Marx and Automation
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Alan Kerr wrote:@Michel Luc BellemareThank you Michel,It’s good that you read Marx. It’s good to discuss this with you. But the fatal flaw is in what you say here.“2… The only way for this to happen! is that value, price and wage-determinations must be artificially and arbitrarily machinated at a lower value, price and wage, both conceptually and materially, than it is actually worth in reality.”Here, we need to think of both use-value and value.Since labour in use creates value, and a value greater than its own.Capitalist pays Value of labour-power.But for this capitalist receives Use-Value of labour.Assume here that worker gets full value for his commodity–labour-power.“Its value, like that of all other commodities, is determined by the working-time necessary to its production. If the production of the average daily means of subsistence of the labourer takes up 6 hours, he must work, on the average, 6 hours every day, to produce his daily labour-power, or to reproduce the value received as the result of its sale. The necessary part of his working day amounts to 6 hours, and is, therefore, caeteris paribus [other things being equal], a given quantity. But with this, the extent of the working day itself is not yet given.”(Marx)http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA10.html#Part III, Chapter 10Let the line A
B = necessary working time.Here’s how the system is rigged.Make working day longer by 1, 3 or 6 hours beyond AB and we get working days1) A
B-C2) A
B—C3) A
B
CHere the working day is longer than just AB.1) Capitalist gets one hour for nothing = surplus value.2) Capitalist gets three hours for nothing = surplus value.3) Capitalist gets six hours for nothing = surplus value.He is just trying to deny that it is the working class the ones who produce all the profits and that we are surrounded by dead labour. There is nothing magical about this
MBellemare wrote:Labor-power must be constantly bought by capitalists at a lower price/value than it is in actually worth.Sorry this is wrong. The point of Capital was to show how the capitalists do by labour-power at value *and yet* can still make a profit.So far all you have demonstarted is that you haven't grasped Marx's theory properly.Here are some questions for you:1. What is the difference between "price" and "value"2. What determines the value of a commodity.3. What determines the price of a commodity.4. What determines the value of labour-power
MBellemare wrote:Such an idea as socially necessary labor-time, which equitably determines values, prices and wages.Again you haven't quite got the grasp of it.The value of a commodity is equal to the amount of socially necessary labour-time it takes to reproduce it.But the price is not determined by this, and by extension neither are wages which are the price of labour power.You haven't grasped the distinction between price and value in Marx's system.
@ Typical Marcos! lol!… Stringent, dictatorial and ready to destroy differences to the end. (Well, you can't fault, Marcos for not being consistent in his logic, even if it is outdated and sooo 19th/20th century). Marx cannot explain CEO exaggerated salaries etc. etc. etc.@ Mr. DJP…,right back at you, "sorry, your wrong", you are holding onto a faulty and flawed analysis, which is clouding and confusing your thinking. You have to break with your fetishism of Marx, to see Marx, clearly. @ Alan Kerr….1. To assume that workers get the full value/price for their labor-power is a bourgeois economists clap-trap, one which Marx fell into, as well, so your in good company, Mr. Kerr. Instead, assume Mr. Kerr that workers, both capitalist and proletarian workers, do not ever get their value/price for their labor-power, because labor-power is both quantifiable (like Marx theorized) and unquantifiable, simultaneously, as I state. It is creative-power that is the fount of value, both conceptual and material expenditures of creative-power, which can be quantifiable (like Marx suggests, and I agree), plus unquantifiable, as I as well suggest, and Marx disagrees. From this premise, you will notice and be able to adequately explain why capitalism continues to persist and thrive and why CEO's get so much more for their labor-power than the working population. Rather than being about the scientific quantifiability of labor-power in exact units of time according to socially necessity, you will notice a Nietzschean stream, where Power is the prime vehicle of capitalism, "whatever one can get away with the marketplace is valid and legitimate".
MBellemare wrote:@ Typical Marcos! lol!… Stringent, dictatorial and ready to destroy differences to the end. (Well, you can't fault, Marcos for not being consistent in his logic, even if it is outdated and sooo 19th/20th century). Marx cannot explain CEO exaggerated salaries etc. etc. etc.@ Mr. DJP…,right back at you, "sorry, your wrong", you are holding onto a faulty and flawed analysis, which is clouding and confusing your thinking. You have to break with your fetishism of Marx, to see Marx, clearly. @ Alan Kerr….1. To assume that workers get the full value/price for their labor-power is a bourgeois economists clap-trap, one which Marx fell into, as well, so your in good company, Mr. Kerr. Instead, assume Mr. Kerr that workers, both capitalist and proletarian workers, do not ever get their value/price for their labor-power, because labor-power is both quantifiable (like Marx theorized) and unquantifiable, simultaneously, as I state. It is creative-power that is the fount of value, both conceptual and material expenditures of creative-power, which can be quantifiable (like Marx suggests, and I agree), plus unquantifiable, as I as well suggest, and Marx disagrees. From this premise, you will notice and be able to adequately explain why capitalism continues to persist and thrive and why CEO's get so much more for their labor-power than the working population. Rather than being about the scientific quantifiability of labor-power in exact units of time according to socially necessity, you will notice a Nietzschean stream, where Power is the prime vehicle of capitalism, "whatever one can get away with the marketplace is valid and legitimate".It has been explained to you already that the CEO does not receive salaries, they receive dividends and stock options, and they do not obtain a salary. A salary is what a worker receive in compensation for selling his/her labour power, or the necessary means to survive, they do not receive dividends. You are wrong again. It would be like saying that the Russian Nomenclature were members of the working class when they were part of the ruling elite. A worker can not even retire with his own pension, but CEO receive part of the surplus value and they can live like kings. I am not a dictator, I do not fool around with principles and I have class consciousness
MBellemare wrote:I never said Marx's critique is no longer valid, I said it is marginalized, i.e., that capitalism functions according to a different, post-modern, post-industrial logic, that no longer holds scientific quantification of labor-power as first and foremost, but merely as a secondary minor consideration. What was in Marx's time an exception, i.e., the arbitrary construction of values, prices, and wages, where no labor-power is found, is now primary. That is all I've said. Marx readily admits that value and price can be dreamed-up and applied to thing. I merely state that now this sort of thing is primary to any quantifiable theory/law of value. By doing this, I can rightly explain from a post-industrial, post-modern point of view, why prices are rising as production costs drop, why there is ever-increasing financial inequality, why there is an ever-increasing debt load dropped upon the working population. Mr. San Francisco, supplied some excellent statistics, which prove my thesis, concerning arbitrary, artificial mark-ups, that continually rise, over the last 40 years. As for the proletariat being the only revolutionary class; at the moment, I see no old school, modern, class structure, I see microscopic groupings with different affinities holding each other together. That is not to say that the proletariat cannot reconstruct itself into a viable monolithic class, and even possibly a revolutionary class, but "class" does not seem to be the appropriate concept for the advanced, high-tech, post-modern, post-industrial society, we currently live in. Alan, rightly corrected me, that the working population is constantly revolutionizing itself, so I cannot, honestly, say that the proletariat as a class cannot reformulate itself out of its current fragmentation. That is why anarchism, or more specifically, structural-anarchism is a viable lens to view our current contemporary world through. Its worth the read.You are contradicting yourself or you are ambivalent. In your later message you have indicated that Marx is outdated, and they belong to the 19 century
MBellemare wrote:@ Mr. DJP…,right back at you, "sorry, your wrong", you are holding onto a faulty and flawed analysis, which is clouding and confusing your thinking. You have to break with your fetishism of Marx, to see Marx, clearly.That's not an answer to my questions. You are holding onto a faulty and flawed analysis, which is clouding and confusing your thinking. You have to break with your fetishism to see clearly.Adios!
Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:Marcos wrote:Antoher good article would be: The Myth of the Transitional Society. Socialism would be a wageless society@Marcos,If everybody paid at the cash register a price that was wage normalized, than would that not be a wageless society in that everyone effectively has the same buying power regardliess of their wage? P.s. thank you for your adamant insistence than SPGB does not endorse or promote anything ever. I agree with you that the transition from capitalism to socialism must come from a revolutionary rabble rising up from within capitalism in order to be accepted by capitalism. Perhaps there is more wisdom from your words than I at first understood. Please feel free to reply with your standard "this has nothing to do with socialism and is just trolling" response.
Today I have some free time and I am going to answer to your distortion. I did not say what you have said here, it is a pure lie. The word rabble means mob, or anarchy, or probably you are confusing the expression Anarchism with Anarchy. I do not support any transitional society programme. I do not make that kind of mistake, I know what I want, and I know what I am looking for, I did not grow up in DisneylandYou can take your cash register to a grocery store, but it would not be needed in a socialist society. You have been here for several years and you have not learned anything yet. Do you need a political exorcism?This article explains the myth of the transitional societyhttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/study-guides/myth-transitional-society. The real transitional society is capitalismI know the content of this article by heart because I have translated in three languages already, therefore what you have said is not true
I am correct on this! Because, if you were correct, @DJP@Marcos@Kerr, capitalism would have ended a long, long time ago! The death knell of capitalism would have sounded decades and decades ago. The fact that you cannot even admit fault with Marx's analysis is fatal to your understanding of Marx, it means you good folks are fetishizing Marx into a religious opiate to sooth your Marxian souls, weary of struggle, and ready to sleep. Its ashame, cuz your once revolutionary spirits have hardened into a conservativism, which is now impeding intellectual advancement. Best of Luck!
MBellemare wrote:I am correct on this! Because, if you were correct, @DJP@Marcos@Kerr, capitalism would have ended a long, long time ago! The death knell of capitalism would have sounded decades and decades ago. The fact that you cannot even admit fault with Marx's analysis is fatal to your understanding of Marx, it means you good folks are fetishizing Marx into a religious opiate to sooth your Marxian souls, weary of struggle, and ready to sleep. Its ashame, cuz your once revolutionary spirits have hardened into a conservativism, which is now impeding intellectual advancement. Best of Luck!It looks like you do not understand the logic of capitalism. It would be ended when it stops to produce profits or surplus value, and the working class still support capitalism, it will not collapse by itself, Rosa Luxembourg try to demonstrate that and she fell on her own mistakes.Communists do not believe in the soul, and spirit is the idea, and religion is to believe in a supreme being. I have heard the same opinion from the anti-communists and the anti-Marxists, and the right wingers, who consider that Marxism is a religion.We have raised many critiques against Marx, but they are logical, and we have said that without Marx we could have developed our own conception of socialism but it would have taken a longer time to elaborate it
MBellemare wrote:I am correct on this! Because, if you were correct, @DJP@Marcos@Kerr, capitalism would have ended a long, long time ago! The death knell of capitalism would have sounded decades and decades ago. The fact that you cannot even admit fault with Marx's analysis is fatal to your understanding of Marx, it means you good folks are fetishizing Marx into a religious opiate to sooth your Marxian souls, weary of struggle, and ready to sleep. Its ashame, cuz your once revolutionary spirits have hardened into a conservativism, which is now impeding intellectual advancement. Best of Luck!We are still revolutionaries because we do not want to place patch on this society, or create coops, or local economic inventions or Oweian failed experiments. Our aim is for a new society different to capitalism
MB, the death of capitalism has been prematurely announced several times but the Socialist Party has not been one of those organisations and produced a message that is rather unpopular – capitalism won't end until working people end it (or perhaps the apocalyptic end of the world climate change events and with it the end of the human race)https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/why-capitalism-will-not-collapseWhich conveniently brings me back to my question to you which i can understand why you could have overlooked it in this busy thread.It is contained in Message #192
alanjjohnstone wrote:MB, the death of capitalism has been prematurely announced several times but the Socialist Party has not been one of those organisations and produced a message that is rather unpopular – capitalism won't end until working people end it (or perhaps the apocalyptic end of the world climate change events and with it the end of the human race)https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlets/why-capitalism-will-not-collapseWhich conveniently brings me back to my question to you which i can understand why you could have overlooked it in this busy thread.It is contained in Message #192His intention is not to replace capitalism for a new society. The answer to your question can be found in the co-ops and communes of Venezuela, Bolivia, local reforms, and the worker's enterprises of Argentina.He said that he is a follower of Althusser, and all his life he was a Stalinists, and he was never able to break away with the Jacobin concept of the Vanguard partyhttp://isreview.org/issue/99/althussers-theory-ideologyhttp://isreview.org/issue/102/althusser-ideology-and-stalinism.The French and the Italian left failed on their reformist intent, and now they are travelling to the psychoanalysis concept, trying to unify Freud with Marxism, in reality, politically Freud was a reactionaryThe Bolsheviks spent their whole life waiting for a proletarian revolution in Germany and France and it never took place, the workers went after the reforms and nationalism, even more, if a revolution would have taken place in those countries nothing would have happened because socialism in one country, in one region, in one local area is totally falsehttps://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1998/no-1131-november-1998/germany-november-1918http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/depth-articles/history/how-close-was-france-socialist-revolutionWe have existed since 1903 and we have covered all the bases. We know what we are talking about, and we have seen all kind reformist ideas coming and going and passing by and all have failed
@Alan Johnstone, about your post 192. . .
alanjjohnstone wrote:I have been following this debate and MB if you have not considered that Robbo's rebuttal has not made you feel the necessity to return to your study and re-frame it somewhat, then it has not been a productive exchange at all.A little too often for my personal liking you have said you accept that Marx was correct then off you go endeavouring to prove he was either wrong or wrongly interpreted and only your own insight into what he really meant is accurate.I will now give you the benefit of the doubt. You are indeed correct in your ideas. Marx's analysis of capital led to him declaring that the proletariat because they are robbed (exploited) and because their sustenance is thwarted by capitalist laws then they would be the vehicle for social change. A bit deterministic granted but Marx does add sufficient caveats that other factors arise in creating revolutionary consciousness.A question. Since for argument's sake, i accept your economic analysis…can you tell me how it will be changed and into what. So far i have only the Bakuninist rabble as the agency of change. But even they must have some motivation to spur them into action – and to old some idea of direction.MB please expand on how a new society will come about through an understanding and acceptance of your economic model of "present-day modern capitalism."It's hackneyed to say this …but philosophers have only interpreted the world…the point is to change it.I have a book on my best guess, but it's long and couched in analogy and metaphore to try and make it clear to people who would otherwise try to limit it by forcing it into a capitalist or socialist frame of reasoning. Also the mods "gently chastise me" and then "lovingly block my communications" when I try to add links to it here. So not much I can do to answer your question. Also, I don't know, my insight solution is a sliding scale price tag that makes a profit for the busines and simultaneously reduces income innequality and leads to a multi-currency economy. But predicting exactly what happens after and how it's interpreted in a language limited by marx terminolgy is probably not possible or worth doing. Explaning this in marx terminology is like predicting what happens when you introduce an invasive species of ants into an ecosystem economy and a food web ecossystem based on ants and other animals in a small texas valley with it's own unique weather. If your model of the food web is limited by aggregating all biomass into aggregate callorie flows between animals and plants then it won't have the words to explain an invasive species of fire ants. It's like asking how does crusoe on crusoe's island function and explain when europeans come in and add pigs to the island ecosystem and economy? Answer is that it doesn't make sense to explain a concept about pigs as an invasive species in an island model where all animals are counted as equal and treated equally. All you could say is the biomass will still equal the productive output of the island. So marx alone and a discussion limited to marx categories and lexicon is not going to prove much value to understanding this. you could try explaing that the pigs will kill off the flightless birds and tear up certain specefic plants and spread over the island in common language using a metaphor. But if you tried to fit that concept into a max argument about the animals vs the plants and exploitation of plants by animals in general as aggregate bio-mass flows. . .Well you don't get far except to resort to the marx platitudes that are true enough of aggregates without explaining the phenomenae of an invasive species in any meaningfull way. I'm going to introduce a sliding scale price tag that is convenient and ubuiquitous to use for buying things like a coffee at startbuks because it makes the profit money so someone will do it sooner or later and if I do it first then I can maybe control the technology for good it and already I found how to make it reduce income innequality. My project which you can find by a google search "code for san francisco" and then clicking on the projects page link and scrolling down to click on the project labeled "hours equals price project", is focused on crowdsourcing research to answer the very question you pose. What does the existence of a convenient and profitable sliding scale price tag that reduces income innequality mean for society? A very good question that I was really hoping the people here could answer for me. All I know for sure is a lot of financial tech is converging on this solution and I just got there first because I listened to you guys and I'm really smart. So whether I build it or they do is just a question of who's faster and works harder at owning the infrastructure of exchange with this concept. I'm pretty sure it's better if I build it and pretty sure it's better for poor people with it growing and becoming common usage and social norms sooner instead of later. But after that its pretty much just wild speculation too long and tentative to be allowed as post here or even a link.
@Michel Luc BellemareLike you we are all here to learn I think. Time after time Marx learned how things did not change as fast as Marx thought things would change. Time after time he learned by this. To learn is to find a truer view on finding some flaw in previous idea. We are all here to learn I hope.You were not slow to answer this question if only by silence. How are we switching total labour between different products in proportions that change all the time with needs ways and means? Any society must have some way. So come on! Which is it?1) Crusoe 2) Prison commissar 3) MarketThe market is currently the one accountant able to organize total labour. The answer is competition. This is the proof of the labour theory. You can see this Michael.But you found a flaw, the heart of the matter. Thank you for sharing what you found.You found that it was impossible to explain profit. That’s if worker gets the value of his commodity labour-power.But, as you see, we have no problem explaining profit when worker’s wage is value of labour-power.
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