Socialist Forum

Posted: 13 Mar 2005 09:20 pm Post subject:

Message copied from newsgroup.

From: "news" <news@be.easynet.net>
Newsgroups: soc.politics.marxism
Subject: Textbooks in Marxist Economics
Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 04:13:50 CST
Organization: [ posted via Easynet Belgium ]

Dear reader,

I take pleasure in letting you know that my latest textbook in Marxist
economics (2005) is available, both as an electronic edition and in
the form of a printed book. This textbook is the culmination and
also the end point of long experience in university research and
teaching (some 35 years), combined with equally long experience in
extra-university training activities.

Access to the text

The book is available on the website <www.i6doc.com> in three
languages (French, Spanish and English) and, for each language, in two
sizes : on the one hand, an "A4" or "quarto" size (267 pages in
English) under the simple title "UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMY. The hidden
face of economic phenomena" ; on the other hand, an "A5" size (389
pages) with the explicit title "THE FOUNDATIONS OF CAPITALIST ECONOMY.
An introduction to the Marxist economic analysis of contemporary
capitalism". Except for the foreword, some passages of the
introduction and the bibliography (included in the "A5" size only),
the two texts are practically identical. But I know that some people
prefer an inconspicuous presentation (moreover with less pages), and
others an explicit one ; in all three languages, every one can have
what seems more suitable.

Each of the six versions of the textbook can be downloaded free of
charge from the website in question. The useful URLs for the English
versions are as follows :

- "UNDERSTANDING THE ECONOMY. The hidden face of economic phenomena"
(A4 size, 267 p.) :
http://www.i6doc.com/doc/a4economy

- "THE FOUNDATIONS OF CAPITALIST ECONOMY. An introduction to the
Marxist economic analysis of contemporary capitalism" (A5 size, 389
p.) :
http://www.i6doc.com/doc/a5economy

Each of the six versions can be reproduced and published freely, with
no royalties to pay (author's royalties or others), but of course
without right of exclusivity.

Texts in the A5 size are also available in the form of printed books.
These are published by Contradictions for the French version, by
Diffusion Universitaire Ciaco for the Spanish and English versions. In
all three languages, therefore, those interested have the choice :
either order the book (through the same website referred to) or
reproduce it on their own.

Contents and interest of the book

As a product of long experience in both university teaching and
extra-university training activities, the book provides a step by
step, clear and rigorous exposition of Marxist economic theory. It
shows its relevance for analysing the deep tendencies of contemporary
capitalism in a coherent way : extension of market production,
globalization of the economy, concentration of economic power, race
for competitiveness, the invasion of advertising, growth of
subcontracting, increasing inequalities, attacks on the environment,
prolongation of the structural crisis and unemployment, etc.
Each chapter is complemented with a summary, as well as a selection of
"theoretical" and "practical" exercises : the former are aimed at
checking the assimilation of the material, while the latter enable
readers to establish links between theory and present-day realities,
whatever the moment and country.
Thanks to its outstanding pedagogical qualities, the book constitutes
a first-class textbook for students and teachers, as well as for any
interested reader, even without previous knowledge.

At the same time, the book should draw the consideration of
specialists. On the one hand, it adopts and develops a definitely
classical Marxist perspective on most topics. For instance, it
emphasizes the contradictory aspects of reality, which are mentioned
or underlined on numerous occasions : this is the case, in particular,
of the contradictory aspects of wages and public expenditure and the
contradictory effects of neo-liberal policies. Similarly, it
underlines the basic influence of both productivity ("development of
productive forces") and power relations ("class struggle" or conflicts
between "class fractions") : both are simultaneously taken into
consideration, especially to account for the relative prices of
commodities and the stages in growth and crisis after the Second World
War
Yet, within the Marxist paradigm, the book adopts (and justifies in
appendices) a number of non-conventional points of view. These
particularly concern the concepts of value, commodity and productive
labour, as well as the relations between wage and value of
labour-power. The non-conventional viewpoints adopted on these topics
combine the advantages of precision and simplicity : on the one hand,
they make the theoretical approach more rigorous and coherent ; yet,
while justified on purely theoretical grounds, they present the
additional advantages of making the theory simpler and allowing a much
easier quantification of various key-concepts.
While focusing on the sector of capitalist enterprises, the book also
examines all the other forms of production (enterprises relying on
self-employment, public enterprises, non-market public services,
voluntary organizations, households) : it shows their specific
characteristics and examines their contradictory relationships with
the capitalist sector. In so doing, it does not restrict itself to
analysing an abstract system but contemplates the actual diversity of
a concrete society.

You will find more details on the contents of the book at either of
the two URLs mentioned above. The item "download a free extract" gives
access to an eight-page document called "presentation of
J.Gouverneur's latest textbook". Pages 2 and 3 of the document in
question mention a series of interesting features, both pedagogical
and theoretical.

Requesting your co-operation

To conclude, I would like to ask you to personally contribute to
circulating my original and multiform offer :
- for one thing, I invite you to forward this letter to all persons
who you think might be interested ;
- furthermore, if you have a personal website, or have access to an
institutional website, I suggest you create a link with the URLs
mentioned above.

Many thanks for your co-operation!

Yours very sincerely,

Jacques Gouverneur
--
Adrien - Quoten is efficiÃ«nt !
www.ou.nl/open/filosoof/ - filosofie discussie
www.a.verlee.easynet.be/ - database, tekst, ...
www.briachons.org/art/quote - Post je wel goed?

Posted: 19 Nov 2005 08:01 am Post subject:

According to Marxian economics, a rare metal has a high exchange value because its rarity implies that a large amount of labor is required to extract a given mass of it. The value should be understood in terms of the mass of ore in the ground that as to be discovered, extracted and refined, to produce a unit mass of the metal.

A recent New York Times article about gold production hinted at this point. The writer may have thought it was more witty than a serious observation about economics.

Instead of mentioning dollars per ounce, the sub-headline of the article was: "The Cost of Gold -- 30 Tons an Ounce."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/international/24GOLD.html

Posted: 02 Jan 2006 05:56 am Post subject:

I just scanned and uploaded an article that appeared in the Weekly People in 1971. Any comments? Agree or disagree?

"Marx's Law of Value"

http://www.deleonism.org/cgi-bin/text.cgi?j=71121101

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 12:37 am Post subject:

It's a matter of symantics - I agree with the whole cloth except on whether there will be coimmodities under socialism. The point of socialist production will not be simply the production of commodities for conversion into money and profit but for the fulfillment of human need. I can come up with a quote from Big Fred - but somewhere he defined a commodity quite succintly as something that had use value. Certainly we will still prodce items with use value under socialism.

dave

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 06:35 am Post subject:

Sometimes socialists fight the use of certain words because of their historical connotations, including "money", "politics", "public ownership", and others. This may be what is happening with "commodities." When they say that socialism won't have commodities, perhaps they wish to emphasize the aspect that it won't be an auction system, with daily fluctuations in price caused by the relative numbers of people interested in buying and people interested in selling, and with most of these actors being investors who buy wholesale in order to resell retail. I don't know the literal meaning of the word "commodities." Perhaps it's related to "accommodation", and, if so, the word is harmless enough.

Posted: 03 Jan 2006 06:40 am Post subject:

Another issue is the relevance of the principle that prices fluctuate about a value which is determined by the socially necessary labor time, and the usual follow-up that this proves that labor creates the social wealth. I can't find clear logic in saying that proposition A implies proposition B. While it's true that labor creates society's wealth, I don't think the behavior of the exchange system under capitalism is what proves it.

Posted: 04 Jan 2006 03:01 am Post subject:

Re commodities.

I wasn't clear enough.

Under socilism we will certainly produce things with use value. That's what a commodity is, something with use value. (That's the definition that use anyway. But this production of use value under socialsm is different than production under capitailism.

Under socialism we will produce components of a transportation system in order to - guess what - be able to provde transportation.

Under capitalism we produce components of a transportation system - for what purpose? To profit the owners of the means of production - the fact that transportation resuts from this production is of secondary concern, if that.

Posted: 06 Jan 2006 05:25 am Post subject:

I don't know if this will help the discussion, but -- copied from Barron's Dictionary of Finance and investment Terms, 1985 edition, page 69:

"commodities - Bulk goods such as grains, metals, and food traded on a commodities exchange or on the spot market."

Even the capitalist definition includes the aspect that it's surrounded by a market system. Or is that a contingent description?

What did Dr. Karl H. Marx say?

Posted: 07 Jan 2006 05:22 am Post subject:

I worked in a big plumbing warehouse once and we would sell commodities of all different colors but we couldn't exchange them. Health Department stuff.

dave

Posted: 17 Dec 2006 11:32 pm Post subject:

Would you please read this article and tell me if you see anything wrong with it. I am about to put the link on WiC. It seems OK but I want a 2nd or 3rd opinion.

thanks dave

http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article136

Posted: 18 Dec 2006 02:58 am Post subject:

I couldn't understand much of that article. So then, just to help clear things up, I drank a glass of whiskey and read it again. It was just as dense the second time. But when you ask whether I saw anything specifically that was wrong with it, no.

Posted: 19 Dec 2006 02:02 am Post subject:

Would you take a look at the discussion by this bill green in land at WiC. Is it at all possible that this guy is for real or is this another ... (well you know who I mean, the professional former SLP member)

Posted: 19 Dec 2006 06:14 pm Post subject:

I agree with Bill Green that the price of land is caused by the fact that the supply is fixed while the population always increases. But he says 'value' there, where I say 'price.' Every price is a value added to a fluctuation. When something isn't produced by labor at all, the value is zero, even if the price is high, and that price is ALL fluctuation. If an acre in Fort Lauderdale costs five million dollars, its value is zero, the fluctuation (departure) from that value is five million dollars, and the price is the value added to the fluctuation, which is zero plus five million dollars.

Posted: 19 Dec 2006 06:27 pm Post subject:

IMO, the main reason the price of land doesn't affect, or only slight affects, the value of commodities which are output by industry is because values are only meaningful at all as ratios, such as barley/wheat.

Say a given amount of necessary labor time will produce either

* three bushes of wheat
or
* one bushel of barley

That three-to-one ratio is approximately all that remains after the effect of the land cancels out. Some effect of land is in both the numerator and the denominator. The part of the fraction for (land/land) comes close to cancelling out to "1". If it's not actually "1", then it's a lot closer to being "1" than is the ratio of the labor times, which is systematically significantly differently from the value "1".

This fraction:

(Labor for one bushel of barley) (a term representing some land)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Labor for one bushel of wheat) (a term representing some land)

is approximately equal to

(Labor for one bushel of barley)
-----------------------------------------
(Labor for one bushel of wheat)

= 3.

Posted: 20 Dec 2006 03:34 am Post subject:

I am wowed by the very concept of a new thought. Thank you. dave.

Posted: 20 Dec 2006 07:30 pm Post subject:

Same argument in other problems. Someone asks: There are some cases in which a capitalist does useful work .. why doesn't this invalidate the law of value? Because such a thing in general would closely approximate multiplying by (x/x). Some people ask: Why don't other cost of production, such as getting robbed, affect the law of value? Because that is usually like multipying by (x/x). There is just one main parameter that is always different and significantly different as we go from one commodity to the next, and that is the socially necessary labor time.

Posted: 20 Dec 2006 07:41 pm Post subject:

I said one MAIN parameter. There may be others besides socially necessary labor time. That's okay. Marx realized that he was developing a first order model, which is what we science nerds call it when a theoretical model is idealized so that we can get started with a method of analysis. We use first order models when we solve Newtonian problems of the type: "Suppose a perfectly non-rigid string, attached to a frictionless pulley, is displaced in the absense of air resistance...." Certain basic relationships are highlighted.

Many of what are considered criticisms of Marx are merely announcements that the critic would like to see the development of model that explains some more outcomes, that is, a second order model. Maybe it would be nice, but the critics are missing the point when they presume that Marx's purpose was to "predict prices." He purpose was actually to show fundamentally where prices, wages and profits come from, that is, to dispose of the psychological explanations of the type, "A buyer and a seller happen to converge on a certain price for no identifiable reason...."

Posted: 22 Dec 2006 09:01 pm Post subject:

I never could understand why it is called Marxian economics since what he wrote--I did read the bulk of Capital--is about how money, labor, commodities, and profits fit in the scheme of capitalism and how labor is robbed.

Posted: 22 Dec 2006 10:10 pm Post subject:

I assume that's because an explanation of something gets named after the person who developed it, like the Ptolemaic orbits of the planets versus the Copernican orbits of the planets.

But you're right -- it may be confusing. Marxian economics means an understanding of how capitalism operates, with practically no comments at all about how socialism might operate. A Marxian transformation of society it the very thing that would make all of Marxian economics cease to be true.

Posted: 23 Dec 2006 11:19 am Post subject:

I am always impressed by the people who profess to have found "the key" that shows Marx's analysis (I dislike that term, Marxian like Freudian Dickensian, how fucking stuckupsian!!)

Oh yes we have that debate going on in WiC. Marx missed the boat completely when he didn't take into account rising value of land due to increasing demand for it. To see that throw if his entire theory and means that we can attach the value that has been robbed from society since the time of the "enclosure" by putting liens on property to extract this wealth back and to compensate the citizens for their past exclusions from full access to private property. Oh yes, also his missing the bat on land did not allow him to fully appreciate: Ricardo's Law which supposedly states that as land becomes less and less available to the common fold to own that wages will go to subsistence levels, with the amazing and magical conclusion that in today - that if land were more freely available that a significant enough number of us will go back to the land which will decrease the pool of labor sufficiently to raise wages!!!

GREEEEEN ACRES IS THE PLAACE TO BEE!!
FAAARM LIVING IS THE LIIFE FOR MEE! !

And of course, this model can be "proved" by earnest people who want to "simplify" going off grid and raising veggies, and what not. Very nice and commendable. But reduce the pool of available labor power so as to significantly and most important, permanently keep the demand for labor power high. Not demonstrated.

Posted: 23 Dec 2006 06:45 pm Post subject:

I'm not a complete novice in the subject, and I'm not exactly a dumbbell, but I don't understand any of what that writer in the WiC fourm is talking about. I have comprehended almost nothing of what he's trying to say. That's usually occurs when a writer or speaker is unclear in his own mind. When ideas are well thought out, the expression of them tends to become clear.

Also, every sentence seems to contain several specialized vocabulary words that I'm unfamiliar with. When he write something like:

Posted: 27 Dec 2006 09:01 am Post subject:

Posts about the "dictatorship of the proletariat" concept have been moved to a new topic.

Posted: 03 Dec 2007 12:07 pm Post subject:

Okay, here we go again. I am seeing this again:

Posted: 03 Dec 2007 09:29 pm Post subject:

That's right, Marx's economic theory concentrates on what detemrines prices. Also since the investors have to buy labor power as one of their raw materials, the worker is a commodity to them, so discussing what determines prices is also a discussion about what determines wages. Labor power has its going rate just as potatoes have their going rate. That would seem to toss out the capitalist's pretense that the wages of each employee is based on "let's see how well you work, so I can see what you're worth." Another one of the implications of the theory seems to be that it hints at where wealth as a general social feature comes from. Sometimes measures like the gross domestic product are used to quantify a general feature called society's wealth. What is it's origin? Some of the capitalist ideas about that are weird. Someimes they seem to be saying, if the department store can just persuade you to pay $10 instead of $8 for an article, then an additional $2 of wealth has magically appeared. They certainly wouldn't want to admit that it was merely a transfer of an additional $2 from one person's pocket to another person's pocket. Marx may not have gotten everything right, but he did tear away at a lot of the nonsense and discard it. That makes him dangerous in the capitlaist way of thinking. The economics teacher in school must make it a point to act as though Marx never even existed.

Posted: 04 Dec 2007 04:22 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 12:02 am Post subject:

The biggest thing determining the price of gold or silver is how much labor is needed to extract the number of tons required to get a given weight of the metal. That includes finding it, digging it, transporting it and refining it. I saw a documentary on TV about a gold mine in Deadwood, Dakota Territory in the 1800s where they estimated they had to extract four tons of ore to yield each ounce of gold. An innovation had one operator running a railroad line right into a mine, so they wouldn't have so much manual carting, but that didn't affect the market price much because it wasn't typical for the mining industry as a whole. If all of the miners could run rails into the mines, it would become a marketwide effect to get more ounces of gold for a given amount of human activity, which would make the value of the metal drop. Also, as they remove the "easy" gold near the surface, and have to go deeper, that increases the human effort per ounce, so the value goes up.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 06:35 am Post subject:

This is all surmise but I think the "easy" gold tapering off is countered by more gold being made easy by advances in extraction.

But your treatment only dealt with the value of the gold. Anymore "price" is much a function of how low the capitalist class through the state is willing to allow the value of the dollar to drop.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 10:46 am Post subject:

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 12:57 pm Post subject:

Boy it's early in the morning. So, in effect the price of gold is always determined by the labors that find, extract, refine and mint the gold. I see that a the private sector sets prices but I am not entirely sure how they come to "set those prices." Now government has to set standards and make sure weights and measures are accurate. I see these on gas pumps and other places. Gotta keep those Capitalists honest and the political state has to step in and do it. No wonder the Capitalist are crying about government regulation. It's just too darn hard to cheat the customer these days. More later when I get back reading. Got a busy day today.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 09:17 pm Post subject:

The mechanism how prices are set is just what capitalist education says. Five days a week speculators bid on futures contracts. A future is a warehouse receipt that says the bearer of that piece of paper is entitled to show up with a truck or railroad car at a certain warehouse anytime within the next 1, 3, 6, 9 months, whatever time limit is specifies, and exchange that piece of paper for a specific weight of something. As of this moment a future for 100 ounces of gold is going for 794.0 with expiration date December 2007, going for 801.2 with expiration date February 2008, etc. Some gold producer went to the Chicago Board of Trade and paid their fee for the privilege of being allowed to put their product into the auction. You can also speculate by buying the future just to sell it to someone else, with no intention of ever showing up at the warehouse yourself.

But that's the nuts and bolts of what people do each day. In the long run, according to Marx, the "moving average" of the price will usually correlates with how much labor must go into making nature yield up a given measure of something.

Posted: 05 Dec 2007 09:32 pm Post subject:

Just as Marx would, the commodity-trading capitalist focuses a lot on the ratios between one commodity and another. For example, here's an excerpt from a news article online at this moment:

Is the Old Gold/Silver Ratio of 16 Still Alive Today?

Is there any rhyme or reason to the millennial old relationship between gold and silver? For centuries it was decreed that about sixteen ounces of silver had the purchasing power of one ounce of gold.

http://www.cbot.com/cbot/pub/page/0,3181,1025,00.html

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 03:25 am Post subject:

I do not know, but I would assume that the ratios would be pretty much in synch. What I was getting at was the plummeting currency "value". Sale can be looked at as purchasing metal with $$ or it can be looked at as purchasing $$ with metal.

Posted: 06 Dec 2007 09:32 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 02:33 am Post subject:

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 02:56 am Post subject:

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 03:16 am Post subject:

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 03:33 am Post subject:

U.S. money isn't based on the gold and silver standard anymore. The Federal Reserve Board has taken the position that carefully regulating the money supply does what they hope to achieve.

Posted: 07 Dec 2007 03:57 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 13 Dec 2007 07:16 pm Post subject:

Marx quote: Money causes the circulation of commodities by realizing their prices. While it serves to realize price, money itself circulates continuously, sometimes moving merely to a different place, at other times tracing a curve or describing a small circle in which the points of departure and return are identical. As a medium of circulation it has a circulation of its own.

And of course we know that labor time is represented in money as well as products created as commodities. I get the idea. However, we see money disappearing in use in order for an electronic medium to take its place. The electronic medium is a great idea because people, like myself, keep better track of available funds. On the other hand, businesses and corporations continue in profit making.

A Time Labor Voucher question. A person get his/her electronic credits according to their labor time. It gets deposited into their account. They go to the store and exchange their credits for commodities. The exchange of credits for commodities would mean that the credits ceases to exist but actually exist within the commodities that are bought. The owner of the commodity can either use them or barter them for something else which may have the same value. Each commodity would have a different labor time within them. Would this labor time per commodity be based on universal labor or would they be based on each department IU median labor time within the SIU?

John T.

Posted: 14 Dec 2007 10:31 am Post subject:

Posted: 14 Dec 2007 03:54 pm Post subject:

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 07:55 am Post subject:

How could any acounting be performed if universal hours weren't used? One group of a hundred workers makes a thousand pairs of shoes in seven hundred hours, and another group of sixty workers makes three hundred clocks in two hundred hours. Unless the system uses an hour in the abstract I don't see any basis for a comparison.

Higher compensation for the harder job is something else. It doesn't have to do with different outputs in different places. It's like creating more hour certificates in circulation that there are hour prices in the stocked goods, so in effect it's like having a sales tax on everyone to permit harder to get more compensation.

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 03:40 pm Post subject:

Thanks for clearing that up that universal labor time has to be used even for TLVs.

Mike wrote:

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 07:59 pm Post subject:

I know, it can be confusing.

Say you and I both work one hour each. You make a gizmo and I make a widget. My job is average in stressfulness, so I get paid one hour voucher. Your job is more stressful than mine, so the voters or their representatives have decided you should get fifty percent more than me, so you work an hour and get credited for 1.5 hours.

Now, unless we do something with the formula, we have a problem. We have too much buying power relative to production levels. Between the two of us, we're going shopping to redeem 2.5 hours of income, and what's in the store that we will spend it on is two articles who's total price is two hours. We have a contradiction that needs to be fixed.

We can't have a gizmo priced at one hour and a widget priced at one hour, while our labor vouchers between the two of us add up to 2.5 hours. If society did that kind of thing, production levels would be insufficent to match the amount of consumer shopping done.

Either we have to assign the gizmo a price of 1.5 hours, and leave the price of the widget at one hour, or an alternative system would be to use a uniform rate of price adjustment for all products, so the gizmo and the widget have the same price of 1.25 hours each, but, either way people choose to do it, the widget and the gizmo together must have a total price of 2.5 hours. Now the total vouchers created by working will be equal to the total vouchers redeemed by shopping.

So having a voucher system that pays more for hard work than easy work is mathematically equivalent to having a sales tax on some or all goods. The labor hour prices of some things or all things have to be artificially increased to make the total vouchers issued per unit time equal to the total consumption per unit time.

Using the same reasoning, anything we get for free, like education and medical, or non-personal consumption of goods for administration or research or disaster response, all that implies some number of peole's work hours being compensated, and when they get paid they will be going shopping, although their type of labor is the type that didn't add to the store's inventory So it is mathematically equivalent to paying for free or administratie services by having a sales tax on those consumer goods that indviduals have to pay for. That's a result of the requirement that shortages an be prevented only if the total production of everything keeps up with the number of vouchers that get issued.

What I said above in words is what my so-called "algorithm" said in the form of algebra.

Posted: 15 Dec 2007 08:21 pm Post subject:

Ah, to justify the rate of pay for the person who does the stressful, sweaty dirty job the price on all commodities would be a bit higher than the actual labor time put within them. So I can see the price increase being like a sales tax. So, 200 shoes done per hour would cost 1/200 of a labor hour but with a small increase to compensate the worker's nasty, sweaty, stressful job. On the other hand, I'm to lazy to go look, I believe you wrote that health care, social services and educational personnel get their incomes by the creation of 20 minutes per labor hour of work done by everyone. Would this 20 minutes be reflected in prices as well?

After you answer this we will go back to Marx.

John T

Posted: 16 Dec 2007 12:05 pm Post subject:

It has to be. Although health care is free to the recipient of it, the people who work for health care are compensated, including people who perform the most indirect work for health care, such as making bricks that become part of a medical building, or iron ore that goes toward the steel contained in medical tools. These are not consumer goods that they have made, but when those medical workers go shopping for themselves what they will take from the store will be ordinary consumer goods. So the number of hour vouchers spent on consumer goods will be greater than the number of work hours clocked in by people making consumer goods. Old time socialists might not like the sound of calling that a sales tax, but mathematically it works out to be the same thing as a sales tax.

Posted: 16 Dec 2007 03:44 pm Post subject:

With Capitalism, despite the profit making, the government have to have a tax on every thing from income, property, vehicles, sales, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, etc., and debt keeps adding up more and more which includes the debt that workers have to pay eventually. though Marx critiqued Capitalism I am very surprise Socialist have not taken a good look into Labor Time Vouchers. I find it very unusual with those who want to continue Capitalism under strict government control. Moreover, thank you for posting responses. When I get done with what I am reading I just might ask a few more things.

John T.

Posted: 17 Dec 2007 01:27 am Post subject:

I think the main idea of labor vouchers is everyone gets the same hourly income by default and this can be overridden when society believes there is a known reason to. The default in capitalism is to have no connection at all between work time and income. What is an hour of a human being's time worth? A few days ago Alex Rodriguez ("A-Rod") of the N.Y. Yankees signed a new contract to get paid $275 million over the next ten years. But that's not the rate for physically stressful work, not if it's a high-rise construction worker, or a coal miner, so there's no rhyme or reason to the income inequalities. The luck of the roulette wheel determines most income inequality in a capitalist system. This follows the general pattern that capitalism versus socialism is the issue of random chaos versus reasonable planning.

Posted: 17 Dec 2007 11:17 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 18 Dec 2007 08:33 am Post subject:

Today's unequal incomes are strange. At least A-Rod has a rare skill, although the skill has been artificially invented, the perceived importance of someone being able to hit a ball far with a stick. But what supply and demand are there in the case of the salaries of David Letterman and Jay Leno? They read back what others have written for them to say. The supply and demand in their cases exists mainly in the imagination of the people who hired them. No one in the audience ever said, "Okay, you may add a few thousand dollars to the price of the next car that I buy, to pay for the the car company's advertising that will be needed to pay Letterman a high salary." At least in A-Rod's case the public bought an expensive ticket to see the celebrity hit the ball.

Posted: 21 Dec 2007 03:09 pm Post subject:

I see the point you are making. On the other hand, to bring the thread back to topic, I continued to read this essay by Marx. All money that is in circulation the use of money is determined by law or the parameters that the government assigns. Okay, I think I understand. I also understand that money exchanges hands a lot for commodities. I am leaving out other aspects because I am having a hard time comprehending what I have already read. Basically, Capitalism needs this sort of circulation to receive profits. Commodities price is determined by the labor contained within them. Money is based on gold, silver, platinum or other metals considered precious but actually their worth is also determined by labor contained in them as well.

At any rate, Marx never wrote about what replaces this sort of system. The former Soviet Union used the Capitalist form of circulation and at times had to resort to private ownership of production by individuals to stimulate economic growth. Socialism can critique Capitalism but has not actually defined what a Socialist economic system is other than a baker bakes bread for him/herself and bakes another loaf for his neighbor.. I understand the voucher system at least up to a point but even this idea of economy is railed against as a form of Capitalism by Socialist, Communist and, of course Anarchist. I have thought this an unfair accusation considering that the Economic Government of Labor could set parameters as to hours worked by individuals. I hate to write this but work has to have an incentive for it to be done. No one has to starve or be homeless under Socialism but work is crystallized in each commodity and I would think that to get commodities a healthy person would perform some sort of work. Those who can't due to medical, physical or other reasons would not be looked down upon as people do now in our present society. Now I am not saying that society, as a whole, won't eventually end up being educated to voluntarily perform work. The infrastructure for that sort of society has to evolve both materially and mentally. That is if Marx was correct that the economic conditions determine how individuals interact with each other. Okay, enough of the editorial.

Posted: 21 Dec 2007 05:57 pm Post subject:

I think the point about material incentive is that the new system has to be launched initially with features that we are sure are reliable. No matter what bad things we may have to say about material incentive, we do know it functions reliably. Compare to the World Socialist group. They don't realize that Democracy Day, which will already have a lot of confusion because methods will be new, is no time to try out an additional scheme that is based on untested speculations about human psychology. On the day that people get rid of systematic exploitation, that's not the right time to make a conversion to using the honor system for labor and consumption. They're trying to do too much at once. They always try to do too much at once, even to the point that they say that another thing that has to be done on D Day is for the two hundred countries of the world to unite into a worldwide system without borders, and laws and enforcement become unnecessary on the same day since every individual in the world is to decide on that day to be purely compassionate from now on, etc. In a word, they are a utopian tendency that adopts goals solely according to whether they sound nice. My own approach to socialism is: production is a very complicated engine, and we must know that all the interconnected parts are reliable.

Posted: 21 Dec 2007 06:22 pm Post subject:

Money doesn't have to be based on precious metals, but it has to be based on the real production of something. If the government increases the money supply out of proportion to the rate that tangible goods get generated, the money just becomes more worthless to that same extent. I think the gold in Fort Knox was just a trick, one of several possible ways to slow down the arbitrary printing of paper money. I think a system of money based on the consumable goods that keep people alive would have worked as well or perhaps better all these past years. If the paper money supply had been tied instead to the total caloric content of food produced per year, I believe it would have worked as well or better. The main thing is: money has to be measurably difficult for the individual or business to get -- one, somewhat difficult, and, two, that difficulty has to be measurable.

Posted: 21 Dec 2007 10:18 pm Post subject:

Suppose you are a small sheep rancher and all bu your family's own labor you shear the sheep and turn the wool into various articels of clothing for your family and mutton for youer family's use.You live very happliy until a child comes home from school and announces that the family just must have cable television.

Now you and your family could endeavor to makeyou own television and string up an antenna system if there is a mountain nearby - but wouldn't it be a bit easier to excahnge some of those sweaters and mutton for money which the TV store and cable company will accept?

Money is merely a tool that aids circulation of commodities.

Also becuase it aids in the circulation of commodies it aids in the explaotation of labor power. Finally under capitalism money stands for all commodites. Don't we think money almost to the exclsuion of all usable commodities when the topic of wealth is brought up?

Posted: 22 Dec 2007 06:28 am Post subject:

That's right, money a tool to aid the circulation of commodities. I think it does that because it gives us the ability to perform the equivalent of barter without actual transportation of the product (I don't have to bring a cow to you - I can just send you $600) and without the need for integer multiples (I can give you the monetary value of one-fourth of a cow). But to me the most important thing to say about money is that it gets its symbolic power from being strictly limited by a monopoly source, in our case the U.S. Department of the Treasury being the only supplier permitted, and that supply being controlled strictly.

Capitalism adds other features. Giving me money today is worth more than giving me money tomorrow, because if you give it to me today then I can invest it today. Once a system has that, there will be a market for money itself, and money will be a commodity. It takes on meaning to say that I can offer to lend you principal $ P at compound interest rate i for n years. I hand you $P and later you will give me back $ P(1+i)^n. I can "earn" a profit by doing nothing but waiting some time for you to pay me back. Simply waiting is assigned a price. That's only meaningful if there's a cost to waiting, that is, I couldn't invest it elsewhere because my act of investment was to lend it to you. So money is, as you said, a tool to aid circulation, but it presents the optical illusion of growing on trees. This is where Marx comes in. The money seems to grow on trees because it can be invested in a business where profit is expropriated from labor. For a piece of paper to carry all that symbolic power requires that it be printed by a monopoly supplier, the government.

Posted: 01 Jan 2008 04:46 pm Post subject:

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Dave wrote:

Posted: 02 Jan 2008 01:45 am Post subject:

Happy New Year yourself.

My family has an original tradition. Something we have been doing since before we were married, which was 21 years ago. On New Years Eve we make a huge batch of the most wonderful French onion soup. In the soup there is toasted bread, boiled red onions, beef broth and a crusty-golden topping of swiss cheese. That always goes so great with the Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel, and a fine $7.00 bottle of champagne.

Of course on New Years Eve and New Years Day both, I'm out there for hours using the snowblower on this half mile long subdivision road, and the shear pin keeps breaking every fifteen minutes because the snowblower catches on every bump in the roadway, so my pockets are filled with the necessary spare parts and wrenches, and I recite every curse word I have learned over the years ...

__________________________

Posted: 02 Jan 2008 06:07 am Post subject:

ML:

Of course on New Years Eve and New Years Day both, I'm out there for hours using the snowblower on this half mile long subdivision road, and the shear pin keeps breaking every fifteen minutes because the snowblower catches on every bump in the roadway, so my pockets are filled with the necessary spare parts and wrenches, and I recite every curse word I have learned over the years ...

DS:

A far less tedious task is to get goinf before the snow gets too deep and run the car back and forth over the snow until it is packed down. Until the big snow last February I went over three years without using the snow blower. Before the widespread use of snow plows Vermont almost exclusivenly used big rollers to flatten down the snow until mud season.

Posted: 02 Jan 2008 06:58 am Post subject:

When the snow gets flattened out, I can hear it taunting me. It says, "That made me easier to drive on for now, but I'll be turning into ice in a few days." The snow says that just to bug me.

Posted: 07 Jan 2008 03:31 pm Post subject:

Sorry but I have not been reading as much as I should have and I got back on track. Having a good discussion over at Messiah Truth Project. Anyways, I am on the topic of hording specifically the concept of hording wealth. I think Marx was saying that commodities can be horded for the purpose of selling them later at a higher price. Another form of hording is done by the Capitalist themselves. Of course their hording is not to be confused with reserves of coins which has to do with money in circulation. I have to admit Marx is not an easy read.

When I wrote: Quote: that people in general believe that their fellow workers cannot be trusted or have the moral fiber to collectively run a labor organization I was going by the talk that I engage with other workers. It is absolutely amazing that when I try to introduce the concept of self management patriotism arises with the raising of the Red, White and Blue and that it is un-American to think that owners if production would not exist anymore. Many people believe the ownership of small businesses and production is what made this country great. I believe too many people have been programmed to accept things as they are no matter how bad their economic lot is. Anything that runs against the grain is shut down post haste. I have never been able to explain anything in its entirety to anyone. I am not trying to sway anyone to how I think. I just want people to understand that the SIU is not Soviet.

John T.

Posted: 08 Jan 2008 07:22 am Post subject:

Posted: 08 Jan 2008 07:26 am Post subject:

Your signature sounds funny to me, as though it should have the word "does" in there.

One class owns the industries and does not operate them... Another class operates them but does not own them.

Posted: 08 Jan 2008 07:27 am Post subject:

What is the Messiah Truth Project?

Posted: 08 Jan 2008 02:56 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 08 Jan 2008 06:52 pm Post subject:

Posted: 09 Jan 2008 05:37 pm Post subject:

Posted: 10 Jan 2008 04:07 pm Post subject:

Posted: 10 Jan 2008 05:11 pm Post subject:

What an honor it is for socialists to share this experience with Galileo.

He told others he could see some moons going around Jupiter. They replied that such a thing was impossible because we already know that the earth is the center of all circular motions. He said, just take a look thorugh the telescope and you'll see it for yourself. They replied that they would never look through that instrument of the devil.

It is the same as the experience of the socialist trying to persuade other people to look directly at the disaster that is class rule and the profit motive. They don't dare to take a look.

Posted: 04 Feb 2008 03:51 pm Post subject:

I've have finished up and have moved on to the Communist Manifesto. Its a little surprising that Marx wrote that the Capitalist have to have a world market and to settle in every corner of the world. It has to destroy old national industries to erect new ones which become a life or death question. It replaces old wants with new ones. Raw material is brought in from remote places instead of using local raw resources. All existing societies have to transform themselves into bourgeoisie societies to continue their existence. I remember in high school the predictions made by certain teachers that world hunger would be abolish by the next century and most of all the social problems would be solved. Things are worse now then back then despite technological advances.

Posted: 05 Feb 2008 03:47 am Post subject:

It surprises a lot of readers to see how Marx gave capitalism credit for being such a powerful force in modernizing the world. Many readers expect to see Marx give a single appraisal: capitalism bad. People aren't accustomed to saying that something advances progress for hundreds of years and then it impedes progress for the next few hundred years. I don't see such ideas being part of society's common vocabulary.

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 05:48 pm Post subject:

Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto:

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 07:41 pm Post subject:

I don't know whether it's best that the political and economic organizaton of labor, under capitalism, be separate. What I do argue is that a socialist society should have its political and economic administrations separate.

Posted: 16 Feb 2008 07:41 pm Post subject:

When reading Marx and Engels let's not forget what a different environment they were talking about in the 1800s. Most of the countries were monarchies. Even where some people could vote, that applied to some men and no women, so that "universal suffrage" is a recurrent demand that Marx and Engels called for. Marx's first newspaper was banned by the law for suggesting an end to monarchy. Bismarck declared it to be illegal to say publically that you believe in socialism. Trade unions were illegal conspiracies. In the United States, if workers walked off the job and formed a picket line, the president would officially declare that to be treasonous sedition and send in the army to shoot them. Quite a different environment than what we know! I wonder if anything that any 19th century writers has to say about labor tactics has any further applicability. In social criticism and in envisioning goals, they classics are often informative, but, whatever they might have say about the tactics of political parties or unions, how far removed might they be? I wonder -- the 19th century writers may be right about something -- by coincidence! I flip-flop on this, and tomorrow I will be quoting the old guys as though they were the Maharishi.

Posted: 17 Feb 2008 04:09 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 17 Feb 2008 05:30 pm Post subject:

Posted: 19 Feb 2008 01:52 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Thus there are two points which the organized Trades would do well to consider, firstly, that the time is rapidly approaching when the working class of this country will claim, with a voice not to be mistaken, its full share of representation in Parliament.

Well, even Engels wrote that the people, as a whole, has to have political representation. What I was saying is that both a political Party and economic organization should exist at the same time but as separate entities. The Leninist would have everyone believe that the government is both entities. This is why we always see people equating Socialism with government. Since the 1980's we have seen the attack of social programs by the Republicans and it did not take long for the Democrats to mimic them. What did it do but demoralize the working class setting them at odds with each other. Even the working poor are considered lazy since they have to have some sort of relief to get by including medical care. As thing grow worse with plant closings and higher prices the working class continues to believe Capitalism will come to the rescue and to continue to blame the less fortunate. Problem is they believe what they are told by the media. People are like herd animals and act like sheep but unlike sheep people can think and the public needs educated that Socialism does not mean government control but their control over the means of production and those in government.

The political government does not nationalize the railroads, the mines, agriculture, or health care which is part of the SP's agenda. These are solely departments in the SIU not under authority of the government. The government acts in the interest of the organization of labor but it might have to legislate laws to protect the air, land, water, and ethical treatment of animals. To protect individual liberties and civil rights. Our form of government does not change. Just whose interest it represents.

John T.

Posted: 19 Feb 2008 02:54 pm Post subject:

John, did you see where i made this point in the socialsts moderated group? about getting the SP to amend its statement of principles on this point? If you don't find it, I'll hunt it down for you. What kind of winter are you having out there?

Dave

Posted: 19 Feb 2008 03:23 pm Post subject:

Yes I did Dave but when are those in the SP going to respond? I hope they amend their statement of principles.

What kind of winter? The temp goes from one extreme to the other. We have had a lot of very high winds that have cause power outages and I seen some trees snapped in half. The high winds scare me the most especially when I am on ice and I slide backwards from the wind.

Posted: 20 Feb 2008 12:34 pm Post subject:

maybe never but all I can do is try.

When the wind does that to you, turn around and pretend that it is going in your direction.

Posted: 20 Feb 2008 08:49 pm Post subject:

Here is another gem from the Communist Manifesto:
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

Who is kidding who here? I mean they constitute more of a barrier than a help for the common interest of workers and I have high doubts to them being advanced.

John T.

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:06 am Post subject:

John, who do you mean that's more of a barrier than a help?

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:14 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

John, who do you mean that's more of a barrier than a help?

Our modern day Communist who insist that it's their way or no way at all. They are either straight Marxist or those hybrids of Lenin. Since Marx referred to the Communist as the advance segment of the working class it is no wonder that an ego trip was developed. Though I am sure Marx meant well that the Communist are suppose to stand with the workers but now it is a matter of hard core ideology which you experienced at revleft.

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 12:52 am Post subject:

But surely you already knew that the paragraph written in 1847 isn't a reference to today's phenomenon that people call Communists.

In 1847 the Communists were a little club with about twelve members. They asked Marx and Engels to write the manifesto for them.

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 01:04 am Post subject:

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 11:26 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 21 Feb 2008 10:51 pm Post subject:

Posted: 22 Feb 2008 03:00 pm Post subject:

Mike, can you give me a quck rundown on any need for a distinction between "labor" and labor power?

Dave

Posted: 23 Feb 2008 05:36 am Post subject:

This is related to the expansion in value that causes Marx to describe labor power as the only kind of "variable capital". All other kinds of capital are "constant capital". [The book named _Capital_, chapter 8] All other things (materials, tools, energy, etc.) add their own value to the product. Labor power adds more than its own value to the product. So he gives it two different names for before and after the value expansion. Before the job is done, it's not labor yet, just the ability to perform labor, the sale of the use of the worker's mind and body for a contracted block of time -- this is what the worker sells to the capitalist. The labor power turns into labor when when the job is actually done. Likewise, You could say that rental of a chainsaw is the power to cut wood, the ability to cut, and only when you actually use it are you cutting. To pay someone for control over their body is the power to have them perform labor, which you intend to turn into actual labor. But when it becomes actual, now you can drop the word "power" from the name, and that's when the expansion in value takes place, the labor imparts "value added" to the product.

I don't think Marx's explanation is literally true. I think it's what scientists call a first-order model, a description that omits some complicated factors but still gives reasonable answers. Marx's theory explains how wealth gets extracted from the worker in a systematic way, which no other theory for the past 150 years has ever been able to explain. I think the results are is "as if" what Marx describes is happening, not that it literally happens that way.

Posted: 25 Feb 2008 11:47 am Post subject:

Communist Manifesto...It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

This echoes today by workers themselves. Here is an example that a person responded to me by writing:

Posted: 26 Feb 2008 09:16 am Post subject:

Some people believes what they are told. They hear their bosses promise that worker will get a raises if they works diligently, and so they assume that's how the system actually runs in real life, with hardworking individuals getting raises. You might give them the names of millions of workers who worked hard to the point of having heart attacks, and nevertheless lived their entire lives in economic insecurity and deprivation, but that wouldn't shatter the beliefs of those who accept what their bosses told them.

Posted: 26 Feb 2008 02:29 pm Post subject:

When I think back those concepts are instilled at a young age and so was the fear of Communism. I remember my grandmother was always warning me about the Communist. Once some years ago I told my mother about me having an interest in a Labor Party. She turned pale really quick and said that it was Communism and I better just stop. Leninism has had such a negative impact on the national consciousness of Americans that it's going to take many years to dispel. Our present Left Parties don't help but to reinforce that negative impact.

John T.

Posted: 27 Feb 2008 11:42 pm Post subject:

John:

You might give them the names of millions of workers who worked hard to the point of having heart attacks, and nevertheless lived their entire lives in economic insecurity and deprivation, but that wouldn't shatter the beliefs of those who accept what their bosses told them.

DAS:

Fear breeds irrationality. Not much to do about it but acknowledge it and move on.

Posted: 28 Feb 2008 08:15 pm Post subject:

Dave, that was a quote from Mike. However, it is true that no matter what insecurity or economic deprivation a worker has to endure throughout his/her lifetime their beliefs in the Capitalist system is remarkably unshakable. I think that they can't imagine anything other than what exist and they fear any sort of change to a different one. I remember Dave pointed out that even the cartoons of the Flintstones or the Jetsons' always showed the "boss" of a corporation. The boss existed in the past and he will exist in the future.

John T.

Posted: 29 Feb 2008 09:33 pm Post subject:

In the opening of Capital Vol. III what in the word is being said here?

The value of every commodity produced by capitalist methods is represented by the formula: C = c + v + s. If we subtract the surplus-value s from this value of the product, there remains only an equivalent for the value of the capital c + v expended for the elements used in the production of this commodity.

Take it that the production of a certain article requires the expenditure of a capital of 500 p.st., of which 20 p.st. are consumed by the wear and tear of instruments of production, 380 p.st. spent for materials of production, and 100 p.st. for labor-power. And let the rate of surplus-value be 100%. In that case the value of this product is equal to 400 c + 100 v + 100 s, or 600 p.st.

After deducting the surplus-value of 100 p.st., we have a remaining commodity-capital of 500 p.st., which is only an equivalent for the consumed capital of 500 p.st. This portion of the value of the commodity, which makes good the price of the consumed means of production and the price of the employed labor-power, replaces only the amount paid by the capitalist himself for this commodity and represents, therefore, from his point of view the cost price of this commodity.

However, the cost of this commodity to the capitalist, and the actual cost of this commodity, are two vastly different amounts. That portion of the value of the commodity which consists of surplus-value does not cost the capitalist anything for the reason that it costs the laborer unpaid labor. But on the basis of capitalist production, the laborer plays the role of an ingredient of productive capital as soon as he has been incorporated in the process of production. Under these circumstances the capitalist poses as the actual producer of the commodity. For this reason the cost price of the commodity to the capitalist necessarily appears to him as the actual cost of the commodity. If we designate the cost-price by k, we can transcribe the formula C = c + v + s into the formula C = k + s, that is to say, the value of a commodity is equal to the cost price plus the surplus-value.

????

Posted: 01 Mar 2008 02:32 am Post subject:

I'll type $ instead of pounds £.

c = constant capital = the capitalist's cost of production except for the worker's wage = cost of materials $380 + wear-and-tear on tools $20 = $400

v = variable capital = worker's wage = $100

k = capitalist's cost of production = c + v = $400 + $100 = $500

s = surplus value = $100
(In this example it has the same value as the worker's wage because the example says to assume that the rate of surplus value is 100 percent)

value of product = k + s = $500 + $100 = $600

Posted: 01 Mar 2008 04:06 am Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 05 Mar 2008 04:23 pm Post subject:

Marx spent a lot of time and effort to critique how Capitalism worked. He stripped away the mystery to show everyone when and where they are exploited. Its interesting that the surplus value equals the same value as wages 150 some odd years ago. Would that be true today or would surplus value made an increase? I do understand that any industry has to have an increase in profit each year and we also see an increase of prices through out the year every year. I made about $8.00 per hour back in 1979 which was considered good money back then. However, we don't see very many jobs that pay over $8.00. It appears wages today are not much different than the 1970's but prices have increased exponentially and I am going to assume that profits have increase at an incredible rate.

John T.

Posted: 05 Mar 2008 11:44 pm Post subject:

If you were refering to Engel's example that Dave quoted, Engels didn't really claim that surplus value was really the same as wages. He was making up any numbers just to show an example of how to do the arithmetic.

But I think the surplus value part gets greater and greater all the time. Everytime something gets automated, that means more wealth for less work, but the workers don't seem to get much of that benefit. First of all, there was a time a century ago when the richest people were multi-millionaires, and now the richest people are multi-billionaires -- that's a factor of a thousand. What raise did the workers get during that same time? That's probably the same length of time for low-end wages to fo from seventy cents per hour to seven dollars per hour, which is a factor of ten. Hmm, a hundred years of automation ... more wealth for less work ... And some inflation in there to complicate the comparison ... The wealthiest stratum of the population, a 1000X raise... The poorest stratum or the population, a 10X raise.

In my college days -- and just to give an indication of how old I am, the lapel buttons said "impeach Nixon" :-) I remember gasoline being about 30 cent a gallon... I also remember discussing with people how a 3- or 4- bedroom house was going for about $25,000. Those two items are up by factors of ten, at least in my area. How about cars? My first car was a 1976 Ford Granada with the 5.8-liter V8 engine. I paid $4500. What factor price increase would that be, about 4X or 5X? In 1977 my salary as a field engineer at IBM was about $6. That's a definite drop in the standard of living in this country.

In a post at revleft.com I recently wrote to someone else:

Posted: 06 Mar 2008 03:33 pm Post subject:

Mike, I remember the impeach Nixon days do recall gas being 33 cents a gallon. A few years later it went up to 57 cents and everyone was having a fit over the price of gas. Today it is well over $3.00 and nobody complains all that much except when the price of postal stamps increases.

I do see the vast increase in automation thanks to computer technology and yes, I remember that a rich person had million but today its billions. Despite all the automation and plant closing workers continue to blame other workers for the woes that exist. They even blame the Mexicans for not having enough money to make ends meet instead of the Capitalist class who controls the means of production. For some reason workers justify the wealth of the Capitalist because they are in the position as owners. It is interesting that they, at times, will criticize company policy over the reduction of work hours but yet work as much in a smaller block of time. Not much workers can do about it when labor power is just a commodity up for sale.

John T.

Posted: 08 Mar 2008 12:18 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 09 Mar 2008 03:34 am Post subject:

"But I think the surplus value part gets greater and greater all the time. Every time something gets automated, that means more wealth for less work"

Yes but it occerrs in a paradoxical manner, almost counter-intuitive.

Increase automation has the tendency of cheapening the value of commodities - it takes less and less labor time to produce a certain item. It also devalues labor power becuase it takess fewer and fewer hours of labor time to produce the goods required to produce the producer.

Posted: 09 Mar 2008 07:25 pm Post subject:

I see. The more automated the more cheaper products become but, as icing on cake, the price of labor is also lowered. The rich get richer while the workers themselves step on each other just to get the better paying position. Yet most workers defend the Capitalist thinking that they can't exist without them and look upon their fellow worker with disdain. We Gentiles have a bad habit of making gods out of men.

John T.

Posted: 10 Mar 2008 02:41 am Post subject:

the value of labor is lower, because it takes less and less "crystallized labor" in the form of what the laborer buys to keep body and soul together for s/he and the family, and as goes value so goes price, for the most part. Walmartization.

Posted: 10 Mar 2008 06:41 pm Post subject:

Is Marx right about this reasoning? I have some doubts. It goes like this. When a commodity is put together from the combination of other commodities, the value of the parts is transferred to the value of the whole. Therefore the value of a wooden chair is based on the addition of the value of lumber, the value of the electricity used in manufacturing, some fraction of the value of each tool, etc. Of course, he adds the concept of the value of direct labor undergoing an expansion, so it's not only the value of the direct labor that becomes one of the terms added to the value of the chair, but the value of the direct labor increased by some expansion factor. So far, so good. I agree with Marx about all that. But now he makes another assertion without defending the logic of it. He says the same process determines the exchange value of labor power as a commodity on the labor market. He says that the value of labor power is the addition of the values of the material parts that go into producing a worker: the value of food, housing, etc. Marx says that's why the average wage is a mere "living wage." Education is one of those ingredients that transfers its value to the commodity labor, which explains why educated labor often has a higher exchange value. But here's my problem. I'm not so sure that its logical to say that the same economic law (the conservation of exchange value) that applies to physical goods also applies to the commodity labor power. It may be true, but Marx doesn't even give any argument to demonstrate why it must be true. You can't make assumptions and call it "scientific socialism."

Posted: 10 Mar 2008 11:34 pm Post subject:

How can it be called Scientific Socialism when this was nothing more than a critique of Capitalism?

Posted: 11 Mar 2008 04:24 am Post subject:

That's true -- I should have said: Marx and Engels claimed in several places that this was a scientific critique of capitalism. It's true that a big part of scientific activity is identifying the numerous varieties of things and classifying them, giving names to them, and then proposing ideas about how things are connected together. But we're already stretching the point about being scientific because social sciences can't perform experiments to test hypotheses (I think). So the practicioners of social science have to, at least, be careful about the part that is under their control. So I get mad when they don't define their vocabulary words precisely, and stuff like that. I think Marx may have made an unwarranted assumption.

Posted: 11 Mar 2008 12:37 pm Post subject:

The vocabulary actually sucks. When I first started out learning Socialism I took the term Marxian Economics to mean that he created a new economic system and that the Soviet Union was practicing Marxian Economics. It was later that I learned that Marx was just critiquing Capitalism. I have no idea what the Soviet Union was practicing but it sure was not Socialism. Forced slave labor is not Socialism neither is arresting people during the night to either shoot people or send them to a Gulag without trial. Nor is it about an elite ruling class called a vanguard.

I have the opinion that Marx critiqued Capitalism to show its dark side. Perhaps he was saying, I do believe hinted at, to create a new economic system which during his life he was unsure of. Of course he wrote plainly that the means of production has to be under the workers control with common ownership.

The term Scientific Socialism is often thrown in a persons face at revleft. Where did the word originate from? I don't even know where they got the concept of Communism as being where people would voluntarily work from time to time.

Posted: 11 Mar 2008 10:43 pm Post subject:

Marx wrote in hs preface to Capital that it was an extension and contuation of his earlier work:

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

The preface to that work has a little more meat on it than the preface to Capital as to why it was written. In the preface to that work he refers to yet an earlier work, The German Ideology

When notifed that the work would not be published he wrote:

"We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification."

So it just might be that Marx's purpose in writing Capital was for the very same reason - his own edification.

This is from his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

Frederick Engels, with whom I maintained a constant exchange of ideas by correspondence since the publication of his brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories (printed in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, arrived by another road (compare his Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) at the same result as I, and when in the spring of 1845 he too came to live in Brussels, we decided to set forth together our conception as opposed to the ideological one of German philosophy, in fact to settle accounts with our former philosophical conscience. The intention was carried out in the form of a critique of post-Hegelian philosophy. The manuscript [The German Ideology], two large octavo volumes, had long ago reached the publishers in Westphalia when we were informed that owing to changed circumstances it could not be printed. We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly since we had achieved our main purpose – self-clarification. Of the scattered works in which at that time we presented one or another aspect of our views to the public, I shall mention only the Manifesto of the Communist Party, jointly written by Engels and myself, and a Discours sur le libre echange, which I myself published. The salient points of our conception were first outlined in an academic, although polemical, form in my Misere de la philosophie..., this book which was aimed at Proudhon appeared in 1847. The publication of an essay on Wage-Labour [Wage-Labor and Capital] written in German in which I combined the lectures I had held on this subject at the German Workers' Association in Brussels, was interrupted by the February Revolution and my forcible removal from Belgium in consequence.

The publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848 and 1849 and subsequent events cut short my economic studies, which I could only resume in London in 1850. The enormous amount of material relating to the history of political economy assembled in the British Museum, the fact that London is a convenient vantage point for the observation of bourgeois society, and finally the new stage of development which this society seemed to have entered with the discovery of gold in California and Australia, induced me to start again from the very beginning and to work carefully through the new material. These studies led partly of their own accord to apparently quite remote subjects on which I had to spend a certain amount of time. But it was in particular the imperative necessity of earning my living which reduced the time at my disposal. My collaboration, continued now for eight years, with the New York Tribune, the leading Anglo-American newspaper, necessitated an excessive fragmentation of my studies, for I wrote only exceptionally newspaper correspondence in the strict sense. Since a considerable part of my contributions consisted of articles dealing with important economic events in Britain and on the continent, I was compelled to become conversant with practical detail which, strictly speaking, lie outside the sphere of political economy.

This sketch of the course of my studies in the domain of political economy is intended merely to show that my views – no matter how they may be judged and how little they conform to the interested prejudices of the ruling classes – are the outcome of conscientious research carried on over many years

Posted: 12 Mar 2008 12:41 am Post subject:

Of course "The German Ideology" was eventually published (in the 20th century) (text here). It's rather philosophical, however. Most readers will find it confusing.

Posted: 12 Mar 2008 12:48 am Post subject:

Posted: 12 Mar 2008 12:59 am Post subject:

Posted: 12 Mar 2008 12:02 pm Post subject:

Lenin coined the word Communism in 1905 to reflect what St. Simon and Louis Blanc described as voluntary work to maintain society? Do you have a link?

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 12:30 am Post subject:

Marx's 1875 correspondence "Critique of the Gotha Programme", Marx used the term "initial phase of communist society" to refer to the thing that you and I call the TLV, and the term "higher phase of communist society" to refer to the "from each .... to each ...." concept. Thirty years later - Lenin, in his 1905 pamphlet "The State and Revolution", set out to paraphrase Marx, but, for those two ideas, he called them "socialism" and "communism", in that order.

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 04:34 pm Post subject:

ML:

I'm not so sure that its logical to say that the same economic law (the conservation of exchange value) that applies to physical goods also applies to the commodity labor power.

DS:

In thinking about the commodity labor power I think of a factory of say 100 workers and some seller of machinery goes to the owner and says I have studied your processes here and for x dollars upfront in purchase cost and y dollars per week in upkeep you can purchase machines to replace 10 workers.

What math does the owner go through in comparing the costs of the machines to labor power?

It seems that the evaluation on both sides of the equation is pretty much the same. That suggests to me that the commodity laws that apply to human labor power are equal to or nearly equal to the commodity laws that apply to non-human commodities, in this case machinery.

But with the human based commodity labor poewr I'm sure that there's a bit more volitility in the market as to price. Humans have to eat whether they work or not.

Posted: 13 Mar 2008 08:00 pm Post subject:

Posted: 14 Mar 2008 11:45 am Post subject:

The point was that when considering the labor power it's dealt with as any other commodity.

Buy a machine with different upfront and continuing costs or keep the humans on.

Because exactly the same considerations apply, to me that suggests that the same "conservation of exchange value" that aplies to all other commodites applies to labor power as well.

Posted: 18 Mar 2008 01:02 pm Post subject:

In dealing with a group of capitalism advocates on another list seeking to ignore or deny or confuse "labor theory of value" I came up with the following statements.

comments please.

1.) Labor operates upon nature and may produce something of increased
and/or differnt potential use.

2.) Labor operates on nature and previous products of labor and nature and may produce something of increased and/or differnt potential use.

3.) Denominating previous products of #1 and or #2 above as "capital"
or as anything else does not detract from the validity of statement
#2.

4.) Denominating any function of labor under # 1 or #2 above as a
managment function or anything else does not detract from the
validity of either statement.

Posted: 18 Mar 2008 05:41 pm Post subject:

(1) and (2), true. It sounds to me like (2) includes (1) as a special case, so (1) isn't needed.

For (3), yes, those things are capital, as long as they are raw materials that have their own value. If you had a pile of lumber, which is an outcome of mixing labor with nature, then you also have some capital. You may save it, use it, or sell it.

Not sure what you mean in (4). If you and I are both workers at XYZ company, suppose I'm told to cut lumber for the boss, while you are told to perform a management function, like administrative paperwork. When the boss get the lumber I have cut, the boss definitely has some capital there. But when the boss gets hold of the paperwork you have generated, I don't know if the boss has some capital there - I would tend to doubt it.

Posted: 18 Mar 2008 06:08 pm Post subject:

I'm carrying this over from the IWW topic, just to keep my comments about economic in the economics topic:

I believe it's correct that raises in "real wages" (the buying power of wages) have to be temporary. Prices of goods depend a lot on the buying power of the population. If the people can afford to pay more, then when prices gradually creep upward the people will continue to buy the product. That's the signal that prices can creep up some more rather than freeze or backtrack. So if all workers throughout society were to get a big raise, then they could afford to pay higher prices, so that gives sellers the opportunity to raise prices.

(But technically this is different from inflation, which is where wages and prices both rise because the government has increased the money supply in circulation. That's another subject, but the symptoms can be similar.)

The consequences are important. The women's equality movement has led to the existence of more two-income families. Many people thought that two income families becoming the norm would lead to those families more materially affluent. But that's not how capitalism works. Two income families becoming the norm meant that those families would be able to afford to pay high prices for consumer goods, so the capitalists obligingly doubled the prices of consumer goods. In effect, the capitalist calss said to the working class, okay, women's lib movement, you weren' t happy with the discrimination against women and the the one-income family, you weren't happy with the bare subsistence wage and a 40 hour family workweek, so now have it your way, now you have a bare subsistence wage and an 80 hour family workweek - are you happier now?

Posted: 18 Mar 2008 07:09 pm Post subject:

Mike wrote:

Posted: 19 Mar 2008 03:14 pm Post subject:

DAS:

1.) Labor operates upon nature and may produce something of increased
and/or differnt potential use.

2.) Labor operates on nature and/or previous products of nature and labor and may produce something of increased and/or differnt potential use.

3.) Denominating previous products of #1 and or #2 above as "capital"
or as anything else does not detract from the validity of statement
#2.

4.) Denominating any function of labor under # 1 or #2 above as a
managment function or anything else does not detract from the
validity of either statement.

ML:

1) and (2), true. It sounds to me like (2) includes (1) as a special case, so (1) isn't needed.

For (3), yes, those things are capital, as long as they are raw materials that have their own value. If you had a pile of lumber, which is an outcome of mixing labor with nature, then you also have some capital. You may save it, use it, or sell it.

Not sure what you mean in (4). If you and I are both workers at XYZ company, suppose I'm told to cut lumber for the boss, while you are told to perform a management function, like administrative paperwork. When the boss get the lumber I have cut, the boss definitely has some capital there. But when the boss gets hold of the paperwork you have generated, I don't know if the boss has some capital there - I would tend to doubt it.

DS:

"It sounds to me like (2) includes (1) as a special case, so (1) isn't needed. " How about this instead of 1 and 2:

++Labor operates on nature and/or previous products of labor and nature and may produce something of increased and/or differnt potential use. ++

ML:

For (3), yes, those things are capital, as long as they are raw materials that have their own value. If you had a pile of lumber, which is an outcome of mixing labor with nature, then you also have some capital.

DS:

Why are you calling it capital as opposed to previous products of labor and nature?

Let's get this worked out before we go onto to your comments about 4.

Posted: 19 Mar 2008 06:13 pm Post subject:

Posted: 19 Mar 2008 06:25 pm Post subject:

Posted: 20 Mar 2008 01:21 pm Post subject:

Marx wrote: This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.

It would seem the Capitalist understands that the "minimum wage" has to be in place to maintain the existence of the entire class of workers. Some workers get more money but if minimum wage were to fall below the subsistence standard we would see an explosion of intense poverty, starvation and homelessness. It's incredible that Marx saw into all or nearly every aspect of capitalist production. No wonder he is not read in school and ridiculed in some colleges.

Posted: 20 Mar 2008 03:28 pm Post subject:

By the way...is this related to what you two are talking about?

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm

Posted: 20 Mar 2008 06:37 pm Post subject:

Posted: 21 Mar 2008 01:06 am Post subject:

Sorry I have spaced out a bit. beem concentrating on a couple of othtyer things. However:

davesearles wrote:
Why are you calling it capital as opposed to previous products of labor and nature?

ML
The way I interpreted your post of 3/19, you called it capital, and then you added that saying so "does not detract from" the other statement that it's source is nature+labor. What I thought you said first, I agreed.

What I said (I think) was that calling pevious products of labor on nature "capital" doesn't detract from the fact that it's a product of labor on nature.

Posted: 21 Mar 2008 06:34 am Post subject:

Posted: 26 Mar 2008 09:34 pm Post subject:

So, labor power has the characteristics of capital. I believe I read that labor power is a peculiar commodity being a value creating force, a source of value, and I don't quite understand this as labor power being a source of more value than it posses itself.

A lot of people have been taught in college or on the net that labor power does not create social wealth but production itself which the capitalist owns. and then cite von Misus or someone else. But without labor production could not raise surplus of production over costs. I understand that capitalism needs critiqued but there is very little in regard to socialist modes of production. A lot of people don't have the capacity to think outside the box of capitalism and their line of reason revolves around capitalism methodology that anything different becomes a threat to their life style.

Posted: 27 Mar 2008 01:54 am Post subject:

Just to make sure we're all speaking the same language, I'll make up an example. I'll try to use Marx's terminology as best as I understand it. This doesn't necessarily prove that Marx was right, but at least let's agree on how Marx used his vocabulary words.

Suppose a capitalist hires a worker for one hour. The worker is going to use up some of the capitalist's materials, which are:

$5 of wood
$2 some miscellaneous consumables such as nails, electricity, oil
$1 depreciation of machinery and tools

The $5 and $2 items are what Marx called circulating capital because they are the kinds of resources that change their physical form (get chopped up, evaporate, burned, dissipated, etc.) as they get used up.

The $1 depreciation is what Marx called fixed capital, because the machinery and tools remain in their fixed physical form of being machinery and tools throughout their useful lifetime until they are finally worn out and scrapped.

All of the above are a total of 5+2+1=$8 constant capital. it's called constant because, if Marx's model is correct, it will add $8 to the value of the product.

Suppose the capitalist pays the worker a wage of $10.

The capitalist's cost of production is 8+10=$18.

Suppose the capitalist puts a price tag of $30 on the product and it gets sold.

The capitalist economist and the Marxian economist agree on this much: Since the price was 30 and the cost of production was 18, the capitalist has made a profit of 30-18=$12. (When I say a profit of 12, this simple example is neglecting the fact that the capitalist has to pay taxes.)

But when the question arises about where that profit "came from", the capitalist economist and the Marxian economist describe it very differently.

The capitalist economist says: The capitalist persuaded a shopper to pay 30 for something that could be made for 18. That "exercise of freedom of choice" on the part of a seller and a buyer, the capitalist's "genius" and "great idea", "being in the right place at the right time", "willingness to take a risk", and various other intangibles of that kind, has created $12 worth of new wealth in the world.

Now here is how the Marxian economist describes what happened. The labor power obtained for $10 was able to impart $22 worth of "value added" to a pile of inanimate materials. When labor power (the ability to work) became labor (the actual performance of work), it underwent an expansion in value from 10 to 22. So $8 worth of constant capital plus $22 value-added, gives us a $30 product.

But the worker only got $10. Why? The worker is paid for labor power, not for actual labor. It's the labor power (the mental and physical capacity to work) and not the actual labor carried out on the workday, that is the commodity that the workers owns and has to take the labor market and sell at auction to a capitalist. The labor power is called variable capital because the capitalist can buy it for $10 and then toss it into the mixture where it contributes $22 to the materials.

We may consider the hour to have been divided in this way: the worker worked part of the hour for $10 in wages, and then worked the remainder of the hour without any pay to produce $12 in surplus value for the capitalist.

In summary, let's add up all the terms:

$5 wood
$2 miscellaneous other consumables
$1 tool depreciation
$10 paid labor (wages)
$12 unpaid labor (also called value-added, surplus value, or profit)
--------
total $30, the price tag of the product.

In the point of view of an economist, what has happened?

These are two possible ways to describe that has happened: the way the capitalist economist describes it, and the way the marxian economist describes it.

We have what philosophers call an antinomy -- a case where either of two proposed explanations is plausible -- they can't both be right at the same time, but either explanation by itself is plausible, at least at first. So we have to choose which of the two approaches has more explanatory power, more power to clarify, more consistency with other common sense observations. How will we decide?

The first thing we may notice is that both explanations have someone being robbed, but they differ in whom they say got robbed. The capitalist economist says that the seller was clever enough to get away with overcharging the customer $30 for an $18 item. The Marxian economist says that the employer got away with paying a worker $10 for the worker's $22 contribution. (We have seen that, mathematically, they are equivalent statements, two different kinds of accounting that indicate a $12 profit.)

But we need some kind of tie-breaker to determine which of these two explanation makes more practical sense.

I believe that there are two kinds of tie-breakers. The first is related to how new wealth is created. The second is related to identifying who is the victim of exploitation.

The first tie-breaker is this: If the capitlaist economist is right, the activity that creates new wealth in the world is the activity of people continually overcharging other people, gypping people. Based on real experience, it doesn't make sense that having a population of people mutually pick each others' pockets could be the very thing that creates new wealth. But it makes perfect sense that the activity that creates new wealth in the world is the application of human labor to nature's resources: planting seeds, building things, assembling things, repairing, transporting, etc.

The second tie-breaker is this: If the capitalist economist is right, then exploitation would be taking place at the consumer end of the process. But the wealthy people do more shopping than an equal number of poorer people, because they have more money to spend. That would mean that the most exploited people would be the welathiest ones who don't have to work, while the least exploited people would be the poorest ones who have to work. This is clearly a nonsense result.

So we had two competing economic models, mathematically equivalent. The model proposed by the capitalist economist was seen to have broader implications that proved to be nonsense: that the act of gypping people is the principal source of new wealth, and that the most exploited people are the people those who can afford do the most shopping, i.e., the wealthiest. The Marxian model has implications that correspond closely to everyday experience: that the source of wealth is the action of labor on nature's resources, and that the most exploited people are those who work regularly and get underpaid for it.

That is my economics lesson for today!

Mike Lepore, Stanfordville, New York, March 26, 2008

Posted: 28 Mar 2008 12:32 pm Post subject:

ML:

To say that labor acts on nature, that's a more universal statement about what all production itself is, what the human condition is, what human activity always was and always will be.

Under capitalism in particular, the activities of workers continuously generates more capital for the capitalist. That's part of the definition of capital -- wealth under a system in which someone owning wealth leads to the owning of more wealth - the goal being accumulation.

DAS:

Yes I was trying to keep it general. To get rid of the idea that "capital" per se is needed to produce. The prior products of labor do not have to be "capital" therfore we do not need capitalism.

Posted: 28 Mar 2008 05:15 pm Post subject:

Thta's right. The way Dr. Marx used the word, the means of production are not always capital.

Posted: 01 Apr 2008 08:11 pm Post subject:

I had to read the lesson a few times and it is mostly believed the capitalist being the victim of theft in the market place--picking each other pockets. But we know that's not the case that commodities values are the result of labor time added above what is paid to the laborer. How is it that the poor, who work the hardest for the least amount of money, be viewed as the least exploited?

Posted: 01 Apr 2008 11:16 pm Post subject:

JT:

We can critique capitalism and then show an workable alternative which could generate support for both SIU and LTV which could lead to that political demand of a Constitutional Amendment. I wonder if there should be one for a new economic system?

DS:

"One" what?

Posted: 01 Apr 2008 11:35 pm Post subject:

I was thinking, which can be dangerous, that the SIU is an economic organization which we have the hope of political demand arising among the citizens for a Constitutional amendment. I was wondering the same thing about the LTV being a new economics system of exchange?

Posted: 02 Apr 2008 01:36 am Post subject:

John, I don't understand the question yet. Are you wondering whether a separate amendment is needed to adopt an LTV system?

This gets back to the early days of our amendment discussion. I believe that the socialist reconstruciton process needs a whole constitution-like document with thousands of words to define the branches and departments of a new industrial administrative system. Dave wanted a short'n'sweet amendment to recognize the workers' right to run things. I was arguing that, while Dave's amendment was a good step to establishing a new right, it wouldn't by itself make socialism a workable system. Actual implementation would require an amendment that says constitutional recognition is given a new document of considerable length. To make industries run, there are many overlapping responsibilities that need to be standardized. The LTV method is one of several principles.

Posted: 02 Apr 2008 03:32 am Post subject:

I understand now. I was wondering how it would all fit together which made me wonder if a different amendment was needed to change the present currency to LTVs. The amendment would have to refer to social ownership and a whole lot of other things that would make the SIU structurally sound. However, Dave did the right thing because it shows that we recognize the importance of the Constitution along with civil rights and liberties and that we are not going to "smash the state" or pull the rug out from anyone politically.

Posted: 02 Apr 2008 06:24 am Post subject:

(sorry I don't have a spell check from where I am writing)

ML:

This gets back to the early days of our amendment discussion. I believe that the socialist reconstruciton process needs a whole constitution-like document with thousands of words to define the branches and departments of a new industrial administrative system.

DS answers thusly:

A whole constitution - all right, but not a part of the US constitution.

The proposed constitutional amendment essentially is the charter of the SIU - just as the US Constitution presently prescribes the arangement between the states and federal govt. It is actually a remarkable arrangement and what's neat, we have over 200 years experience working with a shared soverinty system, not only amoung the three branches but amoung the fed and states as well. So the constitution recognizes the authouty of the workers to set up shop as the SUI, just as it recognizes the states. (Historically this is reversed becuase the states recognized the federal constitution first, but that doesn't matter) Just as the states write their own constitutions, so should the SIU write its own. I can imagine a roll of the US congress in helping to set things up at the get go, just as congress usually has a hand in aproving the first constitution of a proposed state just prior to its admission. But once a state is in, it's free to amend to the same extant that all other states are, subject only to the US Constitution. And so should the SIU.

This roll of congress was brilliantly anticipated by the last section section of the proposed amendment:

"Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

Posted: 02 Apr 2008 07:24 pm Post subject:

Posted: 02 Apr 2008 09:24 pm Post subject:

DS: the amedment takes unioinized industries out of the realm of private property as a matter of law and public policy just as the 13th amendment took human beings out of the realm of private property.

ML:

(The constitution) gives the federal reserve the sole power to issue currency.

DS:

I don't see that.

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 04:25 am Post subject:

I should have said: the constitution gives to the congress the power "to coin money, regulate the value thereof." (article 1, section 8)

related legal interpretations:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article01/37.html

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 05:12 pm Post subject:

I was not far off the mark when I wrote that LTVs would have to be part of the Amendment and anything else related to social ownership of production and distribution. Patents, copyrights, compensation for property loss, etc. There is a lot of protectionism for capitalism within the Constitution but is it possible to address all of them in a single Amendment? Confused

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 06:45 pm Post subject:

The only way I can see to address everything in a single amendment is to have the amendment say that authority is transferred to constitution version 2, which must be already written by then, so that one sentence achieves thousands of words. But that can't be done until the details of the new system have been decided by large workers' conventions, so you can already have it in writing whether the new system shall have twenty departments and two hundred sub-departments, etc. I think this is Dave's paradox. He's promoting an amendment first, to people who first heard of socialism a minute ago. I agree with Dave's strategy, but I see it s an agitational strategy. It's not sufficient to make socialism workable.

Posted: 03 Apr 2008 10:26 pm Post subject:

But I have been to the mountaintop.

http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/americanradioworks/features/sayitplain/mlking.ram

http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=89326670&m=89334239

Posted: 08 Apr 2008 09:52 am Post subject:

I can see why the Constitution is considered "bourgeoisie" since it is more favorable to them. However, there is a lot within the Constitution to work with that would settle grievances politically. Since: FISCAL AND MONETARY POWERS OF CONGRESS ''to coin money'' and ''regulate the value thereof'' has been broadly construed to authorize regulation of every phase of the subject of currency. Seeing that the legal change in currency is very possible politically. Political government is necessary to make those changes but the majority of socialist would have to agree to follow a singular path and we all hope that it is SIU.

Posted: 10 Apr 2008 04:33 am Post subject:

ML:

an agitational strategy. It's not sufficient to make socialism workable

DAS:

not sufficient, 100% correct. It has to be the creation of each worker. The more it is prescribed the more suseptible it becomes to the incessant blatherers.

Posted: 29 Apr 2008 11:03 am Post subject:

The idea, or perhaps gospel, is that a company has to have profits. Under capitalism this is true. Under socialism the idea of profit making is out of the question. Our society thinks that socialism won't work is because no profits would be made. No profits, no investments therefore no production. I find it hard to explain to people that what is produced is the result of what is consumed. When I write that orders would be filled from the stores they seem to think that I am talking about some totalitarian giving orders. Money making and profits are so ingrained in the minds of people that they cannot not think of anything else different. I know a person who believes that if we change our way of thinking (how to exploit people to the max is what he means) we all could become rich like Henry Ford.

Posted: 30 Apr 2008 08:02 am Post subject:

It took me years and years to understand that nobody's mind will bw changed by describing in minutia what you think socialsm will look like. Consider thating that "socialism" consists of the eans f production being owned and operated by ther workers collectively with production for human need as determined by the workers - and leave it at that. Don't chew people's meat for them - after all it has to be theirown idea that they implement. If someone don't want to think about how it could happen, or doesn't think that it can - just keep being an embodiment of the idea. What else is there?

Posted: 14 May 2008 11:28 pm Post subject:

I posted this on another list - seems useful here:

(someone else) wrote:

The eca (which off the top of my head I don't remember
what it stands for) refers to the poiint made by economists
that Marxism had no measns of sorting out the economic
problem without the use of money.

DAS:

The premise seems to be that "money" and Marxism cannot coincide. I
for one do not agree with it. Will "Marxism" make the various
metals that can easliy be used as "money" in a pinch vanish? Or the
myriads of other fungible articles and materials (commodities) such
as cords of wood, bushels of grain, barrels of crude oil, gallons of
gasoline etc. simply disappear? so why wouldn't "money" be available
when the laborers have taken hold of the means of production?

Moreover not all Marxists reject keeping the "state" so what would
prevent utilizing the state to maintain it's currency issuing
function as an adjunct to a system of labor shares as the workers
decide to establish?

Also, if the labor share notes had some degree of transferability
outside of the industrial economy (perhaps free but taxed), why
wouldn't they obtain a money status?

Posted: 15 May 2008 12:31 am Post subject:

The eca is the "economic calculation argument", a modern name for the argument used by Mises.

Maybe we have gone overboard changing the names of things. Is there anything really wrong with the word "money" even to describe the strictest mid-20th-century SLP concept of a goal?

But I wouldn't recommend using metal for money. Everyone knows by now that money is symbolic, getting its value from the promise that you will be able to spend it without difficulty -- and that made paper a better choice, and, in my opinion, bits in a computer an even better choice.

Posted: 15 May 2008 04:09 am Post subject:

Probabbly wouldn't be that easy to by a gallon of milk for a pound of copper but with the falling dollar but in large scale transactions with entities equiped to essay and handle copper and other metals there is no reason that it couldn't or wouldn't be done.

"Hey, I can't pay for my tank of heating fuel that I owe you $1200.00 for but would you take 320 pounds of scrap copper for it?"

Answer: "Damned right we will."

And it wouldn't be symbolic value but the real value of original money.

Posted: 15 May 2008 05:03 am Post subject:

Buy why would a heating feul company want to take possession of a pile of scrap metal? If you pay them with paper money they can easily carry it in an envelope to their next transaction. That's what the "experts" were originally thinking when they invented paper money a couple hundred years ago.

Posted: 15 May 2008 09:38 am Post subject:

I am sure they would rather have the money - but if you call them up and tell them you just lost your job and you're about to file for bancrupcy and do they want to come over and pick up 360 lbs of scap copper in payment I have a sneaking suspicion suspicion that they'll get over there in under 24 hours to pick it up.

Posted: 15 May 2008 12:47 pm Post subject:

That's true as stated. I thought you were going to suggest that barter would be a better system than money in general.

I have about 70 feet of BX cable left over from when I built this house twenty years ago. Several people have told me, "Don't throw that out! It's valuable!" Then I ask them what they'll give me for it, and they say, "What the hell would I do with it?" So I guess barter would need an organized exchange for people to find each other. For lightweight materials easy to ship, and global "eBay", and for heavy things that the user should come and haul away, a neighborhood "eBay". Remember WBNR radio in Beacon used to have a program for people to call up and offer to give things away to anyone who will come and pick them up?

Posted: 16 May 2008 12:40 am Post subject:

If it's old bx it's almost worthless - the new bx (I forget what it's called) has a full sized ground conductor in addition to the metal spiral bx jacket . If it's new hold onto it, there will be a day when you need to run a new circuit for something.

Stripped coper is about $3.75 per pound.

Believe me, you don't have to go on e-bay to find someone who will take it in exchange (I'm talking in bulk quantities) if you tell them that you have no other way to pay. If I had a tenant who had no other way to pay the rent other than to give me 200 lbs. of copper - I'd take it in a minute.

And that is my point. It's virtually impossible to consider a society without money when there are so many things hanging around that can be used as money.

Posted: 16 May 2008 03:35 am Post subject:

If I add any circuits I would use romex. I originally used BX only in the first floor ceiling beams because there was only a one inch deep notch to lay the cable in, in hope that the inspector would just pass it, but he made me plate over it anyway. If I knew I was gonna have to plate over it, I would have used all romex in the first place.

Posted: 16 May 2008 11:24 pm Post subject:

I agree, that is how it has to be within the industrial economy - ok -

So what if the industrial economy needs something from somewhere that the revolution hasn't taken hold of, or has chosen not to. mineral x in country y. Either we roll out the tanks, or start bartering. I don't care what it's otherwise called, it's money.

Posted: 17 May 2008 01:20 am Post subject:

That's true, until the last national boundaries on earth have been taken down, human and industrial existence will require trade in natural resources at least, with trade in finished products being optional and likely.

But I suggest not using the word "money" in such a general way that it includes the direct barter of minerals. If we do that, then whomever we are talking to, some John Doe in some yahoo forum, will then steer the discussion in the direction of arguing about the meaning of glossary words from economics 101, in this case, "money", and then time and attention would move away from the issue of our democratic goal, while John Doe treats us to quotes from chapter 27 of professor so-and-so's textbook on macroeconomics.

Posted: 17 May 2008 02:35 pm Post subject:

I concede the point.

Posted: 19 May 2008 01:35 pm Post subject:

But getting back to the original point - "money" was brought up as part of the Economic Calulation Argument - that supposedly a society that does not have money cannot exist. My point was that when anyting can be used as money how would we ever know.

Also I gave as an example of another country not being socialist - but I would imagine that even after the 'revolution" in our own country there will be individuals and enclaves who simply wish not to be a full part of the industrial system. An example we have used repeatedly is a barber.

We don't want to push the idea that socialsm will be a monolith - that everyone must be a part of the industrail union. If for example Amish and Menonite individuals are happy with their current setups on the family farms, more power to them. They will have to use something as "money" if they do not live totally on bartering product they produce directly for products that they consume.

Posted: 19 May 2008 04:18 pm Post subject:

Posted: 19 May 2008 04:24 pm Post subject:

Posted: 20 May 2008 03:53 am Post subject:

ML:

Those individuals should be allowed to choose. My only problem is visualizing what could happen when those individuals don't make all of their own goods, and they occasionally need something from society's industries.

DAS:

They sell what they can and if that isn't enough they get part time and even full time jobs to bring in cash (Like I do with my rental properties)

Posted: 20 May 2008 04:12 am Post subject:

Doesn't that cancel the effective ability of the Amish farmer to be independent?

Posted: 21 May 2008 05:23 pm Post subject:

If that were the goal, but I don't think that it is. Have you ever been down to the Amish country around Lancaster Pa.?

Posted: 21 May 2008 07:14 pm Post subject:

A long time ago.