Young Master Smeet
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Engels wrote:We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.[…]Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.[…]In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
So the individual demands will condition what is collectively made available.
Victory for free speech! The Qatari royals have failed in preventing us from criticising the Shard over their empty multi million quid apartments. They also failed in getting over 500 quid in costs for their injunction over protests at the building.
— Class War (@Classwar2015) February 8, 2018
Alan,you're right, except that even with Vietnam and it's poor standards of living is busting those enviornmental limits, if we stopped wasteful capitalist production, we'd still be at risk of busting the enviornmental boundaries. So, looking at the UK, under wasteful cap[italism it is busting through those boundaries, and getting down to them would be a serious chore.https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/countries/#UnitedKingdom
Alan, I answered your question. We wouldn't be able to treat each plot as a discrete unit, and would have to aggregate total spud production.Labelling each bag would be not worthwhile when entering into intermediate goods, since the spuds would all mix together.Your way would mean that a worker on plot 1 is three times as productive as one on plot 3…The point about teachers was that you would have to nominally give vouchers to directly productive workers of less than the value they produce, and you would have to find some way of giving teachers labour vouchers from that pot re-directed from that deduction.Rationing would actuially be better than labour time vouchers, and make more sense (and actually be easier to administer); better yet would be productive abundance so it's too much trouble to measure…
Indeed it didn't, except that it posed physical barriers such as a 76.2 tonne material footprint per capita: based apparently on this article:https://www.nature.com/articles/461472aNow, to say that socialism will involve living less well than contemporary Vietnam will not enthrall the masses.Private Frasier is too optimistic…
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…
