Young Master Smeet
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I'm now lost. You say I didn't answer a question that I thought I was answering, so I don't see how scrolling back a few posts would do me any good, I'd only find the question I thought I'd answered.AFAICS you asked "what is the underlying philosophical basis of 'soylent green', in your view, that allows us to explain day-to-day, simple experiences of workers, in the first place, as an inital step, and thus provide a basis for an explanation of something much less obvious, that is, the concept of 'value'?" And I answered that because soylent green revealed that a popular consumer product was in fact human flesh, this is a useful way into understanding that the commodities which we 'consume' in capitalism which appear to use as simple objects that stand in relation to our cash, are in fact the products of (and part) of human labour, we eat the lives of our neighbours. Seeing that the world we live in is a created one (created by us as humans in co-operative labour) is an important political step to seeing that the world can be re-made. Also understanding that modern life is created by other people's labour is a step to understanding the poltitical case for socialism: we make the world sotgether, shy shouldn't we share it.Finally, I'd suggest the cannibalism motif gets to a certain revulsion that I think you're aiming for with your social acid trope.
Well, I thought I was answering the question, care to reformulate? Maybe I didn't understand it correctly.
The above is, apparently, a chart of where immigrant populations are, versus a map of UKIP voting intentions (right) noticeably, UKIP are where immirgants aren't: this gives grist to the idea that people are more moved to defend what they have than to get somethign new.However, I'd caution accepting that it's blue-collar working class who form the back bone of UKIP, labour are only slated to lose about 6% of their votes to UKIP, where UKIP get votes in Labour heartlands it's by activating discouraged Tory voers (or natural Tories who wouldn't vote for the party).UKIP got thumped to bits in London, they got murderated in Blackbird Leys they clearly won over former Tories, but got thumped by Labour. I can't find the chart now, but the transfers from labour to UKIP will be much fewer than from the Tories (percentage points wise) I'll hav anothr look for it this evening.
Soylent green is people. Value is soylent green. Therefore value is people. We are consuming other people, value is cannibalism, when we consumer a car, a side of beef, a cotton shirt, we are not simply using those objects but also the labour of other human beings. Seeing the people, the effort behind the object is the first step, and, I'd suggest, more effective than the erroneous notion of social acid (unless we want to say that commodities are a salt).
LBird,I hear the grinding sound of goalposts moving. Sloganising is different from explanation. The original question was 'How do we explain value?' Detroit does not explain value (and there are factors other than value involved, geographic, constitutional and cultural, I'd suggest, to Detroit's destruction)."Who benefits from our labour?" Is a good enough slogan. "The abolition of the wages system" is better.Or:
Lbird,that doesn't explain value at all: it doesn't explain how value built a global spanning empire, how it created the factories and places we work in. It doesn't simply corrode.And if we're doing rough and ready one sentence definitions: value is the share of the total human effort of producing things for exchange that goes into producing a given good.
Quote:Can hypocrisy and cynicism from a profit-making capitalist enterprise sink any lower?Quote:Maybe, at long last, the blinders will come off when these deniers are forced to come to grips with the fact that Walmart associates are paid so poorly that a store in Canton, Ohio, located in the northeastern part of the state, now holds an annual, Thanksgiving drive to collect canned foods for fellow Walmart employees in need.Walmart spokesperson, Kory Lundberg, thinks this is all just the most wonderful thing—bragging that the drive to collect holiday food for fellow employees shows just how much Walmart employees care about one another.SP,no-one, AFAIK think's you're a shit stirrer, your question was met with an answer, is all. The minimum people need to understand is that a pile of money ina field doesn't grow like a plant. Only human effort increases wealth, and the only way that someone can be relatively wealthy, that is having more wealth than can be produced by a single person working, is by taking control of the effort of others. A lump of metal and a bit of wood are worth as much as a lump of metal and a stick of wood, but turn them into a hammer, and they are worth more than the metal and wood together. That addition is effort. It may or may not sell at that value: it might be a rip-off or a bargain, but we know if it is either that it has some worth other than what it sells for.A myth may help. Imagine a society in which everyone has a similar set of skills. They use these skills to make/find goods A to E. Not everyone makes these objects, some make A and exchange with others, somoe make B, etc. Each though could make the other objects, and they know both how much effort it would take them to make them and how long otehrs would take. When exchanging, they take great care not to swap goods for objects that it would take less effort to get themselves than they have invested in the the thing they are swapping. Some people may have to put in more energy, or find some tasks harder in their minds and have to concentrate harder, but the others can't se that, all they can see is a rough output each per day.So, the people know that in terms of exchange A>B>C>D>E : that is, A is worth more than B, etc. As with our chess pawns, since E is the least valuable, it becomes possible to express these relative worths in terms of E, i.e. E=1. So D=2E, C=3.5E, etc. so to get a fair swap of D's and C's you'd need to swap 7 D for 4 C's (or fractions to that equivilant). Now, a certain number of hours of effort go into an E, but that doesn't enter into the bargain directly, goods are evauated in terms of the number of E's they are worth, and the relative human effort behind an E remains hidden, but it is there.
SP,In a sense they are pre-buttals:"socially necessary abstract labour time"So abstract = no distinction of the quality of the labour (skilled or unskilled)Socially neccesary = taking into account different rates of work between assiduous and lazy workersLabour and time should eb self evident: the time taken to do the work."relative magnitude"The size/scale of something when compared to something else – that's a natural language use. No attempt to confuse or maboozle there.
SP,after over 100-odd years evolution is still difficult to explain. I could say "descent with modification mediated by natural selection" which is concise and explains Darwin's theory nearly entirely, but that';s still not clear, and it takes effort to kep explaining it. Thus with value: that human effort is the only common factor to all commodities by which we can rationally exchange them. Simple as hell, but not necessarilly complete. Enough to begin the conversation. The speakers notes in some senses assume prior understanding by the reader, they're not an introduction.
