Alright, I get the idea. The noble ideas of communism will garner no support from this board. Nobody is going to defend the legacy of Stalin. Go revise Marxism all you want, I'll come up with trolls targeted for a more liberal audience.
roseweird posted:i posted that i was a libertarian-socialist in another thread. what is wrong with revising marx?
i don't understand why you are so eager for someone to construct a defense of stalinism. maybe you are secretly a stalinist and want someone to show you the way? why do you expect everyone here to be stalinists and get angry when they aren't?
Because that's what I came here for. If I wanted to talk to trots I would go on sites like this and have conversations like these. Unfortunately I was wrong and Rhizzone holds a variety of viewpoints, none of them as amusing as Leninism.
It's really hard to troll people who lack fixed, dogmatic beliefs, otherwise they're willing to give ground and "debate" you which really isn't fun most of the time.
ed: If we were to talk about libertarian socialism for example, I would lose because I have nothing to say. Most people who care about these things agree with the idea of worker cooperatives and so forth in principle. The reason why it never happens is because people aren't going to put themselves at personal risk in direct action or even spend time volunteering to run syndicalist unions or revolutionary parties.
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roseweird posted:i think people actually just have fixed beliefs that you aren't bothering to learn about or engage with
They have to be interesting fixed beliefs though, I'm hoping your ideology isn't all about creating the antithesis of the Ubermensch.
For example the problem with the idea of surplus value is that there's no practical way to compute it. I've never seen a Marxist put forth specific values for "S" or "V" in a real economy let alone show how this principle justifies any specific policy. In practice the notion of "surplus value" seems to mean "anyone who makes more money than I do should give it to me".
mustang do you have some kind of disorder where unlike most people you find reading words harder than writing them
This is what I mean. You'll never actually define what exactly surplus value is or how to calculate it IRL.
It'll forever be some mythical concept you cling to, to justify your envy of the elite.
mustang posted:mustang do you have some kind of disorder where unlike most people you find reading words harder than writing them
This is what I mean. You'll never actually define what exactly surplus value is or how to calculate it IRL.
It'll forever be some mythical concept you cling to, to justify your envy of the elite.
You realize that exploitation doesn't systematically constitute a bully stealing your lunch money, right?
Surplus value is the difference between the value of the commodities the worker makes and the value of the worker's labor power, with value being measured in average (social) duration. Capiche?
This is just more sophistry. Again, you have no way of quantifying these variables or using them to justify specific policies.
You realize that exploitation doesn't systematically constitute a bully stealing your lunch money, right?
In the Marxist psyche, it probably does.
iwc, the teenage years
At least my teenhood is contained in my teenage years and I'm not having a Marxist extended adolescence.
Someone earlier objected that it would be "stupid" to calculate surplus value in a feudal society. That's actually correct. It would be "stupid" to calculate exploitation in a feudal society, or in any society, because surplus value is as unscientific and emotionally manipulative a concept as Mises.org "natural rights".
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i'm with you, mustang. i don't see what value marx brings to the subject. i mean, it's mathematically true that labour creates profit, but everyone knows that. no one thinks that somehow profit is created out of thin air. the problem is that the process in making a profit is so complex, and so little of it actually has to do with the factory labour of some chinese kids or whatever, that there's not much use in talking about surplus value in such ways. true ideology is thinking that you can just get rid of all the additional parts of the whole process (management, advertising, insurance, banking) and somehow you'll still be left with the person making shoes. don't think so!!!!
So what exactly are you saying Getfiscal, that surplus value = corporate profits?
Then that only justifies taxes on corporate profits, and it doesn't even prevent Marxism from being retarded because a 100% tax on corporate profits leaves no income left over for investment.
getfiscal posted:i'm with you, mustang. i don't see what value marx brings to the subject. i mean, it's mathematically true that labour creates profit, but everyone knows that. no one thinks that somehow profit is created out of thin air. the problem is that the process in making a profit is so complex, and so little of it actually has to do with the factory labour of some chinese kids or whatever, that there's not much use in talking about surplus value in such ways. true ideology is thinking that you can just get rid of all the additional parts of the whole process (management, advertising, insurance, banking) and somehow you'll still be left with the person making shoes. don't think so!!!!
open wide fringus here comes the choo choo
There is no way to actually calculate surplus value. If you're a women's studies professor getting paid $80,000 a year, and a janitor making half as much comes along telling you you're an overpaid bourgeois swine, what are you going to say? How are you going to justify your surplus value so you can afford to keep writing women's studies studies?
mustang posted:There is no way to actually calculate surplus value. If you're a women's studies professor getting paid $80,000 a year, and a janitor making half as much comes along telling you you're an overpaid bourgeois swine, what are you going to say? How are you going to justify your surplus value so you can afford to keep writing women's studies studies?
she would have blown her rape whistle before the janitor opened his mouth
I don't intentionally link there, there's some autoparse thing.
roseweird posted:most women's studies professors are adjuncts and make around $20,000 per year when they start, maybe $25-30k a little later on. just like in most fields
I think once you get a good following going, get into Harvard and rack up appearance fees you can get considerably more. Either way there's no way to say it's not pure surplus value, professorial salaries usually come out of an institutional endowment granted by some rich person. And even Bill Gates claims he contributes to society and his salary is warranted.
mustang posted:This is just more sophistry. Again, you have no way of quantifying these variables or using them to justify specific policies.
It's quantified in duration.
The difficulty is that value, and thus surplus value are what regulate production in the future – not the present. They can't be read off a commodity like a price. You can only know the rate of exploitation or surplus value after sale in the market, because value is not so much 'contained' in a commodity, but a relation that helps regulate what commodities will be produced in the next round, and in what ratios based on their market exchange values.
So, if exploitation is only possible after the commodity is finished and sold, how are the workers' labor being exploited? The answer, I think, is that the division of the value of a commodity into labor power (wages) and surplus value (profit, rent, taxes , interest), correspond to social claims by different classes based on the property rights in the society. Exploitation can be thought of as a kind of appropriation. Any society with above a low level of technology and organization is going to produce a material surplus (not necessarily surplus value, just a surplus over what they had before), and a state and legal superstructure grow up alongside this material surplus to direct who appropriates what portion of this surplus. That workers only have property in their laboring time in capitalist society is shown in their claim to only what is materially sufficient to reproduce their labor (the wage), while the capitalist's property in the machines and knowledge of production, and not a contribution of laboring time, entitles them to a claim on the surplus.
most people don't make what harvard teachers make, most people never teach at harvard. you just wanted to make a "lol women's studies" joke. the problem you point to has long preexisted women's studies, it is the problem of why ancient societies supported kings and priests in the first place
Probably the same reason support Dr. Phil or Princess Di, people like having someone to look up to. Ancient society is really awesome though, democracy and technology ruined culture.
So, if exploitation is only possible after the commodity is finished and sold, how are the workers' labor being exploited? The answer, I think, is that the division of the value of a commodity into labor power (wages) and surplus value (profit, rent, taxes , interest), correspond to social claims by different classes based on the property rights in the society. Exploitation can be thought of as a kind of appropriation. Any society with above a low level of technology and organization is going to produce a material surplus (not necessarily surplus value, just a surplus over what they had before), and a state and legal superstructure grow up alongside this material surplus to direct who appropriates what portion of this surplus. That workers only have property in their laboring time in capitalist society is shown in their claim to only what is materially sufficient to reproduce their labor (the wage), while the capitalist's property in the machines and knowledge of production, and not a contribution of laboring time, entitles them to a claim on the surplus.
So let me clarify this. We can divide national income into wages and "surplus value", with surplus value being the sum of profit, rent, taxes, and interest. These are all easily measurable values counted in GDP. It makes sense that taxes are counted as surplus value because the liberal state is a tyrannical institution but whatever.
The problem with this definition is that it doesn't really justify the slave morality Marxism advocates. For example, some managers make millions of dollars in salary which is counted as wage income. Likewise, some companies pay their production line employees in profit sharing schemes. Even janitors can receive most of their wage in "surplus value" even though the distinction between stock dividends and wages is academic in this case. And there are things like self-employment and freelancing which blur categorization entirely.
If we use your definition of surplus value it actually doesn't do much to advance the social revolution or whatever. We're back to the problem of the Marxist concept of exploitation just being a way to feel morally superior to people who make more money than you. But I don't accuse you of this, because I think you honestly tried to make the concept of surplus value valid.
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