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Jim Devine | 1 Mar 2011 01:32
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Re: comments on the "labor theory of value"

me:
>> ... The difference is that prices reflect the
>> fetishism of commodities (treating capitalism as merely a dance of
>> commodities being traded in markets) while values do not involve
>> fetishism:

Joseph Green:
> No, value reflects the fetishism of commodities just as much as price. Value
> and price are identical with respect to commodity fetishism.
>
> Value measures things which are qualitatively different as simply differing
> quantitatively on a numerical scale. This is one feature of commodity
> fetishism.

I see value as representing a qualitatively different kind of
alienation than that of commodity fetishism. It's true that reducing
work time to mere minutes and hours (as opposed to seeing it in all of
its complexity and mixed with play) is a kind of alienation, one
that's central to capitalism (the reduction of concrete labor to
abstract labor). But in chapter 1, section 4 of volume I of CAPITAL,
Marx considers a society that suffers from alienation less than
capitalism or simple commodity production does (or rather, suffers
from at least one less kind of alienation since it lacks commodity
fetishism). This is

>> ...  a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in
which the labour power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor
power of the community. ... The mode of this distribution will vary with the productive organization of
the community, and the degree of historical development attained by the producers. We will assume, but
merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities, that the share of each individual
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Jim Devine | 1 Mar 2011 01:34
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Re: Majority in Poll Opposes Weakening Bargaining Rights for Public Workers

> Breaking News Alert
> The New York Times
> Mon, February 28, 2011 -- 6:30 PM ET
> -----
>
> Majority in Poll Opposes Weakening Bargaining Rights for Public Workers
>
> As labor battles erupt in state capitals around the nation, a
> majority of Americans say they oppose efforts to weaken the
> collective bargaining rights of public employee unions and
> are also against cutting the pay or benefits of public
> workers to reduce state budget deficits, according to the
> latest New York Times/CBS News poll.
>
> Read More:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/01/us/01poll.html?emc=na
>
> Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company

>From the article: "Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of
public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to
33 percent. While a slim majority of Republicans favored taking away
some bargaining rights, they were outnumbered by large majorities of
Democrats and independents who said they opposed weakening them. Those
surveyed said they opposed, 56 percent to 37 percent, cutting the pay
or benefits of public employees to reduce deficits, breaking down
along similar party lines. A majority of respondents who have no union
members living in their households opposed both cuts in pay or
benefits and taking away the collective bargaining rights of public
employees."
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Carl Dassbach | 1 Mar 2011 02:35
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Totally different question

How does one live a life of quiet desperation with style?  Does that mean
getting blasted every night on several $40 bottles of wine, being depressed
in your Porsche or shooting dope in your jet?

The only thing I know about quiet desperation is that "hanging on" is the
English way - at least that's what Pink Floyd told us.

I ask because perhaps the addition of some "style" to my quiet desperation
would make it more tolerable.

Sorry to raise the REALLY BIG questions but I would like to know.

CHAD (which is "Carl Henry August Dassbach" to respond to someone's
objection that I did not have the balls to sign my own name). 

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ken hanly | 1 Mar 2011 03:09
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Investment in Libya


  What a difference a few  months makes.  Gadaffi was fine and Libya a great 
place to invest but then he lost control of the country. The appended video from 
Bloomberg shows the sudden sea change not effectively putting down protests can 
make.

http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/8330246-for-the-uk-and-us-investment-in-libya-was-fine-until-gadaffi-lost-control
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Julio Huato | 1 Mar 2011 03:55
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Totally different question

Carl Dassbach wrote:

> CHAD (which is "Carl Henry August Dassbach" to respond to someone's
> objection that I did not have the balls to sign my own name).

I want to apologize to Carl.

I don't remember exactly when I made this accusation against him, but
it was me who did that.  And it was unnecessary and unfair.

I should explain the reason for my ex abrupt: At the time, I just had
had a heated debate with Louis Proyect and others in this list, which
got me two very nasty anonymous emails by an individual using an email
account with a web domain based in Germany.  When, at a point, Carl
intervened (and it wasn't the same thread, but it was related), I just
thought he was the person behind the anonymous emails.   Did I have
any base to believe this?  None.

I'm sincerely sorry about this incident.
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comvox | 1 Mar 2011 04:22
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Re: comments on the "labor theory of value"


Jim wrote:
> 
> I see value as representing a qualitatively different kind of
> alienation than that of commodity fetishism. It's true that reducing
> work time to mere minutes and hours (as opposed to seeing it in all of
> its complexity and mixed with play) is a kind of alienation, one
> that's central to capitalism (the reduction of concrete labor to
> abstract labor). 

In the discussion of commodity fetishism, Marx points to the fetishist nature 
of value.  He makes the famous assertion that *value* is "a relation between 
persons expressed as a relation between things". This is the essence of the 
illusion concerning value that is created by marketplace exchange. Value 
appears to be a property of objects, but actually it is a relation between 
persons.

Indeed, as if to avoid any possibility of being misunderstood,  Marx 
insisted, and correctly so, that *value* is a "non-natural" property of a 
commodity. He wrote things like:

"The iron, in the expression of the weight of the sugar-loaf, represents a 
natural property common to both bodies, namely their weight; but the coat in 
the expression of the value of the linen, represents a non-natural property 
of both, something purely social, namely, their value." ("Capital", vol. I, 
Chapter I, Section 3, Subsection 3. "The Equivalent Form of Value", p. 66, 
Kerr edition.)

Note, he insisted on making this point about "value". He didn't say, well, 
this is true about "price", but "value" is a somewhat better indicator of the
(Continue reading)

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Jim Devine | 1 Mar 2011 04:24
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Re: Totally different question

hey, it's a joke. My jet is in the shop, so I currently can't shoot dope there.

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 5:35 PM, Carl Dassbach <dassbach@...> wrote:
> How does one live a life of quiet desperation with style?  Does that mean
> getting blasted every night on several $40 bottles of wine, being depressed
> in your Porsche or shooting dope in your jet?
--

-- 
Jim Devine /  "Living a life of quiet desperation -- but always with style!"
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Julio Huato | 1 Mar 2011 04:57
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Explain to a non-economist what Marginal Cost is

Carrol wrote:

> What is it and how is it supposed by believers
> to explain pricing.

Value (and, hence, price) is only a particular social form that the
"marginal utility" of goods takes.  In general, "marginal utilities,"
"marginal productivities," "marginal rates of substitution," "marginal
rates of transformation," etc. are the "specific proportions" of
social labor time that Marx (and Engels) referred to in several
writings.

The following is a brief excerpt from the paper (still in draft form)
I presented on Saturday at the annual conference of the Eastern
Economics Association in New York City on economics and socialist
planning.

*  *  *

Scale is at the heart of the argument for socialism, or at least at
the heart of the Marxist argument for socialism, arguably the most
compelling argument for socialism formulated to date.8

It is known that Marx's story goes (more or less) like this:

1. Every society has to allocate the productive force of its labor
(stock), a.k.a. its labor power, or its social labor time (flow) in
accordance with "quantitatively determined specific proportions" among
its alternative uses, so that it produces the goods that it needs to
subsist.9  In a society where private ownership prevails, this
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Julio Huato | 1 Mar 2011 05:24
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Explain to a non-economist what Marginal Cost is

Just to complete a few thoughts left unfinished in the excerpt:

1. It follows from Marx and Engels that, under socialist planning, as
a tendency (under abstract conditions, obviously), the marginal rates
of transformation of productive inputs (ultimately social labor time)
into goods must tend to equalize across all goods and productive
inputs and also equal to the marginal rates of substitution (Engels'
comparison of useful effects) across all goods.  It's really simple:
If these marginal rates are not equal, then that means that society
can gain wellbeing for free simply by switching between resources or
by switching its resources from producing one good to producing
another.  Why wouldn't a socialist society want to do that?  As Marx
noted in Grundrisse, in the "communal society" the economizing of
labor time becomes "a law to an even higher degree."

2. As I have said here before, the notion of "prices" (again, think
here of the material content of prices instead of the social form) as
measures of "relative scarcity" follows in a straightforward manner
from Marx's notion of value.  "Scarcity" is the quality of goods that
are costly to reproduce (if at all possible) under specific
conditions.  In other words, goods are "scarce" because the productive
force of labor is finite.  Value (units of labor/good) is, obviously,
the reciprocal of the productive force of labor (measured as
goods/unit of labor).  Therefore, value is a measure of "relative
scarcity"!

3. On Marx's distinction between "material content" and "social form,"
think by analogy with biological sexual differences between men and
women ("material content") and gender oppression ("social form").  As
Gerald Cohen noted, this distinction can be traced back to the Greek
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Jim Devine | 1 Mar 2011 06:00
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a rant

In yesterday's NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, after sketching the growing
power of the irrational right-wing "climate skeptic" movement, Judith
Warner writes:
>That taking on the scientific establishment has become a favored activity of the right is quite a
turnabout. After all, questioning accepted fact, revealing the myths and politics behind established
certainties, is a tactic straight out of the left-wing playbook. In the 1960s and 1970s, the push back
against scientific authority brought us the patients’ rights movement and was a key component of
women’s rights activism. That questioning of authority veered in a more radical direction in the
academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when left-wing scholars doing “science studies”
increasingly began taking on the very idea of scientific truth.

> ... But somehow, in the passage from Bush I to Bush II and beyond, the politics changed. By the mid-1990s,
even some progressives said that the assault on truth, particularly scientific truth, had gone too far, 
...  many on the academic left experienced some real embarrassment. But the genie was out of the bottle. And
as the political zeitgeist shifted, attacking science became a sport of the radical right. “Some
standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of ‘experts’ and
‘professionals’ and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us,
were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research,” Michael
Bérubé ... said<

Warner suggests a line of causation from the "anti-science" attitudes
of the "left" to the New Right "climate skeptic" movement, so that
donations received by the latter from the oil industry are totally
irrelevant. I guess it goes against Warner's science to define how
causation works here, so somehow it was the amorphous but still
sinister "left" that let the anti-science genie out of the bottle. She
sneaks in the assumption that anti-science attitudes are somehow new,
so that they had to be invented by the "left," which then introduced
that snake into the pro-science Garden of Eden, corrupting even the
normally-rational and until-now pristine right wing forces. The John
(Continue reading)

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Gmane