Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong, as usual. The proved-false Labor Theory of Value antedates Marx by several decades.
It has *not* been 'proven false' -- let's put it *this* way: Labor needs to sustain itself for decades, generations, centuries, and millenia into the future otherwise it won't exist to do the socially necessary things that society needs from it. This continued sustainability requires a certain material cost, usually known as 'wages'.
But the ownership class does not simply hand-down the full labor value, in wages, of what that labor-power, and its products, are sold for on the market. Instead it keeps the 'surplus labor value', beyond the straightforward costs of what labor requires to reproduce itself, going-forward.
So the labor theory of value has *not* been refuted.
[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit
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Truth To Power wrote:
Production is typically private, not social.
Yes, and that's the problem. 'Social production' denotes the meaning of 'What the people of a society require for their consumption for their organic and social sustainability.'
Truth To Power wrote:
Whose product rightly becomes the property of whoever pays them for it. Property rights are conserved in consensual transactions.
You're making an empirical description here with no critique -- you seem to politically *support* private-property rights and the private-property bourgeois rights to private control over (mass industrial) production.
Truth To Power wrote:
Intellectual property is a government-issued and -enforced privilege, not a service.
A "privilege" -- ? No, it's better-described as a component of bourgeois ruling-class superstructural *hegemony*, or a service to a certain kind of property owner, that of 'intellectual property'.
Truth To Power wrote:
Do socialists really think such nonsense constitutes an argument?
Well who still believes in 'trickle-down' / supply-side arguments, aside from those elites who actually benefit from it?
The problem of income inequality isn't with 'supply' issues, because capitalist commodity production actually tends towards *overproduction* -- the problem is in how markets *distribute* the products of commodity production, which is to-those-who-can-afford-them, and not to those who may happen to have real organic and social *unmet needs* for such products.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, that is a fabrication on your part. Labor is provided by the worker, producer goods (classically called, "capital") are provided by their owners, natural resources are provided by nature. The relevant fact, which both capitalists AND SOCIALISTS try to deny, obscure, and make invisible, is that producer goods would not be available to the production process if their owners did not contribute them, while natural resources WOULD still be available for production even if their owners had never existed.
This is merely *social convention* -- the world's economy doesn't *have* to work on this concept and practice of 'exchange values', including capital / producer goods.
You're sounding as bad as any capitalist apologist and you're not even holding up your own stated politics of '[speaking] truth to power'.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Wealth makes *no* 'contribution' to the process of production,
Truth To Power wrote:
That's just self-evidently false, absurd, and disingenuous. Producer goods are indisputably wealth that aids production, and unlike natural resources, those goods would not be available for production if their owners had not produced and contributed them.
The term 'contribution' connotes some kind of charity, and that's the meaning of the term that I was critiquing.
Also, due to the labor theory of value, the producers are not even so much providing any *material* means, as much as they're displaying their collections of stolen labor value that they have.
Truth To Power wrote:
?? What on earth do you incorrectly imagine you think you might be talking about? The exact same is true of labor: if it did not contribute more to production than it cost to contribute it, it would not be contributed.
Nope -- this is where your conception / politics is *flawed* -- capital and labor cannot be considered as rough *equivalents* just because they're both involved in the de-facto capitalistic productive process, at times to supply to social necessity.
Labor is different because it has *organic* and social requirements for material *consumption* (food, shelter, etc.), whereas capital does not. Capital can just sit around and receive rent and interest payments for its sheer existence, with negligible costs, if any, involved. In this way we can call workers 'wage slaves' because they *must* receive wages, for their life and living, and social reproduction going-forward, whereas capital *has no* such requirements.
Truth To Power wrote:
No, that's just absurd Marxist nonsense directly contradicted by indisputable objective fact. Providing labor with access to economic opportunity that would not otherwise be available, as the capital goods' owner does, is not exploitation, sorry.
Economic 'opportunity', as though the capital owner doesn't *depend* on labor-power for the sake of production and profits -- ? You're merely spinning the situation around to make it sound somehow *personal*, when it's *not*.
People are employed by the billions worldwide as a basic component of capitalism's functioning. This isn't so much about 'opportunity' as it is about *necessity*, since workers require wages as a resource to their adequate life and living. Real economic opportunity has to do with who gets to benefit from capital, and why.
Expolitation is the systematic expropriation of surplus labor value, into private hands, for every hour of work performed (sold) to the employers / bosses.
Truth To Power wrote:
It can ONLY be of BENEFIT to the worker.
Tell that to the workers who have lost their lives on-the-job.
Truth To Power wrote:
It is private ownership of LAND that deprives the worker of his liberty, alternatives, and thus bargaining power, not private ownership of capital goods.
You're trying to make it sound as though all land is the same -- but I think the land that has factories on it has better industrial productive capacities. Private ownership of capital goods is the same as 'equities', and can realize profit-making from the process of industrial production, including the systematic exploitation of workers' labor power.
Truth To Power wrote:
Socialists simply refuse to know the fact that offering people access to economic opportunity they would not otherwise have is different from DEPRIVING them of economic opportunity they WOULD otherwise have.
'Offering people access to economic opportunity' is still *spinning* the concept in favor of *ownership* interests, because unemployment still continues to exist, exacerbating income inequality, and revealing the class divide.
Again, there's no 'tabula rasa' / blank-slate default situation (of an implied *lack* of 'economic opportunity' for worker employment) since capital *depends* on labor and its exploitation for the functioning of its capitalist system.
Truth To Power wrote:
[Socialists] literally cannot tell the difference between giving people something and stealing something from them.
No socialist has stolen anything from me, unlike my past employers -- you're implying *criminality* here, which is an untrue stereotyping of socialist politics.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Instead of truthfully *acknowledging* this economic-growth dynamic,
Truth To Power wrote:
I just proved it isn't true.
Yes, the economy *does* expand over decades and generations -- you're deluded to think otherwise.
Truth To Power wrote:
The ruling class's interests are based on ownership of privilege, not capital goods, because capital goods don't yield any unearned return.
You're *definitely* an apologist for capitalism -- yes, ownership of capital goods is what the ruling class' interests are, and is what gives them economic privilege over those who *don't* have capital, and who must sell their / our own labor to bosses for a wage, for access to the means of life and living.
Truth To Power wrote:
That is a fabrication on your part.
More fabrications.
Another fabrication.
Here's the *point* -- you're dogmatically and erroneously attached to this idea that the sum total of the world economy's exchange-values (asset valuations) somehow neatly lines-up to the world's sum total of people / population, and that it never *expands*. By being incorrect you're positing a false material situation for the sake of your dog-eat-dog concept, probably for the sake of guilt-tripping those on the bottom who have never *had* access to any useful ownership of capital.
You're not acknowledging that the world economy *expands*, sometimes in line with world population growth, sometimes *lagging behind* world population growth (effectively a *shrinking* of the world economy, per capita), and sometimes *outpacing* world population growth, meaning that more value is put into circulation, per-capita.
I happen to have an illustration that's relevant here, an economic critique of Marx's 'labor vouchers' formulation, for the same reason:
Pies Must Line Up
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Truth To Power wrote:
That is self-evidently false. Natural resources must ALREADY be -- and are -- appropriate for human use BEFORE labor can do anything with them. This is self-evident and indisputable. You just have to find some way of not knowing it, because you have already realized that it proves your beliefs are false and evil.
I don't have any subjective 'beliefs' about any of this stuff.
How, then, can you explain the existence of a common *table* -- ? Tables don't grow in nature, they have to be designed and fashioned from *wood* from *trees*, which *do* grow from nature, and require human labor-power for their manufacture.
Ditto for any other human-used goods or services. Even taking anything 'finished' from nature, like agricultural goods, requires human labor for the sake of *removing* it from nature and *transporting* it to the end-user / consumer.
Truth To Power wrote:
False. I have made it very clear, many times, that the owner of capital goods provides them to the production process, while the owner of natural resources only DEPRIVES others of access to those resources unless they pay him for permission to do what they would otherwise have been at liberty to do.
Well since you're upholding bourgeois private property rights, this is what happens as a result -- you're unable to distinguish the private ownership of land from the private ownership of production goods (factories).
Your critique of land-only implies that people could still privately own *factories*, but on de-privatized land, which would result in a paradigm that's hardly different from what we have today, *with* private ownership of land. Those who could afford to buy equities / factories would, and would seek to *monopolize* each particular industry that they produce for, using the exploitation of labor.
This is why the *revolutionary* position makes sense, because it calls for the *overthrow* of *all* private property ownership, so that the *workers* control what's produced for societal consumption, and what's not.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
This is a bullshit, alarmist exaggerated claim, that a populist-type single-tax on land value would be enough to threaten the institution of private property altogether
Truth To Power wrote:
That is another fabrication. It would only threaten -- in fact, remove -- wrongful property in natural resources, not rightful property in the fruits of one's labor.
The problem with your propertarian politics is that you're ignoring the *role of labor* -- natural resources don't *extract themselves* for human usage, it takes human *labor* to do that, thereby *commodifying* whatever natural resources are being extracted from nature, for sale to others.
Labor itself doesn't *require* property, mostly because it doesn't already *own* the means of production that it has to work on, as laborers. Labor is treated as a *commodity*, like any other, even though it's *real people* that have to serve the interests of capital for the sake of their / our own life and living, from a wage (without receiving the full market value of their labor that they've sold to the employer).
You're just making an unserious facile promise here, based on *nothing*.
Truth To Power wrote:
I.e., facts that you cannot refute.
(See the previous point.)
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ckaihatsu wrote:
We're back to the faux-infighting-schism ruse of good-capital-(equities)-versus-bad-capital-(rentier capital), as if the system of capitalism could somehow favor one form over the other, when in fact both types operate cohesively to exploit wage-labor of its labor-value -- class warfare.
Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong again. Equities are just ownership shares. They can be ownership of capital goods, production systems, rent collection privileges, or any combination thereof.
Truth To Power wrote:
The term, "rentier capital" indicates a refusal to know the difference between capital goods and rent collection privileges.
Just because you frame the ownership of assets as being 'rent collection privileges' doesn't *change* its nature -- it's still ownership of rentier capital, which means that, economically, it receives interest and/or rent payments just because it exists. 'Equities' more-regularly refers to ownership of a share of capital that's actively used in the production of commodities, for capital gains, by exploiting labor-power.
Truth To Power wrote:
Wrong again. Ownership of capital goods obtains no return beyond what is contributed to production. Ownership of privilege obtains returns without any commensurate contribution to production.
*Of course* capital receives more than it puts-in, otherwise there'd be no economic *incentive* for its involvement -- the gain in value is derived from the economic exploitation of labor ('surplus labor value'), for profits.
You're trying to make it sound like rentier-type profits are the result of aristocratic-type 'privileges', when in this day and age it's sheerly *economic*, with the political superstructure / paradigm existing to *enforce* those bourgeois, capital-based 'rights', with, and up-to *military* force and destruction.
Truth To Power wrote:
Value IS what a thing would exchange for. That is what it means in economics.
But market-based 'pricing' is *ignoring* the regular, systematic input of the material *labor* that created the good or service in the first place.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Neoclassical theory, then, as stated, fundamentally *ignores* the role of labor in the production of the commodity in the first place.
Truth To Power wrote:
Nonsense. What neoclassical economics ignores is the difference between providing a contribution to production that would not otherwise have been available and legally withholding what would otherwise be available to production by dint of privilege.
So you're simply anti-aristocratic, which was from a historical reality *centuries* ago.
The world has since moved to *industrial* production, with the world's commodified workers having a large role in how the machines are run, but without adequate *compensation* for the mass industrial production that they create. Capital goods play a lesser and lesser role in the capitalist production process the more that technology develops and is relied-upon for the material production of commodities (see the 'Business' diagram, above).