Marxian Economic Theory

I know Marx didn't distinguish between the two but I take the Leninist stance, so to me they're two different things.

Firstly, not exactly "selling" (autistic children will be complaining), but getting paid, receiving reward, having his singing socially recognized.

Secondly, why he isn't? Why doesn't society recognize value of his songs? If they are not deemed socially necessary/useful, then he is not actually working. What right does he have to demand anything? [starts calling People's Militia to report attempt at non-labour income]

Where is this said? I mean, other than "Principles of Communism" by Engels (where it is not said in this specific form).

Trots constantly refer to this, but I've yet to see actual basis for this little dogma.

Under communism, a musician that nobody wants to listen to would not be paid to make music. He would get his income through other labour.

so why is it exactly that in developed economies people can less and less live off rent?, i'm reading the economic manuscripts of 1844, and marx says this quoting smith

more, so that eventually only the wealthiest people can live on rent. Hence the ever greater competition between landowners who do not lease their land to tenants. Ruin of some of these; further accumulation of large landed property.(this bit is marx)

i don't understand how the smith bit leads to what marx concludes, in what way does the difference between rent of land and interest rates lead to nobody buying land and only a few people being able to live off it

there is no "income" in communism

Pedantic point. People will still only get to take out as much equivalent snlt as they put in, after deductions for common funds.

funds?????

read the critique of the gotha program

>What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

>Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.

My emphasis

my emphasis

...

Yeah yeah yeah, first things first. We'll get to the higher stage of communism when we see it. The reality of any communism that we might get to build will be lower stage, and it will involve accounting of labour time put in against what you take out, as Marx rightly envisioned. I don't see why you would obtusely try to deny this fact. Ya expect ya gonna jump right into your gay space communism there, buddy?

You mislead when you present lower-stage communism as communism in general. Besides, I'm not convinced productivity is something we have to worry about in the 21st century.

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Lower stage communism is communism in general, as in the communist mode of production.

That's like if you were asked what it's like to be alive and you started describing what it's like to be in utero. It's technically true but misleading.

If we are going to go with analogies to life stages, being in utero would analogous to the DOTP with lower stage communism being the the formative years up to adulthood. Still you, just in a different stage of development to adult you.

You are implying that DotP is to be abolished once "lower stage communism" is reached (after communist mode of production is implemented nation-wide).

That's anti-Stalinist position of Khrushchev. As subsequent collapse of USSR proved (Petit-Bourgeois strata of specialists/artists/top managers went counter-revolutionary and managed to force through Liberal reforms, while the rest of society remained paralyzed and unable to comprehend what is going on), this is wrong. DotP has to keep existing until all basis for non-communist modes of production had ceased to exist.

Is this a good book for an economics noob?

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Well, not your picrelated.

What do you intend to study?

Why not?

I want to have competent knowledge of economics in general and proficient knowledge of Marxian econ

When it comes to marxian economics, from Marx, Engels and Lenin it goes forward with the use of cybernetics and its definition of information which completes the dialectical materialism. You can see in early books the outline of information and how it is connected with matter.

To use this in economic analysis, study of complex systems and flows of information and matter in these system is required and cybernetics gives is the exact tool required for it.

W

U

T

[bourgeois materialism intensifies]

Because Wolff (and late Resnick) had some views that are not generally accepted as correct.

What for? What is the purpose?

If you are doing it just for lulz, you are going to burn out real fast on some obscurantist meme-tier book some larper recommended you on the internet.

It does not.

How the hell cybernetics "completes" DiaMat?
And what cybernetics are you even talking about? Norbert Wiener's?

…such as?

The pursuit of knowledge?
Why learn anything then?

Honestly you guys seem kinda dumb

Pointless exercise. You can go and make a study of all kinds of shit-based fetishes and expand your knowledge of them, yet all you would have done in actuality is look at people eating shit. Nobody just pursues knowledge. What will you do with it? What is it for? There are an infinite amount of books out there, and what ones you should read is informed by what you intend to do with the knowledge.

Can you please fuck off and die?

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Such as "real Marxism" being about hierarchies.

It's called "entertainment".

If you have an objective, information helps you achieve it. That's why you learn it.

And you seem underage and liberal.

West has overabundance of so-called "Marxists" who learn Marxist theories for the lulz and then spend time deliberately distorting them and creating problems for those who actually need to learn things. Rooting those degenerates out and suggesting them to learn Mystical Numerology or Bonsai Arts instead is much more productive for everyone.

So - no. He is absolutely correct.

literal retards

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Why does it need to be 'said'? It can be easily seen both theoretically and historically. The current world order does not work with isolated self-sustaining countries but a global network of commercial and other material relations, so naturally communism as a superation of it can't simply be retreating into some sort of kibbutz-like closed borders shithole with scarcity all over because that is the exact opposite of a social order where all needs are met.

Since a lot of decent theory threads tend to disappear due to catalog spam, I'm going to save an archive of this thread, along with related archived threads here:
>>>/netcom/757

The DotP is a state with the proletariate organized as the ruling class. As we know, the state is a tool for oppression for one class against another. Communism is classless, and is therefore the negation of the state. The DotP is that state that arises in the transition from capitalism to communism.

explain tendency of profit to fall like im 5

There is only so much Earth to exploit.

Then "see" it.

Irrelevant to the point discussed. The claim was that it is theoretically impossible.

You seem to assume that Communism cannot overlap with DotP. But how then are you going to make transition happen? Will you have full-blown Capitalism with DotP and then BOOM - DotP vanishes and Communism is everywhere?

So it makes us thrive for space exploration, terraforming, fucking alien-sluts?

Space isn't profitable and it never will be. We will destroy ourselves before becoming space faring.

Thoughts on the premise of this book? Is a socialized Walmart/Amazon how a 21st century communist society handles consumer products? Is what they do actually "central planning"?

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i haven't read that book in particular, but even Marx recognized that big companies were laying the foundations for socialism by creating techniques of production, accounting, and distribution on a massive scale.

"The same bourgeois mind which praises division of labour in the workshop, life-long annexation of the labourer to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as being an organisation of labour that increases its productiveness – that same bourgeois mind denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to socially control and regulate the process of production, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and unrestricted play for the bent of the individual capitalist. It is very characteristic that the enthusiastic apologists of the factory system have nothing more damning to urge against a general organisation of the labour of society, than that it would turn all society into one immense factory."
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm

Not a big surprise since it doesn't come out until next February

Nationalizing and making into a co-operative type organization massive private corporations under the transitional phase has been a characteristic of pretty much every M-L state and I think Cockshott advocates something similar in his conception of the "transitional phase" so yeah. Obviously the demand for luxury consumer goods would probably be curbed due to cultural changes under socialism so it'd be a degrowth and redistributive rather than growth oriented sector of the economy but it'd still have to exist to efficiently end unemployment and as a means to feed, clothe etc the masses

The rate of profit is the amount of profits made compared to the amount of capital invested. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that as time goes on you will need more and more capital to produce the same level of return; in other words I will make less dollars per dollar invested. To make an example, you invest $100 and gain $120, meaning the RoP is (120-100)/100 = 20%; you then decide to invest in a new machine, bringing your balance to $300 invested and $330 gained, your absolute profits are increased ($20 against $30), but your rate of profit has gone down (20% against 10%).

Why? Because the only valuable thing in capitalism is time, more precisely other people's time, and not machines' time. In more appropriate words, value is produced only by human labor; if you invest in a machine that allows you to produce more with the same amount of labor, you are reducing the overall amount of labor within the economy, while also increasing the base costs (the machine bought), so while in absolute terms your profits may grow, they will be less and less in relation to the amount of capital invested.

If you don't believe me think of it in this terms: imagine an island where two men live, each owning a completely automated factory of chairs; one day a travelling merchant comes to the shore and offers a couch, the two men have nothing more to sell but their chairs, but what amount could they possibly offer? Any offer of one can be beaten by the other with virtually no cost. This is because the labor content of those chairs is zero, they are worthless in an exchange because they do not contain any fraction of time spent by a human being. A fully automated factory is both the greatest dream and the most terrible of nightmares for a capitalist.

If you want more details on why this happen I am afraid I will have to use some math (I am assuming value = price here for simplicity): let's say that those initial $100 where all invested in buying the labor of a skilled worker that produces 10 pieces per day; considering our return is $120, it means each commodity is worth 120/10 = $12. Let's buy the machine, which brings our costs to $300, $200 for the machine and $100 for our faithful worker. This machine allows the worker to produce 30 pieces per day instead of 10, meaning each piece is worth 330/30 = $11. You are producing more stuff, but with a lower value content, which gives you an advantage against capitalists that are not using the machine (since you can sell your products for $11 instead of $12), but will in time lower the amount of value that is circulating (when the rest of your competitors are forced to innovate their factories too), therefore bringing the overall profit rate of the industry down. The process wil continue once again with the next new machine.

There are ways to increase the profit rate of course, one is to increase the amount of human work in the industrial process (and here is why neoliberals are so enthusiastic about immigrantion and sweatshops), another is to lower the amount of competition, thus concentrating more profits in the hands of fewer people (and here is why the profit rate goes up after a crisis), another is creating commodity-destroying circuits that are able to digest the extra production (and here is why war is so useful).

PDF related is a very brief (24 pages) but very well done explanation of many Marxist economic concepts, including the rate of profit.

We will be using the seized infrastructure Wal-Mart and Amazon has built for more effecient distribution of goods to better serve the needs of the people. We could also use it maintain some sort of consumer good production/distribution which I think can stem discontent and possible counterrevolution. Using what those companies built for need instead of profit is pretty exciting.

I'll just leave this here
>>>/marx/7739

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Producing knowledge for the sake of producing knowledge is the highest expression of our humanity, user. Do not let pragmatists rot your brain.

sauce? even though I'm getting Emergence flashbacks

Only if you believe in the (venerable) idea that reason is our connection with the divine. Which is just ancient superstition imho.

Unless you have a more complicated metaphysics you would like to share with us.

No, what I was sayng is that there is no need for a reason to pursue new knowledge. Needing a reason for acquiring knowledge (even in science) is a very recent development, and one that is unsurprisingly married to early capitalism.

What happens when the rate of profit reaches "zero" or whatever?

Fair enough. But say "a expression of humanity". I don't see why it need be the highest.

Transition happens in the DotP. The DotP is the that period in between capitalist and communist society. Please read the Marx quote above, as he readily explains this.

Can you explain how this causes crises?

And how does it happen, if - according to you - communism is impossible while DotP exists?

He explains something quite different from what you claim, as you clearly fail to understand what is the method of Marx's political economy.

It won't reach zero.

Why not? What happens?

NAYRT. The profit approaches zero (look up limits in math), constantly forcing Capitalists to use the most questionable measures to compensate for it - but those measure will constantly destabilize situation (forcing population to rebel). And the less profit Capitalists get, the less stable their power is (as it relies on profit).

I.e. on one hand we have increasingly weakening Capitalism, on the other - workers constantly attempting to overthrow it.

The example I made is what happens, in a certain sense. If the profit rate would reach zero it means that you get exactly what you have put in, essentially that there is no value production, as all work is being done by machines. In such a situation profit can be made exclusively through rent.

In general a low RoP is not directly responsible for a crisis, you need an exogeneous spark of some kind. That said, having a very low RoP makes everything highly susceptible to damage, as the costs of operating a business are at their peak, while the return on those costs is at its lowest. Furthermore, the moment the RoP reaches a new low is usually the moment the worker is able to make demands, as it is also the moment in which the reserve army of labor is running dry and society has just witnessed a long period of constant growth brought in by a precedent increase in the RoP; so the capitalist finds himself between an advancing front of workers wanting their slice of growth and an ever increasing difficulty in expanding the business further to keep riding the wave, because the capital costs keep getting higher.
It is not a surprise that many neoliberal countries fought the crisis off by suppressing labor movements and keeping the cost of capital as low as possible by keeping the interest rates extremely low.

While this is one scenario:

I was more talking about what has happened in even the relatively stable developed countries. When market concentration becomes high the large businesses start colluding. The concentration actually doesn't even have to be that high, I couldn't put a number on it because it differs by the exigencies of particular industries, but trade associations and regional business groups foster business relationships that pivot around decreasing competition, which business leaders tend to consider uncouth and contrary to a healthy market. Early robber baron muckraking stuff dove into this (History of the Standard Oil Company, for instance, covers a lot of these arguments that business executives made for price collusion), though there were also a lot of inquiries by congressional committees and such into the workings of big corporate business during the great depression. In the latter phase, you get a lot of overlapping boards of directors which create a corporate community of business leaders passing in and out of different institutions.

Price collusion becomes informal in some cases, as there were some other business interviews I remember that Cambridge economists did in the UK in which they were surprised to find that price setting decisions rarely considered adjusting to demand, instead opting for a change of supply with minimal to no price change. The managers would also often suggest that price competition was bad for business and created bad blood in the business community.

Which is basically to say, when market concentration reaches a certain amount the biggest players start serving prices to the market rather than taking them. They decide on an agreeable margin per average unit cost (or something like that, there are different methods), and just stick to it. For a long time now they simply try to justify/increase their market share at the decided price using advertising. The margin they decide upon is meant to be in a sweet spot where it disincentivizes market entry, because it isn't lucrative enough to warrant huge capital investment, but it gives a good enough return. The specific sweet spot depends on how high the barriers to entry already are. Like, nobody is about to compete with Apple except for another goliath like Samsung because the barriers to entry are quite large anyways, and both don't really fight over their pricing. Their margins are pretty similar.

So at the theoretical bottom of the falling rate of profit, businesses will likely just level out their expected rate of return at a low enough level to keep their market dominance safe. If they're especially arrogant or arguably short-sighted, they may attempt to imiserate the working class more to increase their meager profit rate. In that case, return to:

However, I think it is conceivable that you get a neo-feudal owner class who simply support a stratum of administrators and other well-paid professions which are theoretically accessible to anyone in the working class. It would look no different from our current society, we'd just have the Bezos family or the Waltons for eternity as capitalist aristocracy, and everything else underneath them being "meritocratic" to justify the system.

It all hinges on how powerful you imagine the pushback from workers to be. For all we know we're just going to look at socialist revolutions as we do on peasant rebellions, if it really stratifies that way.

Yeah, and I do think that the bourgies can be short-sighted when they get too comfortable and drink their own kool-aid. The aristocracy also had that problem where you get the lines of idiot sons who really don't know what the fuck they're doing. It seems as though historically they always start sliding their hand further into the cookie jar thinking nobody will notice this time that their livelihoods are being crushed. It seems we are already living in that phase. Even the ones who have that pretense of being magnanimous billionaires like Warren Buffett can't abide the simple social democratic request to have national healthcare, instead opting to team with Amazon for their own half-baked private health insurance that is supposed to offer better premiums. It's so anathema to their nature to cede any ground now.

Okay lets do this brainlet style.
>Between capitalist and communist society
Okay so here have the description of what happens between capitalist and communist society
>there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other.
Here we see that the transformation of capitalism into communism is happening in this period. This is transition.
Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
As we can see here Marx clearly defines the transitional state as the DotP. But lets also do this by logical deduction. In Marx's theory the state is always an instrument of class domination.
Now, communism is a classless society.(this I hope we can agree on). Within a classless society, who are the conflicting classes? There can be no conflicting classes as there are no classes to begin with. No institution to find itself above and alienated from society to alleviate class antagonisms.
Nationalization of industry, seizure of property and land, implementation of planning, added social programs, democratizing the state and bringing the proletariat to an ever increasing role in the state etc.

Step 1

Throw millions of random people in prison for being "political dissidents"

Step 2

Build society on the backs of slaves… Er… I mean forced labor.

Step 3

Proclaim it a success of the "proletariat".

how does increasing the amount of human labor increase profits? you mean using a population so depressed that their wages are even cheaper than machines?

Well one way is to simply increase the population, hence why immigration was desiderable until populists used it as a bat to bash the moderate parties. Another way is to make use of extremely cheap labor, such as sweatshops.
Yes but you don't need to be that extreme, only cheap enough that acquiring the machine would be an unecessary risk, a machine cannot be hired or fired on the fly after all; and you actually need to take care of it, unlike humans.
Cockshott proposed that a very similar mechanism (machines being not worth the effort, to put it simply) was likely a leading cause in the deterioration of the economy in the late Soviet Union.
youtube.com/watch?v=EE-kCZnlGZU

And I mean specifically working population of course. If you ever wondered why are our politicians so interested in keeping th babies comin'

How can you make rent profitable, if you can't add anything rentier can't add himself (since labour has no input in production)?

They have no choice but to do it, as there is no central authority over them to make them keep their agreements binding.

It's called "dialectical materialism". But 'murricans aren't taught philosophy, so you literally can't understand the problem. Transition from Capitalism to Communism for you like flicking the switch. Even when pointed out that such a period lasts longer than a blink of an eye, you can only think that switch is being flipped real slow.

And all of this is still Capitalism? Capitalism that still exists from point zero, until … what point exactly?

> Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
And what about economy, señor Expert? What modes of production are used in economy? Transitionary?

Communism is a classless society, only if communism is understood as a vernacular for society that tends to emerge under communist mode of production (i.e. social production for use).

Once we separate those, once we recognize the difference between Basis and Superstructure, once we stop conflating modes of production and societies that are shaped by them, the picture becomes completely different and any notions of lower stage communism somehow not existing under DotP - or abolition of DotP being prerequisite for Communism - turn utterly ludicrous.

Just like Feudal state was not abolished overnight - despite Capitalist mode of production growing alongside it and becoming dominant for many decades (if not centuries) - so would DotP co-exist alongside growing Communist mode of production for a long time.

Except it is not society that defines classes, but classes (which are inherent to modes of production) define society.

Consequently, it is not society that you should be looking at, but modes of production. I.e. only as far as Communist mode of production extends and manifests itself, can classless society extend and manifest itself.

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I can't make sense of that statement. Small cells of capitalism spontaneously spawned everywhere during feudalism like a bad case of acne, a development that has to happen to a feudal order. The pimples can then organize in their interest to get concessions from the state or directly take over the state, but this merely speeds up the process. There is no equivalent development under capitalism that communist cells must spawn.

If the Labor Theory of Value only pertains to the capitalist system, then what "theories of value" apply to pre-capitalist feudal or slave societies?

it doesn't
The LTV

The LTV only applies in an economy where commodity trading predominates. In feudal societies, there was no abstract labour, only concrete labour: you had to work a set number of days in a physically separate field, that of the lord or monastery, or had other kinds of corvee labour.

Marx explains it here,

"Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. 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. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products."
Marx, Letter to Kugelmann
marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11.htm

Short answer: Marx's LTV is meant to explain the value of commodities in a capitalist society specifically but there are underlying principles that apply across historical epochs.

I didn't say it was a good plan, in a situation in which the RoP was reduced to 0%, I cannot see any other way for capitalism to survive.

the fact it's a different way of extracting surplus doesn't change mean anything, the LTV applies nonetheless

How can you say that when almost nothing is commensurate? Almost nothing is traded as a commodity, and those things that are skew to being luxury products. I think it's a stretch to assume the LTV applies outright. Maybe it does in a vague sense like says, but certainly not as the law it is today in capitalism.

Quite the opposite, as I've said before it is a process of transition frome one mode of production to another.
This is a process, obviously once the proletariat gains political supremacy capitalism is still the dominant mode of production. Elements of socialist production, capitalist production, peasant and small producer production exist alongside each other.
As noted above, a few modes of production exist alongside the socialist mode of production that is being built.
Quite obviously communist society is that society that arises from the communist mode of production.
Thats nice and all, but you haven't said anything about why that notion is ludicrous.
Yes, and the communist mode of production (and thus the society that arises from it) is classless.
Do you care to explain what classes exist in the communist mode of production?

The utility theory of value applies to all real world economies. The LTV only applies in Marxist imaginationland.

Yes, I meant it in the way did. Marx does not designate different theories to different stages of development, like when he talks about village economies in India, for instance. Given enough time is provided for a mean trend to develop, value based on the socially necessary labor time will be represented in commodities of any society regardless of their mode of production, or do you think differently? Then I'd like to hear your explanation, because Marx doesn't suggest that even in the slightest in any of the volumes of Capital.

No. But unless commodities as such take a dominant position in that society, it's just of less consequence to those societies and will tell us less about them. The law of value operates, but only trivialy. It will not be as useful in analyzing such a society as it is for the one we live in currently.

Where are da proofs? Oh wait, subjective value theory makes no predictions, isn't testable and is unfalsifiable. Sound theory my guy.

how political economist of you user

And yet it has greater explanatory power than the LTV and isn't internally and empirically contradictory. Good theory, considering the alternative.

How much do the forbes top 50 contribute to society? rightists claim that the managers of industries' services take a lot of effort and time, and point out that most billionaires were not born in rich families.

Yeah I'm pretty proud of it, thanks.

It has no explanatory power, it explain nothing. Explain the contradictions within the LTV please. LTV is the only value theory that makes accurate predictions(which your theory can't even make any predictions)

I believe that is called string theory

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