comicsansstein
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User ID: 582
comicsansstein
2d ago
Right, so it seems to me like Marx describes a basic feature of any society more complex than an anprim one, and goes "A ha! This is an inherent problem with capitalism!". How would that follow? It's like the apocryphal story about Euler and Diderot.
comicsansstein
2d ago
Noted. Although now I'm interested in how the industrial revolution would look like if the inclosures never happened. Theoretically, less available workforce would put a premium on labor, which could drive innovations in labor efficiency faster, otoh there could've been not enough "critical mass" to make the early industry feasible.
If the two values were equal you wouldn’t participate in the exchange market because you would just use your commodity.
Am I missing something obvious here, or is this immediately debunked by the word "specialization"? The only people who could "just use their commodity" for the entirety of their needs are subsistence farmers, who I guess still existed when the book was written, but were on the way out already. And even that's only if you squint heavily, because they would need to also miraculously have every construction material they ever need in the surrounding area, which at this point moves us further back to the hunter-gathers, more or less.
He does this in the context of what he calls the commodity, an item like wheat, or coats, or coal that has both a use-value (how useful it is) and an exchange-value (how much it’s worth on the market). These two things can obviously be different, and according to Marx almost always have to be.
I'd argue that access to information flattens the variance here, and prices are asymptotically approaching some kind of equilibrium, as exemplified by the The Digital Provide paper (see graphs at page 21). Obviously, such equilibrium would include some amount of profit for the fishermen - steelmanning the first thing I've quoted, certainly you have to get more from your work that you put in it, otherwise why work at all? Other than mere survival, but that brings us back to the subsistence farmers, which we're not, and revealed preferences even at Marx's time show that people would rather work at Dark Satanic Mills than farm.
comicsansstein
5d ago
If you're cynical enough, the purpose of organized politics is pork barrel spending. Thus, the optimal amounts of votes to get is 50% plus the tiniest epsilon - it allows you to control the flow of money, with the smallest possible clientele to spend it on. Anything more, and you're spreading the profits thinner.
Notably, Chuck Norris facts were a more popular variation of earlier Vin Diesel facts.
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