Ask a Red III

[Hygro]

What's wrong with trying to offer a technical answer when last time it got passed up?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

What's wrong with trying to offer a technical answer when last time it got passed up?

The question is presumably being asked to a Red, and thus a Red's answer is presumably sought. Else it would not have been asked in Ask a Red. There is a certain amount of leeway involved, certainly, but we reserve the right to determine how much that is. There are some non-Reds who we feel do a good job of representing our position or understanding of things, who we permit to contribute on our end of things. There are others who we do not. This may not be entirely fair to the perhaps existent expertise of some people, but I'm not really concerned with fairness here. It is a socialist maxim, after all, that confidence is good, but control is better.

 

[dutchfire]

Thanks Cheezy. If you don't mind, I have some follow-up questions that might be a bit naive too.

This all seems to suggest that if I can make a very nicely polished turd with X hours of work, or a car, that a car and a polished turd are worth the same. That seems non-nonsensical to me. Clearly a car is worth more than a polished turd.

Is there anything in the theory accounting for different 'costs' of labour? The labour of a trained expert might be considered more valuable than that of an uneducated man, though I suppose you communists disagree. Even so, an hour of my labour the morning after I went to a bar is clearly worth less than an hour of my labour when I'm sober. How does the theory cope with that?

Services like soldiery, the priesthood, lawyers, performers, and the government, whose utility lay only in their immediate consumption, fell into this category.

As was somewhat touched upon in the Twinkie thread, I was wondering which professions also fall in this category. Barbers? Teachers? Architects? Inventors? Physicians? Scientists?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Thanks Cheezy. If you don't mind, I have some follow-up questions that might be a bit naive too.

This all seems to suggest that if I can make a very nicely polished turd with X hours of work, or a car, that a car and a polished turd are worth the same. That seems non-nonsensical to me. Clearly a car is worth more than a polished turd.

It is up to the purchaser. His purchase is what deems the object to be socially necessary. A polished turd might appear to be valueless if no one buys it, but is a finely-cut diamond also valueless if no one will buy it? I think so. Engagement in the marketplace is a social transaction, not merely a monetary one.

Is there anything in the theory accounting for different 'costs' of labour? The labour of a trained expert might be considered more valuable than that of an uneducated man, though I suppose you communists disagree. Even so, an hour of my labour the morning after I went to a bar is clearly worth less than an hour of my labour when I'm sober. How does the theory cope with that?

Well, labor value is the manifestation of human labor-power in an object. But the ability of a worker to produce something in a certain amount of time is also a social force, since it sets a standard for others. If it takes one man an hour to make a chair leg, but it takes another 20 minutes, they will obviously not be paid the same, as one man is producing three times the amount of products as the other. We could thusly describe the hour-taking man as inefficient compared to the other. Traitorfish should probably finish answering this part of the question, as my knowledge doesn't cover how labor value relates to time, whereas I know his does.

As was somewhat touched upon in the Twinkie thread, I was wondering which professions also fall in this category. Barbers? Teachers? Architects? Inventors? Physicians? Scientists?

I think, under Smith's definition, strictly speaking, yes. But I also think that, in the case of an architect or designer, the cost of employing them is an aliquot cost of production. They themselves produce nothing, but they do help to produce something of value.

And, of course, society may deem something necessary and desirable as it wishes. This definition doesn't mean that something is without use or purpose, merely that something doesn't create new wealth.

 

[ace99]

Yo sup

What do you account for the drop-off in support from blacks? The Communist message has of course had great resonance at certain points in time, Eugene Debs spoke of it, there were the Black Panthers, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson, and Angela Davis. Currently you still have Stewart Alexander or James Harris running on SPUSA or Socialist Workers tickets, but it hardly reflects in the polls. I'd wager that it's white college kids voting for those parties along with old guard.

I had a professor who thought that the CPUSA could and should have focused on the black community, and urban areas in running candidates and expressing their message and could have actually even won some elections if they had done that.

 

[Agent327]

The Black Panthers weren't Communist FYI.

JEELEN, you do not have permission to answer in this thread. Please do not answer questions in this thread directed at Reds.

You have a personal beef with me or are you just deliberately ignoring all other posters? The question I answered was a repost and directed at "anyone". Literally.

 

[ace99]

They had Marxist inspiration or some manner of socialist thought. Look at some of the points of their ten point program, same stuff with racialist language:

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over 50 million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

 

[Domen]

Always so eager to demonstrate how much you learned from your father and/or teacher

That data was from the newspaper not from my father and/or teacher.

and yet you never learned the maxim: "if you have nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all."

If everybody was using this maxim, then noone could say anything true about, for example, murderers. Or about, for example, the Stalinist regime. Why should we say only nice things about something which simply was not nice (like, for example, the Soviet Communist regime?).

 

[Mouthwash]

Under your system, are the leaders chosen or are they elected by the public?

 

[potatokiosk]

I have a question for people of the Communist persuasion. It may have been asked before, because I haven't read every post in all three "Ask a Red" threads. If workers are being exploited, why don't they just seek employment elsewhere? Maybe find another employer who will agree to exploit them less? I'm at a loss as to how workers can be exploited in a competitive market. I'd like to learn what Communists think on this matter.

 

[ace99]

Because:

<How the multiplication of needs and of the means (of their satisfaction) breeds the absence of needs and of means is demonstrated by the political economist (and by the capitalist: in general it is always empirical businessmen we are talking about when we refer to political economists, (who represent) their scientific creed and form of existence) as follows:

(1) By reducing the worker&#8217;s need to the barest and most miserable level of physical subsistence, and by reducing his activity to the most abstract mechanical movement; thus he says: Man has no other need either of activity or of enjoyment. For he declares that this life, too, is human life and existence.

(2) By counting the most meagre form of life (existence) as the standard, indeed, as the general standard &#8211; general because it is applicable to the mass of men. He turns the worker into an insensible being lacking all needs, just as he changes his activity into a pure abstraction from all activity. To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need &#8211; be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity &#8211; seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy &#8211; despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance &#8211; is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save &#8211; the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour &#8211; your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything ||XVI| which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power &#8211; all this it can appropriate for you &#8211; it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice. The worker may only have enough for him to want to live, and may only want to live in order to have that.>

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm

 

[Hygro]

I have a question for people of the Communist persuasion. It may have been asked before, because I haven't read every post in all three "Ask a Red" threads. If workers are being exploited, why don't they just seek employment elsewhere? Maybe find another employer who will agree to exploit them less? I'm at a loss as to how workers can be exploited in a competitive market. I'd like to learn what Communists think on this matter.

The same reason that a business in a competitive market can't charge whatever it wants, can't pay its owners whatever it wants, can't magically just do anything.

Competitive market does not equal fair market. It means a market that forces everything (aka profit) towards equilibrium. Equilibrium in capitalism doesn't really care much one way or the other about the people that make the system.

 

[potatokiosk]

The same reason that a business in a competitive market can't charge whatever it wants, can't pay its owners whatever it wants, can't magically just do anything.

Competitive market does not equal fair market. It means a market that forces everything (aka profit) towards equilibrium. Equilibrium in capitalism doesn't really care much one way or the other about the people that make the system.

But it's not considered exploitation when a business doesn't profit as much as it would like to.

 

[Hygro]

But it's not considered exploitation when a business doesn't profit as much as it would like to.

I know we gave corporations personhood but that doesn't mean we have to care about their feelings...

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Yo sup

I have no idea, honestly. Many of those people were part of a far more interesting time than ours. Activism today isn't as much centered around Black issues any more. One could ask today why far more homosexuals are liberal or leftist than are conservative, and the answer will be the same: those are the groups advancing the cause of those people. DuBois and Keller had a justified belief in their time that liberal politics and capitalist society could never fully liberate Blacks or females, and they were obviously not alone. I don't think that's an incorrect statement, even today, but back then it was far more "in your face" that the softer approach to the issue wasn't getting very far.

The Black Panthers weren't Communist FYI.

Initially they were not, but they fairly quickly switched to a more orthodox Marxist-Leninist platform.

You have a personal beef with me or are you just deliberately ignoring all other posters? The question I answered was a repost and directed at "anyone". Literally.

That's great and all, but this is a thread for questions to communists, which communists shall answer. I've given my justification for allowing certain other people to post "on our side," after being vetted by us. Most I do not.

That data was from the newspaper not from my father and/or teacher.

If everybody was using this maxim, then noone could say anything true about, for example, murderers. Or about, for example, the Stalinist regime. Why should we say only nice things about something which simply was not nice (like, for example, the Soviet Communist regime?).

This is not a debate thread. Please stop responding to posts in this thread, unless directed specifically at you.

Under your system, are the leaders chosen or are they elected by the public?

Democracy is to socialism as oxygen is to the body. It's not my system, it's the socialist system. An egalitarian society founded upon principles of cooperative enterprise can only exist and function democratically.

I have a question for people of the Communist persuasion. It may have been asked before, because I haven't read every post in all three "Ask a Red" threads. If workers are being exploited, why don't they just seek employment elsewhere? Maybe find another employer who will agree to exploit them less? I'm at a loss as to how workers can be exploited in a competitive market. I'd like to learn what Communists think on this matter.

It's not the specifically low wage that one person gets screwed into taking, it's the system itself that is exploitative.

Follow me for a second. Companies make money by selling objects of value to people who value them. The price they sell at is derived from two things: 1, covering all the costs of production, and 2, a speculative price based upon perceived demand. The costs of production are literally every expense required to turn the object from a bunch of raw materials into the finished product that someone wants. Included in that cost are the costs of obtaining the raw materials, obtaining the machines required to change the raw materials into their finished product, the wear on the machines while they change that product, the cost of transporting the finished product to the market, and most importantly of all, the cost of the labor required to make all of this happen. It's the labor that matters the most, because it's the only human element involved. All those costs contribute value to the object, but it's the human interaction in the production process that changes the proverbial pile of building materials into a house.

And this is where the exploitation occurs. So the worker used the machines to turn the raw materials into the finished product, right? That describes a unique effort on his part. He did that. Just as the machine gave the object a small part of its value while it was used to make the object (when a machine is used, it wears, and that lost value must be imparted to whatever it's wearing on), so did the worker, his "value" being his capacity to perform labor. Where the problem lies is that, when this object gets sold, the worker is not reimbursed for his exertions. The capitalist, so named because he owns the capital [machines] used to make the object, and employs the workers [human capital,or labor capital] to work the machines, derives by virtue of property rights the right to the profits as well. He owns the machines and the labor, so he owns the profits, yet he contributed in no way to the creation of value of which he has reaped the rewards. He simply owns things, it's a piece of paper that gives him this right to as much of the profits as he cares to keep, and gives the miniscule rest to his workers as "compensation." Since the laborer has no capacity to own his own capital, he has no choice but to accept this tainted bargain. Thus, exploitation. The capitalist uses the laborer's need for money to extract as much labor from him as he can, and pays him as little as possible so as to maximally enrich himself.

Now, you might say that the worker should start his own business. Well I say: and do what? Let's suppose for the sake of argument that this worker did have the money to start his own business (which the vast, vast majority simply don't). What would he do? He would simply recreate the process, except with himself at the top, and some other people who were in the same position he was before, working for him. It simply recasts the same exploitative relationship but with a change of cast.

Now you might say to those workers, why not go start a business or work for yourselves? Again, ignoring the fact that most of them can't, let's say that they do. And let's continue that process again and again, until we've gone through the entire human race. What are we left with? We are left with a society in which no one works for anyone but himself, and everyone owns property. There is no mass-production, and there has been, by necessity, a massive redistribution of wealth. All this is decidedly uncapitalistic. So we can tell, then, that capitalism is by necessity both exploitative and creates inequality. Within that system, both are inescapable for humanity as a whole.

That is why we socialists believe in destroying this institution. It is not a matter of selfish escapism and hatred of "hard work," or jealousy of the rich and powerful, or anything else: it is a matter of liberating all of humanity.

 

[Traitorfish]

Under your system, are the leaders chosen or are they elected by the public?

What system?

 

[Takhisis]

Commusocialism. I actually think that by 'your {our} system' he means 'whatever form of socioeconomic organisation you think should replace the current one'.

 

[Traitorfish]

As a rule, I don't. That implies the ability to stand outside of history, to alienate ones perspective from ones historical being, which is really more of a Kantian than Marxian way of approaching these issues. Marx was insistent upon the necessity of historical perspective, and although he did argue that we in capitalist society enjoy a certain epistemological privilege in that we are able to look backwards upon previous societies with some degree of accuracy, this was understood as very much a one-way street. What he claims to see isn't a realised communist society, but rather the forces within capitalism that make communist society necessary.

 

[potatokiosk]

It's not the specifically low wage that one person gets screwed into taking, it's the system itself that is exploitative.

Follow me for a second. Companies make money by selling objects of value to people who value them. The price they sell at is derived from two things: 1, covering all the costs of production, and 2, a speculative price based upon perceived demand. The costs of production are literally every expense required to turn the object from a bunch of raw materials into the finished product that someone wants. Included in that cost are the costs of obtaining the raw materials, obtaining the machines required to change the raw materials into their finished product, the wear on the machines while they change that product, the cost of transporting the finished product to the market, and most importantly of all, the cost of the labor required to make all of this happen. It's the labor that matters the most, because it's the only human element involved. All those costs contribute value to the object, but it's the human interaction in the production process that changes the proverbial pile of building materials into a house.

How can you say labor is the only human element involved when humans obtained the raw materials, humans build and maintain the machines, and humans transport the finish product to the market? Humans provide the capital that workers use.

And this is where the exploitation occurs. So the worker used the machines to turn the raw materials into the finished product, right? That describes a unique effort on his part. He did that. Just as the machine gave the object a small part of its value while it was used to make the object (when a machine is used, it wears, and that lost value must be imparted to whatever it's wearing on), so did the worker, his "value" being his capacity to perform labor. Where the problem lies is that, when this object gets sold, the worker is not reimbursed for his exertions. The capitalist, so named because he owns the capital [machines] used to make the object, and employs the workers [human capital,or labor capital] to work the machines, derives by virtue of property rights the right to the profits as well. He owns the machines and the labor, so he owns the profits, yet he contributed in no way to the creation of value of which he has reaped the rewards. He simply owns things, it's a piece of paper that gives him this right to as much of the profits as he cares to keep, and gives the miniscule rest to his workers as "compensation." Since the laborer has no capacity to own his own capital, he has no choice but to accept this tainted bargain. Thus, exploitation. The capitalist uses the laborer's need for money to extract as much labor from him as he can, and pays him as little as possible so as to maximally enrich himself.

And how did the capitalist become owner of capital? By investing his money. When people invest, they make a decision that instead of using their purchasing power to consume now, they will consume later. But for the market for savings and investment to clear, it is usually necessary for one unit of present consumption to be valued at more than one unit of future consumption. Therefore investors receive a chunk of a firm's revenue instead of all of the revenue going to production costs.

Now, you might say that the worker should start his own business. Well I say: and do what? Let's suppose for the sake of argument that this worker did have the money to start his own business (which the vast, vast majority simply don't). What would he do? He would simply recreate the process, except with himself at the top, and some other people who were in the same position he was before, working for him. It simply recasts the same exploitative relationship but with a change of cast.

Let's say a worker saves his/her money and invests, becoming a capitalist to a small degree. What happens? Well the supply of savings is larger, so the real interest rate should fall, and profit margins across the board shrink.

Now you might say to those workers, why not go start a business or work for yourselves? Again, ignoring the fact that most of them can't, let's say that they do. And let's continue that process again and again, until we've gone through the entire human race. What are we left with? We are left with a society in which no one works for anyone but himself, and everyone owns property. There is no mass-production, and there has been, by necessity, a massive redistribution of wealth. All this is decidedly uncapitalistic. So we can tell, then, that capitalism is by necessity both exploitative and creates inequality. Within that system, both are inescapable for humanity as a whole.

That is why we socialists believe in destroying this institution. It is not a matter of selfish escapism and hatred of "hard work," or jealousy of the rich and powerful, or anything else: it is a matter of liberating all of humanity.

What is so bad about a system that rewards saving and investment with profit that you would feel the need to liberate all of humanity from it? It looks to me like your complaint is that labor gets paid its marginal product, when you think it is also entitled to capital's marginal product minus the cost of capital depreciation. But if we enforce a real interest rate of zero, and insist no one profit from investment, then investment will dry up and everyone will be poorer.

 

[Traitorfish]

How can you say labor is the only human element involved when humans obtained the raw materials, humans build and maintain the machines, and humans transport the finish product to the market? Humans provide the capital that workers use.

Are you claiming that these processes do themselves constitute labour?

What is so bad about a system that rewards saving and investment with profit that you would feel the need to liberate all of humanity from it?

Dictatorship of dead labour over living labour. Like having a political system where only corpses get to vote. It's not possible for people to pursue an authentic, fulfilling existence in that sort of set-up.