Young Master Smeet
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Admittedly:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_United_Kingdom_general_electionThis does show UKIP eating both main parties (though Tories got eaten first). In my travels looking for a particular chart (I'll find it if it kills me) I do find a lot of right-wing paper talking up UKIPs inroads into the traditonal working class. On policy issues, it's worth noting UKIP playing the democracy card, both in its call for a referendum, but also Carswell is into direct democracy as well, this could also be a way of understanding their growth. KLabour has basically to turn its back on democracy (indeed, direct democracy could well be a reaction to the gramscian hegemonic strategy of Blairism)…
SP,Start with your own day. You break your time up to achieve various tasks. So, eating, washing, household chores, etc. Some time you spend "at work". Value, in a sense, is like doing such a breakdown for the entire of humanity. In order to make that work, people need to know that the goods they receive are equal in effort to the goods they give away, otherwise between us someone would be putting unecessary amounts of eeffort into a given task.That's it, it's that simple. If that's not clear, you'll need to tell us how it's not clear, and ask some questions about what's confusing you.
The concept of rock certainly is a product of human labour, but not necessarily social labour, and thus it doesn't need to have value.
Lbird,I dropped rock because we're discussing value, and rocks aren't (generally) the produce of human labour.
LBird,Ah, I see. Considering this thread is about explaining value, I read your question in that light, rather than as a general question about epistemology. What soylent green says about a car, a watch, a brick, is that they are parts of a human, created by human labour, and twhen you enter into any relationship with that object, you are entering into a transferred human relationship with the human beings who brought it before you (even if they are now present). So, I suppose the philsoophical basis of soylent green is historical matrialism… *ta-ra-oops* (Comedy trombone).
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.
