Marx and Automation

[Anonymous]

   Networks are real and objective. Creative-power is real and objective. Just because you cannot quantify them, althought an element of creative-power is quantifiable, among the many unquantifiable elements, does not mean they do not exist and are not fundamentally influencing price, value and wage. In fact, these unquantifiable elements within the concept of creative-power are the driving force of price, value and wage, not scientifically quantifiable labor-time. Despite the fact that quantifiable labor-time is still around, it is no longer paramount. And anyone who works in any creative-field, post-industrial field, will agree, labor-time is a minor consideration when it comes to profitable creative results.  Sorry, to be the bearer of bad news, but that's a reality in post-industrial, post-modern capitalism.  And only when we adopt a broader concept of marxian labor-power, do many socio-economic phenomenons involved in value, price and wage-determinations, that defy scientific quantification, become understandable and filled with revolutionary possibilities.Michel Luc Bellemare  Ph.d.   

[Anonymous]

   Another quick comment, if you factor in creative-power, i.e., both unquantifiable and quantifiable labor-powers expended both in production and outside of production, in everyday life. My economic models introduced above, work and function adequately in explaining, that the rate of profit, and the falling rate of profit etc., can be circumvented, indefinately, via creative networking, i.e., creative unquantifiable economic engineering. And it is, that's why the 2007-09 economic crisis, did not collapse capitalism. A network of people/capitalist in high places came together and circumvented the collapse through creative networking, booking etc. etc. etc. What the 2007-09 crisis did is to show that the inner workings of capitalism are founded on networks, crony-networks etc… no some invisible hand or economic laws, these only hide the crony-networks pulling the strings of capital. Michel Luc Bellemare     

[Bijou Drains]

MBellemare wrote:

   Another quick comment, if you factor in creative-power, i.e., both unquantifiable and quantifiable labor-powers expended both in production and outside of production, in everyday life. My economic models introduced above, work and function adequately in explaining, that the rate of profit, and the falling rate of profit etc., can be circumvented, indefinately, via creative networking,Michel Luc Bellemare     

factoring in something means taking account of (something) when making a calculation, if this is unquantifiable, how can "creative power" be said to be factored in, in any meaningful way. You may as well say that you have been factoring in magic pixie dust and when you do that it explains the meaning of life, the world and everything.I have previously asked you to back up your view that capitalists can increase prices by small amounts when they wish without impact (If they could do this with impugnity, it begs the question, why don't they?). You have studiously chosen to ignore the question of the magic capitalist price rise impugnity. If we add this to the Pixie Dust of "creative Power", we can see that your "economic models" seem to have more in common with JK Rowling that Karl Marx!

[Anonymous]

Super funny, Mr. Kilgallon,(I answer your question further down but to perk your interest, that is why I don't use economic models. The Math can be manipulated to get the results you need. But also because economic models tend to reflect their own mathematical realities and not actual reality. One must accept the premises of an economic model, its numbers, its discussion points, in order for an economic model's simulations to work. That's why economists live in their own universes akin to JK Rowling.Maybe Marx also.)

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Now, how can being well-connected "NOT" have a significant effect of value, price and wage! CEOs pride themselves on being well-connected, yet, somehow, for some Marxists, this should not have any influence on their wage/salaries! This is an error to say the least. Also, good ideas, inventive ideas etc., have value, value that cannot be easily, or if at all, be translated into price. Its an educated guess, buttressed by the conceptual-perceptions of a network or more broadly speaking a population. To refer to Marx, "the relationship between price and value is an ideal one", meaning constructed and based in the mind, i.e., on conceptual-perception. This can be quantifiable, which Marx perfectly got right, but he missed the unquantifiable side of this statement, the side that opens-up to the out of whack economic conditions of post-modernity and post-industrialism.     Pixie dust, glitter, would be the universal equivalent, more precious than gold, if the majority of people believed, conceptually, it had significant value, if it was the pinnacle of value. People would actually begin filling bank vaults with bags and bags of pixie dust instead of gold. Beliefs, Religious background, family background, culture, education, ideology etc., all factor into what one is willing to buy, what one values as a use-value, and what price one is willing to pay! These are unquantifiables components, they are creative-powers in the sense that these factors are very slippery,  it comes down to an educated guess. It is an arbitrary estimation which must be tested over and over via trial and error. Unquantifiables, they engage our creative-powers to estimate and as creative-power themselves they tend to change and sometimes radically change over time and space. I believe that is why in the last 30 years their has been a huge jump in statistically analysis, surveys, surveillance of the population, information gathering etc., because when it is discovered that creative-power is the fount of value, both, like Marx states, as quantifiable labor-power, and unlike Marx, as unquantifiable labor-power, then the unquantiable side of creative-power opens up to a vast terrain of revolutionary and scary possibilities capable of vast economic dissonance and/or synergies. Populations must be watched and calibrated, every second, every minute, every day etc., because they are creative-entities, creative-beings capable of slipping out of capitalist quantifiable frameworks, i.e., capitalist processes, capitalist wage-determinations, capitalist price-determinations and capitalist value-determinations, both conceptually and materially.  

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      Let me answer your other question, why doesn't a network of capitalists raise prices to outlandish new highs. Well, sports does it all the time. Stadiums have raised the price of entry in North America with huge mark-ups. Sport stars demand obscene salaries, CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution. You cannot measure network-control yet network-control can have a substantial influence of value, price and wage-determinations. Network-control is a type of unquantifiable generator of value, it enacts its creative-power in various ways upon the minds of the population, upon conceptual-perception. In fact, convincing the segments of the population that paying outlandish prices, is part of having a good sport team, it is about belonging, it is about pride in one's city, in one's nation etc., its about irrationality. So to quote NIKE "JUST DO IT". And so the working population dishes out, dishes out when they cannot even put gas in their own cars and food on their own tables.       Another example where capitalists raised prices, consciously, to outlandish highs is the EPI-PEN crisis in North America. Because you cannot measure certain specific unquantifiable creative-powers, such as network-control, it is a matter of trial and error. Such as the EPI-PEN crisis, where raising prices by like 700%, resulted in lawsuits, resulted in government investigation, unwanted media attention etc. The network, i.e., the enterprising-network, controling the patent on EPI-PENs by raising prices to this outlandish level ended-up in the end that they could not back-up there value/price-determination. They did not have the network-control needed to sustain such a value/price augmentation. They could not make the population go along with the value/price-hike. Arbitrary/Artificial values, prices and wages, eventually run-up against social antagonisms, such as sick patiences who no longer can afford essential medicines etc. Or a strong union, capable of taking over a factory when CEOs pay themselves bonuses and outlandish salary raises, even when the company loses money, which happened in Canada with BOMBARDIER International.     There are limits, but the job of the capitalists is to circumvent all things that work against the maximization of profit. Capitalists expend creative-power as well, but in the name of capitalist growth. So they do everything in their power to prevent the working population from ascending financially and politically etc. That's the capitalist job. They will prevent knowledge from being shared, they will prevent individuals from ascending any hierarchy, if they do not hold the right ideology and/or frame of mind, or belong to the right networks, despite this individual having the right stuff for advancement etc.     Capitalism is, and Marx was right, extremely wasteful of intelligent people, and people in general. It kicks them aside like hard dog-shit on the sidewalk.    Michel Luc Bellemare         

[Anonymous]

 The economic models, i introduced above, work just as well as Marx's. Where the creative-power may come in is in the numbers, they are from an imagined economic scenario, a hypothesis, whereupon certain forces exert an influence.  Marx utilized his creative-power when he showed us the falling rate of profit. His numbers where based in his imagination upon an imagined economic scenario whereupon labor-power was strictly quantifiable measurements of clock-time. A relation to JK Rowling?

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When I use the word factor, I could have use the word component, as unquatifiable forces are components which influence value, price and wage, in certain time-periods and in certain spaces where these become artificial/arbitrary constructions of the whims of capitalists and/or enterprising-networks. 

[Anonymous]

MBellemare wrote:

. . .      Another example where capitalists raised prices, consciously, to outlandish highs is the EPI-PEN crisis in North America. Because you cannot measure certain specific unquantifiable creative-powers, such as network-control, it is a matter of trial and error. Such as the EPI-PEN crisis, where raising prices by like 700%, resulted in lawsuits, resulted in government investigation, unwanted media attention etc. The network, i.e., the enterprising-network, controling the patent on EPI-PENs by raising prices to this outlandish level ended-up in the end that they could not back-up there value/price-determination. They did not have the network-control needed to sustain such a value/price augmentation. They could not make the population go along with the value/price-hike. Arbitrary/Artificial values, prices and wages, eventually run-up against social antagonisms, such as sick patiences who no longer can afford essential medicines etc. Or a strong union, capable of taking over a factory when CEOs pay themselves bonuses and outlandish salary raises, even when the company loses money, which happened in Canada with BOMBARDIER International.     There are limits, but the job of the capitalists is to circumvent all things that work against the maximization of profit. Capitalists expend creative-power as well, but in the name of capitalist growth. So they do everything in their power to prevent the working population from ascending financially and politically etc. That's the capitalist job. They will prevent knowledge from being shared, they will prevent individuals from ascending any hierarchy, if they do not hold the right ideology and/or frame of mind, or belong to the right networks, despite this individual having the right stuff for advancement etc.. . . Michel Luc Bellemare 

@michel luc bellemare, Would a capitalist work to circumvent all things that work against maximizing profit if maximizing profit resulted in charging rich people more?  If you can pit the retailers interest in profit making against the owner class interest in holding on to money they have already, then things change.  Here's an example of implementing this I'm working on and hope to make real someday. It's not a solicitation or anything like that, it's just a strategy for how to build an economic rope that a capitalist will sell you and we can use to hang the capitalist system with. . . hOurs Equals Price ProjecthOEP.coin is a project to design and test a sliding scale price tag that is convenient to use and ubiquitous.

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The price tag says a book cost “2 hOEP.coin”, so that means 2 hours of your time equals the price you pay.  If you think that’s a fair price, you click the buy button and enter your credit card info.  If you’re a first time user, check the box to allow the IRS, bank, or other verifier to calculate and confirm an hour of your time is worth/cost $25/hr.  Charges on your credit card read “2hrs@$25/hr”.  

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A sliding scale price tag charges more to rich people than to poor people.  The more it’s used, the more it will reduce financial inequality. To make the most profit the seller will choose a hOEP.coin price that is equally costly to everyone. Let’s consider a hypothetical seller Epipeen, that has a monopoly patent on a medical device they sell for a regular price now of only $500.  If they switch to selling at a 10 hOEP.coin price.Poor buyer gets a 10 hOEP price tag10hrs@$10/hr = $100 ($400 decrease to inequality)Medium income buyer gets a 10 hOEP price tag10hrs@$50/hr = $500 (no change to inequality)Rich buyer gets a 10 hOEP price tag 10hrs@$200/hr = $2,000 ($1,500 decrease to inequality) 

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If Epipeen sells in hours equals price coin then sales revenue jumps from $1,000 to $2,600. With regular dollar pricing Epipeen sold only 2@$500 because the low income customer couldn’t afford to buy. With a “10 hOEP.coin” price they sold all three: 1@$100, 1@$500, and 1@$2,000. ( 260% increase in profits.three sales decrease inequality by $1900 )

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Meet Alberto. He’s very poor and he needs an Epipeen.  1 hOEP.coin is only $1 for him because he’s unemployed except for odd jobs so retailers don’t much want his hOEP.  For very low income buyers, greedy Epipeen set a floor price of $25+10hOEP.coin.  The marginal cost to Epipeen of producing one additional unit is $25. Epipeen still won’t lose money selling with hOEP.coin to him at production cost in dollars and can now make a small $10 profit from hOEP.coin off of even the poorest patients.  ($10 profit for Epipeen, $465 decrease to inequality)

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[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

      Let me answer your other question, why doesn't a network of capitalists raise prices to outlandish new highs. Well, sports does it all the time. Stadiums have raised the price of entry in North America with huge mark-ups. Sport stars demand obscene salaries, CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution. You cannot measure network-control yet network-control can have a substantial influence of value, price and wage-determinations. Network-control is a type of unquantifiable generator of value, it enacts its creative-power in various ways upon the minds of the population, upon conceptual-perception. In fact, convincing the segments of the population that paying outlandish prices, is part of having a good sport team, it is about belonging, it is about pride in one's city, in one's nation etc., its about irrationality. So to quote NIKE "JUST DO IT". And so the working population dishes out, dishes out when they cannot even put gas in their own cars and food on their own tables.      

 This statement by Michel gives the game away and reveals what I think is the fundamental flaw in his basic argument. In fact reading through his posts, reminded me of Naomi Klein's book  "No Logo".  If anyone here hasnt yet read it,  I would recommend they do – it is quite a compelling read and stuffed with juicy tidbits of information. Klein wrote of the power of branding products – "you are selling a lifestye not a pair of Nike shoes" – which transformed the world of advertising from roughtly the 1980s onwards and led to a huge increase in global expenditure on advertising (which in 2016  reached a total of $579 billions).  The rise of the logo and of branding which eased out the old fashioned approach to advertising which focusssed on the merits of the products themselves rather than their invented assciations with a way of life or some hip cool attitude, seems to me to be a particuarly striking example of Michel's "creative power" employed by his "networks of capitalists".  There is no doubt that, on the back of branding, some businesses have made astronomical fortunes – by hiking up prices and garnering huge profits.  To that extent Michel has a point .  But even so, he is failing to see the wood for the trees.  He is failing to see that what we are talking about is a zero sum game.  Some businesses can indeed dramatically increase their market share but the necessary corrollary of this is that the market share of others must shrink You cant have more than 100% of the market and you cannot conjure market demand out of nothing.  Michel more or less concedes this point.  He talks of the abilty of the sports industry to hike up prices to outlandish highs and to convince working people to go along with this "when they cannot even put gas in their own cars and food on their own tables".  Exactly.  They have bought into the mythology of the logo at the cost of having to divert more of their hard earned cash from other, some would say rather more important or useful, expenditures. Its the same in the world of business.  Klein talked of the law of diminishing returns in branding products. The more branding there is out there (for which read Michel's "creative power"), the more aggresively do business need to push their brands to make them stand out in an overcrowded market.  In other words they have to run faster and faster in order to stand still.  The winners in this game can only win at the expense of the losers and this is the basic problem with Michel's whole argument.  He is only looking at half the picture; the winning half.  More fundamentally, he is using value in the subjective of the term, not in terms of socially necessary labour time which is the Marxian sense of the term.  This is why he talks of creative power adding value  to the product in the sense of pushing up its price.  From a Marxian standpoint this makes no sense.  Value is not made in circulation, at the point of sale (it is only "realised" there).  It is made at the point of production. From a Marxian standpoint, the sum total of values must equal the sum total of prices. Consequently, if the price of some goods is above their value the price of other goods must fall below their value.  Logically there cannot be any other way. I am not decrying Michel's use of the term value in this way.  You can define "value" or for that matter  "class" in any which way you want but the question is whether the definition is fit for purpose. The purpose for which Michel employs his notion of value is to acount for the ability of some capitalist businesses to hike up their prices by employing smoke and mirrors to enhance the perceived value of their products in an aggresively competive market.  That's OK as far as it goes but it is not the purpose for which Marxists employ the term value.

[Bijou Drains]

MBellemare wrote:

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      Let me answer your other question, why doesn't a network of capitalists raise prices to outlandish new highs. Well, sports does it all the time. Stadiums have raised the price of entry in North America with huge mark-ups. Sport stars demand obscene salaries, CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution.Michel Luc Bellemare         

Ok let's test out this scenario. My beloved football team decide that for me to go and watch my back and white herooes I will have to pay an Additional £20. As a loyal fan I go along to the match as per usual. Before the match I meet up, as usual with the lads in my hostelry of choice, however instead of my usual modest consumption of 10 pint Bottles of Newcastle Brown, I only have enough money to consume a pityful 8 pint bottles. Similarly, on my walk up to St James' Park I stop off at the bakers. The baker happily bags up my usual order of five large pork pies, but to his dismay I shake my head and indicate I'm only going to purchase 3 of his delightful comestibles.In the aftermath the brewer and the baker get together. "Oh my god, the fat bastard has cut down on his consumption, what are we to do!" they cry amidst much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Well they decide there are only two options, we can either reduce production, to meet the new requirements, or we can reduce the prices to ensure the glutton continues to consume our wares and doesn't go off in search of other cheaper purveyory of beer and pork pies. Either way, they decide, it will mean a cut in profits.And when the final scores come in, I have spent the same amount of money, The football club have made greater profits and the baker and the brewer have made less. Sadly, no pixie dust, just simple straight forward maths, that even I, with 8 pints, 3 pork pies and the two kebabs I purchaed to celebrate another home victory, gurgling away in my stomach, can work out!

[alanjjohnstone]

I'm wondering just how much importance there is in actual attendance to stadiums these days. Isn't much of the club's revenue and thus ability to pay star-players (60% of a clubs revenue), the broadcasting rights and sponsorship, both dependent upon intellectual ownership rights to ensure exclusivity? Michel's controlling cartel/network?My recent personal experience was searching for a strip for a present and being asked to fork out 55 quid. Sky high price, well above the labour and production costs and most likely based on the royalties demanded ( I resorted to the charity/thrift shops,btw)And i recall reading that for Scottish clubs, their main revenue to stay in existence is from passing players on through the transfer system…the wage-slave market, The social necessary labour time in coaching and training and nurturing talent but scoring big time when they discover a genuine skilled player but again the market is controlled by club contracts and not so much with the mobility of labour.But i think i digress from the topic although i think i have shown the theme is a bit more complicated these days than simply paying someone to turn up at 3 PM on a Saturday for 90 minutes to chase a ball around a field and folk paying for a ticket to watch while consuming a cup of bovril and a mutton pie.

[Anonymous]

   Well, fellas, I am glad that Robbo does acknowledge, some truth to my perspective. And, like Robbo, I think Klein's book "NO LOGO" is a gem, but I also suggest reading the "Shock Doctrine",another gem, where you have the application of the theory of conceptual-commodity-value-management to whole nations in the southern cone and other war-zones. Where you have the use of the military to back-up outlandish artificial/arbitrary price/value-determinations etc., where a vast number of people are thrown into poverty and out of the middle class so as to maximize proft for a select few.  Subsequently, you have a slew of unquantifiable forces influencing price and value. This is not subjective, it is objective and unquantifiable. Shooting people in the streets because they go against your government's arbitrary price-hikes, which will throw them into absolute poverty, are "unquantifiable" objective realities. This is not subjective. From this perspective, every demonstrator that dies at the Junta`s hand, means a step towards the normalization of outlandish arbitrary prices, values and wages. No one can say that socially necessary labor-time constructs these values, prices and wages, they are artificially fabricated with the barrel of the gun and, that is “unquantifiable“. Nietzsche always stated that the creative drive, i.e., creative-power, could be both constructive and DESTRUCTIVE.  In these instances, socially necessary labor-time comes after the fact, to legitimate and validate the artificial fabrication of arbitrary values, prices and wages, as somehow the product of autonomous laws, separate from the carnage. What did the neoliberal, chicago school say during this period, the economic policies, being implemented in the southern cone, have nothing to do with the carnage, “We are sadden by the devastation, but we are just economists, concerned solely with economic policy“. Klein`s book goes to great lengths to demonstrate that state-violence and economic policy are mutually constituted. And you cannot put an quantifiable value and price on state-violence, these are “unquantifiable“ values and forces, generated by creative-power`s destructive drive to have its own way, regardless.             I know Marx stated that the sum of prices and the sum of values must equate, but he also stated that this was an ideal connection, more or less, equated in the mind, in conceptual-perception. This opens his theory up to the Nietzschean argument that everything is a matter of perspective, truth is constructed by and in conceptual-perception.   

[Dave B]

i  The Marxist model was supposed to apply to basic commodities like the stuff you can buy in Wallmart and not really applicable to strange stuff like football teams, pop stars and works of art etc. However a football match as entertainment is just valid as a commodity as anything else and like opera, play or J K Rowling book. Actually as regards a commodity selling at its value etc or according to the amount of labour time embodied in etc. It depends on the full formal definition of the amount of labour time required to reproduce it. Economically reproducing good football players isn’t a straightforward process and falls outside the scope of the analysis. The possibility of spending money prospecting for them in the old talent scout system that used to exist 40 years or so ago I suppose. The other kind of creative work generally has an impact on reducing the amount of labour time required to produce a use value and that obviously has an impact on price and it is possible to take patents and liciencing on that etc to make it illegal to freely reproduce something using that technology blah blah. Eg a good computer programme and software etc. Although investment in new labour saving technology and even new patentable products is supposed to be recouped by being able to sell for a period of time the commodity above its labour time value. It is a hit and miss affair and gamble and you can get creamed as well as make a fortune; both cases appearing to go against the Marxist theory of value. 

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 Karl covered and even predicted the CEO type scenario when he did the profit of enterprise thing, when CEO’s were in their infancy in the 19thcentury. He even did the CEO stock buy back scam thing which otherwise is a more modern phenomenon eg the Enron thing. 

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 The scientific method of the model is supposed to create the simplest ‘ideal’ situation as regards the subject matter. To create a theory. Then apply or test the theory against more ‘real’ situations to see what happens and what can be learned from it etc. And see if it still stands up. Newtons or Galileo theory of gravity theoretically predicts that a hammer should fall to the ground at the same ‘speed’ as a hammer. Obviously it doesn’t on earth. It did on the moon however and the theory worked very well for the planets or heavenly bodies etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4_rceVPVSY  The reason was that ideally it only works in an absolute vacuum. However applying the Newtonian scientific model led to and understanding of air resistance and Reynolds numbers and stuff like that that keeps planes in the air. The gas laws which became the Rosseta stone for much of pure science are the same. We have been fairly lucky on planet earth the way things are, if another set of bods were on a planet with three times the atmospheric pressure and half the gravity it could have set them back hundreds of years. I did the following quickly yesterday but couldn’t be arsed posting it.  I think creative advertising and marketing etc can create added supernatural and magical use values to a product.  But it does come at a labour time cost that is included in ‘price’ the product. Thus both calvin klien and nike underpants are commodities that are both produced and are sold in economic competition with each other. Thus what you are mostly paying for as a use-value and commodity is some kind of feel good escapist dream or fantasy.  Which for many, obviously, is more important than the pure functionality or use value of the underwear itself. And thus you purchase one versus the other.   I suppose one could be a bit high brow at criticising that kind of thing. But maybe there isn’t much difference between paying for a virtual reality computer game and wearing Nike underpants and fantasying about being Tiger Woods or whatever, I guess a lot of it involves buying fictitious social status, being concerned about what other people think about is perfectly normal for a social animal and I guess the advertising business is tapping into that. But creating psychologically dysfunctional and fictitious narcissism isn’t my idea of creativity.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_van_Meegeren#The_forgeries

[robbo203]

MBellemare wrote:

   Well, fellas, I am glad that Robbo does acknowledge, some truth to my perspective. And, like Robbo, I think Klein's book "NO LOGO" is a gem, 

Michel, yes there is some truth in what you say but this applies at the micro-level of analysis NOT the macro-level and for the reason I stated – that we are talking about zero sum game as far as price rises are concerned.     Individual business can indeed, by means of branding and the like – what you call the application of “creative power” – leverage huge price rises for their products and thus garner huge profit as a result.  There is nothing particularly “post-modern” about this either though you seem to think this is some radically new departure.  Thorstein Veblen at the end of the 19th century was writing about this sort of stuff  – about how the “Leisure Class” are willing to pay over the odds for certain status goods (dubbed Veblen goods) to differentiate themselves from the riff raff who couldnt afford these goods.  It’s called conspicuous consumption and these so called Veblen Goods have the peculiar attribute of inverting the normal economic logic of capitalism whereby prices rises are supposed to discourage, rather than stimulate, purchases.  But as I say, one business’ increase in market share is another business’ loss in market share.  Your whole analysis suffers from the shortcoming of focussing only on the winners in this game of one upmanship, rather than the losers.  In other words you are not seeing the wood for the trees.    If some business is able to raise its prices to some absurd level then self-evidently the people having to pay these astronomical prices will have less money to splash out on other commodities.  This is the opportunity cost of their decisions which you are overlooking.  Less money to buy these other commodities mean the demand for them will fall and hence also their relative prices (discounting inflation)  You mention in a previous post that  “CEOs command obscene bonuses and salaries. To support such salary-hikes requires fundamental network-control over the nodes of production, consumption and distribution. You cannot measure network-control yet network-control can have a substantial influence of value, price and wage-determination.  Network-control is a type of unquantifiable generator of value, it enacts its creative-power in various ways upon the minds of the population, upon conceptual-perception” I would dispute this.  “Network control” or “creative power” does not in itself generate value, at least not in the Marxian sense of value as “socially necessary labour time”.  What it does is aid the redistribution of wealth in favour of those who use and manipulate that creative power for their own ends and at the expense of others.   Advertising itself, for example is totally unproductive of value in the Marxian sense; it adds no value in that sense though certainly it adds value in the subjective sense and it is that that encourages the consumer to buy the product in question by “talking it up”, by investing in it a certain emotional appeal.  As I noted earlier, Klein herself pointed out that advertising itself is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The more advertising there is out there, the more aggressively do business need to push their own brands to make them stand out in an already overcrowded market of brands– meaning they have to run faster and faster simply in order to stand still or defend the share of the market they have cornered  Finally you refer to the obscene bonuses and salaries that CEOs – or, at least, some CEOs – command in particular, in companies such as those listed in the Dow-Jones index (to use an American example) which comes to an average compensation package of about 20 million dollars per year per CEO.  Now, to me, this unequivocally puts these individuals in the ranks of the capitalist class, albeit the lower rungs of that class, meaning that their income is substantially unearned income, the fruits of a process of working class exploitation.  These salaried exploiters occupy a position analogous to that of the Soviet capitalist class, the Red Bourgeoisie, who extracted their share of the surplus value for personal consumption in the form of bloated or pseudo salaries.  The point is that if you look at all these hugely successful corporations with their handsomely paid CEOs, very often at the base of this pyramid of wealth generation are the kind of grim sweatshop factories Klein talks about which you are likely to find in places like Vietnam or the Philippines where work is subcontracted out and where the actual workers who produce all this wealth are paid an absolute pittance.   I don’t think you really bring out this vital connection between extreme wealth and extreme poverty in your analysis.  Free floating “creative power” such as is evidenced in the branding of products like Nike shoes is said to “add value” to the product as reflected in its increase price but it is almost as if the value, or socially necessary labour time, of those who actually produced the product in the first place is forgotten or barely figures in this subjective calculus of “value”…. 

[Anonymous]

He is pretending that he is analysing Marx, in reality he is revising Marx, I think that he is worst than Bernestein and Lenin, and he wants to remove  the contribution that the working class makes in the capitalist economy.As someone wrote in this thread Marx concept of commodity does not apply to sportsmen, or hollywood stars, he applied it  to the type of commodity sold at the retailers center produced at the point of production. Exploitation takes places at the point of productionCrisis is not something created by magic, crisis is part of the capitalist economical system and it is a product of super-production. In reality he soounds like any other bourgoise economists defending the capitalist system.He is giving more to the high level CEO and rich peoples than to the working peoples. I do not see any new contributions made on his so caled economical model, they are just old capitalists application to the capitalist economy.Those high paid CEO the obtain their high salary from the surplus value, from stocks and profits sharing, therefore, they fit in the definition of being members of the capitalist class. I have not seen in any of his analysis giving any credit to the working class.Under all his rethoric what he is trying to say is the old capitalist jargon that profits is made by the hard labor of the capitalist class. This excercise is just a wasting of time, and to scape from the real purposes of this forum.

[Anonymous]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

 

Quote:

I align more with anarchism, then marxism.

Michel, my comrades on the forum have suffered from my repetitive quotations so i hope they forebear with it, but perhaps this observation may well be new to you.It is a quote from a worker, a writer and a thinker who found favour with Marx and Engels, no small feat in itself – Joseph Dietzgen

Quote:

"The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them- for it is dialectic." June 9, 1886"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference…..While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other…. The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time."- April 20, 1886

Marx was one of the theoritician of Anarchism, and there are many kind of Anarchists, the so called Anarco-capitalists they call themselves Anarchists, and there are many Anarchists which recognize the contributions made by Marx to socialism and Anarchism

[Anonymous]

Marcos wrote:

alanjjohnstone wrote:

 

Quote:

I align more with anarchism, then marxism.

Michel, my comrades on the forum have suffered from my repetitive quotations so i hope they forebear with it, but perhaps this observation may well be new to you.It is a quote from a worker, a writer and a thinker who found favour with Marx and Engels, no small feat in itself – Joseph Dietzgen

Quote:

"The terms anarchist, socialist, communist should be so "mixed" together, that no muddlehead could tell which is which. Language serves not only the purpose of distinguishing things but also of uniting them- for it is dialectic." June 9, 1886"For my part, I lay little stress on the distinction, whether a man is an anarchist or a socialist, because it seems to me that too much weight is attributed to this difference…..While the anarchists may have mad and brainless individuals in their ranks, the socialists have an abundance of cowards. For this reason I care as much for one as the other…. The majority in both camps are still in great need of education, and this will bring about a reconciliation in time."- April 20, 1886

Marx was one of the theoritician of Anarchism, and there are many kind of Anarchists, the so called Anarco-capitalists they call themselves Anarchists, and there are many Anarchists which recognize the contributions made by Marx to socialism and Anarchism

I do not think that he is an Ararchist

[Author]

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