(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
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The Voice of Labor posted:because of the semipermanence of the intellectual component of productive capacities it's easy to fall into a trap where the intellectual side can be mistakenly separated from the physical labor side. once you do that trick you're free to imagine free energy and limitless growth and whatever other nonsense because you're no longer shackled to the requirements of maintaining the physical. then you end up with a technology fetishism where innovations and technological progress are self generating products of the mind. obviously ignoring that mental work requires a ton of investment in the people possessing the minds and that anything related to technology rests on thousands of years of material development in addition to the thousands of years of built up knowledge. a goon in the gip emergency prep thread summed it up pretty well, knowing how to make a steam engine might be a useful thing in the post collapse world, but you would still need mining and forging and precision measurement stuff to be able to build one. techno optimists would really rather not have to acknowledge that there's a physical historical tether to everything because their miracles can't happen if there is Which is the exact reason why while the ancient Greeks or Romans or whatever might've understood the concept of the steam engine perfectly fine, they couldn't do anything with it because their metallurgy wasn't at the levels required to make a boiler that could contain a useful amount of pressure. And for the same reason in the early days (well, decades) of the industrial revolution steam engine, boiler explosions were commonplace. But those mostly just killed some workers and that's a price capitalists are always willing to pay for Orange Devil has issued a correction as of 22:25 on May 12, 2024 |
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May 12, 2024 22:22
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Well, some follow up in case anyone cared. I was hoping he'd go more into his take on Marxist thought. Yeah, that's kind of cool, but I think the logical step from comparing the value of a carrot and a phone would be to go to the basic premise in Marx. There is no value in nature, it's only meaningful in the context of human civilization. So, yeah, a carrot can be much more complex than a phone, but the human labor invested in a carrot is much less and you're not entering an exchange relation with the carrot field.
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May 13, 2024 00:02
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genericnick posted:Yeah, that's kind of cool, but I think the logical step from comparing the value of a carrot and a phone would be to go to the basic premise in Marx. There is no value in nature, it's only meaningful in the context of human civilization. So, yeah, a carrot can be much more complex than a phone, but the human labor invested in a carrot is much less and you're not entering an exchange relation with the carrot field. I wish I had just said that instead of whatever the hell I typed.
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May 13, 2024 00:06
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:I got more. Just seen this guy post again today. I'm all on board that using complex physics to make am analogy misses the point of an analogy, even if it fits the Oxford dictionary. Functionally analogies are supposed to make things simpler. I stand by my assessment this is a supply chain analyst, with no economic background. Some of what's being said makes perfect sense in that context.
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May 13, 2024 03:52
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Gonna 5S lean away thermodynamics. EDIT: Think you may be right, Bill. Supply Guy posted:To be clear, I don’t think iPhones will grow on trees any time in the near future. But I think it is physically possible. The point to the remark is that I think we are far away from optimal production methods. The incremental improvements in energy efficiency and labor productivity of recent decades could see step changes. Not familiar with the book, though looks like it may the early ‘90s reaction to Japan eating America’s lunch until the real estate bubble popped and gave them thirty years of stagnation. I just don’t see you getting any more lean than you are now. Not paying labour sufficient wages is where they’re getting “efficiencies” now after all lines have been modernised and all foreign markets tapped for workers. Skaffen-Amtiskaw has issued a correction as of 12:33 on May 13, 2024 |
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May 13, 2024 12:13
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iPhone could grow on trees what in the loving world?
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May 13, 2024 12:49
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Orange Devil posted:iPhone could grow on trees what in the loving world? That would be in reference to me trying to understand what he was getting at with the carrot vs. iPhone analogy. I think he’s infatuated with the cost savings in constructing and the logistics chain for consumer electronics when compared to how simple just getting fresh produce is. I think. Except you ignore the significant advances in modern agriculture that allow barely 2% of the population to work in that sector compared to around 80% not long before Marx was about.
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May 13, 2024 13:12
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So trying trpf again. The posts are long, so I'll try to summarize. New "machines" or advances in technology can probably explain the ebb and flow of the tendency of Rate of Profit to fall and why it's a tendency, not something that always occurs. Going way back, we have a new machine that makes product twice as fast. A capitalist first deploys this machine, which gives them a competive edge, but it reduces the ratio of exploited labor to end product. But at first, the increased speed means they're crushing the competition, so this specific capitalist benefits. As others don't want to lose out, they also adopt this new machine, and at some point everyone has the new machine, resulting in a reduction of exploited labor for all, or a reduction in profits. At the other end, we have a different machine in a new industry that lasts twice as long, but is no faster. This is reduces the capital expenditure for the capitalist, but when they deploy this machine, the ratio of exploited labor to value in the product actually increases. Once again competitors will eventually all adopt it as well, but this time it leads to an eventual increase in profits. There's other elements at play, but those are the main two. Speed will usually win out, because it will give a larger competitive advantage short term than a longer lasting machine, though both will be sought after. I think this uses only Marx to reinforce what Marx claims about falling profit in capitalism, while also filling in why profits can rise at some points - or why it's a tendency, not continual observation.
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May 13, 2024 17:21
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But surely even if it's a longer lasting machine, not one that produces more output per unit time, we just run into the problem further down the line? The end result is that you're eventually getting back to a profitability crisis if your expectation is increasing income perpetually. Even if machines never broke down and labour never asked for a pay increase, it's a finite growth cycle one way or another. That's why efficiency improvements only give you a temporary boost, and actually in some ways can be worse. In the oil extraction game, being able to more efficiently suck up crude means you use it up faster and eventually bring about a faster decline rate than had you kept the original production quota. It's why anyone talking about a fixed resource being x number of decades or centuries before exhaustion is redundant when you have x% increase in usage annually. At present levels of consumption, it will last 100 years. So long as you don't want to increase profits or use more of the stuff each year, naturally.
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May 13, 2024 17:28
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Skaffen-Amtiskaw posted:Gonna 5S lean away thermodynamics. I doubt they read this book either. If you can get them to comment about safety, maybe recent boeing issues I think I know what they're on about.
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May 13, 2024 17:32
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BillsPhoenix posted:So trying trpf again. The posts are long, so I'll try to summarize. this sounds right to me. the big difference here, and why i am bearish on the rate of profit, is that the first kind of machine is how regular, ongoing optimization and technical development usually works, while the second kind of machine is how scientific revolution and lucking into heretofore-unknown free gifts of nature usually works. you really need to stumble onto something special in order to reduce the fixed capital investment into some kind of technical process, like an entirely new power source or the realization that some previously-existing element of the process was actually unnecessary or even harmful. but, once you've settled on a new scientific state-of-the-art, the usual course of progress is higher fixed capital investment and concentration, increasing speed and saving on labor by increasing the amount of machinery you're using. it should be noted that even the "free gifts of nature" all-upside kind of advance won't necessarily increase the rate of profit, or at least won't necessarily increase the rate of profit without any kind of attendant risks or weaknesses being bundled in. like, imagine the mk1.5 version of the machine that costs the same amount of money and makes the same number of coats, but stamps coats out twice as fast. at a glance this seems like it's just going to double everyone's yearly rate of profit, because the same capital can now turn over twice per year rather than once (it's worth distinguishing here between a time-independent rate of profit, which is just a fraction made of surplus out divided by capital in, and something like a yearly rate of profit, in which we ask ourselves how much surplus we get out at the end of a year if we invest and reinvest and reinvest our starting sum from the beginning of the year). but if each coat takes half the time to be made, that also means workers work on it half as long and get paid for it half as much, which means that the proportion of each coat which is made of surplus rather than paid labor is lower, and the profitability of coats as a whole drops. let's do the napkin math: mk1 coat: 50 materials + 100 machine depreciation + 10 paid labor + 40 unpaid labor = 200 value. you made a 40 profit on a 160 investment, so your rate's 25% per coat mk1.5 coat: 50 materials + 100 machine depreciation + 5 paid labor + 20 unpaid labor = 175 value. you made a 20 profit on a 155 investment, so your rate's only 12.9% per coat. on the other hand, the same 155 investment could* turn over twice in the same year, making for a 40 profit on a 155 starting investment and therefore a 25.8% profit (and this is after the honeymoon period, which was much more lucrative than the mk1.5 status quo) * i put an asterisk after "could" here because, as you might notice, our mk1.5 capitalist is suddenly doubly dependent on the rest of the market working properly. if he starts on january 1st with just $1,550 in his pocket, he needs to secure a machine, secure materials, secure laborers, combine them at the point of production, get those coats on the market, see those coats sell, and then secure a whole new machine and a whole new set of materials while hiring some mixture of new or the same labor. how long do machines take to make? how long do coats take to sell? what if there's a problem in materials production somewhere? even though everything's better than before on paper, our capitalist is now more vulnerable to market and supply chain fluctuations than before. one buffer against this vulnerability is, of course, having more money on hand (so that you could be buying machines, hiring a second team of laborers, etc, before the first coats are even sold), which is why capitalists can't help but require bigger and bigger stockpiles of money on hand even though, theoretically, that money would best be served being transformed immediately into factors of production so that it could reproduce itself in the form of surplus value
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May 13, 2024 19:04
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The tendency of profit to fall is due to the inevitability of profit ultimately trending towards zero because of capital accumulation. "Profit" isn't a thing created ex nihilo due to industry, it is a quantification of wealth transfer: any behavior that generates profit moves wealth (from whatever source) to whatever entity collects the profit. As capital continues to accumulate, the only profit growth happens further up the chain and more and more exclusively in the domains of near, and then actual, monopolistic enterprises, and then finally within that strata until all capital has been accumulated in a kind of systemic heat death and all profit is zero. It is probably materially impossible to get to that terminal point before revolution or some other system collapse state, but the profit trend is the visible part of this process actually being carried out. The shuffling around of wealth can happen in a million different ways that represent localized high profit periods and activities, but the tendency of profits to ultimately collapse is due to, and a reflection of, the tendency of capital to ultimately accumulate. It is, specifically, the profit motive that determines all actions within capitalism.
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May 13, 2024 19:25
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can anyone recommend me some good reading about yugoslavia from a materialist historical perspective? I was still young when the war happened, but from what I can see and the testimonies of my family and their friends, it was a much better system than the increasingly privatized neolib hellscape most ex-yugoslav countries find themselves in now. so it's kind of wild to me to see how a lot of the people from the younger generation in this area seem to buy into lib propaganda about yugoslavia being "totalitarian" and bad all while paying 750 euros rent for a lovely one bedroom apartment etc
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May 14, 2024 09:16
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hey mom its 420 posted:can anyone recommend me some good reading about yugoslavia from a materialist historical perspective? I was still young when the war happened, but from what I can see and the testimonies of my family and their friends, it was a much better system than the increasingly privatized neolib hellscape most ex-yugoslav countries find themselves in now. Тражим и ја, али не налазим ништа.  e: I mostly get by on decent scraps from a bunch of different things I wouldn't recomend otherwise, OR specific documents regarding specific history of things I know about personally to some level. my dad has issued a correction as of 10:19 on May 14, 2024 |
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May 14, 2024 10:17
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dzesi ba druze! but yeah, I imagine it’s gonna be hard to find some quality analysis on the subject. I’ve been meaning to read parenti’s book on yugoslavia, even though it’s more of an analysis of the fall of yuga than its functioning over the decades
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May 14, 2024 11:41
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I have experienced the trpf first hand in a past industry I worked in. When you see it once you start to notice it all over the place. I worked at a company that made products / services for other companies. Eventually down the chain is a common commodity you all are familiar with. I had some technological improvements such that by using our products our customers could improve the efficiency of a part of their process. It basically allowed them to replace a manual process with something less manual, resulting in a reduction in labor required. We priced this product slightly below the labor intensive alternative - whatever we thought was sufficient to get customers to adopt our product. As a hypothetical, say the old standard way of doing things cost $100 to our customer, of which $60 went into labor/equipment costs. A profit of $40. Our new way of doing things cost $20 in labor/equipment, and we priced it at $80 for a profit of $60. We reduce our customers costs and make more profit, and we also get to lay people off. Seems to contradict the trpf right? This works for a moment. Most customers switch over to the new way of doing things because its cheaper. We have margins that were described as 'succulent' in internal conversations. I think its Bezos that is now quoted with the age old observation, "Your margin is my opportunity" and so fast forward a few years and all our competitors have caught up. Due to this new pricing pressure the thing we sold for $80 we now sell for $40 and our profit is a measly $20. Ok so the profit in our little slice of the world is lower, but hasnt that all just shifted to our customers who in effect have now replaced something that cost them $100 with something that costs $40 meaning they reap the reward? No actually, because they have their own competitors and their increase in margin has drawn other people into the space looking to scrape some of it off for themselves. Now there are ways to attempt to maintain margins. Anti-competitive practices like price fixing (some of this actually came out in the news recently!), wrapping up technology in IP, increasing the exploitation of labor by leveraging all the people this technology made unemployed, etc. At the end of the day the companies fight to maintain margins on a shrinking pile of money. It ebbs and flows as new technology arises and companies fight for position and leverage, but there is a certain gravity to it that everyone struggles against.
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May 14, 2024 13:25
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Acelerion posted:I have experienced the trpf first hand in a past industry I worked in. When you see it once you start to notice it all over the place. congratulations, you have advanced to the next level of capitalism: “we’ll make it up in volume”
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May 14, 2024 13:32
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was reading about the 1964 split in the indian communist party and discovered there were several dozen more communists parties in india before this split its kind of unbelievable how strong they were compared to now
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May 14, 2024 15:36
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:The tendency of profit to fall is due to the inevitability of profit ultimately trending towards zero because of capital accumulation (a bit of exercise given recent topics then) And in advanced Marxism, this is where the value-form question shows up and what informs the current theoretician work in China: the transformation of the Dengist capitalist slingshot of production and accumulation of exchange-values for capital formation towards the all-out effort into comprehensive and in-depth industrial production and technological capability, or of capacity of use-value. It's what foreign Marxists also attest from analyzing along Party's theoreticians and discussing with them. This is one of the fundamental Marxist aspects of Xi Jinping's tenure and the present CPC. This transition into an economy oriented towards use-value in the way it is going now is unprecedented, uncharted territory. China keeps building industrial infrastructure and productive power while economists in the USA are screaming murder about how that makes no sense and it is unfair, because they are seeing things entirely in terms of exchange-value and accumulation: why build more capacity if you are so dominant already? If you think it in terms of use-value, having more industrial capacity allows to satisfy more necessities and to have greater possibilities of economic development: they miss the entirety of economic structural factors built for the BYD car and its price tag.
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May 14, 2024 16:07
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AnimeIsTrash posted:was reading about the 1964 split in the indian communist party and discovered there were several dozen more communists parties in india before this split was it caused by the sino-india war?
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May 14, 2024 16:30
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Mandel Brotset posted:congratulations, you have advanced to the next level of capitalism: “we’ll make it up in volume” So this is why I use Musk and Bezos as my capitalists. I don't know if I agree that speed increases is actually easier to achieve at a scientific level than longevity. But from a capitalist owner perspective, speed can quickly create a volume that allows a capitalist to create artificial barriers to box out competition, which also creates more funding for speed over longevity. Musk uses volume to abuse legal systems to box others out. Outside of that, planned obsolescence existed in America at least even when Marx was writing. Western business schools will teach about the Boston light bulb companies, realizing their products were so good they couldn't sell more. Machine sellers obviously are aware and utilize this strategy as well. In capitalism, regulation is really the only way to deter these strategies, and as we clearly see today, regulation as a strategy has a lot of exploitable flaws.
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May 14, 2024 17:27
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Related, something I find extremely frustrating under modern western capitalism has been the extreme resistance to green products. In general, green products have shorter lifespans and larger exploitable labor to fixed capital (profit) returns. AFAIK Goldman is the only major player pushing for green to increase profits, and they have large internal conflict over it still.
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May 14, 2024 17:30
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Pentecoastal Elites posted:The tendency of profit to fall is due to the inevitability of profit ultimately trending towards zero because of capital accumulation. "Profit" isn't a thing created ex nihilo due to industry, it is a quantification of wealth transfer: any behavior that generates profit moves wealth (from whatever source) to whatever entity collects the profit. As capital continues to accumulate, the only profit growth happens further up the chain and more and more exclusively in the domains of near, and then actual, monopolistic enterprises, and then finally within that strata until all capital has been accumulated in a kind of systemic heat death and all profit is zero. It is probably materially impossible to get to that terminal point before revolution or some other system collapse state, but the profit trend is the visible part of this process actually being carried out. this is a major point to keep in mind with the trpf in the short term you can always have some improvement that increases profits but today's profits are tomorrows investments and those investments require returns, tending to drive the rate of profit down
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May 14, 2024 17:41
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dead gay comedy forums posted:(a bit of exercise given recent topics then) i gotta learn mandarin.
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May 14, 2024 17:41
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah to the point of literally using terms like entropy lmao and a cross disciplinary paper comes out a day later https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/new-work-extends-the-thermodynamic-theory-of-computation
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May 14, 2024 21:07
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mila kunis posted:was it caused by the sino-india war? yes, also the sino/soviet split and there were also internal differences on if the CPI should support the INC
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May 14, 2024 22:05
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Pf. Hikikomoriarty posted:this is a major point to keep in mind with the trpf It's almost like Marxism is based in a physical reality with inescapable laws that dictate outcomes...
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May 14, 2024 23:12
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hey mom its 420 posted:can anyone recommend me some good reading about yugoslavia from a materialist historical perspective? I was still young when the war happened, but from what I can see and the testimonies of my family and their friends, it was a much better system than the increasingly privatized neolib hellscape most ex-yugoslav countries find themselves in now. George Szamuely's Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia is a good account of the war and NATO's dirty dealings therein, at least, and can now be found on the usual book-nabbin' sites Aeolius has issued a correction as of 16:27 on May 15, 2024 |
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May 15, 2024 16:23
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dead gay comedy forums posted:(a bit of exercise given recent topics then) there are a hundred caveats but China may really be able to execute the ultimate economic coup and take the entire thing out from under us, and they might actually be able to do it in a way where the US provides no real resistance because everyone who would have launched the bombs on the grounds of maintaining capital hegemony will have long since been bought out (migrated to a living profit center), and then just cut the fuckin head off the thing and transition to a planned economy. If we survive the next 500 years people should probably be talking about Deng and his cohort in the same way we talk about Marx and Engles or, like, Jesus Christ and the disciples. Provided they can actually pull it off, anyway. that aside, it's a really great illustration of why the profit motive inexorably locks all firms (all economic actors period, really) into one specific pattern of behavior of short term profit maximalization, even if they consciously know it will be disastrous in the long run. There is no possible action besides maximizing short-term shareholder profit, and if you don't dedicate 100% of your efforts to that you will be ousted and replaced with some other even more dead-eyed mckinsey guy who will.
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May 15, 2024 17:25
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Zodium posted:i gotta learn mandarin.
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May 16, 2024 01:36
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FYI anyone looking for history in g.a. cohen’s “Karl Marx’s theory of history” will be sorely disappointed
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May 16, 2024 21:16
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are there useful/interesting generalizations to be had in describing how ancient chattel slavery gave way to systems of corvee and (eventually) serfdom? like, are there worthwhile sweeping statements to be made about how chattel is only really suited as the basis of specific kinds of agrarian economics, ones without extensive need for difficult to directly overseer work like artisanry, forestry, and bureaucracy? or were the transitions of chattel empires towards other relations too context-specific to describe in broad or universal terms?
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May 17, 2024 02:54
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stumblebum posted:are there useful/interesting generalizations to be had in describing how ancient chattel slavery gave way to systems of corvee and (eventually) serfdom? like, are there worthwhile sweeping statements to be made about how chattel is only really suited as the basis of specific kinds of agrarian economics, ones without extensive need for difficult to directly overseer work like artisanry, forestry, and bureaucracy? or were the transitions of chattel empires towards other relations too context-specific to describe in broad or universal terms? i only know about rome but what happened there was that slaves were taken during conquests and in the 100s AD the conquests stopped and the empire even contracted a bit. roman slaves weren't quite chattel and since the children of slaves in rome were freemen the number of slaves kept going down over time. luckily there were plenty of poor italians they could convert into serfs just sitting around rome doing nothing from when they were kicked off their land by rich senators in the republic period i assume the same happened in other slave labor empires where slave status wasn't passed down to the next generation like it was in the USA but i don't know for sure
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May 17, 2024 15:56
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