robbo203
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robbo203Participant
“The whole mess was created by Engels, Marx never considered that commodity was produced in a pre capitalist society. Marx clearly indicated that the law of value is only applicable to a capitalist society”
That may be true of the law of value – in fact, what you say is I think correct – but does that necessarily mean commodities could not have existed prior to capitalism? I don’t think so
Commodities in the sense of articles bought and sold on the market obviously predated capitalism and possibly by thousands of years. What distinguishes capitalism from precapitalist societies is the generalization of commodity production as the opening line of Das Capital notes. In particular, it is the generalized transformation of labor-power into a commodity that makes capitalism, capitalism.
When you think about it, the law of value presupposes generalized wage labor insofar as we are talking of value being constituted out of “socially necessary labor time”. That implies commensurability (and a universal metric in the form of money) across the board for different kinds of labor in order to arrive at some notional idea of the average amount of time it takes to produce a given commodity.
If this is correct then you could not really talk about the law of value operating in a society that consisted, let us say, of half-slave labor and the other half-wage labor. Presumably, the vast bulk of labor would have to take the form of wage labor for the law of value to become operable…
robbo203ParticipantQuite an interesting article on the situation in China
robbo203Participant“Dutch Party Asks Zelensky to Account for $850M in Personal Wealth | 6 May 2022 | Last year, a Pandora Papers leak revealed that Mr Zelensky, who campaigned on promises to “break the system” of oligarchic control and corruption in Ukraine (ER: to our knowledge, the very opposite has happened), set up a spider web of offshore companies in 2012. Zelensky’s office justified the move by saying they were a form of “protection” against former President Viktor Yanukovych. A Dutch political party has taken an interest in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s personal fin-nces. “Zelensky has a fortune: various estimates put his wealth at around 850 million. He amassed most of it after taking office as president. Where does the m-ney come from? And more importantly, where is it going?” the Forum for Democracy asked in posts on its Twitter and Telegram accounts on Monday.”
robbo203ParticipantLula in the link below suggests Zelensky and Putin are equally to blame for the war. Of course, wars don’t originate out of the character defects of so-called “Great Men” but this does mark a sort of change from the relentless (and frankly sickening) adoration of Zelensky by parts of the Western media. Both Zelensky and Putin head up corrupt, authoritarian oligarchies with little to choose between them when it comes to their conspicuous lack of democratic credentials
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/04/brazil-lula-zelenskiy-blame-war
- This reply was modified 2 years, 6 months ago by robbo203.
robbo203Participantoops sorry about that – my bad. Here’s the link
robbo203ParticipantPeterFrank
Yes, I have read some of his stuff. I have mixed views on him. His empirical work in relation to the LTV is useful but he is an advocate of labour time accounting and central planning, both of which are highly questionable. In his book “Towards a New Socialism” he seems to imagine that the state-capitalist Soviet Union was essentially “socialist” but marred by the fact that it lacked a democratic form of governance
robbo203ParticipantPrakash
As you say, the prices of commodities don’t equate with their labour values and it is only in the long run that you find a tendency for these things to equilibrate. This is brought about by the self-correcting nature of market competition itself. Higher than usual prices attract businesses (existing ones and new entrants) to step up output lured by the prospect of higher profits. As supply increases so does this begin to affect a commodity’s price. At some point, supply may come to exceed market demand and the price begins to fall
Marx fully acknowledged the influence of supply and demand on price in the short term but in the long run, he noted, these two things cancel each other out. What we then need to explain is the long-run differences in price and it seems to me that only the LTV enables us to do that
As an aside you mention that utility means use-value. Pedantically speaking I don’t think these terms have quite the same meaning though they are obviously linked. Utility is quantitative – or should I say pseudo-quantitative – attempt to gauge the strength or intensity of one’s desire for a particular commodity based on its perceived use-value. The early Marginalists like William Stanley Jevons even went so far as to attempt to come up with some unit of measurement by which utility could be quantified = “utils”
Thus in neoclassical economics everything is reduced to utility which reflects the market’s need for commensurability between commodities in order to effect a market exchange based on equivalence. The problem is that use values in themselves are incommensurable. Utility is an attempt to render them commensurable
- This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by robbo203.
robbo203ParticipantAdam Smith invoked the famous water-diamond paradox in this way:
“The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water: but it will purchase scarce anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any use-value; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it” (Adam Smith, 1776, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter IV, “Of the Origin and Use of Money”)
He seemed to be suggesting that it was the exchangeability of diamonds that at least in part (he was also an advocate of the labour theory of value) contributed to its high price. This might be connected with the explanation as to why “status goods” or “Veblen goods” (named after the social critic Thorstein Veblen) are so expensive, It is to price other people out of the market who cannot afford to buy these goods and so becomes a means of asserting the high status of those who can afford these things
Conventional mainstream economists will of course argue that the reason why diamonds cost so much is that their marginal utility is extremely high compared to water. Normally the marginal utility of a good is supposed to diminish with every additional unit of the good in question being consumed. The rarity of natural diamonds prevents this from happening. Hence the high price of diamonds is determined by their high marginal utility. That however does not in itself explain why the demand for diamonds is so high
Normally, if demand exceeds supply the competitive nature of capitalism means that output will be stepped up with existing businesses and new entrants being attracted by the high prices and profits (although that is not so easy with natural as opposed to artificial diamonds). There is thus a tendency for supply and demand to equilibrate in the long run. That being the case, supply and demand cannot be invoked as an explanation for the differences in prices over the long run since these things cancel each other out. Only differences in production costs (which boils down to labour costs) can adequately explain this
This is why the labour theory of value is the only one that really holds water
- This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by robbo203.
robbo203ParticipantNot to condone in any way the atrocities the Russian military has committed but the relentless tide of hysterical pro-Ukrainian propaganda in my newsfeed has surely plumbed new depths of hypocrisy and double talk. Here’s the latest: “Russian army ‘writing itself into world history as most barbaric and inhumane'”
I mean, come on. I would have thought the scale of what the American military did in Iraq surpasses what is happening in Ukraine by a wide margin. And what about the bombardment by Ukrainian forces of civilian targets in Donbas since 2014? What is the figure? 8000 dead or something like that? But barely a word from our morally challenged western media
- This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by robbo203.
robbo203ParticipantYes I agree with Alan – it is worth a try contacting Brand to entice him into a response, We have nothing to lose
Incidentally what happened about contacting that free-market libertarian in America who has criticised the SPGB?
robbo203ParticipantIs he contactable? I am wondering what are the prospects of holding some sort of discussion meeting with the guy
robbo203Participant“Here’s another way to be selfish. To want socialism.”
Hhhhmm, Yes and No
I think it is a mixture of BOTH egoistic and altruistic values that is called for. Otherwise, we fall into the mindset of bourgeois individualism. Class solidarity requires a measure of altruistic feeling towards our fellow workers
- This reply was modified 2 years, 7 months ago by robbo203.
robbo203ParticipantIt gives a whole new meaning to the expression, “anti-capitalist struggle”
robbo203Participantrobbo203Participant“Took only two minutes for me to be suspended from Facebook after posting this link.
Out of sight, out of mind.”I am just gobsmacked. What reason did FB give? It’s absolutely ludicrous. New Scientist is a fairly reputable mainstream scientific journal is it not?
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