Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 12:08:22 No. 663923
<3.6 LABOR AND PRICE UNDER SLAVERY <But this evidence that labor content determines price all comes from the modern economy. The first historical writing linking labor time to value is in the work of Ibn Kaldun in the fourteenth century. If he at that date was stating as a fact that value originated in labor, we can safely assume that he observed this relationship in practice. Of course, it would be a rough and ready empirical observation, not a precise econometric study, but it does indicate that this relationship was apparent in the fourteenth century. <We do not have any written sources making a similar causal observation from the time of classical slave society. North Africa in the fourteenth century did have a fairly extensive use of slaves, but they were predominantly in domestic contexts and in small-scale agriculture. A series of slave revolts between the seventh and ninth centuries had led to a reduction in large-scale plantation slavery [Heuman and Burnard, 2010]. Large groups of slaves were more likely to rebel. So Kaldun’s observations cannot have been based on observing prices in a full slave economy. <We do not know that prices were governed by labor content in these periods, but the idea is plausible because slave plantations appear to have made rational use of the labor available to them. Consider the following discussion of how to organize slave labor by Cato. <When the master arrives at the farmstead, after paying his respects to the god of the household, let him go over the whole farm, if possible, on the same day; if not, at least on the next. When he has learned the condition of the farm, what work has been accomplished and what remains to be done, let him call in his overseer the next day and inquire of him what part of the work has been completed, what has been left undone; whether what has been finished was done betimes, and whether it is possible to complete the rest; and what was the yield of wine, grain, and all other products. Having gone into this, he should make a calculation of the laborers and the time consumed. If the amount of work does not seem satisfactory, the overseer claims that he has done his best, but that the slaves have not been well, the weather has been bad, slaves have run away, he has had public work to do; when he has given these and many other excuses, call the overseer back to your estimate of the work done and the hands employed. If it has been a rainy season, remind him of the work that could have been done on rainy days: scrubbing and pitching wine vats, cleaning the farmstead, shifting grain, hauling out manure, making a manure pit, cleaning seed, mending old harness and making new; and that the hands ought to have mended their smocks and hoods. Remind him, also, that on feast days old ditches might have been cleaned, road work done, brambles cut, the garden spaded, a meadow cleared, faggots bundled, thorns rooted out, spelt ground, and general cleaning done. When the slaves were sick, such large rations should not have been issued. After this has been gone into calmly, give orders for the completion of what work remains; run over the cash accounts, grain accounts, and purchases of fodder; run over the wine accounts, the oil accounts—what has been sold, what collected, balance due, and what is left that is saleable; where security for an account should be taken, let it be taken; and let the supplies on hand be checked over. Give orders that whatever may be lacking for the current year be supplied; that what is superfluous be sold; that whatever work should be let out be let. Give directions as to what work you want done on the place, and what you want let out, and leave the directions in writing. Look over the livestock and hold a sale. Sell your oil, if the price is satisfactory, and sell the surplus of your wine and grain. [Hooper and Ash, 1935, 9] <Note the reference to the need to calculate the amount of labor time expended to produce particular yields of wine, grain etc. It is assumed that there are “cash accounts, grain accounts, wine accounts, oil accounts,” everything that is required for a rational computation of the labor devoted to each branch of agricultural production and the yields it produces. The instructions end up with the instruction to sell if the price is satisfactory. We have here all that is necessary for labor time to regulate prices in a slave economy. <The dominus knows what each product has cost in terms of labor, knows the prevailing market price and will only sell if the price is “satisfactory.” But what can this mean? The standard of what is satisfactory is provided by the “calculation of the laborers and the time consumed” along with the oil, grain, and wine accounts. He knows the relative costs in terms of slave labor of the different products, and can thus judge when the relative prices are satisfactory enough to justify selling. If the price falls below a satisfactory level, the estates will withdraw from selling that product until the price rises. <It is not necessary to do what Smith did, and project back the regulation of price by labor to an imagined past when individualized hunters exchanged beavers for deer. A past that could only be imagined, since the individualization required for regular trade does not exist in hunter-gatherer society. Smith imagines specialized deer and beaver hunters prior to the private property and general commodity exchange in order to give a mythical account for something that he observed to be actually occurring in the combined slavery and capitalist systems of the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. But if we read the classical writers on agriculture we can grasp the process better. The latifundia produced multiple commodities, their relative labor costs were known to the owners and this provided the basis for labor to regulate price. <The slave-owning class did not only own farms, they also ran other forms of business. If slave labor yielded a higher return in cash terms in some other branch of activity, they would either set up rural production on their estates, or invest in urban slave workshops. We do not know that prices were actually regulated by labor in Rome, but it is a reasonable hypothesis. It is also one that could be tested. <In principle, research could be done to see if prices in slave economies followed a law of labor value. The relative prices given for example in the edict of Diocletian [Bolin, 1958] in 301 A.D. could be compared with estimates of the time taken to make things under the technical conditions of that era. For agricultural products, techniques of production remained similar until recent history, so data on labor use from more recent periods could be exploited. For the slave economies of the Americas there is of course much more extensive data available. This would make a similar investigation much easier.
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 14:09:04 No. 664005
>>663836 slaves aren't constant capital, and prices formed predominantly slave-based societies, not the other way around
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 14:24:07 No. 664014
>>663923 Debunked by graeber
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 15:38:54 No. 664089
>>663836 I remember when I asked questions like this and thought they were important. Whether slaves transferr d their value and depreciated like other assets employed in production. Marx didn't write much on precapitalist modes of production, but the answer should be clear: slaves are laborers, they cannot be constant capital or means of production. Ancient slaveholding societies had a low degree of monetization relative to our own, but where it was applicable prices were determined by the fluctuation of supply and demand and the cost of production, of which the determining factors were the efficiency and rate of destruction and replacement of slaves.
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 18:48:00 No. 664279
>>664014 Could you elaborate a little bit more? At least say what book or lecture.
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 19:18:01 No. 664302
>>664014 No. Debt slavery and slavery imposed on criminals or PoWs ain’t the same as slavery used as a mode of production or a slave class.
Anonymous 2021-12-28 (Tue) 19:18:28 No. 664305
>>664014 You keep saying this but you haven't shown any proof. Doesn't Cockshott work with the latest anthropological evidence anyways?
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 00:32:15 No. 664844
>>663836 >Are slaves constant capital? If so, how were prices formed in predominantly slave-based societies? You cannot apply LTV or the law of value on societies that weren't engaged in generalized commodity production.
If there are cases of slavery existing within generalized commodity production, you could just model them as an input output where the cost for them is the feeding and maintance and the output is the maximum labour you can get out.
But most slave societies in history were not generalized commodity societies. Rome was made up of primarily self sufficient farmers, slaves were used as direct labourers by the rich for their own ends. Even slave-era america was mostly made up of self-providing homesteaders and some marginal for-trade producers, and as such prices in said society did not follow the LTV or the law of value.
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 00:35:18 No. 664848
>>664844 Cockshott
>>663923 wrote a whole book about why the law of value supposedly was active in non-capitalist societies, which is honestly fucking stupid, and it wont be active under socialism either. The law of value is directly a result of generalized commodity production made up of many independent producers, its not some historic truth.
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 09:18:11 No. 665375
>>664844 I thought that it applied to commodity production in general, and that prices of production determined prices in generalized commodity production while more direct labour values determines prices in simple commodity production. I struggle to see how slave products that are brought to the market as commodities would not be considered to embody value. I agree that slaves who existed to purely produce use-values (like household servants) were engaged in unproductive use-value aimed labour. This boils down to the point of OP's post, I think. Is is the wage-labour relation that results in value-creation or is it connected to human labour in the context of commodity production?
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 10:12:25 No. 665414
>>664014 Fuck off you fucking fed.
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 11:26:47 No. 665449
>>665375 The reason you cannot apply the law of value on non generalized commodity markets is because most production isn't conducted competitively for sale. The production for sale in a competitive market is what creates the law or value. Homesteaders or self sufficient farmers having surplus to sell don't rationally produce said surplus for profit maximisation. They don't produce specific products in a strategic way to maximize profit like a modern farmer does. They have time left over but no sellable labour to out it into because of limited land, so they can't just go out and work for a wage to buy clothes from a seamstress, instead they made their own clothes and tools, even if it's not macro efficient. The market is what drives specialisation and optimisation, a lack of a generalized market, the existance of large scale non market production, makes it harder for the market to do this optimisation.
Thus, most slave societies did not follow the law of value. Most products, even those sold in markets, weren't competitive, they were mostly happenstance left over surplus or directly planned by the lords in feudalism. Only the merchants really engaged in small scale capitalism in the form of cottage industries. It wasn't until this grew, combined with heavy industry and proletarianisation that everything became commodity production and the law of value asserted itself.
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 11:40:09 No. 665454
I don't think OP's question is a sensible one given the massive difference between capitalism where labour power is a commodity, and slave economies where the labourers themselves are commodities. porky doesn't care
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 12:17:37 No. 665475
>>664848 What a nice strawmen you have invented there, Cockshott wrote that every economy that had social labor and generalized production has A law of value. Read: modes of production have distinct laws of value. Capitalism has one , and socialism will too, but they will be different.
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 12:25:36 No. 665481
>>665475 But that's not what he says. He litterslly says the same law of value continues to exist.
And even if he means the other thing, that is not true. There is not going to be an automatic mechanism that drives economic activity from one place to the other with incentives and punishment under a planned economy. a planned economy explicly takes direct control of the questions of production: what, where, how, how much, who gets it. Just because cockshots planning system directly adopts the same concept of efficiency as a capitalist economy doesn't make it true. There is no reason why it should be "optimal" or efficient to target prices in his shops to their labour costs, it's completely arbitrary, we can choose to do so, or not. It's just as valid to not follow those price targets and instead target different prices because of social benefit concerns or other considerations.
Unless you mean that "a law of value" means "you try to make good use of your resources", in which case I would say that is such a complete broadening of terms that it might well be meaningles
Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 13:13:25 No. 665518
>In the slave system, the money-capital invested in the purchase of labour-power plays the role of the money-form of the fixed capital, which is but gradually replaced as the active period of the slave’s life expires. Among the Athenians therefore, the gain realised by a slave owner directly through the industrial employment of his slave, or indirectly by hiring him out to other industrial employers (e.g., for mining), was regarded merely as interest (plus depreciation allowance) on the advanced money-capital, just as the industrial capitalist under capitalist production places a portion of the surplus-value plus the depreciation of his fixed capital to the account of interest and replacement of his fixed capital. This is also the rule with capitalists offering fixed capital (houses, machinery, etc.) for rent. Mere household slaves, whether they perform necessary services or are kept as luxuries for show, are not considered here. They correspond to the modern servant class. But the slave system too — so long as it is the dominant form of productive labour in agriculture, manufacture, navigation, etc., as it was in the advanced states of Greece and Rome — preserves an element of natural economy. The slave market maintains its supply of the commodity labour-power by war, piracy, etc., and this rapine is not promoted by a process of circulation, but by the actual appropriation of the labour-power of others by direct physical compulsion. Even in the United States, after the conversion of the buffer territory between the wage-labour states of the North and the slavery states of the South into a slave-breeding region for the South, where the slave thrown on the market thus became himself an element of the annual reproduction, this did not suffice for a long time, so that the African slave trade was continued as long as possible to satisfy the market. https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1885-c2/ch20_04.htm https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch29.htm Anonymous 2021-12-29 (Wed) 13:41:03 No. 665559
>>665481 So you have an arbitrary value theory ?
That's even worse than subjective value theory.
Cockshott is right that every mode of production that uses social labor and generalized production will generate a unique law of value. You haven't really said anything that contradicts this. If you make an economic system that facilitates social labor you'll have a law of value. You'd have to go back to primitive society where all labor is direct to avoid that.
Oh you're one of those types that "analyzes the incentive structure" , yeah i see why you would be frustrated with Cockshott, he's building a system to enable all of society, not just a few callous assholes.
Anonymous 2021-12-30 (Thu) 15:09:15 No. 666853
>>665481 >cockshots planning system directly adopts the same concept of efficiency as a capitalist economy In the TANS model labor counts differently than in capitalism and it's literally based on something Marx explicitly wrote about how labor-saving machinery gets replaced by labor sometimes because of how capitalists make their cost calculations and that communists can and shhould do it differently. It's literally in Capital volume 1:
"The use of machinery for the exclusive purpose of cheapening the product, is limited in this way, that less labour must be expended in producing the machinery than is displaced by the employment of that machinery, For the capitalist, however, this use is still more limited. Instead of paying for the labour, he only pays the value of the labour-power employed; therefore, the limit to his using a machine is fixed by the difference between the value of the machine and the value of the labour-power replaced by it. Since the division of the day’s work into necessary and surplus labour differs in different countries, and even in the same country at different periods, or in different branches of industry; and further, since the actual wage of the labourer at one time sinks below the value of his labour-power, at another rises above it, it is possible for the difference between the price of the machinery and the price of the labour-power replaced by that machinery to vary very much, although the difference between the quantity of labour requisite to produce the machine and the total quantity replaced by it, remain constant."
Footnote: "Hence in a communistic society there would be a very different scope for the employment of machinery than there can be in a bourgeois society."
"But it is the former difference alone that determines the cost, to the capitalist, of producing a commodity, and, through the pressure of competition, influences his action. Hence the invention now-a-days of machines in England that are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, machines were invented in Germany to be used only in Holland, and just as many a French invention of the eighteenth century was exploited in England alone. In the older countries, machinery, when employed in some branches of industry, creates such a redundancy of labour in other branches that in these latter the fall of wages below the value of labour-power impedes the use of machinery, and, from the standpoint of the capitalist, whose profit comes, not from a diminution of the labour employed, but of the labour paid for, renders that use superfluous and often impossible."
What happens when such a policy is widely adopted is that you under-value labor and so using labor-saving devices will appear as economically irrational, the above problem of capitalism, but in even more extreme form.
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 00:13:48 No. 667453
>>666853 > it's literally based on something Marx explicitly wrote about how labor-saving machinery gets replaced by labor sometimes because of how capitalists make their cost calculations Correct, but cockshot does use the LTV value model, even if capitalists in capitalism can never achieve efficiency due to distrotions caused by wage labour
Wrong. An economy planned in kind is in no way affected by the way in which the end products are distributed for consumers. Whether a loaf of bread is 10 minutes or an hour of price, has no impact on the rational choice between different forms of production in planning, because an economy planned in kind does not rely on prices for its accounting. The resource costs (labour, limited land, other resources) are completely seperate from the consumer prices in cockshotts model, as they should be. It is thus completely possible to price cigarettes extremely high or vegetables extremely affordable, without affecting which method of production seems more economical.
The fact that you think the two are linked in any way shows you think of a planned economy in no other way than a market economy. The factories do not sell or receive income or profit based on prices.
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 02:02:20 No. 667594
slaves aren't machinery or a substitute for automation
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 02:23:59 No. 667618
>>667594 This isn't a moral judgement, this is about how slaves fit in the larger context of production you hysterical faggot. No one is stating that it is "right", just that in regards to production operates in certain modes of production, slaves are differentiated from wage laborers in that they do not create additional value, but rather pass it on.
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 02:24:51 No. 667620
>>667618 *in regards to how production
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 02:26:32 No. 667625
>>667618 this isn't about morality, it's just a-historical garbage as a whole, which also explains why cockshott is being mentioned for some reason
>you hysterical faggot kill yourself
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 02:29:42 No. 667628
>>667618 >slaves are differentiated from wage laborers in that they do not create additional value, but rather pass it on i'm gonna assume you have no proofs for this, it's just your vague /pol/ feelings, so don't worry
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 03:09:13 No. 667693
>>667594 >>667628 Quit wrecking. Or better yet, stop falseflagging. Understanding how slaves are treated in the economy is not an endorsement of slavery. Studying cancer, and I don’t mean people like yourself, does not imply that oncologists are pro-cancer
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 03:30:59 No. 667737
>>663836 In ancient economics the price of a slave was generally the price to capture a slave which was often took much less labor then the slave owner would get back from the slave. It is true that sometimes people where sold into slavery but the price the slave sellers had to compete with the price of a captured slave. So in slave economies surplus value arises from the difference between the amount of labor it took to aquire a slave vs how much labor slaves actually performed.
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 03:40:08 No. 667761
>>667737 The USA post revolution is an interesting exception to this because the importation of slaves was illegal and yet slavery persisted and eventually led to a civil war. The thing to understand about the slave embargo is that it was seen as a way of ending slavery naturally without pissing off slave owners because even before the revolution slavery was becoming unprofitable. The founders would probably have been right had it not been for the cotton gin which suddenly gave slave owners a new product they could sell for a lot of money and increasing the value of the slaves. They of course already owned the slaves so with this sudden increase in a slaves value they could extract surplus value. When it became clear the slavery wasn't going away for a long time is when the abolitionist movement gained steam leading to the civil war.
Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 03:45:57 No. 667771
>>667693 you're just ranting about something that i never brought up
>>667737 >>667761 this is a better analysis, along with
>>664005 Anonymous 2021-12-31 (Fri) 15:28:50 No. 668097
>>667453 >Correct, but cockshot does use the LTV value model, even if capitalists in capitalism can never achieve efficiency due to distrotions caused by wage labour You originally said:
>cockshots planning system directly adopts the same concept of efficiency as a capitalist economy The point made is that these measures of efficiency are different. Capitalists do not fail to meet that standard for some reason, they follow a different one.
As for the rest of your post, you are wrong with almost every word: Planning in kind and using prices are not in an either-or relation. Demand-based feedback of course matters, whether its directly fixed in an algorithmic rule or merely a data point for decision-making bodies. Demand-based feedback even exists in models that don't have consumer budgets. And I don't have the position that you hallucinate me to have. I am strongly against auto-financing.