or electromagnetic weather system might.
without a genuine understanding of consciousness ourselves, i propose the following standards of testing whether a machine may be capable of creating or hosting or sustaining consciousness:
1. consciousness hosting hypothesis
if the proposed sentient machine can temporarily host a human consciousness, as in transfer the consciousness out from the human visitor's body, into the machine, and return it, intact, without any noticeable differences, modifications, or defects, into the original body, without the necessity of any significant modification to the human visitor's brain, or any other kind of invasive or noninvasive active control over it, (for example, if the machine uses nanites, or cybernetic implants, or some kind of undiscovered signal or field, to animate the original body, and uses its knowledge of the visitor to merely emulate their behavior, it is disqualified.) then that machine may be truly capable of sentience.
2. solipsistic mind transference wager
if an individual were to undergo a hypothetical 'mind transference', even if it were a one-way trip with no way to restore the mind to it's original body, then, if the mind transference is genuine, the individual would experience firsthand, though in a way that would be impossible to prove to a third party, that the machine they were uploaded into was capable of hosting genuine sentience.
3. genuine experience generation hypothesis
if a hypothetical machine can generate or store, and then directly input, experiences (in the sense of Qualia) into a human mind, i.e. without re-creating the physical phenomenon associated with the qualia, locally (for example, if the machine 'transmits' the qualia of seeing red by merely showing you something red, it is disqualified) then that machine may be truly capable of sentience.
>>2695972technical ability in what? Some skill was lost but the claim that the "dark ages" was a massive collapse in knowledge isn't really all that true.
>>2696021keep believing in "progress" bro 😂
2 more weeks til communism, i swear
>>2695997good thing none of that is relevant for its economic factor.
>>2695826>yes, precisely, but where does this value originate? in the sustenance of the slave by their consumption, just like the wage to the worker. however, the worker is seen to produce an output greater than their input, so why not the slave.good question
>what? the profits come from the master selling the product of the slave's labour in the form of commodities, the same as the capitalist to the worker.yes, and we should expect the price of said commodities to hover around their value. the value of a commodity is determined by the least production method. specifically by whichever process adds the most dead + living labor per unit of output. slaves add zero living labor according to Marx. whether this is true I can't say. we'd have to measure it somehow
>YES IT CAN. this is why marx is contradictory.not necessarily. it could be the case that Marx is right and slaves do not add value. the surplus value just happens to be 100% rent in that case. Marx breaks down revenue into three parts: wages + profit + rent, where surplus = profit + rent. all surplus being due to rent is not a contradiction. what would be a contradiction is if some industry is able to rely exclusively on slaves while still realizing surplus value
>when a slave is worth $20,000 at market, WHAT is the master purchasing?they are purchasing the slave itself, not their labor power. labor power is specifically what wage laborers sell. it is the "rent form" of labor so to say. it is the capacity to perform labor, sold as a commodity. labor power is the commodity, the wage is its price (exchange value) and concrete labor is its use-value
>>2695997intelligence is not equivalent to consciousness or subjectivity, so right of the bat you are operating from a conflation. as for your criteria;
>1. consciousness hosting hypothesiswhether something can "host" a consciousness has no bearing on whether it is itself conscious. this also makes the dualist mistake of assuming that consciousness has an existence independent of its body such that it can in theory be "transferred" from one vessel to another.
>2. solipsistic mind transference wageryou say yourself that there is no way to actually verify this criteria beyond cartesian personal certitude, and so it can be dismissed out of hand as non-scientific pseudo phenomenology.
>3. genuine experience generation hypothesisit does not follow that because a machine is capable of generating the experience of artificial qualia in a conscious agent, they are themselves capable of experiencing said qualia. for all intents and purposes, it would just be a machine capable of mimicking the neuro-chemical signals which correlate with and condition the subjective experience of seeing red. practically no difference in outcome from a machine that generates red light waves.
>if one purely physical, deterministic arrangement of matter can generate consciousness (or 'the illusion of it', whatever that means), then why not another? because consciousness is a very specific and (as best as we can tell) vanishingly rare arrangement of matter. conscious agents are physically structured and behave in radically different ways as compared with rocks, calculators, etc. so far we've only seen consciousness emerge through biological evolution. there is nothing impossible about the idea of non-biological consciousness, but nothing you've written here clarifies what that might look like or how we would know it if we saw it.
>>2696092>specifically by whichever process adds the most dead + living labor per unit of output. slaves add zero living labor according to Marx. whether this is true I can't say. we'd have to measure it somehowwouldn't that be adds the LEAST dead+living labor per unit?
And does marx specify slaves under capitalism or slaves under slavery?
>>2696318>wouldn't that be adds the LEAST dead+living labor per unit?no. Ricardian rent is determined by the least fertile plot of land in use. else it wouldn't be in use. the same applies in industry, except Marx calls it relative surplus value (vol I) or superprofit (vol III)
>And does marx specify slaves under capitalism or slaves under slavery?Marx does mention the latifundi system in ancient Rome. not sure if he claims Roman slaves created value or not, nor whether he believes value existed before capitalism
>>2696092>yes, and we should expect the price of said commodities to hover around their valueyes, but the slave also has the initial cost of capital investment (e.g. $20,000), so the purpose of the purchase is to realise this value and more by utilising the slave in production. like how a machine makes machines which makes machines, etc. the slave may also have children, which necessarily act as a surplus on the initial investment. its this dimension of reproduction which concretises the mode of slavery, since it can only exist where the offspring also become property. in the US, the offspring of the negro mother became property, but not the father (leading to a number of free negroes by conception of a white mother). here then, slavery is necessitated upon the claim of offspring, which can be used for production or sold off at a profit to the master (just like animal breeding). so then, the small slave owner pays off the initial capital investment by generational breeding of replacements. the value of the fixed capital is supposed to be this cost, but what of the slave child? he inherits his mother and father's debt, but can pay it off in time. marx seems to think otherwise.
>we'd have to measure it somehowif the slave produces any surplus, then he is producing more than he is consuming.
>all surplus being due to rent is not a contradictionbut its still labour converted into surplus value
>what would be a contradiction is if some industry is able to rely exclusively on slaves while still realizing surplus valueyou mean like the slave plantations of the southern colonies? they were profitable enterprises, which is shy they lasted for over 2 centuries.
>they are purchasing the slave itself, not their labor powerright, so lets think. what makes a slave valuable? their potential labour, not embodied labour. they are not a value (e.g. a commodity with embodied labour), they are labour-power, which is capable of producing a surplus.
>>2696318marx says that capitalism is a system upheld by slavery:
<Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations. Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02.htm>>2696363>not sure if he claims Roman slaves created value or not, nor whether he believes value existed before capitalismto marx and engels, money is the "form" which value necessarily appears as in its most developed state, but is present in all commodity exchange, which they estimate has existed for milennia:
<But 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. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htmwith slaves themselves being a type of commodity. however, marx says labour-power is also a commodity with a fixed value (e.g. the wage) - its just that the labourer himself adds labour in the process of production, which should also be true of the slave.
>>all surplus being due to rent is not a contradiction
>but its still labour converted into surplus value
it is not the labor of the slave that is converted to surplus value, but the labor of proles in other industries. this is the nature of relative surplus value (rent and superprofit)
>you mean like the slave plantations of the southern colonies? they were profitable enterprises, which is shy they lasted for over 2 centuries.
were these the only methods by which say cotton was produced? was there 100% slavery in the cotton industry, or was there also things like sharecropping or industrialized cotton agriculture carried out by proles? the passage you cite from Marx seems to imply the former, in which case it does indeed appear that Marx is incoherent
>right, so lets think. what makes a slave valuable? their potential labour, not embodied labour.
the value of a slave is the amount of labor necessary to produce them, same as any commodity. one could realize relative surplus value by breeding slaves industrially
>they are not a value (e.g. a commodity with embodied labour), they are labour-power, which is capable of producing a surplus.
not according to Marx. we can disagree with Marx of course
one way to make sense of Marx' view on slavery is to view slaves as a free gift of nature. a form of primitive accumulation. they exist outside Porky's circuit of commodities. let us say that the resources needed to raise children in say West Africa during slavery came mostly from peasant labor. the food that West African children ate were therefore not commodities, so from Porky's POV that is neither here nor there. the slave was raised by its parents free of charge. therefore the value of the slave is initially zero. only the actions of slavecatchers imbues the slave with value, because slavecatchers are salaried workers. but must like capturing wild horses is more laborious than breeding them, we should expect the value of slaves go down once slavery is properly entrenched
>its just that the labourer himself adds labour in the process of production, which should also be true of the slave.
I suspect much the same
>>2696936crap I forgot your (you)
>>2696857 >>2696936>but must like capturing wild horses is more laborious than breeding them, we should expect the value of slaves go down once slavery is properly entrenchedslavery became more expensive when it switched from fresh catch to breeding actually. one thing that made carribean slave sugar plantations so fantastically profitable was the fact that they were simply working slaves to death with constant threat of casual torture and whenever they had a low workforce they simply captured more.
>>2696936>it is not the labor of the slave that is converted to surplus value, but the labor of proles in other industriesdo slaves create a surplus product? (y/n)
is this product converted into commodities (y/n)
do these commodities have value? (y/n)
>the value of a slave is the amount of labor necessary to produce them, same as any commodity.yes - the same as a worker. the value of labour-power is the wage, but the labourer himself provides surplus.
>they exist outside Porky's circuit of commodities. but they dont. a slave IS a commodity, like labour-power IS a commodity.
>therefore the value of the slave is initially zerothen how do you explain their price at the market?
>we should expect the value of slaves go down once slavery is properly entrenchedbut it didnt. the demand for slaves increased following the cotton gin in the 1790s, leading to higher prices. the value of the slave therefore operates the same as the wage labourer, whose value also increases with additional capital investment, and declines with over-supply.
>>2696092>the value of a commodity is determined by the least production method. specifically by whichever process adds the most dead + living labor per unit of output.>>2696363>Ricardian rent is determined by the least fertile plot of land in use. else it wouldn't be in use. the same applies in industry, except Marx calls it relative surplus value (vol I) or superprofit (vol III)value for marx is socially necessary labor time which is defined with respect to the average conditions of production prevailing within a market. relative surplus value and surplus-profit are both premised on this fact. the idea that value as a social average was a simplifying abstraction rather than maybe the single most fundemental part of marx's contribution to political economy is insane.
>>2697028SNLT doesn't seem to necessarily care overall as a question as to whether or not a laborer is being paid or enslaved though, wrt slavery. in either case the property owner is being paid who then pays for, in one way or another, the accommodations for the laborers, whose output determines income.
>>2695309>AIs will sell their services on LinkedIn soon. lmfao
Hello, Marxist here. May I enlighten you on OP's confusion?
AI is a machine (a software, a complex algorithm running on hardware), i.e. dead labour, constant capital.
What makes this machine special is its input, namely, cultural detritus, from varying sources. In terms of class origins, these sources are:
1) Actual scientists (and the research they produced), actual fictive/general humanities authors (of books and other media content), which is to say either top-of-the-top earners (from academia, for example) or private (research- or culture-)industry hired personnel, or "freelancers" of the "creative/expert types", which is to say petty bourgeois;
2) haute bourgeois, for example big Hollywod blockbuster or Silicone Valley vydia poperties owned by them, used to train said machines, to produce similar outputs;
3) the general populace, which is to say 90% prole, although given the country of origin, for most of these actual labor aristocrats (posting on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, blogs, etc.).
Now, given that 99.9% of these could be considered "cultural products" under currently existing capitalism (yes, even scientific research papers qualify as such), and given that 95% of these are easily if not freely (torrent, etc.) accessible, it is fair to say that we are talking about the typical case of "privatization of the commons."
But things get more complicated here.
Commonly (and mostly freely) accessible products become a database asset that is algorithmycaly sold back to you as a service in terms of an answer to a question, or a generated video, or as source code, etc.
No, I do not think that, for example, millions of Facebook posts by random users should be considered "labour" (variable capital), just like how millions of stories told while sitting around the tribe's fire under primitive-communism should be considered "labour".
For sure, intellectual property leaks into AI, but the machine is so massive and all-consuming (in-putting), and its output so generalized and at best similar to the original, that factions among the haute bourgeoisie are fighting over legal terms. Imagine being a Disney stock-holder, for example, and seeing that Mr. AI, learning from your schlock (property), produces a meaningful output for average Joe (potential AI subscriber = paypig).
That's pretty much all you need to know.
No, AI is not labour.
No, AI's input is not dead labour.
No, AI's output is not genuine human culture (what we did done and still do while sitting around that cultural fire), however, we do socialize/humanize this algorithm's output by, for example, sharing idiotic AI webms.
No, AI's output is not dead labour either. The only dead labour in this conjuncture is:
A) the code itself, written by actual human programmers, running on
B) computer hardware, assembled by actual humans, parts for which mined by African child slaves in cobalt mines, etc.
I think I thoroughly explained to you, dear anon, the correct (=Marxist) understanding of this question, raised by op.
(This post was generated by Grok 3.4!)
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!
>>2695470you could start by articulating what you think about Marx is wrong. because I have seen critiques vary from complete nonsense like "muh mudpies" to slightly more subtle nonsense like "value isn't real, bro, it's just a subjective social construct maaaaaaaan" to highly contextual stuff like "I agree with marx 99% of the time except in this one very specific instance which his theory doesn't fit"
how am I supposed to know what particular kind of critique you have. How do I know whether it's a valid critique or you're doing rehashed nonsense from Bohm Bawerk and the Austrians?
>>2697197…and all of this effort I put into this while I could have merely said instead:
"Americans."
>>2697197>In terms of class origins, these sources are:you forgot all the thousands of nigerians that actually build the training datasets, it's literally dead labour
>>2697477or rather grok did but whatever you get the idea, AI is the congealed labor of a veritable army of third world data entriers.
>>2696962>slavery became more expensive when it switched from fresh catch to breeding actuallyinteresting
>>2696969>do slaves create a surplus product? (y/n)this is indeed the central question
>but they dont. a slave IS a commodity, like labour-power IS a commodity.sure. but West African peasants are not commodities. they only become commodities after having been enslaved. before that they are free gifts of nature
>then how do you explain their price at the market?acquiring and shipping slaves costs money. let's assume the slavecatchers are paid a wage. the slavecatcher must deliver slaves worth more than these costs. as a result the slavecatcher is exploited
another consequence of taking Marx at his word is that slaves are not exploited, since slaves do not produce value. this realization is sure to make moralfags very angry
>>2697028>value for marx is socially necessary labor time which is defined with respect to the average conditions of production prevailing within a market. relative surplus value and surplus-profit are both premised on this fact. the idea that value as a social average was a simplifying abstraction rather than maybe the single most fundemental part of marx's contribution to political economy is insane.Marx was not aware of the finer mathematical points around value since the necessary mathematics did not exist in his time. there is no way to determine an "average" for real production, because almost every production process results in more than one output. the simplified model presented in vol I is just that - a simplification. there is no way to apply the Neumann series to real production. there is no way to "add up" labor and arrive at values, except in the simplified special case presented in vol I where there is one and only one output
we can quibble about what "Durchschnitts-Arbeitskraft" means exactly. is it the average/mean? or is the "prevailing level"? why is agriculture and mining subject to marginal effects (ground rent) but spinning and weaving supposedly are not? the simplest explanation is that both groups are subject to the same law. there is no separate law of value that only applies to one set of constraints, just because those constraints happen to involve land. only when all production methods for some commodity are sufficiently similar does rent/superprofit no longer appear. only in that case do we have something approaching a mean. there's a philosophical term for this that escapes me, but things are "the other way around"
>>2697926>the marginalism of labour inputs is applied with the law of diminishing returns on each commodity produced. marx acknowledges this in capital vol. 1, chapter 1, where he says that technology lowers the value of commodities in proportion to outputthat's the opposite of a marginal effect. marginal effects
increase the value of a commodity. this is the essence of ground rent. but, investment
lowers the value of a commodity. the latter is what Marx is saying in your quote. both effects are neatly covered by optimization theory. it can be summarized thusly:
>value is marginal in the absence of technical changethe value of a commodity goes up the more commodities are produced
>technical change brings about economics of scalethe value of a commodity goes down the more commodities are produced
both statements above are true. it's dialectical you see
>>2694130he seems to have misspelled project Cybersyn
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