[robbo203]

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

 I think Robo203 can speak for himself.  But I'll wager 1 hour of yout time reading on a topid the other chooses based on Robo203's sole determination of whom he feels owes whom an hour reading. for his service as judge Robo203's can also add an hour of time and any reading comprehension quizes to the wage and he gets to choose the topic the loser has to read.  Care to put your means and abilitiy where your mouth is?  If you're more than just an angry idiot then put up or shut up and let robo203 decide in his sole discretion and at his sole judgement criteria who he wants to spend an hour of time reading what.  That would be the socialist way if you can see past your preconceptioins to recognize it and not get all scardy cat of an hours time lost having to think and answer a few simple reading comprehension questions.  You accused me of caliming I know more than Karl Marx? So socialist defer to elites and prestigious figures to settle arguments?  what difference does it make if I know more than Karl Marx except for offending your religous veneration of him which I don't think he would have wanted anyway.  I want you to consider the phrase "I stand on the shoulders of genious" and consider what that might mean. I read a few marx books and summaries in college long ago and it had a profound effect on me, but clearly wasn't relevant or actionable so I didn't get much value from practicing it or talking about it most of the time.  I have spent a lot of time studying human behavior in capitalist markets, usually on the inside doing some horibble job to survive making presentations for the very worst of capitalist because you got to pay the rent.  Speaking of which I need a roommate now and I have one of the last rent controlled wharehouse bohemian room shares in SF that I'm renting at an incredibly low price because that's the law, and I completely approve of the law and my rent control and you have me all wrong because of your preconceptioins.  Political Economic is just part of what I study and it was just part of what Marx studied. I have come after marx and my genious is added to his not in competition with his genious.  Please don't apply the law of competition to me and marx because that's a capitalist way of thinking. 

 Could you please stop wandering all over the place and address the argument in a simple straightforward fashion.  I find your style f argumentation distracting and frustrating, frankly

[robbo203]

robbo203 wrote:

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.    

  Michel Something does not quite add up in this argument you present of steadily rising prices and falling costs of production.   Another forum user here, Steve San Francisco, comes to your aid by presenting the following evidence:   “According to economists Jan De Loecker of Princteon University and Jan Eeckhout of the University College London, this basically describes the US economy since 1980. In a recently released paper, De Loecker and Eeckhout analyzed the balance sheets of listed companies from 1950 to 2014. (In 2014, these firms accounted for around 40% of all sales.) They found that average markups, defined as the amount above cost at which a product is sold, have shot up since 1980. The average markup was 18% in 1980, but by 2014 it was nearly 70%."  However such evidence hardly clinches the argument for the obvious reason provided in the quote itself – that the firms concerned account for only 40% of all sales.  We do not know what the situation is regarding firms accounting for the other 60% of all sales.  It is quite conceivable that the former have been able to substantially raise their prices because of the changing pattern of supply and demand but at the expense of the latter, perhaps because relatively greater productivity in the latter sector has greatly increased the output of goods there bringing about a fall in their relative prices.   In fact, according to this article I came across, there are “seven categories of goods and services that are comparatively cheaper today than they were 10 years ago. All figures are based on a BLS comparison of like products and services from August 1998 and August 2008.”   These include phones, electronics, footwear, new vehicles, toys, apparel, watches” (http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/7-falling-price-tags-1.aspx)  So the picture you present is somewhat misleading – some businesses or industries may have been able make substantial mark-ups but only because other businesses of industries have not been able to do so.  So what you have in fact is a shift in the overall pattern of demand from the latter to the former, relatively speaking.

Can anyone provide some data concerning the average mark up for industry as a whole not just a select number of businesses, as in the above quote, that account for only 40 per cent of total sales?

[robbo203]

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

robbo203 wrote:

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

.  Capitalism in the form that you and marx understood has already ended.   

 Really? The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”1 its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.(Capital vol 1 ch 1) Has this ended?

When all you have is a single limited theory of socialism, then any “ immense accumulation of commodities,” looks like capitalism to be stamped out.  I think the hypothetical general store is an "immense accumulation of commodities".  So the theoretical socialist general store is capitalsm becuase inside of it is an immense (indead unlimited) accumulation of commodities, by your own logic.

 What on earth are you talking about?  I can make no sense of this response whatsoever.  How is it the case that "by my own logic", socialism too will exhibit an "immense accumulation of commodities"?  You apprently do not understand what a commodity is.  It is not an object or good providing use value per se.  Rather , it is good that is specifically produced for sale on a market.  What characterises capitalism is that most goods are produced for same.  i.e. there is generalised commodity production. In socialism there are no commodities whatsoever. There are goods providing  use value, certainly, but these goods are not bought and sold.  They are not commodities.That is because socialism is not a market exchange economy.  Market exchange implies private or sectional ownersjip of the mean of wealth production but in socialism those means are owned in common, by everyone. If you own something you dont need to exchange something else for it in order to gain the right to access to the thing in question,  That is why in socialism there will be no commodities and, therefore, "immense accumulation of commodities"

[robbo203]

Steve-SanFrancisco-UserExperienceResearchSpecialist wrote:

.  Capitalism in the form that you and marx understood has already ended.   

 Really? The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”1 its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.(Capital vol 1 ch 1) Has this ended?

[robbo203]

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.    

  Michel Something does not quite add up in this argument you present of steadily rising prices and falling costs of production.   Another forum user here, Steve San Francisco, comes to your aid by presenting the following evidence:   “According to economists Jan De Loecker of Princteon University and Jan Eeckhout of the University College London, this basically describes the US economy since 1980. In a recently released paper, De Loecker and Eeckhout analyzed the balance sheets of listed companies from 1950 to 2014. (In 2014, these firms accounted for around 40% of all sales.) They found that average markups, defined as the amount above cost at which a product is sold, have shot up since 1980. The average markup was 18% in 1980, but by 2014 it was nearly 70%."  However such evidence hardly clinches the argument for the obvious reason provided in the quote itself – that the firms concerned account for only 40% of all sales.  We do not know what the situation is regarding firms accounting for the other 60% of all sales.  It is quite conceivable that the former have been able to substantially raise their prices because of the changing pattern of supply and demand but at the expense of the latter, perhaps because relatively greater productivity in the latter sector has greatly increased the output of goods there bringing about a fall in their relative prices.   In fact, according to this article I came across, there are “seven categories of goods and services that are comparatively cheaper today than they were 10 years ago. All figures are based on a BLS comparison of like products and services from August 1998 and August 2008.”   These include phones, electronics, footwear, new vehicles, toys, apparel, watches” (http://www.bankrate.com/finance/personal-finance/7-falling-price-tags-1.aspx)  So the picture you present is somewhat misleading – some businesses or industries may have been able make substantial mark-ups but only because other businesses of industries have not been able to do so.  So what you have in fact is a shift in the overall pattern of demand from the latter to the former, relatively speaking.  You see, this is the problem that I have with your whole argument.  You seem to think you can just arbitrarily or “creatively” push up your prices but the purchasing power of the consumer is not infinite and the law of opportunity costs intervenes to balance things out.  If our consumer has to buy your product at a higher price then she is left with less money to spend on other things.  It’s as simple as that.  So if she has less money to spend on other thing the businesses producing those other things will struggle to sell these things at the same price as before.  In short, they will be obliged to reduce their price to attract buyers  Another thing.  You talk about production costs falling in recent years and the prices of goods steadily rising.  Let’s look at this more closely.  Now production costs (by which I take you to mean UNIT production costs), have indeed fallen across large swathes of industry and this is largely because of rising productivity brought about by technological innovation.   Marx refers to this as the cheapening of the prices of commodities.  This is part of what makes for the increased standard of living.  Because prices are cheaper, workers are more able to afford them or to stretch their money wages further to buy things they could not previously buy.  In America for example there has been a significant increase in productivity in recent years.  According to Gillian White: “When you look at the relationship between worker wages and worker productivity, there's a significant and, many believe, problematic, gap that has arisen in the past several decades. Though productivity (defined as the output of goods and services per hours worked) grew by about 74 percent between 1973 and 2013, compensation for workers grew at a much slower rate of only 9 percent during the same time period”  (Gillian B White Feb 25, 2015, “Why the Gap Between Worker Pay and Productivity Is So Problematic”, The Atlantic)  The point I am making here is that the costs of production which you say has been falling includes, of course, the wages bill that businesses have to cover.  But wages have not fallen but grown albeit only slightly.  Workers may be relatively poorer vis a vis the capitalists today but, in absolute terms, their living standards have gone up slightly.  Why is this? Well, one reason is their increased productivity which translates into increased output which in turn brings about about a relative cheapening in the price of commodities.  How else would you explain the slight increase in their real wages over this extended period?  However, your whole argument hinges on the claim that prices have risen vis a vis real wages which would mean that the standard of living should have steadily fallen over this whole period.  But that has not happened – in fact the reverse is true – which strongly suggests that there is something seriously wrong with your theory. You are not taking into account the increased output and the effect this has on prices What the gap between increased wages and increased productivity does help to explain is the increased level of inequality between the working class on the one hand and the capitalists on the other.  But remove from the equation the factor of increased productivity (and hence increased output overall) then any increase in wages received by the workers would simply signify a decline in the share of the social product appropriated by the capitalists – and, of course, vice versa.  Marx explains this in Value Price and Profit:  “The aggregate demand for commodities would, therefore, not increase, but the constituent parts of that demand would change. The increasing demand on the one side would be counterbalanced by the decreasing demand on the other side”.Meaning that if capitalist increased their share of the social product this would tend to be reflected in an increased in price in the kind of commodities capitalists typically purchased such as luxuries but the flipside of this would be a lowered demand, and therefore a lower price, for “necessaries” – the sort of commodities that workers typically purchased  Perhaps, it is the former type of good, or what I would call “status goods”, that your theory of rising prices versus falling production costs is based upon.  We talked earlier of Naomi Klein’s book No Logo.  But Klein herself makes a clear cut distinction between what she calls, on the one hand, “big box” outlets like Walmarts whose whole approach is selling as cheap as possible, buying in bulk and employing economies of scale and, on other, businesses like Nike who go in for branded products (though Nike itself , I believe, does not own any factories itself and outsources its production to subcontractors in the Third World). It is in the case of branded products such as Nike trainers that your argument is (half) correct.  The Third world sweatshops that produce branded products like Nike trainers are notorious for the very low wages they pay their workers and there is a constant downward pressure to reduce wages even lower in a race to bottom with multinational corporations ever ready to switch to whichever supplier can come up with the lowest cost.  But you are mistaken if you think that is the end of the matter and that everything over and above the low wholesale price charged by the subcontractors, reflecting its low production costs, is consumed by the businesses concerned as pure profit.  What you overlook is that the production costs of the subcontractors supplying this branded goods and passed on to a corporation like Nike are not the only costs born by the latter.  There is also the massive and increasing costs of marketing and branding the goods in question which is why these companies are so insistent on looking out for cheaper suppliers.  They want to divert as much of their financial resources into marketing and branding their products and that too is a cost that eats away at their profits.  The mark-up figures quoted above probably do not take into account these kinds of overheads but only direct production costs Finally you paint a generalised picture of steadily declining production costs and steadily rising commodity process and suggest that this has somehow marginalised Marx’s Labour theory of value.  Well, no, it does not because all that that does on the face of it is suggest that the rate of surplus value – s/v – otherwise known as the rate of exploitation, has increased and to understand that you would be obliged to fall back on precisely that theory However, I would point that there is also the rate of profit to take into account (which is not the same thing as the rate of exploitation – namely, s(cc + v) – and there is quite a lot of evidence to suggest that, if anything, there has been a long tendency for this rate to decline.  See for example this article http://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1126/rate-of-profit-continues-to-fall/.  I don’t quite know how that would fit in with your suggestion that there is an ever growing volume of profit accruing resulting from the capitalists arbitrarily raising their prices using their “creative power”, notwithstanding the decline in production costs, but it would be interesting to see how you square this particular circle

[robbo203]

theneilkirk wrote:

Thank you.Dave, I did manage to speak with Rob and Mandy at the stall and am keen to meet up more.Robin, you really tested my Afrikaans there, but I managed without Google Translate! But I'll stick to English if you don't mind; I can't say 'ek kan die taal praat' any longer, I'm afraid to say. I was born in Vereeniging but moved to Germiston to start school and lived around that area for nearly 20 years. Small world… Where are you based now?

 Hi Neil,   Im based in Southern Spain now – in the Alpujarras, south of Granada.  Actually, some of the landscape around here reminds me of South Africa.  Very rugged. You almost expect a troop of baboons to come over the top of the cliffs sometimes and maybe the odd leopard.  Gawd, I remember Vereeniging and of course Germiston where I was born.  We lived in Klippoortjie in Germiston  not far from the lake and I recall there was a series of gruseome murders that took place around the lake back then – a serial killer or something.  I guess you probably went to Germiston High, eh? Anyway have fun on the forum.  Its good to have new faces and yes, as you say,  what a small world it is!   Cheers

[robbo203]

theneilkirk wrote:

Hi, As a new member of the forum, I wanted to introduce myself.My name is Neil, I’m 35 and I live and work around Canterbury. I’ve lived here 10 years and am originally from South Africa (I hold dual citizenship). In my day job, I am a Project Manager in software and technology development for a global telecommunications company. In my spare time, I enjoy running and have recently completed a Foundation Degree in Sports Science. I have applied and am hoping to become a member of the SPGB. 

 Hoe gaan dit , Neil? Ek is ook van Suid-Afrika – van die stad Germiston – alhoewel dit baie jare is, was ek laas daar. Welkom by die forum.  Robin

[robbo203]

Marcos wrote:

That conception of Alt-Left is just a stupidity, there is not a movement or an organization in the USA called Alt-Left, anything that  opposes the Republican Party, or the right wingers, is called Alt-Lef, it is like the term Liberal  that is being for all  kind of situation, except for the real ones, there are not liberal in the USA, and Liberalism does not exist either. Most of the so called Alt-Left are just a bunch of reactionaries, recalcitrants,  and similar to the right winger. Leninist which is the real leftists do not support the so called Alt-Lett

 There is a FB group called "Alt-Leftist Empire" which has over 10,000 members and calls itself a subset of liberals and leftists distinguishable from the "regressive left" – it is purportedly in favour of free speech ad opposed to Antifa and the Alt Right.  I tried to join the site to exchange ideas but it didnt allow me in.  My suspicions are that it is a front for Ancaps of various kinds

[robbo203]

That is an interesting article, Alan. But Bookchin the Younger demonstrates, unfortunately,  the same kind of black-or-white thinking that Bookchin the Elder exhibited.  I'm thinking of these two paragraphs in particular: Municipalism rejects seizing state power, which we all know from the experiences of the twentieth century to be a hopeless pursuit, a dead end, because the state — whether capitalist or socialist — with its faceless bureaucracy is never truly responsive to the people. At the same time, activists must acknowledge that we won't achieve social change simply by taking our demands to the street. Large encampments and demonstrations may challenge the authority of the state, but they have not succeeded in usurping it. Those who engage only in a politics of protest or organizing on the margins of society must recognize that there will always be power — it does not simply dissolve. The question is in whose hands this power will reside: in the centralized authority of the state, or on the local level with the people.It is increasingly clear that we will never achieve the kind of fundamental social change we so desperately need simply by going to the ballot box. Social change won't occur by voting for the candidate who promises us a $15 minimum wage, free education, family leave or offers platitudes about social justice. When we confine ourselves to voting for the lesser of evils, to the bones that social democracy throws our way, we play into and support the very centralized state structure that is designed to keep us down forever. Why is it that so often on the Left, the Marxist argument for seizing the political instrument that we call the state, is just automatically and in knee jerk fashion, equated with a programme  of reforms implemented by some "faceless bureaucracy"?  This  shows a lack of imagination or readiness to think laterally and project into a future state of affairs,  if and when there is a very substantial socialist movement  that has materialised out there (without, of course, which there can be no socialism). There is no necessary reason why the democratic capture of the state as a strategy should go down the road envisaged by  Bookchin -providing it is made clear at the outset that this is not what it is being used for.  I am very sympathetic to the idea of local intiatives along the lines Bookchin suggests but I am also aware that the fundamental social change we are arguing for absolutely requires large scale coordination  backed up by large scale so-consciousness. It cannot  happen peicemeal in the systemic sense we are talking about… This, to me, is the  absolutely key advantage that the  " parliamentary road to socialism" possesses which  no other strategy seems to possses – namely its symbolic coordinating function that concentrates the wishes of a majority in a form that enables the switchover from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production to happen – and in a manner that effectively de-legitimises the moral authority of  capitalism to continue (thus reducing the prospect of destabilising violence which is not in our interests).  How else do you coordinate the changeover from private ownership to common ownership of the means  of production? This is what the opponents of the parliamentary apporach never ever explain.  It is a huge lacuna in their argument; a fatal flaw, in my opinion Perhaps it might  be worth contacting Debbie Bookchin to engage her in an exchange of ideas on precsely this point

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

Hence a new elaborated analysis is required. Thus, a term like "creative-power" which encompasses both quantifiable labor-power and unquantifiable labor-power.Now, the working class is the most numerous, and thus its creatice-power is the bulk of creative-power expenditures. Who else could support a football team, with outlandish prices and wages, certainly not the few capitalists who organize a stadium and/or the premier league. Workers, who are the bulk of creative-power, expend their creative-power, in believing in football or hockey and consuming football and hockey. 

 Michel, you have me confused now about this concept of yours of "creative power".  I was thinking of the ability to attract huge price increases for  products well above their cost of production  – in contrast to the Marx's "cheapening of commodities" brought about by technological innovation and enhanced productivity.  Branding as a form of advertising is a good example  of this because it invests the commodity in question with layers of signfiicance and emotional associations.  As I suggested earlier, you are lulled into thinking that buying  a pair of Nike shoes is like buying into a way of life Now you are saying creative power is really just an attribute or extension of labour power and as such resides substantially in the working class itself – in its ability to imagine.  I dont quite get this.  You say workers expend their creative power supporting their football or hockey team and paying through the nose for the privilege of doing so.  But does this connect with the idea of raising prices way above the cost of production.? I had thought the expenditure off creative power was something that benefited those who did the expending.- like the football stars you mention.  Now you seem to be saying the opposite – that the workers in whom this creative power substantially resides are the victims of their own ability to exercise creative power even to the extent of leaving themselves without enough money to put food on the table or gas in their cars as I think you mentioned earlier.  They are the ones who have to pay the high price of supporting their football or hockey team Could you possibily clarify this?

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

   Well, fellas, I am glad that Robbo does acknowledge, some truth to my perspective. And, like Robbo, I think Klein's book "NO LOGO" is a gem, 

Michel, yes there is some truth in what you say but this applies at the micro-level of analysis NOT the macro-level and for the reason I stated – that we are talking about zero sum game as far as price rises are concerned.     Individual business can indeed, by means of branding and the like – what you call the application of “creative power” – leverage huge price rises for their products and thus garner huge profit as a result.  There is nothing particularly “post-modern” about this either though you seem to think this is some radically new departure.  Thorstein Veblen at the end of the 19th century was writing about this sort of stuff  – about how the “Leisure Class” are willing to pay over the odds for certain status goods (dubbed Veblen goods) to differentiate themselves from the riff raff who couldnt afford these goods.  It’s called conspicuous consumption and these so called Veblen Goods have the peculiar attribute of inverting the normal economic logic of capitalism whereby prices rises are supposed to discourage, rather than stimulate, purchases.  But as I say, one business’ increase in market share is another business’ loss in market share.  Your whole analysis suffers from the shortcoming of focussing only on the winners in this game of one upmanship, rather than the losers.  In other words you are not seeing the wood for the trees.    If some business is able to raise its prices to some absurd level then self-evidently the people having to pay these astronomical prices will have less money to splash out on other commodities.  This is the opportunity cost of their decisions which you are overlooking.  Less money to buy these other commodities mean the demand for them will fall and hence also their relative prices (discounting inflation)  You mention in a previous post that  “CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution. You cannot measure network-control yet network-control can have a substantial influence of value, price and wage-determination.  Network-control is a type of unquantifiable generator of value, it enacts its creative-power in various ways upon the minds of the population, upon conceptual-perception” I would dispute this.  “Network control” or “creative power” does not in itself generate value, at least not in the Marxian sense of value as “socially necessary labour time”.  What it does is aid the redistribution of wealth in favour of those who use and manipulate that creative power for their own ends and at the expense of others.   Advertising itself, for example is totally unproductive of value in the Marxian sense; it adds no value in that sense though certainly it adds value in the subjective sense and it is that that encourages the consumer to buy the product in question by “talking it up”, by investing in it a certain emotional appeal.  As I noted earlier, Klein herself pointed out that advertising itself is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The more advertising there is out there, the more aggressively do business need to push their own brands to make them stand out in an already overcrowded market of brands– meaning they have to run faster and faster simply in order to stand still or defend the share of the market they have cornered  Finally you refer to the obscene bonuses and salaries that CEOs – or, at least, some CEOs – command in particular, in companies such as those listed in the Dow-Jones index (to use an American example) which comes to an average compensation package of about 20 million dollars per year per CEO.  Now, to me, this unequivocally puts these individuals in the ranks of the capitalist class, albeit the lower rungs of that class, meaning that their income is substantially unearned income, the fruits of a process of working class exploitation.  These salaried exploiters occupy a position analogous to that of the Soviet capitalist class, the Red Bourgeoisie, who extracted their share of the surplus value for personal consumption in the form of bloated or pseudo salaries.  The point is that if you look at all these hugely successful corporations with their handsomely paid CEOs, very often at the base of this pyramid of wealth generation are the kind of grim sweatshop factories Klein talks about which you are likely to find in places like Vietnam or the Philippines where work is subcontracted out and where the actual workers who produce all this wealth are paid an absolute pittance.   I don’t think you really bring out this vital connection between extreme wealth and extreme poverty in your analysis.  Free floating “creative power” such as is evidenced in the branding of products like Nike shoes is said to “add value” to the product as reflected in its increase price but it is almost as if the value, or socially necessary labour time, of those who actually produced the product in the first place is forgotten or barely figures in this subjective calculus of “value”…. 

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

      Let me answer your other question, why doesn't a network of capitalists raise prices to outlandish new highs. Well, sports does it all the time. Stadiums have raised the price of entry in North America with huge mark-ups. Sport stars demand obscene salaries, CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution. You cannot measure network-control yet network-control can have a substantial influence of value, price and wage-determinations. Network-control is a type of unquantifiable generator of value, it enacts its creative-power in various ways upon the minds of the population, upon conceptual-perception. In fact, convincing the segments of the population that paying outlandish prices, is part of having a good sport team, it is about belonging, it is about pride in one's city, in one's nation etc., its about irrationality. So to quote NIKE "JUST DO IT". And so the working population dishes out, dishes out when they cannot even put gas in their own cars and food on their own tables.      

 This statement by Michel gives the game away and reveals what I think is the fundamental flaw in his basic argument. In fact reading through his posts, reminded me of Naomi Klein's book  "No Logo".  If anyone here hasnt yet read it,  I would recommend they do – it is quite a compelling read and stuffed with juicy tidbits of information. Klein wrote of the power of branding products – "you are selling a lifestye not a pair of Nike shoes" – which transformed the world of advertising from roughtly the 1980s onwards and led to a huge increase in global expenditure on advertising (which in 2016  reached a total of $579 billions).  The rise of the logo and of branding which eased out the old fashioned approach to advertising which focusssed on the merits of the products themselves rather than their invented assciations with a way of life or some hip cool attitude, seems to me to be a particuarly striking example of Michel's "creative power" employed by his "networks of capitalists".  There is no doubt that, on the back of branding, some businesses have made astronomical fortunes – by hiking up prices and garnering huge profits.  To that extent Michel has a point .  But even so, he is failing to see the wood for the trees.  He is failing to see that what we are talking about is a zero sum game.  Some businesses can indeed dramatically increase their market share but the necessary corrollary of this is that the market share of others must shrink You cant have more than 100% of the market and you cannot conjure market demand out of nothing.  Michel more or less concedes this point.  He talks of the abilty of the sports industry to hike up prices to outlandish highs and to convince working people to go along with this "when they cannot even put gas in their own cars and food on their own tables".  Exactly.  They have bought into the mythology of the logo at the cost of having to divert more of their hard earned cash from other, some would say rather more important or useful, expenditures. Its the same in the world of business.  Klein talked of the law of diminishing returns in branding products. The more branding there is out there (for which read Michel's "creative power"), the more aggresively do business need to push their brands to make them stand out in an overcrowded market.  In other words they have to run faster and faster in order to stand still.  The winners in this game can only win at the expense of the losers and this is the basic problem with Michel's whole argument.  He is only looking at half the picture; the winning half.  More fundamentally, he is using value in the subjective of the term, not in terms of socially necessary labour time which is the Marxian sense of the term.  This is why he talks of creative power adding value  to the product in the sense of pushing up its price.  From a Marxian standpoint this makes no sense.  Value is not made in circulation, at the point of sale (it is only "realised" there).  It is made at the point of production. From a Marxian standpoint, the sum total of values must equal the sum total of prices. Consequently, if the price of some goods is above their value the price of other goods must fall below their value.  Logically there cannot be any other way. I am not decrying Michel's use of the term value in this way.  You can define "value" or for that matter  "class" in any which way you want but the question is whether the definition is fit for purpose. The purpose for which Michel employs his notion of value is to acount for the ability of some capitalist businesses to hike up their prices by employing smoke and mirrors to enhance the perceived value of their products in an aggresively competive market.  That's OK as far as it goes but it is not the purpose for which Marxists employ the term value.

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

 Come on Robbo, that  I somehow misconstrue Marx, is the last rung on the critique ladder. You cannot go anywhere with this line of argument. It ends up by me stating back unto you that you have misunderstood Marx. There is not a fundamentally true understanding of Marx, there are interpretations of Marx.  The holy grail of Marxian truth does not exist its full of nuances.  Most certainly Marx, founded his science on scientific quantification. That's what he wanted to do, a scientific understanding of capital and surplus value, what regulates capital flows etc. The law of motion is measurable and quantifiable and expresses itself as the regulatory mechanism of socially necessary labor-time. By the simple fact Marx uses the word "labor-time", means he corrolates labor-power and the commodity-form in general to time segments, measurable time segments. There is no getting out of that one. Now, whether these time-segments, embodied in a commodity, are valorized/realized in circulation is another matter all together. What did Marx say in Volume 3: Total Value = Total Price. Once again price is a numerical number sitting-in for the nebula of value. However, in our everyday lives  value is both measurable and immeasurable. That's why in reality, and I think Marx, states this, value and price do not equate. They oscillate. Well that's because value cannot be reduced to absolute quantification, there are values outthere essential to the production process, that are not scientifically quantifiable. 

 This is slightly confusing.  You seem to be both agreeing with what I am saying ( "there are values out there essential to the production process, that are not scientifically quantifiable.")  and disagreeing.  I urge you to read again, carefully, the passage  I quoted.  Value I asserted, is not something that you can dirctly measure with a stop watch and Marx never suggested that it was.  Value is rather a constantly shifting potentiality that reveals itself ONLY in market exchange –  in exchange value or the ratios in which commodities exchange and then only in an average sense over the long run.  So, one pair of boot exchanges for ten pairs of socks such that the socially necessary labour time to produce a pair of socks is said to be – in theory – one tenth of that required to produce a pair of boots by virtue of the former being one tenth the price of the latter.   However, . insofar as  the price (which is indeed quantifiable) of a pair of boots is 20 dollars and the price of each individual pair of socks is 2 dollars this will be due to factors quite other than just  the socially necessary labour time that went into making the respective commodities in question.  Notably, it will be influenced also by the supply and demand for these commodities which is why I say it is only in the long run  and in an average sense, due to the tendency of markets to equilibriate which allows us in theory, to discount the influence of supply and demand on prices such that the ratios in which commodiities exchange can then be said to reflect their value content.  However, markets NEVER achieve a state of equilibrium and this is why, in practice, trying to measure value is like the search for the holy grail Moreover, note the point that Pilling makes in the quote I provided:  And it is only when the producer of a product tries to sell this product on the market that he discovers its real, objective value (if any). During periods of capitalist slump the piles of unsold goods signify that the concrete labour embodied in them was socially unnecessary. Such labour cannot, through the market, be transformed into abstract labour and therefore creates no value. But the owner of capital can never discover this beforehand, even though he may be armed with the latest ‘market research’ techniques and may even have read Capital. The essence of capitalist production here is that he can only discover whether the labour incorporated into his products was socially necessary at the end of the process. Our task is not, therefore, to seek some measuring rod for the processes of capitalist production There is no guarantee under capitalism that the commodity you produce will be sold.  That being so how can you measure the value of something when you cannot be sure there will anything to measure in the first place?  

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

   A side note to my recent previous comment, I'd like to add a quick comment on competion,i.e., the coercive laws of competition.  It seems to me that for product costs to steadily go down and for prices to steadily go up across a sphere of production or pertaining to a specific commodity, competition between producers must be short-circuited.  

 If it is the case that production costs are steadily going down and prices are steadily going up then it must also be the case that the rate of profit must likewise be going up.  That does not appear to be borne out by the facts which if anything suggest a long term decline in profit rates.  See for example this working paper  http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1098&context=econ_workingpaper

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

    Many interesting points, here, which I fueling this debate tread very well. I'll try to add a little more fuel to the fire, a little @narchism . I think some of you are seeing the unquantifiable nature of value, there is something not quite right with Marx's law of value, there are things within the economy influencing price, value and wage, which are intangible, unquantifiable. I am of the firm belief that Marx wanted to give the world a Science, a scientific understanding of capital and how capital works. He was part of the 19th century's fetishization for laws, there must be laws to all phenomena, including the economy. This is why Monsieur Marx, sent a copy of Das Capital to Darwin, I felt they were cut from the same scientific determinist cloth. And repeatedly throughout Marx's Capital series of books, he states labor-time is quantifiable, labor-power is determined by social necessity, and this socially necessary labor-power expended in production, always mesurable. His whole concept of the commodity is as a container of use-value and surplus valus, necessary labor and surplus labor, measured in quantifiable segments of labor-time, clock-time. Which is pure science, the application of the scientific method to labor-power. How victorian of Marx, to do this, a man of his age and epoch. 

 Michel,  I think you are seriously misunderstanding  Marx and his labour theory of value judging by some of your comments here, Marx did not envisage value or abstract labour to be something capable of, or lending itself to,  empirical measurement or quantification.  Allow me to quote a lengthy exceprt from Geoff Pilling's 1980 book "Marx’s Capital, Philosophy and Political Economy"(https://www.marxists.org/archive/pilling/works/capital/geoff4.htm) "A ‘measure’ of valueThese comments by Marx about the nature of social labour raise another directly related topic. For in these statements Marx is by implication rejecting what for political economy was one of its main tasks – the search for some ‘measure’ of value, or what amounted to the same thing, the attempt to arrive at a true definition or concept of value. (We shall deal later in more detail with this question of Capital’s concepts.) We have seen that in a commodity-producing economy the equalisation of labour is achieved through the equalisation of the products of labour. This is but another way of saying that all varieties of concrete labour are reduced to abstract labour through the market and thus become social labour. But nobody can or does ‘measure’ these many forms of labour empirically. To imagine that this is so would be to ignore an essential feature of commodity production – its spontaneous, anarchic nature. Considerable misunderstandings will arise (as Rubin, Theories of Surplus Value, has rightly pointed out) if the law of value is seen as an ‘instrument’ which makes possible the comparison and measurement of the various products in the act of exchange. It has been widely (and wrongly) believed by many economists and others that Marx emphasised labour precisely as this ‘practical’ standard of value. As opponents of Marx, such writers have directed their efforts to showing that labour could not be accorded this privileged status; they have argued along these lines because of the absence of precisely established units with which to measure the various forms of labour which are different from each other with regard to intensity, skill etc.Such a line of attack utterly misconceives the nature of Marx’s value theory. It is both impossible and unnecessary to discover a measure of value which will make possible the equalisation of labour or the products of labour. It may be a simple point, but none the less profound, to insist that this equalisation of labour takes place objectively, spontaneously and indirectly – that is, independently of any participants within the capitalist system. It is in this real, objective process that value is measured. Out of the process of the production and circulation of commodities money (gold) arises. Gold is not some ‘external’ measure, standing outside the world of commodities. Nor was it ‘selected’ by conscious planning on the part of economists or politicians. This measure (gold) was historically selected, after long trial and error, in the sense that it was its physical-material properties which enabled gold to select itself as the most suitable money-commodity. The matter can be reformulated thus: it is not money that renders commodities commensurable; on the contrary, it is because all commodities as values are realised human labour, and therefore commensurable, that their values find their measure in one and the same commodity. By a social and historical process this commodity is converted into money. Unless the objective nature of these processes is grasped, then the significance of all Marx’s categories of political economy is lost. We have already spoken of the social character of the labour which creates value, summed up in Marx’s concept of abstract labour. Marx insists that the measure of value is not labour-time, but socially-necessary labour-time, that is labour-time required to produce a commodity at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces. And it is only when the producer of a product tries to sell this product on the market that he discovers its real, objective value (if any). During periods of capitalist slump the piles of unsold goods signify that the concrete labour embodied in them was socially unnecessary. Such labour cannot, through the market, be transformed into abstract labour and therefore creates no value. But the owner of capital can never discover this beforehand, even though he may be armed with the latest ‘market research’ techniques and may even have read Capital. The essence of capitalist production here is that he can only discover whether the labour incorporated into his products was socially necessary at the end of the process.Our task is not, therefore, to seek some measuring rod for the processes of capitalist production. The very process is its own measure. Value does not measure commodities; commodities discover their own measure of value. The task of Marxism is to discover how this is done, to discover the laws and tendencies of this process, laws and tendencies which do not appear empirically on the surface of society but appear always in the form of crises:"in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products, the labour-time socially necessary to produce them asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him. The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret hidden under the apparent movements in the relative values of commodities."In short, instead of the vain search for some formal standard by which to measure the magnitude of value, Marx set out to abstract the laws of the development of capitalism (‘law of motion’), that is to uncover the (highly contradictory) processes whereby this problem was actually resolved in practice.

[Author]

Posts