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Cockshott General 3.0: Chad Cybernetics Edition
Joshua Foster
Ethan Peterson
New blogpost by Paul Cockshott, this time about manipulated security-cam footage?? paulcockshott.wordpress.com
Ryder Wood
...
Dylan Bennett
it's refuting British anti-Russian war propaganda
Cooper Jones
lmao wtf. I didn't follow the affair, I just saw liberals screaming fake news at RT for doubting the offical version. This kills the redditor
Brody Smith
Thanks user. I was away from the internet for a couple of days focusing on studies.
Leo Barnes
I've been re-reading TANS lately and early on in the book, in chapter 2, he calculates the value created by an hour of labor in the UK, coming to about £7.50 or £300 a week. I looked up some statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate what it'd be today in the US. Assuming a NNP of $17.25 trillion and a working population of about 153 million, it works out to about $112,500 created per worker. This means an hour is worth $58.59 and implies a weekly wage of $2343.69. Compare this to the median weekly wage of $876.
Charles Collins
NNP includes finance activities. Not a good measurement. Why not just look at the average or median "hourly" wage for proles and divide it by the average workday?
Cooper Johnson
oh and multiply the wage by ~1.6 to ~2 to find out the actual value of their work
Zachary Fisher
I want to clarify some issues here by quoting Marx on price, value, and production.
"In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be capable of being expressed in terms of something common to them all, of which thing they represent a greater or less quantity. This common “something” cannot be either a geometrical, a chemical, or any other natural property of commodities. Such properties claim our attention only in so far as they affect the utility of those commodities, make them use values. But the exchange of commodities is evidently an act characterised by a total abstraction from use value."
…
"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."
Marx, Capital vol.1 chapter 1
marxists.org
"It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves."
Marx, Letter to Kugelmann
marxists.catbull.com
"The assumption that the commodities of the various spheres of production are sold at their value merely implies, of course, that their value is the centre of gravity around which their prices fluctuate, and their continual rises and drops tend to equalise."
Marx, Capital vol.3 chapter 10
So, the argument goes like this:
1. The 'abstract labor time' necessary to produce a commodity determines its exchange-value with other commodities. (Or, its value for short.)
2. In capitalism, since private property is the norm, one does not know directly how much abstract labor time is necessary to produce an individual commodity.
3. Averaging the prices of a single category of commodity gives you a rough estimate of the average value and therefore the socially necessary labor time (SNLT) for that commodity.
4. That said, production of the same category of commodity (ex: a banana) may require different labor inputs depending on the specific producer and the conditions of production that obtain in that specific enterprise.
5. Like Marx says above, the fact that one banana is physically identical to another has absolutely nothing to do with its value.
What's my point?
Under a system of socialized production the abstract labor required to produce a given product is no longer something that only the producer knows and the consumer estimates via averages. The labor inputs would be directly social and therefore directly accounted for. For that reason any attempt to blend these various labor inputs (costs) by a system of averaged prices would be irrational. Like Marx said above, the distribution of social labor in specific proportions is governed by natural laws and not specific forms of manifestation. In both a capitalist mode of production and a socialist mode of production the specific distributions of social labor would need to be distributed on a rational basis. Socialism, in this sense, would be a step forward in that things which are only estimated by producers and consumers in capitalism can be directly measured and accounted for in socialism.