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Nobody, apart from LBird, thinks that he is sublimely unique in holding the position that our conception of the Sun is fixed.  To even bother making an issue out of it is to reveal at once the non-scientist talking.Every working scientist, without exception, is acutely conscious of his dependence on a dynamic tradition of changing scientific conception.  Without exception!And especially not Engels!Most of the investigators, at least the early ones, who contributed scientifically to our conception of the Sun were scions of the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie — decidedly not working class — and typically deeply religious and some even mystical.  Yet those non working-class attributes proved no impediment to them altering our social conception.  Those who change it know it is not fixed.Perhaps, then, in the context of our dynamic scientific conceptions, you might care to respond to some of the materialist statements in the document I mentioned the other day.  Your comments will clarify your view on matters which are dear to me.“The necessity for society to distribute its social labor in these definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production — only the mode of its appearance can change.”“Natural laws cannot be abolished.”“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.”“And the form in which the law of the proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.”“Science consists precisely in demonstrating how this law of value asserts itself.”“So that if one wanted at the very beginning to ‘explain’ all the phenomena that seemingly contradict the law, one would have to present the science before the science.”“On the other hand, the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood, though hedged more or less with illusions or, scientifically, as a more or less definite concept.“Since the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, over time, according to the maturity of the development of the conditions, including the maturity of the development of the thinker.  Everything else is drivel.”Try comments 2, 5 and 8.

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LBird wrote:

Marx effected a unity of Idealism-Materialism, taking something from both, and rejecting something from both.  He realised that the Idealists were correct about ‘activity’, and thus united the ‘active’ with ‘the human’, but rejected the ‘divine’ and the ‘passive’.

Apparently,Idealists teach active✓and divine✗Materialists teach passive✗and human✓.Idealist–Materialists teach active✓and human✓.∴ Materialist–Idealists teach passive✗and divine✗.Little does LBird realize that Marx was defending Materialism when he wrote his Theses on Feuerbach.  Thesis X makes this indisputable:“The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new materialism is human society, or social humanity.”As correctly recognized by Engels when he published the Theses on Feuerbach (after Marx’s death) Marx is here seen laying the foundation of his new Materialism.The Theses capture Marx’s genesis of his new Materialism, a re-invigorated Materialism that transcends — in Hegelian fashion — Feuerbach’s old Materialism, that is forced to reduce:the religious world into its secular basis by reducing man’s religious essence into a fixed human essence.Feuerbach’s old Materialist blindspot thrusts fixity upon his discussion whenever he undertakes to discuss material man.  This is despite Feuerbach relying heavily for inspiration on the non-fixed, dynamic, Hegelian Idealist system that he sets out to oppose materialistically.Marx identifies Feuerbach’s old-materialist blindspot, and this allows him to critique the old Materialism itself:Thus, Feuerbach does not conceive sensuous human activity — in contrast to thinking activity — as beingdynamicobjective.By contrast, Marx does.  He takes the objectivity of dynamic human sensuous activity as his scientific foundation.This allows Marx to transcend (in Hegelian fashion) the old Materialism by recognizing that material Man makes himself dynamically — actively — through his own objective sensuous practice.For Marx, it is man’s sensuous objective practice that is his foundational activity, not his thought.So, is Marx here denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?No, of course not.  Forms of appearance are what have to be explained.  Explanation of thought, from the exterior of thought, has always been the role of Materialism.By contrast, the Idealists (at least those rarefied ones of the LBird variety) comprehend thought by thought alone — by the interior of thought — and also comprehend action, likewise hermetically sealed from exteriority, as being grounded by thought alone.But, grounding thought and action in thought alone leaves thought and action bereft of any non-thought criterion of objectivity — anything external to thought — which for Marx (in the Theses) is tantamount to scholasticism.By contrast, the new Materialist, Marx, grounds thought in [the necessity] of man’s sensuous activity.  Man’s thought, for Marx and Engels, is ultimately the thought of his sensuous practical activity.Thus to return, and answer the question: is Marx denying the universally agreed phenomenal form of appearance that thought guides our sensuous activity?…Marx explains this appearance as follows:  Man’s thought can only be a reliable guide to his sensuous activity when it is the product of his successful sensuous activity.[In passing:  This conception of successful thought, in its Idealist form, accords with absolute Idealist Hegel’s Phenomenolgy, which Marx forever prized, castigating poor Dietzgen for stumbling across it too late in his ‘philosophical’ career.]As a consequence of grounding successful thought in successful action, the Theses are not Marx’s grafting of Materialism onto Idealism, because — as Marx points out in the Theses — Idealism disavows Marx’s foundational critique that real, sensuous activity is objective.LBird recognizes the purified brainy stuff, but cannot bring himself to recognize the foundational objectivity of the sensual stuff.  His response is to sneer haughtily at those who do.  As such, he is decidedly anti-Marx.To reiterate…Marx goes to great pains in the Theses to make it absolutely clear — i.e. irrefutably, in no uncertain terms — that he is establishing a new Materialism.Marx is not grafting his sensuously objective Materialism onto an anti-sensuous, anti-objective, purely subjective, version of Idealism to produce a mélange like LBird’s rarefied anti-scientific Idealism–Materialism.Shocking is that Marx’s new Materialism takes sensuous human activity asobjective human activity,the ultimate criterion, or arbiter, of objective truth.  Any alternative is purely scholastic.For Marx, material man ultimately makes, and must make, himself through objective practice.  Marx himself makes it abundantly clear that:“All social life is essentially practical.” (Thesis VIII).Man makes his own world and his own history through his objective sensuous practice in a world he inherits and of which he is a natural part, and whose social laws of motion he is naturally equipped to comprehend and then to wield in his interest.It is the role of his thought to comprehend the objectivity of his sensuous human practice, in his practical world, so that his thoughts can become, by indirection, the objective guide to his successful sensuous activity in changing that world.Man inherits the objectivity of his thought from the objectivity of his practice.The objectivity of practice, in the world of our appearances, grounds everything human.

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LBird expresses hostility to materialism.In his need to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels, he blames Engels for distorting Marx with materialistic accounts.The following materialistic account about how Marx arrived at the law of value was written in 1868, only one year after Marx published Capital Vol. 1.“Every child knows that a nation that ceased to work … even for a few weeks would perish.“Every child also knows that the quantities of social products, satisfying social needs, require definite proportions of the total social labor.“The necessity for society to distribute its social labor in these definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production — only the mode of its appearance can change.“Natural laws cannot be abolished.“What can change, under historically different circumstances, is only the form in which these laws assert themselves.“And the form in which the law of the proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.“Science consists precisely in demonstrating how this law of value asserts itself.“So that if one wanted at the very beginning to “explain” all the phenomena that seemingly contradict the law, one would have to present the science before the science.“It is precisely Ricardo’s mistake that (in his first chapter on value) he takes as given all possible, and still to be developed, categories in order to prove their conformity to the law of value.“On the other hand, the history of the theory of value shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — i.e. more or less clearly understood, though hedged more or less with illusions or, scientifically, as a more or less definite concept.“Since the process of human thought itself grows out of conditions — is itself a natural process — thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, over time, according to the maturity of the development of the conditions, including the maturity of the development of the thinker.“Everything else is drivel.“The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations cannot be directly identical with the magnitudes of value.“The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production.“The rational and natural necessity asserts itself only as a blindly working average.“And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different.“In fact, the vulgar economist boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate.”I wonder if LBird might amuse us by clearly explaining for our delight:what’s wrong with this account?whether Marx would ever have described it this way, or written anything remotely like this?

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Sympo wrote:

Is calling the political conditions “subservient to the economic conditions” the same thing as calling it “undecisive” in the making of history?  (This question is not meant to be rhetorical)

No.  It depends on what you are “deciding”.If you are “deciding” on strategies for bringing about Socialism:The Labour Party wanted to bring it about gradually.The Bolsheviks wanted to bring it about by fiat.If you “decide” their actions against their claims, and if you then “decide” their claims against their abject revisions of their claims, you must “decide” that they failed absolutely to “decide” history.Rather you must ultimately “decide” that the Labour Party and the Bolsheviks were an impediment to history, since both of them landed up indistinguishable from each other, identical to the Conservatives except in rhetoric (and rhetoric is cheap), and the capitalism they “knew how to overthrow” remains as capitalism.The question to be answered is why?This is where the “subservience of politics to economic conditions” asserts itself…Capitalist politicians and politics can make all sorts of changes to the capitalist superstructure.  The truth is, any fool can change the superstructure, just as any fool is able to imagine.The point, however, is to change the foundation.That political act is anti-political.  It is the social act that abolishes politics forever. 

Sympo wrote:

Why exactly weren’t the Bolsheviks decisive in the making of history?

In the narrow sense, of course they were.But they also set history back enormously…The Bolsheviks effectively derailed history, ably abetted by their western hangers on — originally the perk seeking trade-union officials and political-careerist self-proclaimed “leaders” of the working class, who eagerly grasped Russian money and willingly became an arm of soviet foreign policy in the west, supporting every thuggish nationalist movement as “socialist” (see below on the “primitive accumulation” they were championing).In the broad sense, in which Engels is using the term, they did not “decide” history, but rather history cast its fatal “decision” upon them, in precisely the way Engels foretold in his 1850 writings.What confronted the Bolsheviks historically was the necessity for them to implement what Marx calls the “primitive accumulation of capital”, which in plain speech is the creation of a working class where none, or only a minuscule one, ever existed before.The Bolsheviks, like every other state power that confronts the task of constructing capitalism out of a prior existing social system (such as a form of feudalism), were forced to create a capitalist working class by the only means available to them:  the dispossession of the prior existing labouring class’s formerly owned means of production, i.e. the reduction of the majority from a state of semi-independence to one of total dependence in order to live.Read Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 31 and following, on “Primitive Accumulation” to comprehend the painful birth of the British working class.There Marx says in no uncertain terms: “Capital comes into this world dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”.  The Bolsheviks excelled in delivering this.So, if we look to the Bolsheviks for being “decisive” then credit is due where they deserve it most:The Bolsheviks “decisively” dispossessed a prior existing labouring class of its means of living to pave the way for capitalism employing them as its very own working class.And this brutal, but necessary, act of dispossession is totally “decisive” in capitalist historical terms, but these are not the criteria Engels was adopting in the context of bringing about socialism.Thus, to repeat, in their own “avowedly socialist” terms, the Bolsheviks were destined to fail miserably at doing what they claimed they set out to be doing.What they “decisively” achieved was inevitable — establishing capitalism in Russia.And that achievement — fatal to their bombastic rhetoric — was “decisively” their own work, but it was carried out under the inexorability of an economic foundation that the very history that made them into Bolsheviks also prevented them, as Bolsheviks, from ever changing.The Bolsheviks were the victims of history, not its “deciders”.  That should be the end of the matter!

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Sympo wrote:

What does it mean that “political conditions” play a part but are not “decisive” in the making of history by humans?

“Political conditions” belong to the superstructure that societies build upon the foundation of their economic conditions of production.Thus Marx, “… it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”¹ Political conditions are subservient to the economic conditions of production, which as Engels says, in his response to Bloch²  are those of the production and reproduction of social life.Thus, for Marx and Engels, the foundations of social existence are non political, but in class societies they are maintained politically.  This is because they are maintained in the interest of a ruling class [politics].[On this, see Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which is what Engels is referring to about Punaluan brother–sister ‘marriage’ in the full letter to Bloch, reproduced in its entirety here² .]Political actors and political movements come and go.The superstructure is their battleground of illusions, where their misconceptions over the economic conditions of production contend against each other.The political actors struggle for dominance over, but entirely trapped within, that very same palpable superstructure that, unbeknownst to them, is actually subservient to the non-palpable non-political conditions that are actually essential to their own social reproduction as a ruling class.The Idealist philosophical conception, that is itself subservient to the overwhelming social appearance that the social superstructure is self-sufficient and autonomous, prevailed in the time of Marx and Engels, and still prevails today.This Idealist misconception is the universally held view that political conditions determine the economic conditions of production — that the social superstructure, or world of appearance, determines everything.For Marx and Engels, as for Hegel, appearance was precisely what needs to be explained!Marx puts it this way in Capital “if essence and appearance coincided, there would be no need for science”.Essence–Appearance (or, scientifically, Foundation–Superstructure) is Marx’s scientific challenge to the Idealism of appearance.  It is the basis of all human comprehension.

Sympo wrote:

Can something really be important without being called decisive?

Yes.  Take the Labour parties.  Take the Leninist parties.  They were really, really, really important.  Nobody could deny that.But they were not decisive.  Not at all!The social foundation they claimed they could change by meddling with the superstructure (palpable appearance) defeated them lock, stock and barrel.These intellectual champions of the superstructure finished up repudiating everything they preached, ratting on every single superstructural tenet they held.  They were defeated by the abhorred economic conditions of production they deluded themselves and their followers that they had risen superior to.These “important”, but self-discredited, organisations “decided” nothing beyond the tangible proof that they were impediments to the very socialism they boasted they knew better than we how to achieve.What was truly “decisive” about the Labour Party and the Leninist Parties was written by Engels in 1850, over half a century before those disreputable organisations rode to superstructural power on the backs of the working class.³ 

Sympo wrote:

If so, I wouldn’t mind a concrete example of something that’s “not decisive” that plays a big role in the making of history.

Well, for starters…The Labour Party.The Communist Party.The Royal Family. Footnotes⁽¹⁾ Karl Max, in the Preface to A Contribution towards a Critique of Political Economy.⁽²⁾  https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_09_21a.htm.⁽³⁾  “The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply…  What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party; what he ought to do cannot be achieved.  In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.  In the interests of the movement itself, he is compelled to defend the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with phrases and promises, with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests.  Whoever puts himself in this awkward position is irrevocably lost.”[He may be “important” but, in his case, the economic conditions of production are “decisive” — to his failure!]

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DJP’s quote from Engels [post #2] expresses — in the vernacular — Marx’s scientific view on the relationship between freedom and necessity.[Of course, any ‘thinker’ can raise himself above the necessity of the world, and is perfectly “free” to defy the material world before succumbing to its necessity.The most notable modern politico to defy social necessity, through his idealist will, is, of course, Lenin, whose succumbing to the necessity of the world, Engels expressed — in the vernacular — 70 years earlier.]Unbeknownst to me, Alan has reproduced an earlier post of mine in defence of Engels’s much later “freedom is the recognition of necessity” at:http://socialist-courier.blogspot.com.au/2017/02/freedom-is-recognition-of-necessity.html?q=TwcPurely ‘philosophical’ pronouncements on this issue reduce science to nothing more than “thinking that is isolated from practice — a purely scholastic question” [from Thesis II].

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Those cited Buddhist ‘philosophers’ interpret Western science from their hostile Buddhist ‘philosophical’ standpoint, just as LBird interprets Western science from his hostile ‘philosophical’ standpoint.Both wilfully hijack Western science’s achievements to their own ‘philosphical’ ends, and twist it at the most superficial level.Both stand superior to the working scientists who laboured to build Western science, cumulatively over the centuries, shoulder upon shoulder, and brick by brick.Both are blind to the productive world that Western science created for them, and that they nonchalantly inherit.Both are oblivious of the substantiation of Western science’s achievements by society’s incorporation of Western scientific thought and technology into society’s daily practice.Both of them, despite themselves, repudiate Marx’s thesis that Man must prove the power of his thinking in practice!  All is thought for them — the non-doing, or do-nothing, ‘philosophers’.Let these ‘philosophers’ show us the achievements of Buddhist ‘science’ in practice.  Let them show us Buddhist ‘science’ in the service of Buddhist ‘philosophy’, as handed down over the ages from the sacred Buddhist texts of universal wisdom.  Let them show us!Then we might have sufficient grounds for taking their ‘science’ more seriously than mere bluster.Maybe paucity of Buddhist ‘scientific’ demonstration, but profusion of ‘philosphical’ mysticism, may give pause to LBird’s and the Buddhist ‘philosophical’ effrontery of pontificating to Western scientists, who grapple daily with the production of Western science, about how such Western scientists should “thank them” (LBird’s words) for putting them on the right track, by telling Western scientists —who are “thick as dog s**t” (LBird’s indelicate description of those he aims to influence) — how they should really conduct the very thing they think most deeply about daily.Maybe LBird might also demonstrate how Western scientists aim to take over the world — under Socialism mind you — and perform vile experiments on us all (LBird’s confirmed words).Ah, the passive ‘thinker’, priding himself in the activity of his imagination.  Ah, imagination is cheap.  Let imagination prove itself in practice, sustain itself in society, before anyone bothers to take imagination as definitive in any but a tentatively useful social sense.To ‘philosopher’ LBird and the Buddhist ‘philosophers’, Western science has only crass utility.  Western science’s intrinsic value falls short of their ‘philosophical’ expectations.Instead they ‘philophically’ deprecate Western science as a scrap heap for mercenary substantiation of their own ‘philosophical’ world views.  They are the worst kind of scientific plagiarists.To Western science, ‘philosopher’ LBird and the Buddhist ‘philosophers’ are sunk by their own practice as soon as they seek ‘philosophical’ confirmation in the very scientific process they ‘philosophically’ scorn.  Their arrogance prevents them from sensing the irony of their attempts to validate themselves through the achievements of detested Western science.Western science succeeds precisely by repudiating the ‘philosphical’ stance of LBird and the Buddhist ‘philosophers’.The most sickening aspect of LBird’s pontification on Western science is its dogmatic casuistry.  For LBird, the distinguishing characteristic, or telltale signature, of ‘philosophically’ correct science — his so-called ‘proletarian science’ — is that correct “proletarian science’ always changes observation to suit its theory.No doubt good medieval Catholic ‘science’ tried the same ploy, and no doubt good Buddhist ‘science’, in subservience to its holy scriptures, has no choice but to adopt the self-same LBirdian casuistry that LBird trumpets as closed ‘scientific’ method (or scientific fraud) to counter open Western science.LBird, who by now has reduced himself to reading merely in order to seek comfort in the slightest hint of confirmation of his own views, takes the devoutly catholic cosmologist Carlo Rovelli as supporting LBird’s ‘philosphical’ relativism.  Little does LBird appreciate how superficially he reads.Let us examine Carlo Rovelli on the cultural clash between Western science and oriental science.From “The First Scientist — Anaximander and his Legacy”, Carlo Rovelli,  Chapter 9 — Between Cultural Relativism and Absolute Thought.In the third century BCE, Eratosthenes measured the Earth’s circumference, as shown.A contemporaneous Chinese astronomical text describes a comparable measurement based instead on an oriental flat Earth.

Rovelli wrote:

In the seventeenth century, Jesuit Matteo Ricci brought to China the Greek and European astronomy.  The two world visions finally came into direct contact.  When Western astronomers came to know of the Chinese calculation, they responded, on the basis of their own belief system, with a smile.  As soon as they learned of the Western calculation, Chinese astronomers immediately, ¹  and on the basis of their own belief system, changed their worldview, recognising the Western conception as superior.⁽¹⁾ This took place long before European colonialism in the Far East.  Ricci died in 1610.

Sure, this is by no means the last word on the fascinating subject of oriental science, but it merely demonstrates O’Bird’s delusion that Rovelli submerges absolute thought to ‘philosophical’ cultural relativism.It also demonstrates that Carlo Rovello went out of his way — he deliberately makes a point of saying so — to demonstrate the power of Western science relative to so-called ‘sciences’ that cow-tow to ‘philosphical’ or religious dogma.

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We recognize one, and only one, definition of Socialism — our Object.A system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth by and in the interest of the whole community.

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Twenty familiar phrases…Winston:  “But how can you control matter?”¹O’Brien:  “We control matter because we control the mind.²  Reality is inside the skull.  You must get rid of those nineteenth century ideas about the laws of nature.³  We make the laws of nature.”⁴Winston:  “But man is tiny—helpless!  How long has he been in existence?  For millions of years the earth was uninhabited.”O’Brien:  “Nonsense.  The earth is no older than we are.⁵. Nothing exists except through human consciousness.”⁶Winston:  “But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals, which lived here long before man was ever heard of.”O’Brien:  “Nineteenth-century biologists invented them.⁷  Before man there was nothing.⁸  After man there will be nothing.⁹  Outside man there is nothing.”Winston:  “But the whole universe is outside us.  Look at the stars!  Some of them are a million light-years away.  They are out of our reach forever.”O’Brien:  “What are the stars?  The earth is the center of the universe.  The sun and the stars go round it.¹⁰  The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them.  Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that?”¹¹ …  “I told you, Winston, that metaphysics is not your strong point.”¹² …  “For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four?¹³  Or that the force of gravity works?¹⁴  Or that the past is unchangeable?  If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?”¹⁵ …  “You are a slow learner, Winston.”¹⁶Winston:  “Two and two are four.”O’Brien:  “Sometimes, Winston.¹⁷  Sometimes they are five.¹⁸  Sometimes they are three.¹⁹  Sometimes they are all of them at once.¹⁹  You must try harder.²⁰  It is not easy to become sane.”

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The moral solution to amoral capitalism…Keen, lost deep inside his Minskian models of the capitalist economy — in abstraction from the amoral world of practical capitalist profiteering — demands that the banks make his models, which reveal the amorality, work morally in the interest of capitalism.He tells the banks to kickstart capitalism by gifting everyone money to pay off “debt” — the essential capitalist necessity — or suffer the stigma of “profligacy” — the essential capitalist virtue.Here we can view the folly of pursuing a purely phenomenological modelling of the capitalist economy, and passionately believing in the rules that make the model work in abstraction from the human necessity of reproducing society under capitalist social relations of ownership and control of society’s productive forces.And then, emerging from his phenomenological model into the world beyond it, and pontificating on human conditions such as the “morality” of debt repayment, and not its essential necessity for capitalism and his model of it.Keen forgets that it is precisely the amoral capitalist class that demands its debts be settled — under compulsion of capital to actuate itself — in order that the capitalist may remain the personification of his vital bloodsteam: capital.God, and the aggrieved investor, bless moral Keen…

Quote:

As a transition from todays debt stagnation, Keen suggests that the central banks create a lump sum to put into everyone’s account. Debtors would be required to use their gift to pay down the debt. Non-debtors would keep the transfer payment – so as not to let demagogic political opponents accuse this plan of rewarding the profligate.If this solution is not taken, debtors will continue to lumber on under debt and tax conditions where only about a third of their nominal wages are available to spend on the goods and services that labor produces. The circular flow between producers and consumers will shrink – being siphoned off by debt service and government taxes to bail out bankers instead of their victims.This should be what today’s politics is all about. It should be the politics of the future. But that requires an Economics of the Future – that is, Reality Economics.

 

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Sorry, but he isn’t surreptitiously doing anything.  He is openly identifying physical labour time (with inputs simultaneously evaluated with outputs, over the entire economy) as value.This definition was accepted by virtually all the post-war marxian economists.  They turned this definition left-side, right-side, upside-down, and couldn’t fault the definition.  This was identical to Marx's, but mathematically improved.And it was evaluated over the entire economy, and so it was clearly socially necessary in the Marxian sense.Everyone also agreed that this definition, in terms of socially necessary physical labour time (with inputs and outputs evaluated simultaneously) revealed that Marxian value was utterly in error.  The error was clearly demonstrated to be Marx’s own definition.Please don’t underestimate the seriousness of the resulting charges that Marxian value was an incoherent, unnecessary or redundant, concept.This alone drove most serious academic Marxian economists out of the field.  The academic standing of Marx and Marxian economics sank to the level of a misguided standing joke. Only a few dogged diehards remained, and none of them could find the flaws in the argument. There is nothing surreptitious at all.  Keen is merely following the rest. You see machines producing surplus-value comes straight out of the definition of value based on identifying it with physical labour time (with inputs evaluated with outputs simultaneously over the entire economy) as value.That’s precisely why I chose to expose Keen above by exposing the problems with evaluation in physical labour time.Clearly that didn't strike home.Please re-read what I wrote, with the above explanation in mind.  You may then understand why I tried to demolish physical labour time and stress Marxian socially necessary labour time.  My omission was to skip over the simultaneity.  But I mistakenly thought that concept would even confuse matters more.Eventually read Kliman.

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Forget about Lenin as a serious economist.

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Yes, yms refers to relative surplus-value.  Relative surplus-value doesn’t arise out of the machine, as such.  It arises out of the relative advantage a more productive machine confers upon its owner over its less-productive competitors, who temporarily set the socially necessary benchmark.That this is not absolute surplus-value is demonstrated when the more-productive machine owner loses his relative, or competitive, advantage when his competition catches up.On the other hand, we are considering absolute surplus-value arising out of a machine, which is the miraculous generation of surplus-labour by employing dead labour.  Terrific if it worked, as dead labour isn’t unionised, doesn’t go on strike, needs no meal and bathroom breaks, and operates 24/7.  You’d really think its supporters, like Keen, would advocate employing dead labour as a universal capitalist panacea.

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Sorry, Robbo, I must to leave it there,  Otherl things, as I said yesterday, temporarily claim my attention.The full answer lies in Kliman, who unfortunately is at times mathematical, and so is not always an easy read.I tried to précis him earlier, and replicate his insights above.There are web sites that put his argument that are worth googling.

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Well, if you can’t see how the market treats dead labour and living labour differently, there’s no hope for you ever seeing they aren’t the same. Dead labour has already been sold and turned into money.  It has already escaped from the market—which is what we are considering—prior to production.By dead labour we mean the past living labour that is embodied in machinery, raw materials and, it seems, donkeys.It is no longer embodied in a commodity when it enters production.  As means of production, it has been purchased as means of consumption, fit for producing surplus value.Marx’s Capital rests squarely on the fundamental distinction between means of production and living labour-power.  These guys know that, and that’s why they attack this distinction.The answer to your grave doubts therefore lies squarely on the efficacy of Capital to explain market phenomena—something these guys flatly deny. You flounder because you studiously demand I/we avoid Marx’s Capital, just like these guys.***One might reasonably assume that the efficacy of dead labour was a thing of the past, defunct, ancient history.But, having studiously sidestepped Marx, you leave us to entertain the mystical animism of the dead—the revivification of dead labour on each and every successive sale of it as paid-up means of production.  We are asked to confer upon dead labour a phantom ‘labour-power’, which it spookily exercises on its successive incarnations, double dipping, treble dipping, …, through multiple production lives ad infinitum.This scenario is none other, in a different guise, than the dreaded banker scenario. It mirrors 19th century capital by roundabout means—the benefit of deferring immediate enjoyment. The upshot is—dear capitalist, sell your means of production, your dead labour, through n successive stages of production, and you will increase its contribution to your revenue n-fold.By avoiding Capital you have no hope of discovering the difference between the living and the dead.  They are all one — a perpetual enigma of the capitalist universe… which is where defeatist minds prefer to keep it—a mystery.A detailed answer can be found in Andrew Kliman. 

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