Young Master Smeet
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Oooh, they've just banned demonstratons in Petrograd: this isn't going to end well. https://twitter.com/RT_1917/status/839414408514158592
I think the under studied concept of surplus profit is relevent here: Marx did envisage a competetive advantage to machinery: if there is a predominant method of production in an industry, innovative production methods may allow a firm to produce goods sold at a price above their value, if otehr manufacturers have to sell at a production cost based on the old method. This isn't rent as such, but it is close. Such a new machine would seem to create or add value.
https://twitter.com/i/moments/839071562057809920It's all about to kick off, what could possibly hapen next?
Back to the motion before conference: it does not seek to set up abstentionism as a principle, but a tactic: one which can be changed at any point, I think the main thing is to prevent a lone councillor or anything of that sort. Once we get to a stage where we could be a significant minority, or a practical majority on any particular body, we can change the tactic. There is no benefit to the working class in being outvoted in the chamber.
ALB wrote:how our candidates in elections should answer the "Acacia Avenue Question",With the same answer as the Schleswig Holstein question: only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.
The DOP doesn't commit us to electoralism: it commits us to political action, and transforming the machinery of state, including the armed forces into THE agent of emancipation (once had long discussions with a member who went off to be an infamous anrachist on that very definite article).
DJP wrote:Interesting, but socialism obviously isn'y going to be an endless series of referenda about how many tins of baked beans we produce.No, but it could be an endless series of referendums.
So, this is interesting:https://theconversation.com/the-shape-of-brexit-is-probably-already-written-in-a-60-year-old-document-734033Keep an eye out for Article 217:
Quote:the EU:May conclude with one or more third countries or international organizations agreements establishing an association involving reciprocal rights and obligations, common action and special procedure.So, what we'll get is an Association, with it's own infrastructure, and rights, responsibilities and arrangements, but it won't be the EU. The question will be, can we tell the difference between New Whizzo Butter and a dead crab?
This one is worth a post in itself, I think, in terms of this debate, it's important:https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm
Grundrisse wrote:Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.Grundrisse wrote:Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form; (2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time. It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine), or makes his labour shorter. Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here – quite unintentionally – reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation. From what has been said, it is clear how absurd Lauderdale is when he wants to make fixed capital into an independent source of value, independent of labour time. It is such a source only in so far as it is itself objectified labour time, and in so far as it posits surplus labour time. The employment of machinery itself historically presupposes – see above, Ravenstone – superfluous hands. Machinery inserts itself to replace labour only where there is an overflow of labour powers. Only in the imagination of economists does it leap to the aid of the individual worker. It can be effective only with masses of workers, whose concentration relative to capital is one of its historic presuppositions, as we have seen. It enters not in order to replace labour power where this is lacking, but rather in order to reduce massively available labour power to its necessary measure. Machinery enters only where labour capacity is on hand in masses. (Return to this.)Nice clear exposition of Marx' position. And
Grundrisse wrote:Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.It seems the minority government is creaking, and a no-confidence motion is heading in the vague directioon of Enda Kenny: clearly FF reckon a quick heave could see a fresh election and a stable coalition for them.Kenny has been highlighting the risks of Brexit to Ireland:https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/16/enda-kenny-says-ireland-will-oppose-any-post-brexit-hard-borderAs Kenny notes, the EU shores up the All-Ireland agreement and peace process: also, unmentioned in this article, the economic relations between Britain and Ireland are important (I wouldn't be surpised if some London planner is looking at pulling Ireland out of the EU to resolve the border question).
The battle continues, and nary any pres coverage:https://theconversation.com/despite-reports-of-imminent-success-mosul-is-still-a-dangerous-flashpoint-72987
Quote:It has lately been reported that IS “sleeper cells” are present in eastern Mosul, but of much greater immediate concern are the frequent attacks being mounted in the supposedly liberated part of the city. Although supposedly under government control, the east is frequently subjected to attacks by mortars, suicide bombs and armed drones.More worrying in the long term is that in its efforts to maintain control, the Iraqi government appears to be relying not on regular army units but on Shia militias, who already have a reputation for harsh treatment of Mosul’s mostly Sunni civilians. This puts the CTS units in a bind: reluctant to hand over their garrison role to the militias, but unable to rely on the regular army to replace them.Mosul is not falling. The Iraqi army is taking a pasting.And Raqqa is not going to be attacked soon:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/donald-trump-scrap-retake-raqqa-isis-islamic-state-barack-obama-months-old-plan-a7561886.htmlAnd the running commentary from the BBC: doesn't make the top headlines, but it's there so they can say they have covered it.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-37702442Fighting until June, they're reckoning.
Marx Premise 1 wrote:Let us take two commodities, e.g., corn and iron. The proportions in which they are exchangeable, whatever those proportions may be, can always be represented by an equation in which a given quantity of corn is equated to some quantity of iron: e.g., 1 quarter corn = x cwt. iron. What does this equation tell us? It tells us that in two different things – in 1 quarter of corn and x cwt. of iron, there exists in equal quantities something common to both. The two things must therefore be equal to a third, which in itself is neither the one nor the other. Each of them, so far as it is exchange value, must therefore be reducible to this third.Marx Premise 2 wrote:If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour. Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S1Pretty much the whole of Capital rests on these two premises, and lives or dies by them.And, finally, another long quote, from the chapter on Exchange, which I think is quite key
Marx wrote:It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them. [1] In order that these objects may enter into relation with each other as commodities, their guardians must place themselves in relation to one another, as persons whose will resides in those objects, and must behave in such a way that each does not appropriate the commodity of the other, and part with his own, except by means of an act done by mutual consent. They must therefore, mutually recognise in each other the rights of private proprietors. This juridical relation, which thus expresses itself in a contract, whether such contract be part of a developed legal system or not, is a relation between two wills, and is but the reflex of the real economic relation between the two. It is this economic relation that determines the subject-matter comprised in each such juridical act.https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch02.htm
Well, I'd have thought it would go 'by definition', so you're back to the first premises of Labour theory (that it's the only universal element of all commodities): if value is by definition human labour, and surplus value by definition is the difference between the value of labour power and value of labour added, then machines can no more add value than seas or trees can.
LBird wrote:Of course, for my part, I can provide many thinkers who argue that 'materialism equates to Leninism'.Go on then. I'll find you some non-Leninist materialists and refute that utterly, how's about that?Now, to returnj to the theme of the thread, it has been pointed out in the past that teh Sovs used Net Material Product:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_material_producthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_Product_SystemAs the WP article notes, the definition of unproductive labour was closer to Smith than to Marx, but we come back to unproductive for whom? The p[oint of the definition of productive labour was that it didn't generate profits, and all these national; accounts are accounts of howwell the system is performing for capital: otehr indicies are needed, like infant mortality, life expectancy, etc. to show us real performance (much as the Two dollaars a day is largely mythical as well).Whilst these things are useful for the big picture, we need to drill down to the individual experience of the economy.
