sigh
Sam Stone, you are my new idol. 
Sam Stone: “I was engaging in a roundabout refutation of your appeal to authority. A) your assumption that I haven’t read Marx, and B) Your inference based on that assumption, that my opinion isn’t really valid.”
I can’t tell from this what authority you think I was appealing to. My own?
I’m sorry, btw, if my speculation about you’re not having read Marx turned out be incorrect (I owe the same apology to Guinastasia, actually.) But I think you’d have to admit–and in fairness to you, you did admit–that reading something twenty years ago can sometimes produce the impression of not having read something. My point was only that the way you’d responded to my original post didn’t suggest any familiarity with Marx as a philosopher. But whatever…
“As for his ‘shoddy thinking’, you yourself just mentioned candidate A), his labor theory of value.”
Exactly–and I specifically said that however one may feel about the invalidity of that, or of any other single aspect of Marx’s thought, it does not reduce to “shoddy thinking.” Darwin, for example, make a lot of mistakes in his observations about various species of animals; but I would hardly call him a shoddy thinker.
Let me just put my cards on the table: Marx was, to my mind, brilliant. A hell of a lot smarter than either one of us! It’s one thing to say, esp. in hindsight, he was wrong about this or that. It’s another dismiss his thinking as “shoddy” and under-researched.
However, you are, of course, entitled to your opinion…
“The fatal flaws in [Marx’s labor theory of value] doom much of Marx’s writing, because he considered them a cornerstone of his philosophy. Knock those down, and all you have is a series of comments about capitalism and socialism that contain some interesting ideas and some useful criticisims (as I admitted in my first message about this), but which completely falls apart as a coherent economic system.”
Again Sam, my point is that we should value Marx as a philosopher and social critic who can substantially illuminate the most important concepts in the Western tradition. You keep coming back to Marx as an economist; I keep saying I don’t value him as an economist. As so often, we are, alas, talking past one another. 
I am still wondering, though, about your thoughts on what I cited above. Do you view it as shoddy thinking?
I have no quarrel with that statement. But it is incomplete. What it should say it that, while businesses do not necessarily have interests that are the same as the public’s, they are in large part regulated by that same public. As long as the business is operating within the confines of the marketplace (and absent any market failures, which I do believe happen and which seperates me from some of the more hard-core libertarians), then it hardly matters what the business wants, because it will succeed or fail based on how well it provides what its customers (i.e. the public) want. Or as Adam Smith might have put it:
But Marx’s statement in this case is a good reason why the public should be very, very, leery of government intrusion into the marketplace. Because once you introduce the government’s power to coerce, you disconnect affected businesses from the desires of the marketplace.
I note that you did not quote the most important part of my statement so I’ll quote it for you.
Apparently you have capitalism and the US Consitution and the Bill of Rights confused. If capitalism ruled then those with the most money could, say, order the deaths of those they didn’t like. Thanks to the laws in the US that isn’t really feasible with a few exceptions(OJ).
As far as the property rights arguement you bring up, what do you suggest? Is it ok if a person creates something(property) and another person decides to steal that property? If that is what you believe then the only thing in the world that would matter is who has the most guns. If you think that the government should hand out the property then you end up in a system that rewards those who toe the party line and punishes those who disagree. This isn’t a guess, history proves it very clearly.
The US uses force against certain people. Criminals who would take what they did not earn, terrorist and countries that try to harm US citizens and other scam artists and other thugs. This is not supressing the criminals ‘right’ to rob, steal and kill. It is protecting the rights of the citizens.
Slee
Sigh. I spent how many messages trying to get this across in the first of those communist threads, and Sam pretty much sums it up in one go.
That being said, you seem to cite Austrians or monetarists (like Friedman) an awful lot. Economics hardly begins or ends with Friedman, Hayek, von Mises et al. Is this intentional, or just due to the subject matter?
Largely the subject matter. The informational theory of market economics is an interest of mine, so I tend to enter discussions that involve it. Certainly if I were to discuss other aspects of economics I might trot out a few different names, or stay out of the discussion entirely for lack of knowledge.
Sam: I was mostly interested because I tend to share Paul Krugman’s opinion of Marx: Keynes pointed out many of the same problems, but unlike Marx, actually figured out how to do something about it. I personally believe that while the technical defenses of capitalism by the devout free-marketeers are useful, the biggest reason people stopped paying attention to Marx is that the kind of social action that Keynes advocated (or legitimized) ended the perception of a harsh Darwinian capitalism by the same “proletariat” that Marx was trying to appeal to.
(It’s tough to argue that the system is set up to screw the workers and enrich the capitalists when good portions of the government are devoted to making sure that they stay reasonably healthy and secure. )
But, this is true of all systems of government.
Absolutely all.
For example, there are many citizens in the United States who do not agree with the laws regarding property confiscation in narcotics cases, but those laws still exist, enforced by men with guns.
All government, in all systems, is rooted in, and utterly dependent on, the use of force to maintain that government.
This is the primary argument used by Anarchists to justify the opposition to all forms of government.
Actually, I find this shoddy. Capitalists do not have an interest in deceiving or oppressing the public, on two grounds.
First, outside their chosen fields, capitalists are members of the public. Accordingly, they wish other capitalists who interact with them as capitalists to act honestly. This, arguably, leads to an acceptance of regulation, even if it affects their chosen field.
Second, even when acting as capitalists, most capitalists are not monopolists. Their interests are harmed if capitalists competing with them act to deceive or even oppress the public. Thus, they have an interest in honesty in their field and regulation to enforce that honesty.
Sua
My brother met Karl Marx. He met him at a function in the People park he said
Marx replied
ah… The Sultans of ping…
OK, let’s say a large company knows it is due to tank any day now, and the accounting firm it hired to do its books is in on the deal to keep it mum. All the upper management of said company sell their shares in the company while simultaneously preventing the majority of their employees, whose pension funds are tied up in this same stock, from doing so. The company tanks, the now jobless employees’ pension funds dry up faster than a puddle in the Sahara on July 4th, and the corporate bigwigs walk off with golden parachutes that would give Fort Knox a serious case of penis envy. It seems to me that the public certainly has been deceived and that it was in the interests of the capitalists in question not only to maintain that deception but to actively engage in oppression by refusing to allow the company’s employees the same escape route they themselves were taking.
Or does that not count because it wasn’t “outside their chosen field” and therefore the expectation of honesty is void?
Sam Stone:“I have no quarrel with that statement. But it is incomplete.
…[A]s Adam Smith might have put it [quotation deleted]. …But Marx’s statement in this case is a good reason why the public should be very, very, leery of government intrusion into the marketplace.”
Sam, you have passed a test honorably and I want to say, in advance, that I’m not surprised. So I hope you aren’t upset with me when I tell you that the statement that I cited wasn’t written by Marx. In fact it was written by Adam Smith towards the very end of Book I, XI in that flaming capitalist-bashing tome The Wealth of Nations. ;).
Seriously, though, lest I seem like a twit, I know the same could have been done to me: that is, that you might someday set up something to lead me to be believe that Milton Friedman was Pierre Bourdieu. :eek: Well, you know what I mean.
However, while you clearly are capable of giving to Marx what is, by your lights, a fair hearing :), I did want to make a point about Smith. When I quoted Smith saying that the interests of capitalists (or, to be precise, those who live off of profit, as he puts it) are contrary to those of the public, you responded to what you’d been led to believe was Marx by quoting Smith on–no surprise here–the invisible hand.
This may help to prove a point that I’ve often tried to make on these boards about the Big Hand (mentioned only a couple of times in WofN). For Smith the invisible hand is divine providence. Smith was an ardent moralist who believed that God had designed the world in a way that would reward movement towards rationalized but moral progress. Let me add, too, that the way Smith describes the effect of industrial labor on human beings is not very far from Engels’s descriptions of the same. So for Smith progress meant getting rid of corrupt mercantalist government and replacing it with vigilant citizenship of the propertied (including government action towards improving the moral condition of the all but dehumanized industrial laborer).
Although Smith looks to minimize government intervention, he very often calls for it–and in the particular passage I cited above–he’s in the midst of showing that the very last people who should be trusted to legislate are capitalists: who will legislate in their own interests and against the public’s. And no–Adam Smith did not believe, that the invisible hand would prevent this situation.
So what have we got in, say, the US? Precisely the kind of business-tied plutocracy that Smith feared.
Here also from
Now this is to be sure, a digression from Marx who wasn’t a liberal reformer as Guinastasia has pointed out :).
Here’s an example of where Marx is invaluable and where–if, Sam, you remember what you read twenty years ago–I do not think you do it justice. Check out, Part I. section 4 “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof.” To me this discussion of the commodity which, as Marx writes, “appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing” but is “in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” provides invaluable insights into the world that we live in today.
(Hence, my appreciation, to a point, of Baudrillard a philosopher whose ideas informed the kind of perspective on society that you get, allegorized, in the movie, The Matrix.)
In other words, commodity forms deeply affect our experience of one another, our relation to our own own bodies and desires: the commodity form, in this respect, makes us who we are to ourselves though without Marx’s thought we wouldn’t be aware of it. What Marx means has, in a sense, been dulled by overreptition (and undercomprehension) of the word “alienation.” Check this out:
“[T]he labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the prodcuts, and indirectly, thorugh them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labour of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things. It is only by being exchanged that the products of labour acquire, as avlues, one uniform social status, distinct form their varied forms of existence as objects of utility.”
Since Marx did not, like Smith (who was writing about 100 years before Marx) believe in divine providence, he believed that we find our meaning, our purpose and our spirit here on earth. And we do that by fulfilling our human nature. And Marx’s idea of our human nature (which I find quite appealing actually) is that we are producers: homo habilluses, you might say. In other words, as humans we leave our impress on the world by making things. We mix our labor into the things of this earth: that is what we do.
And yet, because of the way the system of exchange has developed over time, the mass of people not only take no pleasure in, but also feel no personal stake in the product of their labor. It is an object of exchange: its use to the individual laborer is that of a wage subsistence; its use to someone else is something mediated by exchange value; the laborer may never know, is not likely ever to know or to experience the use value of his/her own labor as part of a social (vs. material) exchange. And therefore our lives feel empty: and they don’t necessarily feel full up to the extent that the wage subsistence becomes greater; or the hours of labor shorter, or even the complexity of the labor greater.
And therefore on this very board I’ve read posts by people who say they are or work near $300k/year finance managers who feel like poor shnooks in comparison to the guys that make the big money, and live (this is a fairly accurate paraphrase, I think) primarily in the hopes that they won’t ultimately fail to be one of those players before they die.
So that the kind of comforts that $300k/year can buy–it boggles my mind when I write this–are not felt to provide any of the resources for being/feeling/experiencing oneself as human.
I’m not sure whether I’ve done anything like a good job of explicating why this thought is so valuable to me in this space; but it’s the best that I can do.
Marx writes in a very technical language; and I suspect if we read German his writing would be more elegant. But this, I think, is what he means when he writes:
[T]he existence of things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising thereform. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order…to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. … So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands."
BTW: Greetings Demos
[Fixed coding. – MEB]
Argh! Dear Moderator, I did try very hard to preview this long post, but nearly lost it entirely in the attempt. If you have the patience would you please edit the code to get rid of the excess italics. Your commodity form will be ever-so-much more desirable if you do ;).
I just now read the posts after Demos’s which must have come in while I was composing and the system was jamming up bigtime.
Olentzero, thanks for highlighting the Enronian foresights of Adam Smith–who really was, all things considered, one heck of a kewel Scottish dude.
It would appear Sam got Swooshed in a new and unbelievably amusing new form.
Ok, perhaps I’m wrong here, but wasn’t the Labour Theory of Value (specifically the idea that all value comes from labour) part of Smith’s economic system as well? My knowledge of economic history is limited, but I had thought that the switch to the hardcore trade-based subjectivism of today’s economics was part of the big switch from classical political economy (which Marx uses and critiques) to neo-classical economics (which Sam would be referencing with his heavy name dropping of Friedman and the Austrians)
Olentzero, Enron demonstrates why capitalists like honesty. Deceit destroys wealth.
Not only were investors - capitalists all - absolutely screwed by Enron’s dishonesty, but so were its competitors. During Enron’s heyday, competitors like Dynegy were harmed because Enron’s apparent financial condition attracted more customers and cheaper loans then Dynegy could get.
On the flip side, what part of the public was harmed by Enron’s collapse? Gas consumers? I haven’t noticed my case prices going up. Enron’s employees? Even assuming we should consider them part of the “public” for purposes of this discussion, they were primarily harmed in their role as capitalists - their primary loss was the value of the 401(k)'s - which were their investment in Enron as stockholders. That is to say, as capitalists.
The fact that the regulatory system failed in the case of Enron does not mean that capitalists dislike the regulatory system - which at its heart, is intended to enforce openness and honesty.
Sua
Show me a photo of a down-at-the-heels Ken Lay outside the Chevron Building in Houston, wearing a suit he got from the Salvation Army and holding a sign saying “Will Work for Food” and I will renounce everything I ever said in defense of Karl Marx and communism. “Deceit destroys wealth” indeed. Lay may not own a company any more, but if you think that means he got busted down to poverty levels you’re hopelessly naive.
Funny, I thought that was what the free-market economists saw as the functioning of the Invisible Hand.
Well, they have, but that’s another kettle of fish entirely.
Owning stock in a company does not a capitalist make. If you own enough stock to live off the dividends and no longer need to work a day job to earn a decent income, yeah, I’d argue you’re a capitalist because you’re making money off of other people’s labor. But if your stocks aren’t enough to get you by - for instance, I own ten shares of Northeastern Utilities, which nets me something like $5 a quarter in dividends - and you have to work for somebody else in order to put food on your family’s table and a roof over their heads, you are definitely not a capitalist.
Furthermore, I am of the distinct impression that Enron employees didn’t really have much of a choice as to where their 401(k) deductions were invested.
The regulatory system didn’t “fail” Enron. Enron actively circumvented the system and enlisted Arthur Andersen’s help in doing so. Enron’s goal, like all the other corporations out there, is profit, and profits alone. Regulatory systems are an inconvenience that only present a barrier if you don’t have the kind of access Enron had to the power brokers of this country. Which reminds me, has Cheney coughed up those energy policy records yet?
Gawd amighty, olentzero.
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Ken Lay would have to be peniless for the deception of Enron to have destroyed wealth? WTF? Howzabout the simple fact that Enron used to be the 7th largest company in the country, per market capitalization, and is now worthless due to its deception? That’s not destroyed wealth?
Add to that the fact that, had Enron not lied in its accounting, its market value never would have gotten so high, but it also would not have collapsed. Instead it would today be a middle-tier company. -
No, deceit is not the working of the “invisible hand.”
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“Owning stock does not a capitalist make.” Puhlease. I thought that ownership of the means of production was the definition of a capitalist. Besides which, Enron employees did not own all, or even most, of Enron’s stock. Finally, while Enron’s 401(k) had rules about selling Enron’s stock and provided incentives to its employees to buy said stock - such investments got a matching investment from Enron (i.e. more money), Enron’s employees didn’t have to have a 401(k) in the first place, much less buy Enron stock.
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Of course Enron tried to circumvent the system, and the system failed to stop it. And, by circumventing the system, Enron destroyed wealth. Thanks for playing, and have a nice day.
Sua
Well, insofar as the pension funds of hundreds, if not thousands, of employees, as well as the fiscal value of the company’s stock, are now reduced in value to absolutely nil, then yes, you’re right. Ken Lay’s deceit destroyed the wealth of the company and the people who worked for him. But Lay, the organizing head of this whole morass of questionable business practices, walked out of the rubble with a thin coating of dust, as did a handful of other top executives like Skilling. The ones who actively practiced the deceit are not the ones who suffered the drastic consequences.
And if the Titanic had had enough lifeboats and the crew let all the passengers out of steerage, 1,500 people wouldn’t have drowned in the cold North Atlantic. Doesn’t mean their actions would have precluded other marine disasters of similar scale for the foreseeable future, does it?
The invisivble hand is a myth anyway. Capitalism favors those who either are more competitive or actively seek to make themselves look more competitive. But their actions precipitate crises, and more often than not the ones that provoked the crisis are the ones almost completely untouched by it.
Stock isn’t the means of production, it’s a way of expressing the value generated by the means of production through the labor of others. Owning stock is not the same thing as owning the means of production.
True, they had a choice in deciding whether or not to have a 401(k) in the first place. But they were locked into steerage when the boat capsized. Lay, Skilling & Co. were able to sell their Enron holdings before the stock tanked, but Enron employees were actively prevented from doing so.
Much like a red light “fails” to stop an aggressive driver. The laws are in place, and there are penalties to be paid if the violator gets caught. Does the system of traffic laws fail if someone successfully runs a red light? If so, then by your logic capitalism is an inherently flawed system that cannot hope to prevent flagrant violations like Enron and should therefore be replaced.
Maybe you’re trying to rationalize your ownership of Northeastern Utilities stock, Olentzero, but stockholders are owners of the corporation in which they own stock. Corporations are the “means of production.” Ergo, stockholders are owners of the means of production.
Sua