Young Master Smeet
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Dave, of course, Chuck was discussinghow Labour Value works in a market economy, and how rent is derived. For planning purposes you could look at the global amount of demand/planned production for spuds, and how many hours it would take to achieve that in the aggregate, but it would only produce an average value per spud, and you'd have to rely on technical reports on the productivity of land to decide how to allocate labour among plots: put another way, the labour value would be a second order at best tool, behind knowledge of how many tatty pickers were available, how many spuds were needed, and the productivity of land: i.e. technical/concrete planning.
Or, as another thought, are such boundaries and limits a useful guide to how socialist planning could be done, much better than abstract labour time: such targets would make a useful start for global planning…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Marxian_EconomicsA different Robinson, but she makes an intersting point, concerning land.To illustrate my own way: young Billy was the luckiest boy in all of Fulchester, for he had three patches of socialist land, which grew potatoes. On Plot A you could harvest 30 kilos of [potatoes per hour. Open Plot B you could gather 20 kilos of potatoes per hour, and on Plot C 1 kilo per hour.So, the labour value of spuds from plot A is one third of those from plot C. So, we have two choices, either we average out the values, and say that all potatoes have a labour value of 20 kilos per hour, which would have the ffect of misallocating labour among the plots, or, we price the potatoes from each plot at theoir exact rate, which will lead to market distortions as people will prefer plot A spuds, and will only buy B & C when A run out. Also, what do we do when the tatties make it to the chippy, and become intermediate goods, how would we know which spud came from which plot?Further, we would need to address unproductive tasks, such as teaching, that do not create a transferable object. teachers need to consume, and so we would have to include a portion of goods produced for them, which would mean that "productive" workers would only get a portion of their labour vouchers allocated to them.
Spliddit (http://www.spliddit.org/apps/tasks ) has an interesting task allocation algorithm, which rather than abstract labour casts a share of all tasks in terms of the most time consuming task. (if you go to the demo, you see that each person is asked to say which task they perfer over each other, and how many times they'd be prepaired to do the preferred task over the non-preferred). Obviously, this would have to be scaled by survey, but with a few thousand iterations, you'd have a fairly accurate knowledge of what concrete work people would be willing to do, and how many hoursof each task people would be prepared to do in 'unpopular' jobs…
The lesson of Michael hanneke's movie Time of the Wolf is that we have already seen what a post-apocalypse looks like, we see these things all the time, in Bangladesh, Mexico, etc. pace Hollywood, they don't involve people in leather having high speed battles with improvised weapons, and reverting to some sort of tribal atavism. They usually involve people looking scared, helpless and dislocated, sitting around waiting for help.The relevence of this little aside is that we have also seen what real post-capiotalism without active socialism looks like: megaslums, humans by their millions consigned to scrapyards and literally living off the detritous of the rich.
Paul Mason has tweeted this graph:$19 trillion dollars of quantitatoive easing it took to produce this stock market rise…
LBird wrote:Is Marx just 'philosophy and sociology' (ie. the humanities, 'soft science'), or is Marx relevant to 'physics, maths, logic, philosophy, sociology, etc.', (ie. all science, whether defined as 'hard' or 'soft')?To clarify what I was arguing, those elements of Marx' writings about philosophy, sociology, etc. were largely adaptations or syntheses of other writers, so Marx is not essential to those debates, Marx' most significant original contribution was the theory of exploitation: Marxism does not hang by it's philosophy of science (though Marx' writings on the subject are certainly interesting) but by the theory of exploitation, and all the derived extrapolations therefrom.Unless I am wrong, and there is a specific innovation of Marx' in those philosophies.
Lbirds point is sage, what part of 'Marxist theory' do we mean?There is the factual analysis, the evidence Marx used, and which may well be superceded (including the human behaviours he detailed). There is the analytical framework (which was shared in parts with others), and the deductive analysis based on the two.I'd say that if Darwin can be summed up by the great contribuition : "speciation arrives through decent with modification through natural selection" then Marx' great contribution is 'exploitation occurs in the difference between the value of labour poiwer and the value of labour performed.' The deductive conlclusion of that is that waged labour is inherently exploitative, and that profits of capitalists and the compensation of labour are inversely proportional to one another. All else is just useful philosophy and sociology, but disprove that statement, then Marx is rendered redundant.
I'll just add one thing: the mod should send more posts to the Rubbish Bin, especially "off topics": that is not censorship, that way at least the rest of us can follow threads without wading through a pile of rubbish plus three reminders adding top the rubbish.Just nuke them from orbit.
I say lets concrete over the lot, build arcologies and be served by robots, and then taunt our children with pictures of the natural beauty we have destroyed.Everyone needs a hobby.More seriously, given that humans have always terraformed their enviornment (per the high counters case of what happened to the Americas after the small pox plague, that the human centred environment fell apart).We have oceans we could fill up with arftificial islands (made of collected plastic?), even upper orbit and below the ground if we need.As far as I know, the only practical limit on human populations is phosphorous, and we could probably mine some asteroids for that…
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/face-value-bitcoin-proof-work-labour-theory-value/2018/02/01This is a really interesting article, that tries to use Marx' thinking to "fix" bitcoin.
Quote:If there is value in the original vision of Bitcoin, to have a form of money that can be used to make payments across the internet in a way that makes government unnecessary and doesn’t reveal real names or physical location, it needs to be programmed differently. Such a currency would need to work in such a way that the supply of the currency increases when more mining capacity is added to the pool. This allows the market to regulate its exchange value by the natural increase and decrease of investment in mining relative to demand for the currency.It is possible to create a cyptocurrency with a with a stable value by simply eliminating the feedback loop, creating a rational cryptocurrency with a consistent work:coin ratio. Bitcoin could be made rational by increasing and decreasing the number of Bitcoins produced per block along with the increase and decrease of the difficulty of the proof of work. This way, the number of Bitcoins produced would scale in proportion with the investment in mining.Apologies for long quote, but worth it, I think.
Marx wrote:The value (the real exchange value) of all commodities (labour included) is determined by their cost of production, in other words by the labour time required to produce them. Their price is this exchange value of theirs, expressed in money. The replacement of metal money (and of paper or fiat money denominated in metal money) by labour money denominated in labour time would therefore equate the real value (exchange value) of commodities with their nominal value, price, money value.Equation of real value and nominal value, of value and price. But such is by no means the case. The value of commodities as determined by labour time is only their average value. This average appears as an external abstraction if it is calculated out as the average figure of an epoch, e.g. 1 lb. of coffee = 1s. if the average price of coffee is taken over 25 years; but it is very real if it is at the same time recognized as the driving force and the moving principle of the oscillations which commodity prices run through during a given epoch. This reality is not merely of theoretical importance: it forms the basis of mercantile speculation, whose calculus of probabilities depends both on the median price averages which figure as the centre of oscillation, and on the average peaks and average troughs of oscillation above or below this centre. The market value is always different, is always below or above this average value of a commodity. Market value equates itself with real value by means of its constant oscillations, never by means of an equation with real value as if the latter were a third party, but rather by means of constant non-equation of itself (as Hegel would say, not by way of abstract identity, but by constant negation of the negation, i.e. of itself as negation of real value).[15] In my pamphlet against Proudhon I showed that real value itself – independently of its rule over the oscillations of the market price (seen apart from its role as the law of these oscillations) – in turn negates itself and constantly posits the real value of commodities in contradiction with its own character, that it constantly depreciates or appreciates the real value of already produced commodities; this is not the place to discuss it in greater detail. [16] Price therefore is distinguished from value not only as the nominal from the real; not only by way of the denomination in gold and silver, but because the latter appears as the law of the motions which the former runs through. But the two are constantly different and never balance out, or balance only coincidentally and exceptionally. The price of a commodity constantly stands above or below the value of the commodity, and the value of the commodity itself exists only in this up-and-down movement of commodity prices. Supply and demand constantly determine the prices of commodities; never balance, or only coincidentally; but the cost of production, for its part, determines the oscillations of supply and demand. The gold or silver in which the price of a commodity, its market value, is expressed is itself a certain quantity of accumulated labour, a certain measure of materialized labour time. On the assumption that the production costs of a commodity and the production costs of gold and silver remain constant, the rise or fall of its market price means nothing more than that a commodity, = x labour time, constantly commands > or < x labour time on the market, that it stands above or beneath its average value as determined by labour time. The first basic illusion of the time-chitters consists in this, that by annulling thenominal difference between real value and market value, between exchange value and price – that is, by expressing value in units of labour time itself instead of in a given objectification of labour time, say gold and silver – that in so doing they also remove the real difference and contradiction between price and value. Given this illusory assumption it is self-evident that the mere introduction of the time-chit does away with all crises, all faults of bourgeois production. The money price of commodities = their real value; demand = supply; production = consumption; money is simultaneously abolished and preserved; the labour time of which the commodity is the product, which is materialized in the commodity, would need only to be measured in order to create a corresponding mirror-image in the form of a value-symbol, money, time-chits. In this way every commodity would be directly transformed into money; and gold and silver, for their part, would be demoted to the rank of all other commodities.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch02.htm
Just to bookmark:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/maduro-sets-venezuela-s-debut-cryptocurrency-sale-for-february
Quote:Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro said the country is pushing ahead with plans for the first sale of its cryptocurrency next month, and developing plans for its use with a national ID card held by at least 15 million Venezuelans…Previous drafts of the white paper showed each coin would be backed by one barrel of Venezuelan crude, though the coins can’t be exchanged for the actual oil. The petro will be divisible into 100 million units and the minimum exchange unit will be called the mene, according to the draft proposal.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-42885211Would you Adam and Eve it.
Quote:A calamitous fall in the share price – off by over one-third, reducing the company's stock market value by £800m – looks the worst possible news for Capita….Capita, which issued a series of profit warnings last year, has again cut its profit forecast and revealed plans to raise £700m by issuing new shares…Capita had relied too much on acquisitions to drive growth and had also seen weakness in new contracts, he added.Deja Vu.
A quick look for top executive pay brought up this:"The average pay of FTSE 100 chief executives fell 17 per cent to £4.5m in 2016, according to analysis published on Thursday by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and the High Pay Centre, a think-tank. The single figure for pay includes salary, bonuses, incentives and employer pension contributions. "https://www.ft.com/content/5cfa1cd6-7791-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71So, we can say top 100 Chief Execs cost £450 million p.a. The highest paid CEO is on £48 million, though.Obviously, that's just multiplying the average (which is fine for our purposes). Here is the CIPD report teh article refers to:https://www.cipd.co.uk/Images/7571-ceo-pay-in-the-ftse100-report-web_tcm18-26441.pdf"the average pay ratio between FTSE 100 CEOs and their average employee wages (excluding pensions and share-based pay) is 138:1, down from 156:1""For example, the average headcount of FTSE 100 companies in the industrial sector is 43,112 in 2016. On average, the CEOs of these companies earn just under £3.5 million and the average staff package is around £43,000."Obviously, that is just CEOs not boards of directors and other top management roles.
