Marx

Nah this is wrong, too. I want to work in a diamond mine because the wage for diamonds is high, not because I want to bring diamonds into the world.

― flopson, Friday, August 26, 2016 1:52 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but marx never suggests otherwise. he's trying to answer the question -- if you have capital to deploy, why do you want to say mine for diamonds instead of coal, and the answer is "you see more opportunity for profit" but the question of why you see more opportunity for profit has to do with _many_ things over time, in part demand, but also in part other relative questions of cost of production.

its also silly to drag general equilibrium into this because marx is not trying to describe a stable system of capital in equilibrium, but rather the a highly dynamic system in constant transformation and disruption, but nonethless with identifiable pressures and tendencies and momentary balances and imbalances.

anyway its totally silly to say marx rules out the relative desirability or utility of commodities -- he begins with that but notes that it well predates capitalism, or even money as a universal medium of exchange. if your complaint is "where are the supply/demand curves" the answer is really "that pertains to distribution but doesn't account for the factors driving and determining choices in production"

if you have capital to deploy, why do you want to say mine for diamonds instead of coal, and the answer is "you see more opportunity for profit" but the question of why you see more opportunity for profit has to do with _many_ things over time, in part demand, but also in part other relative questions of cost of production.

"other relative questions of cost of production" are what determine (wait for it) Supply

its also silly to drag general equilibrium into this because marx is not trying to describe a stable system of capital in equilibrium, but rather the a highly dynamic system in constant transformation and disruption, but nonethless with identifiable pressures and tendencies and momentary balances and imbalances.

you can shock general equilibrium, make firms discover new prices etc, there is a whole literature on it. but it doesn't give you anything like marxism afaik

"where are the supply/demand curves" the answer is really "that pertains to distribution but doesn't account for the factors driving and determining choices in production"

genuinely don't know what this means. pertains to the distribution of what? factors driving and determining choices in production you mean inputs? they're also determined by S&D

> "other relative questions of cost of production" are what determine (wait for it) Supply

but whence the reason for the quantity of that supply.

supply and demand don't explain anything about the general structure of an economy, they just account for how certain prices are set at a certain moment in time.

its like you're looking at a car and you explain everything by saying "this car operates by the conservation of energy". sure the conservation of energy plays a role, but you haven't even begun to look at the broader things one needs to understand to see why the car moves.

a lot of why marx is hard to read is he's not just explaining an approch, but he's very carefully trying to explain why ideas like "the supply of this is determined by the demand for it and also the supply of things to make it" don't get you almost anywhere at all.

you also have to understand that the labor theory of value isn't a unique marxian thing, but already rooted in classical political economy, including smith (though there's a particular and important treatment of it marx gives that's distinct from the predecessors).

> you can shock general equilibrium, make firms discover new prices etc, there is a whole literature on it. but it doesn't give you anything like marxism afaik

right, because there's no premise that there's even such a thing as a general equilibrium to shake -- prices, industries, production, employment are all in continuous and dynamic motion and interaction, constantly moving with regard to political, technological, social, broader economic developments.

this is one of the strangest articles i've encountered in a while. i've read it twice and i have no idea what point is being made:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-am-not-a-marxist/

Heads up: Verso is selling all things Marx w/ 50% off, as it's the bicentenary of the big man's birth.

they claim to be left-wing AND YET they’re SELLING marxist books

checkmate, pinkos!

*goes back to being slowly crushed by capitalism, dies*

You should've known better, bg. I'd like to say that I'll be right here waiting for you to get a clue, but I'll hazard a guess that it'll never happen. Sorry to be so harsh, but your words don't mean nothin'.

hey, the Man took 49.5% of my severance pay out in taxes.

Karl was right.

he was only right about 95% of everything, tbf

xp. famous libertarian karl marx

In a rare expression of neediness, I demand that someone acknowledge my astonishingly-clever wordplay a few posts back. Please. It's all I have.

In thread-related news, I've been thinking lately about tackling the immensity of Capital. Would've pulled the trigger had it been included in the sale. WTF.

Although I understand Althusser's companion is highly-regarded so maybe that's a good start.

In a rare expression of neediness, I demand that someone acknowledge my astonishingly-clever wordplay a few posts back. Please. It's all I have.

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llhglhW0IF1qekszro1_500.gif

I still haven't even finished Capital Vol 1, but one thing that strikes me a lot now is how bad a lot of the common criticisms of Marx's theories are, like I'll see one tossed off by some purported economist or political scientist and I'll think, "Um, no, he addresses that a few chapters into Vol 1."

there’s lots of great stuff in marx imo, but as far as his “pure” economic theory goes i think Samuelson’s ‘minor post-Ricardian’ quip is accurate

ive only read pamphlets and shorter works (wage labor and capital, value price and profit, manifesto, napoleon) wonder how much im missing out by not reading capital, which at this point i doubt ill ever do

q for man alive: did marx believe technology was ‘labor-saving’?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the question. If you're asking whether he accounts for the fact that machines increase productivity and enable the same person working for the same number of hours to produce more goods, yes, of course he does. But I doubt that he would frame it as "labor-saving."

I imagine you're getting at the argument that Marx fails to account for the ways in which the rising tide lifts all boats, i.e. if productivity greatly increases it should be inevitable that at least some of those gains go toward improving the standard of living of the workers. I'm kind of agnostic about that, but in recent years that certainly has not been true. It was admittedly dramatically true in the United States and Europe during the 20th century, but it's probably an unanswerable open question how much of that was the gains flowing to the workers vs the workers demanding a piece of the gains (e.g. through socialist and communist political action, the labor movement, etc.). You can also certainly point to places in the world where it does not seem to be the case, e.g. where effective slave labor continues in wealthy gulf countries.

On the other hand capitalism begins to really need mass consumerism to flourish, so it kind of needs some of that wealth and purchasing power to flow to the people on the bottom. But I think marx and marxists would say that capitalism is self-destructive in the long run and doesn't know what's best for itself, and therefore eventually capitalism begins to erode that same purchasing power in its dumb search for new avenues of profit.

the moral of das kapital: marx's dad was a judge (imagine that) and engels was an outrageously privileged trustfunder which is why they failed to effectively relate to the proletarian class. (see also 'frankfurt school, the')

I went to the hq of the French communist party today. They were selling goofy tshirts and coffee mugs.

That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Das Kapital has nothing to do with “relating” to the proletarian Class, it’s just a description of how an economy would work if it actually behaved according to classical economics. The manifesto is the work aimed at “relating” to people and it was enormously popular and successful.

last year i struggled through the first several hundred pages of Capital with the help of David Harvey's videos before burning out. i learned enough to know that it is not a book that can be easily summed up in one sentence

I mean that kind of brings me back to my above point - if you can’t be bothered to read Capital, I don’t blame you, because it’s a slog and I haven’t gotten through it either. But don’t make shit up about it just so you feel better dismissing it.

man alive otm.

also marxism as a project isn't about "relating" to people in the focus group/pandering sense but about to appealing to them as human beings with an innate craving for freedom and dignity. the idea is to abolish the working class, not fetishize working class culture.

also speaking of the frankfurt school, there is no contradiction even in adorno's hatred of popular culture and his commitment to marxism as a political project. maybe it's mandarin and condescending, but it was coherent. for him modernism was about breaking the spell of false consciousness; popular art was about naturalizing capitalist social relations, which is why it was the enemy.

I imagine the answer is probably yes x 100, but has anyone ever undertaken to sort of “reimagine” Capital in a contemporary context, using modern examples and language and responding to today’s popular economic arguments? I think part of its problem is that it made a lot more sense in its historical context. David Harvey did help me understand that better but it seems like there ought to be an easier way.

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but perhaps the answer is Ernest Mandel and 'Late Capitalism'?

That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read. Das Kapital has nothing to do with “relating” to the proletarian Class

yeah okay guy

"Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/index.htm

marx inspired massive working class movements across the globe that shook the foundations of capitalism. the project failed; the experiments in almost every nation were catastrophic; but his problem was never that he was marginal. he did change the world.

you don't say. he still failed in his project, if you haven't noticed. my point is his remarkable privilege and engels even more remarkable privilege played a role in that failure. somehow that keeps getting brushed aside in marxist studies, probably because studying marx at an advanced level is mostly the province of the privileged. see, for example, the frankfurt school

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

also i'm not sure marxist academics are all that privileged, given that most of them are toiling away in precarious adjust jobs in humanities and social science departments

al gore flies on planes

marx lived in poverty for most of his life.

tell that to his london housekeeper

i've never had a housekeeper

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helene_Demuth

qualmsley proves his point about "the moral of" Das Kapital by quoting a completely different work by Marx? that seems... misguided.

Marx set about to accomplish two major goals. One was to analyze capitalism, especially its inherent faults and internal contradictions, and the other was to replace it with something he conceived would be better. Das Kapital was his most complete attempt to accomplish the first goal. He definitely engaged in other activities and wrote many other treatises pursuant to the second goal. Scrambling everything together into one mess is just sloppy. Das Kapital stands on its own merits or mistakes, but it was never about 'relating to' the proletariat.

das kapital was never finished. who knows how marx would have ended it

and that proves?

i think there has been criticism of marx from feminists especially. the salient point with helene demuth wasn't that he employed her as a domestic worker--that was vastly more common in the 1800s and not a marker of wealth, really--but that he fathered a child with her.

marx was a bad husband and father. he didn't work which made his family suffer in poverty in london. there are plenty of defects in his character. i would be more comfortable pointing to those specifically than this vague broadside about how "privileged" he was or wasn't, which seems irrelevant

Das Kapital was actually going to end: "And therefore if you add up all of these units of labor power you get...wait, WTF, Capitalism is good now?"

I don't even know if it's fair to call the Soviet Union a "failure" -- it lasted nearly 80 years and industrialized and modernized huge swaths of agrarian Russia.. It was perhaps not the model of what we would want a society to look like, but neither was Tsarist Russia.

Better than you can say for many regimes, including some liberal/capitalist ones.

i'll call it a failure without reservation. the regime stalin created was at least a betrayal of the hopes of the petersburg soviet that seized power in 1917

it should be measured against its own claims, i think, not against some external marker. the form of life that was created was dull and bureacratic at best and, at its worst, marked by like, constant terror and assaults on the truth. it was nothing like a free association of free people

I think that's fair.

It should also be measured against what came before and after - compared to Tsarist Russia and post-Soviet Russia, the Soviet Union was a success. Some of its greatest failings need to also be contextualized in terms of the hostility of Western powers (from the Civil War) and trauma of the world wars. We can criticize their heavy hand in Eastern Europe as quasi-imperialist but it wasn't just an idle conversation among the western powers to immediately launch an attack on the USSR.

Measured against its claims and what a socialist state could be, the Soviet Union was a failure.