Explaining economics simply
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LBird,the actual anaology, though, is rather like the people who believe that when their telly goes on the blink they need to say a prayer to God, spin thrice widdershins and then give the box a good thump on the right side. Trying to explain to them that it is a loose connexion that can be simply fixed would be met with a plaintive cry of 'But where God come into that solution?' Try telling them that they can thump it on the top or the left side would be met wiuth incredulity too.
Marx’s own SimplificationValue, Price and Profithttp://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/value-price-profit.pdfHis simplified account of value begins at §VI.
I can’t see anything wrong with simplification for educational purposes; for example an imaginary barter situation.Look what the early political philosophers did in their justification of the capitalist state. The ‘state of nature’ never existed nor did the ‘social contract’ but they were inventions to get over a point: If we didn’t have a capitalist state, we would have to create one!
Young Master Smeet, post #9, wrote:TBH, it's normally the audience who make it over complicated by starting to split hairs, or introducing complex concepts that have been universally assimilated…It's ironic that you wrote that, YMS, because that's exactly what you've done here:
YMS wrote:LBird,the actual anaology, though, is rather like the people who believe that when their telly goes on the blink they need to say a prayer to God, spin thrice widdershins and then give the box a good thump on the right side. Trying to explain to them that it is a loose connexion that can be simply fixed would be met with a plaintive cry of 'But where God come into that solution?' Try telling them that they can thump it on the top or the left side would be met wiuth incredulity too.The analogy is about components, structure and emergent properties. If someone doesn't understand the purpose of the analogy, all they need do is ask, and they can be provide with endless others, which don't involve 'on the blink', 'thumps' or 'loose connections'.Once they've understood that, we can move on. We haven't even really moved from the beginning of the explanation until we've done that.Really, it requires comrades who don't understand 'value' to take this process forward, and then we can see if it is working. I presume that you, YMS, already 'understand' value, so perhaps you're jumping too far ahead of the steps in the explanation.I've never said that some people don't understand 'value' just by reading chapters 1-3 of Capital, but I think that it's unarguable that most people don't. We need to try to remedy that. This attempt is really for that majority, not those who seem to be easily able to understand Marx's opaque ideas. I, for one, don't.
LBird, my point was, though, to go closer to your own example, if people already have a mystified explanation for television, so you explain about components, structure and emergent properties, and then they go: "Ah, so that's where the pixies come in".I suppose my point is we're not explaining things ex nihil, but in competition with a widespread set of beliefs that people don't know they have assimilated, so it's not a question of finding ever more simplistic ways of explaining, but of understanding the dominant paradigms and noting weak points and matching our explanations to the narrative.At some point though, if people don't want (or feel a need) to give up the Faeries…
Yes, there is a whole school of leftwing economic writers who argue that it is possible to explain how capitalism works without having recourse to the concept of "value". This is because they see "value" as "socially necessary labour time" and nothing more and so don't see it as a social relationship. (Others make the same mistake and end up arguing that value will continue to exist in socialism).But the social relationship that value represents is capitalism. Capitalist production is value-production, commodity production (the same thing), i.e the production of use-values for sale on a market by separate producers whose production is regulated by the market.I don't think this is a difficult concept to understand. Where you have private ownership (= ownership by sections of society, whether individuals, corporations, states or co-operatives) of means of production then what links these "private" producers is the market and articles are produced as commodities, as value.Where you have the common ownership by society as a whole of the means of production then there is production directly for use and distribution. There is no commodity-production, no value-production, no value, no money.Why is this so difficult a concept to grasp? Maybe it's the unusual language (value, commodity) but surely everybody can immediately understand the idea of a society without money (even if they don't think it could work)? I know that talking of "the abolition of money" gets us stick as "utopian", so some others prefer to talk of "the abolition of value" (which means the same) but at the risk of not being understood.Here's a group of activists making heavy weather of this simple idea:http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/marx-and-wertkritik/
Young Master Smeet wrote:LBird, my point was, though, to go closer to your own example, if people already have a mystified explanation for television, so you explain about components, structure and emergent properties, and then they go: "Ah, so that's where the pixies come in"……At some point though, if people don't want (or feel a need) to give up the Faeries…Well, if they have difficulty believing that 'tellies aren't worked by pixies or Faeries' (I have my doubts that this is true for the vast majority), then the easy answer is to give another example which involves something that they do themselves, but which they already know isn't done by 'pixies or Faeries'.Say, for example, they collect various flowers and make them into a bouquet, which produces delight in others. Or, that they put their hat, scarf and coat on to produce weatherproofing, for their walk during the rain.Of course, if you're going to argue that you know people who say that pixies picked their mother's day present, rather than themselves, or that the Faeries dress them each winter's morn, we might have a big problem with them.Personally, I think most people will know some structures that are built by themselves, rather than elves/spirits.Once we've achieved that initial understanding, we can move on.
Three old pamphlets on explaining economics i would recommend are:the IWW's Economic Interpretation of the Jobhttp://www.marxists.org/history/usa/unions/iww/1922/economic.htm John Keracher's Economics For Beginnershttp://www.marxists.org/archive/keracher/1935/economics-for-beginners.htm And James Connolly's Socialism Made Easyhttp://www.marxist.net/ireland/connolly/socialism/socialism_made_easy.htm
Something on this Alan missed from the Truthout site:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21605-rethinking-economics-from-the-uk-a-global-student-movement-takes-shape
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