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Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

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Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#11

Post by oh_sigh »

ianleeclark wrote: post #10
CryptoPunk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the price I get for my labor is the value I am attaining for it. The price the employer gets for the product of my labor is the value the employer is getting for it. The value that I as an employee can attain for my labor is not equal to the value the employer can get for its product. The employer's capital is adding value that enables them to sell the product of my labor for more than I can sell the labor alo…

> The price the employer gets for the product of my labor is the value the employer is getting for it. This is demonstrably untrue. Your employer almost necessarily needs to profit from hiring you. If they hire you at 30$, they may make 40$. So, the value they are provided in hiring you is roughly 40$. The price they pay is 30$. Edit: this was likely a bad example because people are going to fly off the rails thinkin…

They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you, they derive value generally from hiring you and mixing your labor with their capital.

OP was talking about the value for the worker in taking a wage from an employer in the part you quoted. Clearly the employer wants to make a profit from hiring employees - I don't see how you can think OP would think otherwise based on what they wrote.

An employer who hires people who only cost money will soon be out of capital, and same with an employer who just breaks even(since there is uncertainty in any forecast, and you can't go below $0)

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#12

Post by CryptoPunk »

interpenetrate wrote: post #9
CryptoPunk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Profit isn't surplus value generated by the worker that has been appropriated by the employer. Value is not an objective property that employers are attaining for below its true value to earn a profit. Value is subjective. If I value my free time at $20 an hour, and you value my labor at $40 an hour, we will be able to come to an agreement where you pay me $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjec…

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#13

Post by ianleeclark »

oh_sigh wrote: post #11
ianleeclark wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The price the employer gets for the product of my labor is the value the employer is getting for it. This is demonstrably untrue. Your employer almost necessarily needs to profit from hiring you. If they hire you at 30$, they may make 40$. So, the value they are provided in hiring you is roughly 40$. The price they pay is 30$. Edit: this was likely a bad example because people are going to fly off the rails thinkin…

They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you, they derive value generally from hiring you and mixing your labor with their capital. OP was talking about the value for the worker in taking a wage from an employer in the part you quoted. Clearly the employer wants to make a profit from hiring employees - I don't see how you can think OP would think otherwise based on what they wrote. An employer who hires peopl…

> They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you

This might be a dialectual/regional difference, but the word, at least to me, means something along the lines of "gain access to." If a value is a perceived benefit of a good or service, then "gaining access to a resource through hiring" is semantically the same as "the value they are provided in hiring you."

This really isn't an ideological argument I'm providing, the guy just isn't using the two words correctly in the context that he's speaking.

> I don't see how you can think OP would think otherwise based on what they wrote.

It's just incredibly confusing when he's mixing terminology that has standard definitions within economics.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#14

Post by comex »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #6
interpenetrate wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Profit isn't surplus value generated by the worker that has been appropriated by the employer. Value is not an objective property that employers are attaining for below its true value to earn a profit. Value is subjective. If I value my free time at $20 an hour, and you value my labor at $40 an hour, we will be able to come to an agreement where you pay me $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjec…

Formalizing it in terms of the value of free time is not wrong, but it seems rather unhelpful. For most people, the amount of time they spend working is not very elastic, so it's more of a question of where they can sell a fixed amount of working time for the highest price (wage), and what that price is. In a perfectly competitive market, the highest wage would approximate the value the employer derives for the work, with some discount to account for things like the risk the employer takes on and the need for growth.

But real markets tend to be far from perfectly competitive. Depending on how hard it is to switch jobs, which is affected by factors like the level of demand by other employers for the same type of work, and the difficulty of retraining for other types of work, the employer may have a semi-monopsony status, in which case the wage may be far below the value the employer derives. The employee still works voluntarily, because they are still gaining value compared to not working, but they don't gain nearly as much value as they would in a competitive market.

For that reason, unions and minimum wage laws, among other things, can often create higher wages without driving employers out of business (though not always).

I don't know very much about Marxism, so I can't judge how well it addresses this problem; it admittedly doesn't seem to have worked out well in practice. But your libertarian fundamentalism hardly seems like an improvement!

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#16

Post by ptah »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

arguably the russian revolution would have failed without trotsky's ingenious tactics

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#17

Post by Moonshooter »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

This seems like dangerous glorification of intellectualism. The intellectual communities of the world are not inherently moral because of their intellect. That even intelligent people can commit heignous acts is one of the oldest tropes of the 1940s (with good reason). I might just be misunderstanding your points, in which case I apologise, but what you've discussed don't seem to actually relate to whether or not Trotsky was a part of the intellectual communities of his time.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#18

Post by [deleted] »

ianleeclark wrote: post #13
oh_sigh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you, they derive value generally from hiring you and mixing your labor with their capital. OP was talking about the value for the worker in taking a wage from an employer in the part you quoted. Clearly the employer wants to make a profit from hiring employees - I don't see how you can think OP would think otherwise based on what they wrote. An employer who hires peopl…

> They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you This might be a dialectual/regional difference, but the word, at least to me, means something along the lines of "gain access to." If a value is a perceived benefit of a good or service, then "gaining access to a resource through hiring" is semantically the same as "the value they are provided in hiring you." This really isn't an ideological argument I'm providin…

[deleted]

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#19

Post by CryptoPunk »

ianleeclark wrote: post #13
oh_sigh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you, they derive value generally from hiring you and mixing your labor with their capital. OP was talking about the value for the worker in taking a wage from an employer in the part you quoted. Clearly the employer wants to make a profit from hiring employees - I don't see how you can think OP would think otherwise based on what they wrote. An employer who hires peopl…

> They don't get "provided" value simply by hiring you This might be a dialectual/regional difference, but the word, at least to me, means something along the lines of "gain access to." If a value is a perceived benefit of a good or service, then "gaining access to a resource through hiring" is semantically the same as "the value they are provided in hiring you." This really isn't an ideological argument I'm providin…

Let's go over this again. I stated:

>Value is subjective. If I value my free time at $20 an hour, and you value my labor at $40 an hour, we will be able to come to an agreement where you pay me $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjective perception of value.

You responded with:

>This is the price, not value. Value is the benefit provided to an economic agent from a good or service, whereas price is the exchange value for a good or service.

What exactly are you referring to here? I stated that "if I value my free time at $20", and then proferred a situation where we agree to a labor agreement where I am paid $30, and suggested that I would be profiting according to my subjective valuation of said trade of time for money.

I didn't equate the price I got for my labor with how much I value it at. Likewise, I didn't say that the employer who values my labor at $40 is getting $30 of value as a result of that being the price they paid for it. I was actually extremely clear on both points which makes your misunderstanding frustrating in how inconsiderate it is.

So how about we start our discussion over again instead of you strawmanning me from the very beginning and then lecturing me on economic terminology.

>This might be a dialectual/regional difference, but the word, at least to me, means something along the lines of "gain access to." If a value is a perceived benefit of a good or service, then "gaining access to a resource through hiring" is semantically the same as "the value they are provided in hiring you."

You're lecturing on using precise economic terminology and are now using this vague and informal connotation based definition of value?

Anyway, you're totally missing the point. The point your interlocutor made is that the profit they earn from selling the product of the labor is not solely from the value contributed by the labor they bought, as you implied in your previous commenting where you equated price the employer sells the labor at as the value they get from it. The product of the labor that the employer is selling is actually a product of a combination of the labor they bought plus the capital they own and utilized (mixed) with the labor.

The overlooking of the value that their capital contributed to the production of the good/service is a classic oversight of Marxists.

Re: Mexico’s Attempt to Save Freud from the Nazis

#20

Post by CryptoPunk »

ptah wrote: post #16
CryptoPunk wrote: post #2

Calling Trotsky an intellectual is pretty macabre. The man personally ordered the execution of numerous prisoners of war and civilians. He was a major advocate of the "Red Terror", which introduced new levels of brutality to Soviet political culture that set norms for decades to come. His intellectualism consisted of little more than inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties cl…

arguably the russian revolution would have failed without trotsky's ingenious tactics

There is nothing ingenious or intellectually redeeming about using brutality and deceit to gain power. That's all people like Adolf Hitler and Leon Trotsky did. They betrayed humanity and the culture of humanitarianism that had been built up for millenia before them to gain an advantage.

Mass murderers who traded the moral foundations of their civilization for tactical and strategic advantage are intellectual midgets who belong in the dustbin of history.

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