Staler87
Warlord
Everyone is a proletariat.
Everyone is a proletariat.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.
I realize that communist societies are classless. If anything that is why my argument is valid. If you have a physicist, then is he part of the proletariat?
"Machines were, it may be said, the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor."
The problem is Marx's definition of contribution to society did not include managing a business. He believed those that were merely leaching off of others physical labors were leaches. He strongly believed in social progressiveness (obviously) and (ironically) called his theory scientific socialism as he thought it was developed in a scientific method and he had great respect for the hard sciences. I'm not sure if Marx had any problem with scientists thinking things up, I don't see why he would, but he did have problems with useful things as those, in his mind, generally helped the bourgeoisie as opposed to the working people. In essence he viewed general intellectualism as an offshoot of the bourgeoisie class.
I'm not going to say there would be no technological progress in a Marxist society but there wouldn't be very much.
If you have a classless society, then is anyone part of the proletariat?
Everyone is a proletariat.
Except to be a (member of the) proletariat is to be dependent on the bourgeoisie; you might as well say everyone can be an employee without anyone being an employer.
And? How is that relevant? In a communist society the means of mental production would of course belong to all the people, that is everyone could look something up on the Internet and has free access to all forms of education. The means of mental production are of course used for ideology and propaganda in capitalism, but that doesn't mean they just stop existing all of a sudden in Communism, instead they become available to everyone. In Communism there is no separate intellectual class because everyone is somewhat of an intellectual.
Depends on how far we are willing to stretch the term proletariat. At its most basic, a proletarian is anyone who has nothing but their labor to sell in order to survive. The modern welfare state muddles definitions because he allows people to survive who neither work nor own property. A farmer for the most part is not a proletarian because he owns his farm and can just live off his own labor without selling it. A multimillionaire is not a proletarian because he is set for life and doesn't have to work at all. A physicist might very well be a Proletarian if he would end up homeless and starving if he doesn't teach and write books and do research on a regular basis.
I assume this quote refers to how industrialization made craftsmen obsolete by outproducing them.
The problem with intellectualism is that it serves the interests of the ruling class, once there is no more ruling class that it could serve I don't see why should be a problem.
So a society in which every one has free access to the entire knowledge of humanity and nobody is bogged down in doing pointless busywork would be worse at technological progress than one where only a small minority has that freedom while the vast majority is in a daily struggle just to survive?
Nobody is Proletariat because nobody has to sell their labor in order to survive, which as I said is the definition of the term.
Staler87 said:The knowledge is already available to everyone
Staler87 said:So farmers don't sell their products?
Multimillionaires either worked hard to get to that point (meritocracy) or inherited it.
Staler87 said:Either way we need people to manage companies. Division of labour results in efficiency as everyone learns how to do their one task really well. The managers and owners do their part and the workers do theirs. The owners should make more as they take the associated risks with running a business, and it requires more skill to run a business than to work for one.
Staler87 said:in Canada we have something called a meritocracy where you advance in society based on your skill
Staler87 said:Even in previous times intellectuals were the largest critics of the ruling class so I don't really get this argument.
Staler87 said:As I've pointed out before it doesn't work that way. There is absolutely no way the laymen are going to read a couple Wikipedia articles, teach themselves physics, and then think up of a great new theory.
Staler87 said:Capitalist societies (because labour is paid for) generally despise busy work as it loses someone money.
Staler87 said:Communism is a nice ideal to think about but it won't work and it hasn't worked. Every time it has been tried it has devolved into a brutal totalitarian regime.
But are they not all proletariat? They all have to labour to receive their needs. Although this is not technically selling it might as well be.
Is it just Communist Parties (like Lenin's) that stall scientific progress?
I don't know where you live but in Canada we have something called a meritocracy where you advance in society based on your skill. So there isn't really a ruling class in modern liberal democracies (not counting America which is coming close to a corporate state) for the intellectuals to serve.
Imp. Knoedel said:You mean like the party that sent things, animals, people and stations into space before anyone else?
georgjorge said:What's more, there is a constant battle about which skills are worth how much. There's no "natural" values stating that a CEO has to earn a hundred times as much as a teacher. Again, it's the people on top having the most influence on how these values are formed. This is where the idea of "everyone getting what he's worth" conflicts with structures of power.
The formal economic theory which underpins this meritocracy stuff is called marginal productivity theory of labor value, and it basically states that everyone is paid according to their contribution to production. But as a former professor of mine said, marginal productivity "is an invented category that is used to explain an outcome of which it is in fact the result." Basically, it says you're paid what you're worth, and we know this because we can measure your worth - by measuring how much you're paid!
The real reason people are paid what they're paid is power, plain and simple. But of course, explaining real-world conditions people face as the result of power imbalances, rather than the natural result of people's differing contributions to production, has all kinds of messy implications for existing power structures and so forth. Marginal productivity theory has had success in economics not because of its predictive or explanatory power (it has none) but because it serves to expunge all these messy moral and political questions about distribution from the field of economics. It turns the Market into a god who apportions rewards and punishments to those who deserve them. And the Market god demands sacrifice in the form of austerity budgets, wage cuts, layoffs, huge wealth going to hedge fund managers and bank CEOs while the rest of us squeeze to get by.
Staler87 said:To say people are paid because of power is way too simple.
Staler87 said:University professors have very little real power and yet they can pull in six-digit salaries. Teachers would have similar levels of power as professors (maybe even more so) and get paid less because society (their employer) values them less.
Staler87 said:You are using crony capitalism as an argument against capitalism.
Staler87 said:Just as you should differentiate between communism as Marx laid out and communism in the USSR, you should differentiate between pure capitalism and the modern form we practice. Yes, in the modern form we practice consumers often get screwed and cronies get fatter but we practice a form that is far gone from what Adam Smith laid out in the Wealth of Nations. In fact we have done things that Adam Smith directly said not to do. For example: allow corporate donations to politicians.
At first glance perhaps but not when you recognize that other factors - the scarcity of your particular skills, for example - can be explained in terms of power, while there are aspects of the question - that men tend to be paid less than women for the same work, for example - that can't really be explained by any other dynamic than power.
Now, it's kind of ironic because you accuse me of simplicity- this is certainly quite simplistic. The power we're talking about here is always relative. The question is how much power does someone have relative to the person paying them wages. University professors mostly do have lots of power relative to their employers, due among other things to the social norm of tenure.
As for the rest of what you're talking about, it's pretty muddled:
I'm not making an argument about "capitalism" one way or the other here, unless you think redistributing wealth (which I did make an argument for) would end "capitalism" or something. And I think my power argument applies a lot more broadly than to just capitalism. Why do you think slaves and serfs don't get paid for instance? Could power have something to do with that?
Er, so? Adam Smith was an anti-capitalist, even if his theories were perverted by capitalists for propaganda purposes.
Again this could be explained with perceived value and in reality we're arguing the same thing here. Someones perceived value to society and their power in society are pretty much equal when the society is their employer.
No one really understands exactly how the market works (economic information is too dispersed) so to meddle with it isn't the best idea.
Capitalism is a socio-economic system in which the dominant form of work is wage labor, that is people work in exchange for money. That is what Marx boils it down to in Das Kapital.
and a socio-economic system in which owners of capital were not privileged, such that they could not pay a worker less as a wage than the value said worker added (else said worker would, by having free access to the means of production, work for themselves), could be.