Do machines produce surplus value?
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There is not need to read so many. Intelectuals trying to deny the labour theory. Those are anti labours thinkers pretending that they are defending the working class. It is known that only human beings produce surplus value. They can stand up from their rocking chair and work in a factory to see the reality and the conditions of the working class. That is what. Engels did. We have more important issues. What about wars. Hungers, and persecutions against the workers? What about sending the troops to the poor to deport them ? No wonder why we do not get new members?
Actually marginalism and utility theory etc as adopted by the Misses people etc was invented by a British bod in the 1860’s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Jevons a bit before Walras I think
Yes, the man who thought that economic crises were caused by sunspots:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2011/no-1280-april-2011/cooking-books-1don%E2%80%99t-ask-jevonshttp://www.economictheories.org/2008/08/jevons-sunspots-and-commercial-activity.html
Some capitalist economists have said that pollution is produced by cow farts. We have said that economists are not from this planet
Dave wrote:Actually marginalism and utility theory … was invented by a British bod [William Stanley Jevons] in the 1860’s, a bit before Walras I think.Actually, a thought as powerful as marginalism was anticipated long before Jevons, e.g., in the 18th century by Swiss mathematical physicist Daniel Bernoulli, and earlier in the 19th century by Italian engineer Jules Dupuit and German economist Heinrich Gossen.I mentioned Léon Walras because he is widely credited with founding so-called general equilibrium theory by simultaneous equations which describe conditions for equilibrating a capitalist market based on subjective utility.Walras’s significant achievement led the economic historian [and student of Bohm Bawerk] Joseph Schumpeter to consider “Walras … the greatest of economists”.The point I am making is that the simultaneity of [Walrasian-style] general equilibrium theory—independent of that theory’s basis in subjective utility—is its Achilles heel for application to actual capitalist conditions.Marginalist economics, like Sraffian economics, is inescapably and ineluctably riven with physicalism. It too predicts positive profits for zero labour values.On Robbo’s issue — Hic Rhodus!
I think Adam is being a bit sneering on Jevon's sun spot hypothesis. The idea I think was that the activity of the sun could cause changes in weather resulting in changes in the productivity of agricultural production which could precipitate economic disruption etc etc. Based on analysis of data and postulating a causality/correlation etc. http://www.economictheories.org/2008/08/jevons-theory-of-sunspot-empirical.html There is a similar volcanic eruption theory re Indonesia or wherever these things happen and a price of food and ‘revolution’ correlations. I thought his; A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy(1862) Was ok as regards a thesis for a utility theory was concerned compared to more modern expositions; although perhaps the bar isn’t set so high. I having a feeling that there were precursor ideas to that even and there was something in German ideology on it?
Dave B wrote:I think Adam is being a bit sneering on Jevon's sun spot hypothesis. The idea I think was that the activity of the sun could cause changes in weather resulting in changes in the productivity of agricultural production which could precipitate economic disruption etc etc. Based on analysis of data and postulating a causality/correlation etc. http://www.economictheories.org/2008/08/jevons-theory-of-sunspot-empirical.html There is a similar volcanic eruption theory re Indonesia or wherever these things happen and a price of food and ‘revolution’ correlations. That will not produce economical crisis I thought his; A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy(1862) Was ok as regards a thesis for a utility theory was concerned compared to more modern expositions; although perhaps the bar isn’t set so high. I having a feeling that there were precursor ideas to that even and there was something in German ideology on it?That will not produce economical crisis
Ah Iceland! The meteorological impact of Laki continued, contributing significantly to several years of extreme weather in Europe. In France, the sequence of extreme weather events included a surplus harvest in 1785 that caused poverty for rural workers, as well as droughts, bad winters and summers. These events contributed significantly to an increase in poverty and famine that may have contributed to the French Revolutionin 1789.[20]Laki was only one factor in a decade of climatic disruption, as Grímsvötnwas erupting from 1783 to 1785, and there may have been an unusually strong El Niño effect from 1789 to 1793 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laki http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/04/revolutions_and_the_price_of_b.html this google thing and the internet is great. Paul Mason? That name rings a bell.
A decade after Engels’s Conditions of the Working Class in England in 1844, Jevons (still in his late teens) travelled to Australia.Though far from Engels’s working-class standpoint, an outraged William Stanley Jevons nevertheless reported in ascerbic disgust, in his social map of Sydney, the grim plight of those unfortunates dwelling in the Sydney Rocks (formerly Gallows Hill).
Quote:Standing in many parts of Sydney, noting the bright sky above, the clear blue waters below … one is compelled to acknowledge how much Nature has done for us; how little we have done for ourselves….It was once my fate to enter [one of the many dwellings in the Rocks he visited] but I know not how to describe to others its filthy appearance—the wooden partitions covered by rotten, torn canvas, the uneven blackened floor, not free from human exuviae, the dark miserable rooms let out to different occupants.One small room was the only abode of a family, including several children….[Nether drainage nor sewerage; instead stagnant pools, runoff, and rejectamenta of a solid nature.]The rents of such a place are indeed filthy lucre….If Dr Aaron is really a city officer of health at all, why do ‘The Rocks’ find no mention in his reports?What are we to think of aldermen, who meet opposite the Supreme Court to talk, vote other people’s money away, and sometimes to quarrel, yet always neglect the social plague spots and cesspools of the city?Here we glimpse Jevons as incensed railer against the disastrous social effects of capitalism, comparable in passion to, though perhaps not as deep nor sustained as, the criticisms of Charles Dickens, Jack London of the Abyss or Orwell of Wigan Pier. Surely this side of the multi-faceted scientist William Stanley Jevons is astonishingly unexpected by socialists. For we acknowledge him to be, as Dave quite correctly points out, the father of modern marginalism.We may pause to consider. All of us support the system, by default, until we recognise how to change it.
At one time those who think that the exchange value of a product is determined by its "marginal utility" thought that utility could be measured in terms of some unit called perhaps a "util". They soon realised that this could not be done and now only argue that all that can be measured is whether or not one thing is more useful than something else:https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Principles_of_Economics/UtilityI'm not sure, though, how this helps them explain the different prices of different goods. I'd have thought it made it more difficult.
There is a related problem to do with the question of whether machines produce surplus value. We talk about the value of a product being determined in the long run by the amount of "socially necessary labour" it contains. This is not something that can be measured by a stopwatch so to speak, but constitutes a kind of "social average". This is why labour intensive businesses using outmoded technologies cannot be said to produce more value than capital intensive businesses with high levels of labour productivity. However, the value of a commodity depends on it being sold on the market. No value is produced to the extent that there is an overproduction of commodities in relation to what the market can absorb and, of course, this makes the question of measuring "value" all the more problematic because we cannot know in advance whether a commodity that has been produced will actually be sold. It is only in the process of exchange that value manifests itself so to speak. It is then that the value of goods, the SNLT embodied in them, will express itself indirectly through the prices such goods command – which prices will tend to vary, in the long run, in accordance with the quantity of SNLT embodied in them. In other words, the expression of value is mediated through money units – prices. As Marx put it: "Social labour-time exists in these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange…. Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’ ( A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy). Indeed, it is for this very reason that Michel De Vroey has suggested that the creation of value seems to be located "not in production but at the articulation of production and circulation" ("Value, Production and Exchange" M de Vroey, The Value Controversy, NLB, London, 1981, p.173) It is this kind of thinking that informs G A Cohen’s claim that the "relationship between the labour theory of value and the concept of exploitation is one of mutual irrelevance" (ibid, P202-223). Cohen bases this claim on the argument that past labour – the amount of time actually spent on producing a commodity – is not strictly relevant as a guide to what is currently socially necessary labour time which is what constitutes that commodity's value in Marxian terms. Since SNLT is itself a constantly shifting potentiality it cannot therefore be meaningfully be said to "embodied" in a commodity in the way that actual (past) labour may be said to be thus embodied (as in the case of the machine the worker is using to prpduce some product). As mentioned earlier, what is socially necessary labour only becomes apparent a posteriori through market competition and is finally determined by conditions subsequent to the actual production of commodities themselves. Thus, commodities that cannot be sold do not possess value. In effect, what that means is that workers in capitalism do not, and cannot logically, actually "produce" value as such and, hence, cannot be said to "produce" surplus value either. What they produce are the commodities that contain value – a subtle but all-important difference. It is because they, and not the capitalists, manifestly, produce what has value (rather than produce value as such) that the workers are exploited by the capitalists in the sense that the capitalists appropriate part of the value of what has been produced but without actually contributing to the production of what has been produced. This, according to Cohen, makes the exploitation of the proletarian, "more similar to the exploitation of the serf than traditional Marxism says" (ibid p.222) Its an interesting argument. Any thoughts?
What was absurd about Jevons's sun-spot theory of crises was not that crises (economic downturns) cannot be caused by some natural event (some obviously have been) but that a natural event explained the regular boom/slump cycle. Here's how Jevons set out his theory in his textbook Political Economy (1878):
Quote:Good vintage years on the continent of Europe, and droughts in India, recur every ten or eleven years, and it seems probable that commercial crises are connected with a periodic variation of weather, affecting all parts of the earth, and probably arising from increased waves of heat received from the sun at average intervals of ten years and a fraction. A greater supply of heat increases the harvests, makes capital more abundant and trade more successful, and thus helps to create the hopefulness out of which a bubble arises. A falling off in the sun's heat makes bad harvests and deranges many enterprises in different parts of the world. This is likely to break the bubble and bring on a commercial collapse.As a statistician he was able to present figures showing some correlation between sun-spots and commercial crises, but this could surely serve as a classic case of the dictum that "correlation does not mean causation".The other objection to the theory is that it tries to explain the regularly recurring economic downturns that are a feature of capitalism by some event outside the system rather than by something inherent in the system itself.
ALB wrote:The other objection to the theory is that it tries to explain the regularly recurring economic downturns that are a feature of capitalism by some event outside the system rather than by something inherent in the system itself.To be fair, though, you could argue that the sunspot theory could serve as a "triggering" event that impacted upon capitalism/s tendency towards disproportionate growth which underlies the capitalist trade cycle. So while on its own it cannot account for the trade cycle, it could be incorporated as part of a larger explanation. So, for example, if good weather caused by changes in solar radiation resulted in a bumper harvest causing prices to drop, this could have knock on consequences that exacerbate disproportionalities in the economy and so lead to crises. This is only in theory, mind you. I suppose it would depend on how serious an impact changes in agricultural prices had on the economy. Capitalism is capable of absorbing minor oscillations in prices without this resulting in crises – though, in the long run, the cumulative effect of these inter sectoral changes will assert itself in the form of the trade cycle. Specifically , in relation to sunspot theory, the impact would be mediated by others factors such as how much of an effect changes solar radiation actually had on agricultural output itself – the argument that a change in quantity leads to a change a quality which implies there is some kind of threshold the former needs to reach before effecting qualitative change, This in turn might depend on the kind of agricultural technology employed and whether it could use more of some kinds of inputs (e,g, articfical nitrogen fertilisers) to compensate for the decline of others. It would also depend, I guess, on how important the agricultural sector is in the economy, generally. In a part of the world where agriculture comprises the majorty of paid empkyment, changes in incoming solar radiation could, in theory, I imagine have significant knock on economic repsercusions One way to test the theory would be to see if there is significant temporal correlation between sun spot events and economic events like crises. Did Jevons ever do this or was it just speculation on his part that such a correlation actually existed?
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