[twc]

I understand, Victor, that you are a parishioner of the Russian Orthodox Church in Lithuania, the land of your peasant ancestors, and that you were raised by single mother, you were educated in central Russia, and were sometime gaoled as a dissident for disseminating anti-Soviet literature, and that now you run a translation service in Lithuania.I dimly comprehend your suffering under the Soviet Union, and there is no mistaking your bitter hatred of it and its supposed “socialism”.  But to its supposed “socialism” anon.So, you have come to us to reveal a fiery apocalypse, that would ensue from implementing the so-called Marxian “tenets of socialism, namely, equality, and the elimination of private property, the church, and the family ” which can only engender “the extinction of all mankind, its death”.Why so?  Because Marxian socialists forget human nature.  They ignore evil.  They deny the obvious truth of traditional religions:  that humans are “good and bad, decent and indecent”.Equality is not a socialist notion“Equality” is a capitalist notion, and it enters the world fully formed as such.“Equality” is the rallying war cry of the rising capitalist class—the class of manufacturers, professionals and traders—in their battle for social supremacy against their class enemy, the feudal nobility—the socially privileged monarchs and aristocrats who control the vast landed estates.The general notion of “Equality” enters general human consciousness in some of mankind’s most memorable formal declarations:“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal” [Declaration of Independence , 4 July 1776] Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin in the American Revolution against King George III of Great Britain.“All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and of their talents." [Declaration of the Rights of Man August 1789] Lafayette, Mirabeau and Jefferson in the French Revolution proclaiming an end to feudalism and abolition of the monarchy.“LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.  The same words are inscribed on flags which bear the three colours (tricolour) of the nation.” [On the National Guard, 5 December 1790] Maximilien Robespierre.These official proclamations of “equality” are unmistakably bourgeois.  They are shameless attacks on the despised social hierarchies of feudalism.The equalisation of labour is not a socialist operationIn your quotation on the equalisation of labour, Marx is simply saying that the concept of value remains a mystery that can’t be solved theoretically before capitalism solves it practically by implementing it unconsciously behind the backs, so to speak, of the actors in the capitalist market,The mystification arises because the concrete forms of commodities—e.g., table, cloth, coat—are the products of different concrete forms of labour—carpentry, spinning, weaving.  All concrete things are concretely incommensurable, unless you can find something non-concrete that is common to them all.Capitalist society in practice manages to compare them on the market.  Only then can secret of the common commensurability of concrete incommensurables be discerned, and it turns out to be their common “social substance" abstract (not concrete) labour whose equalisation the everyday market establishes as a matter of common practice.That is the only equalisation Marx is talking about here.Consequently your forced attempt to turn Marx’s specific analysis of abstract labour into an axiomatic theory of socialist equality is utterly misplaced.All I can say in your defence is that such a total misapprehension of what Marx is actually doing is a sad example of the deleterious effects that Soviet obfuscation still has on its citizens.Primitive accumulation of capitalI am well aware that it is futile for me to point out to you that the Russian Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, like the English one of the 1640s, the American of the 1760s…, the French of the 1790s…As such, your grandparent’s and your mother’s generations had to endure the painful birth of a capitalist nation—not socialism—as it emerged out of the womb of old feudal society.Old feudal society couldn’t deliver to the nascent capitalist society a mass of unpropertied workers that were seeking employment.  That is a huge social problem because unpropertied workers seeking employment are the pre-condition of capitalist production to take place.Instead, old feudal society offers the nascent capitalist society a mass of propertied peasants, which are the foundation of the old (feudal) mode of production.Capitalism, if it is to succeed on the ashes of old feudalism, has no choice but to dispossess the feudal peasants of their property—to rob them of their livelihood—and to turn them into unpropertied workers readymade for capitalist employment.Never forget that capitalism is necessarily based on the forced dispossession and ruination of the peasant in order to create the propertyless worker.Marx thoroughly studied this terrible process of “primitive accumulation of capital”, and this investigation concludes Capital Vol 1.  It is the conclusion of Volume 1 because the “primitive accumulation of capital” is essential to comprehending in theory how the whole process of capitalist production gets going in practice—out of the womb of its predecessor mode of production.Lenin had read Marx on the “primitive accumulation of capital”, and yet it was Lenin’s denial that determined the fate of the Russian Revolution, and that forced himself to play the ghastly midwife to the gruesome birth of capitalist Russia.To see what we understand by socialism, read our Object and Declaration of Principles.

[twc]

Please don’t derail this thread.It is devoted to a critique of something highly specific — even though it has general ramifications — Michel Luc Bellamare’s Principles of Anarcho-Historical-Relativism.He requested people do him the honour of reading his paper in Dissident Voice precisely because it summarizes his (1) theoretical position and (2) his criticism of Marx.He has the undivided right to defend, in this thread, unadulterated by extraneous posts, his Principles paper — i.e. his published exposition of his theoretical position and his detailed criticism of Marx.He has the authorial right to respond to specifically targeted critiques of what he has exposed for our attention.  Any other discussion does him, the thread and the forum a disservice.The theme and contents of Michel’s paper, and only its own narrowly targeted focus, should be solely what is under discussion here in this thread devoted to it.That is the courtesy he expects and that we must always offer anyone and everyone who agrees to make a detailed case avowedly for or against us.Parcipants who stick to the thread — unadulterated — have a right to get their conflicting points across.

[twc]

[Apologies for taking so much space.  It’s too dicey to copy and paste this safely to a new thread, where it belongs.]

Quote:

So, twc, you clearly affirm … when the term 'materialist' is used by both Marx and Engels, it always means 'social production'.

No!  I clearly affirm no such thing.What I do clearly affirm is that Marx and Engels always used the terms ‘materialist’ and ‘materialism’ in opposition to the terms ‘idealist’ and ‘idealism’.From Marx’s PhD dissertation on Greek materialism, their passing infatuation with German idealism and their engagement with the young Hegelians, Marx and Engels knew precisely what tradition of thought idealists and materialists avowed, and precisely what the terms ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ signified.  They saw no pressing need to depart from established traditional usage, and every reason to preserve the distinction.Here follows the proofs from Capital Volume 1…1. Marx’s use of the terms ‘materialist’ and ‘idealist’ in Capital Volume 1… an article dealing with the method of “Das Kapital”, finds my method of inquiry severely realistic, but my method of presentation, unfortunately, [Hegelian] German-dialectical:  “At first sight, if judgment is based on the apparent [Hegelian] form of Marx’s presentation of the subject, Marx is the most ideal of ideal philosophers, always in the German, i.e., in the bad [Hegelian] sense of the word.  But in point of fact, Marx is infinitely more realistic than all his forerunners in the work of economic criticism.  Marx can in no sense be called an idealist.”After a quotation from the [materialist conception of history] Preface to my Critique of Political Economy, where I discuss the materialistic basis of my method, the writer goes on:  “…If in the history of civilisation the conscious element plays a part so subordinate, then it is self-evident that a critical inquiry whose subject-matter is civilisation, can, less than anything else, have for its basis any form of, or any result of, consciousness.  That is to say, that not the idea, but the material phenomenon alone can serve as its starting-point…”Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals.  It is not the articles made, but how they are made, and by what instruments, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs.*Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development to which human labour has attained, but they are also indicators of the social conditions under which that labour is carried on.  Among the instruments of labour, those of a mechanical nature, which, taken as a whole, we may call the bone and muscles of production, offer much more decided characteristics of a given epoch of production, than those which, like pipes, tubs, baskets, jars, &c., serve only to hold the materials for labour, which latter class, we may in a general way, call the vascular system of production.  The latter first begins to play an important part in the chemical industries.* The least important commodities of all for the technological comparison of different epochs of production are articles of luxury, in the strict meaning of the term.  However little our written histories up to this time notice the development of material production, which is the basis of all social life, and therefore of all real history, yet prehistoric times have been classified in accordance with the results, not of so-called historical, but of materialistic investigations.  These periods have been divided, to correspond with the materials from which their implements and weapons were made, viz., into the stone, the bronze, and the iron ages.Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.  Every history of religion, even, that fails to take account of this material [=technological] basis, is uncritical.  It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than, conversely, it is, to develop from the actual relations of life the corresponding celestialised forms of those relations.  The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific one.  The weak points in the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism that excludes history and its process, are at once evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions of its spokesmen, whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.2. Marx’s use of the term ‘material’ in Capital Volume 1The first ten of many hundreds of occurrences of the term ‘material’ in Capital fall in its opening pages of Chapter 1:A commodity, such as iron, corn, or a diamond, is therefore, so far as it is a material thing, a use value, something useful. [p.1]The use values of commodities furnish the material for a special study, that of the commercial knowledge of commodities. [p.1]In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. [p.1]If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; [p.2]Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. [p.2]But coats and linen, like every other element of material wealth that is not the spontaneous produce of Nature, must invariably owe their existence to a special productive activity, exercised with a definite aim, an activity that appropriates particular nature-given materials to particular human wants. [p.5]So far therefore as labour is a creator of use value, is useful labour, it is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be no material exchanges between man and Nature, and therefore no life. [p.5]If we take away the useful labour expended upon them, a material substratum is always left, which is furnished by Nature without the help of man. [p.5]We see, then, that labour is not the only source of material wealth, of use values produced by labour. [p.5]3. Marx’s opposition of ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ in Capital Volume 1With Hegel, the dialectic is standing on its head.  It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite.To Hegel, the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea”.With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.The physicist either observes physical phenomena where they occur in their most typical form and most free from disturbing influence, or, wherever possible, he makes experiments under conditions that assure the occurrence of the phenomenon in its normality.In the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use.  The force of abstraction must replace both.  But in bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour – or value-form of the commodity – is the economic cell-form.  To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae.  It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms that result from the natural laws of capitalist production.  It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future.In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains.  The peculiar nature of the materials it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.4. Why ‘materialist’ is not a synonym for ‘social production’It was the ‘idealist’ Hegel who discovered and made explicit the concept of the ‘social production’ of thought.Unlike modern subjectivisms, Hegel grounded social thought, or social subjectivity, in the objectivity of the evolving world “Idea”.  For Hegel, social thought is the history of society’s discovery of the objectivity of the world.Marx knew and thoroughly appreciated what Hegel had achieved within the limitations of his idealism.However, according to LBird, ideas are primary and practice is secondary.  Practice, though unified with thought, invariably follows behind it at thought’s behest.  Why then didn’t Marx equally, or preferentially, honour Hegel and use the term ‘idealist’ instead of ‘materialist’ to mean ‘social production’?According to LBird, only Engels thought idealism and materialism were different and opposed, while Marx thought they were united.  Why then didn’t Marx use the famous LBird oxymoron ‘idealist–materialist’ — in the strict correct LBird word order — to mean ‘social production’?According to LBird, ‘material’ means ‘social’ and ‘materialist’ means ‘social production’.  Why then didn’t Marx use the term ‘material-ism’ to mean ‘social-ism’?.  Why didn’t Marx simply say —    Materialism = Socialism

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Thanks Robbo and Marcos.However, for a more incoherent experience than the talk, as published, I suggest (if you can spare the time) listening to the post-debate discussion between Andrew Kliman and Per Bylund — can’t recall, but it starts about an hour from the end. Kliman seems to agree wholeheartedly with most, if not all, of the Mises/Hayek proposals.Have I badly misconstrued something?

[twc]

Yes, Adam, I agree that:Andrew’s argument relies on Marx’s passage (above),Marx implies common ownership-and-control of the means of production but individual ownership-and-control of personal consumption.However, Andrew seems to be arguing for:individual ownership-and-control of personal means of production, within common ownership of social means of production (!)If you can manage 2½ hours to spare I’d be interested in your take on what I find incoherent.

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LBird, yes.Yes, when Engels is investigating society — from pre-historical primitive communist modes of production (of which he is a pioneer), through pre-capitalist social-class modes of production, the capitalist mode of production (of which he is a pioneer, before Marx) and a future socialist mode of production (of which he saw clearly before anyone else) — he is talking about the implications of ‘social production’. Always without exception.Yes.  Engels’s celebrated account, in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, of the materialist conception of history, which is effectively his popularization for workers of Marx’s Preface to the Critique (which I excerpted for you, in continuous sequence, above) is social.Yes. I have affirmed this, and have always affirmed it, and have no need to re-affirm what I’ve never denied.I stand by my word.

[twc]

LBird, you are the only person to state here that Engels thought the materialist conception of history was about matter.Read (above) what Engels wrote about the materialist conception of history in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. It’s clear enough.So far you have decided on matter,  Nobody else has.  Surely that’s clear enough.

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LBird wrote:

Once we've clarified … that Marx and Engels were talking about 'social production' (and not 'matter')…

If the passages (which you mocked) from Socialism: Utopian and Scientific can’t change your opinion about whether Engels was saying the “same thing” as Marx’s Preface to the Contribution, then my opinion can’t.Since, in your idealist–materialist [sic] view, thought can never break free from opinion, the onus falls squarely on you to explain, in your opinion:Why your idealism–materialism [sic] misled you to your former opinion — that Engels was not saying the “same thing” as Marx’s Preface to the Contribution?Why, in idealist–materialist [sic] terms, you have now changed your mind?

[twc]

LBird wrote:

Engels said something different to Marx.Marx was talking about 'social production', not 'matter'.

Engels is saying the same thing as Marx’s Preface to the Contribution.So is Engels.

[twc]

And these also for LBird.Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific.[Here we find the greatest use of the word Materialism is by Marx, and not by Engels.  This is where Marx recounts his critical history of philosophical Materialism]Engels:  “I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public [e.g., LBird].Engels:  “This book defends what we [=Marx and Engels] call “historical materialism” [although LBird claims Engels lied about Marx calling it “historical materialism” and that feebly Marx acquiesced in this foundational lie in order to appease Engels, whether for honourable personal or grubby mercenary reasons remains unresolved.]…Engels:  “…and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers [certainly upon the ears of LBird].Engels:  “Agnosticism” might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible. [to LBird]Engels:  “And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the 17th century onwards, is England.Here follows Karl Marx, The Holy Family, p. 201–4:Karl Marx:  “Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain.  Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, ‘whether it was impossible for matter to think?’Karl Marx:  “In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God’s omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism.  Moreover, he was a nominalist.  Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.Karl Marx;  “The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon.  To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy.  [Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms].  According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge.  All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation.  Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method.  Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a ‘qual’, to use a term of Jakob Bohme’s — of matter.Karl Marx:  “In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development.  On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles.  On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.Karl Marx:  “In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism.  Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences.  Materialism takes to misanthropy.  If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic.  Thus, from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.Karl Marx:  “Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. … Man is subject to the same laws as nature.  Power and freedom are identical.Karl Marx:  “Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation.  It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof.Karl Marx:  “Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke'’s sensationalism.  At all events, for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion.”

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I’ll supply them for LBird.Engels, Socialism Utopian and Scientific :Engels:  “The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged.Engels:  “From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in men’s better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.  They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch.Engels:  “…  From this it also follows that the means of getting rid of the incongruities that have been brought to light must also be present, in a more or less developed condition, within the changed modes of production themselves.  These means are not to be invented by deduction from fundamental principles, but are to be discovered in the stubborn facts of the existing system of production.Engels:  “The socialized appropriation of the means of production does away, not only with the present artificial restrictions upon production, but also with the positive waste and devastation of productive forces and products that are at the present time the inevitable concomitants of production, and that reach their height in the crises.Engels:  “Further, it sets free for the community at large a mass of means of production and of products, by doing away with the senseless extravagance of the ruling classes of today, and their political representatives.Engels:  “The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day-by-day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties — this possibility is now, for the first time, here, but it is here.Engels:  “With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer.   Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization.Engels:  “The struggle for individual existence disappears.  Then, for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones.Engels:  “The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization.Engels:  “The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.Engels:  “Man's own social organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action.  The extraneous objective forces that have, hitherto, governed history, pass under the control of man himself.  Only from that time will man himself, more and more consciously, make his own history — only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him.Engels:  “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.

[twc]

ajj wrote:

I thought the basis of science is that a hypothesis is set up…it is examined and argument and counter-argument takes place to resolve differences and for the hypothesis improvement. In other words, the "truth" of it is always being questioned.

No.  This is Karl Popper’s method of conjecture and refutation.The particular refutation Popper had uppermost in mind was Marx’s Capital.Conjecture might start out as hypothesis, inspiration, imagination, or mere stab-in-the-dark, but it remains forever grounded in thought.  Popper’s conjectural science glorifies thought but relegates practice to the refutation of thought.The method of drawing on practice to falsify thought is not Marx’s scientific method in Capital.  For this, see http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx‘s-scientific-method.

[twc]

LBird wrote:

Marx was talking about how we collectively control our own natural production, which we are compelled to do by our natural existence.  This ‘compulsion’ isn’t a trick by the bourgeoisie…  We can’t ‘retire’ from it, as a species.

LBird’s natural compulsion operating upon ‘our species’, independent of our will, is the foundation that opens up the (otherwise closed) possibility of a deterministic science of society.A science that comprehends external necessity has no choice but to recognize that thought is not the determiner of the necessity, but is the determined, just as LBird asserts against ajj.LBird acknowledges that social reproduction is subject to external necessity, from which he has abstracted a deterministic social law, and that society (as a whole, despite some members of it) isn’t free to practice just as it desires nor to think just as it pleases.And herein lies the germ of Marx’s materialism and Marx’s deterministic science of society which investigates the social forms that arise under the compulsion for social practice to reproduce society:“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production.  The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” [Marx, A Contribution…].

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Suspension of Marcos:Re: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum/general-discussion/marx-and-automation?page=28#comment-43036 …

moderator1 wrote:

First warning: 1.  The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description. Do not start a thread in a forum unless it matches the given topic, and do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.2nd warning: 15.  Queries or appeals relating to particular moderation decisions should be sent directly to the moderators by private message. Do not post such messages to the forum. You must continue to abide by the moderators’ decisions pending the outcome of your appeal.3rd and final warning: 15. Queries or appeals relating to particular moderation decisions should be sent directly to the moderators by private message. Do not post such messages to the forum. You must continue to abide by the moderators’ decisions pending the outcome of your appeal.This warning will stay in place for the next 30 days.  I this [sic] breaches the rules within this period he'll be immediately suspended.3rd [sic] and final warning: 15.  Queries or appeals relating to particular moderation decisions should be sent directly to the moderators by private message. Do not post such messages to the forum. You must continue to abide by the moderators’ decisions pending the outcome of your appeal.

This has been tactlessly handled.The author of the topic initiated the alleged “derail” — as in, MBellamare:“I see the advent of return to the dark ages… I call this the rise of  micro-fascism…”Marcos can’t possibly “derail” a thread by responding to a claim made by the original author.Moderators might reconsider turning first warnings into recommendations, e.g.,“Your post on XXX is off-topic.  To continue posting on XXX, please do so in a more-appropriate thread or start a new thread on XXX”.Most self-respecting writers would be tempted to defend themselves, as Marcos did, in the open, and to resist the ignominy of having to defend themselves in private against unexpected charges laid against themselves in public!Marcos has “derailed” nothing.  He believes himself innocent of implied intent.  As a result he has compounded his “offence” by openly defending his integrity.Marcos has taken his stance in the very same public arena in which his integrity was unfathomably impugned — in the open forum.  Why should he grovel to private appeal and await private judgement?Serial derailment is one thing, but unintended derailment is quite another.Moderation is difficult, but something is wrong with its current implementation.

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Full-automation and Marx’s theory of valueIn 1898, a Russian economist, Vladimir Dmitriev, ‘demonstrated’ that the rate of profit would be positive in a fully automated economy.Capitalists can get “profit on capital without human labour … when all products are produced exclusively by the work of machines” (Economic Essays on Value, Competition and Utility, p. 214).In Dmitriev’s model economy, where machines make machines, the annual turnover is as follows:Annual input = 4 machinesAnnual output = 5 machinesInput price of machine = $100Output price of machine = $100Annual profit = $500 / $400, or 25%Consequently Dmitriev’s fully automated economy creates $100 annually out of thin air.In Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, Andrew Kliman points out that this “slipshod” argument absolutely convinced professional Marxist economists like Maurice Dobb, Meghnad Desai, Howard & King (History of Marxian Economics Vol 2)!Kliman exposes Dmitriev’s celebrated so-called ‘demolition’ of Marx’s theory of value as follows:As no labour is performed, there is no valuePrice of machine ≠ $100 (it rapidly falls to zero)Input price of machine = $0Output price of machine = $0Thus, profit = $0 / $0 (it rapidly becomes meaningless)Kliman points out that, while Dmitriev incorrectly asserts that non-Marxian machine ‘labour’ can produce value (as we have seen), he quite correctly asserts that non-Marxian animal ‘labour’ cannot produce value.  Yet, both non-Marxian cases are entirely analogous.(‘Debunking’ economist Steve Keen snidely hints that non-Marxian animal labour, e.g. mules and donkeys, can produce value independently of the human labour-power of their tending.  Such lack of clarity of thought is characteristic of the economists who would “improve” Marx!)I leave Andrew Kliman’s substantive criticism of Dmitriev and his long line of followers for another occasion.It merely remains for me to emphasise that Kliman’s exposure of Dmitriev simultaneously exposes Michel Luc Bellamare’s reproduction schema (above).

[Author]

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