351–360 of 372 posts
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> I do not need to study every perpetual motion machine design to dismiss them. It's their job to show that they work. What amazes me is the people who desperately cling to Marxism despite its 100% failure rate. Maybe if you bothered to try to understand the perpetual machine that everyone’s bought into then you wouldn’t be so amazed by people buying into it all of the time
Maybe he understands it better than you.
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It's inherent to the way a coop works that it's not possible to follow the same path. There is no 7% equity to be given, only the repayment of a loan. The coop model does not promote taking risk and hence have many fail, yet a few grow very quick. Another problem is law. At this point it favors the common ownership forms of business. Starting a coop is hence much harder than it should be. This is what i think where t…
Are there countries with legal structures more friendly to worker coops? For example I know Germany has structures like works councils that are foreign to us in N. America (though this is not a worker coop structure). However these structures historically arise from labor movements, not from top-down planning from authorities or electoral politics, which takes more than thinking up a design for a better society witho…
Cuba has many, but also usually are state initiated and somewhat state controlled. China, Vietnam and DPRK have many "not true worker coops" also due to state control.
Finland, Italy and Basque/Spain also score high, and we're talking about actual worker coops there.
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>> or seems to work for some people, for the time being It seems to work for any country that embraced free market ideas the same way socialist policies predictably don't work in any country that tried them. You are seriously claiming WW2, colonialism and climate change is a direct consequence of people having too much choice? If only Germany had a strong dictator preventing people to be too free to choose, oh wait,.…
Of "people" having too much choice, no. The vast majority of folks have comparatively few meaningful choices available to them. About things like Android vs. iPhone, sure. But about things that actually matter -- like the fact that they have to work so hard all their lives; and that they probably have to drive a car to get there; that the oceans are filling up with microplastics, and their drinking water with somethi…
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You are completely wrong. This stupid example of digging holes is dismissed even in the first chapter of Das Capital if I'm not mistaken. First because if you do not provide use value (like digging useless holes), you cannot produce exchange value. Second because what really matters is the social necessary labor to dig the holes, assuming that there is a market for this. You will just waste money paying people to dig…
The market does not always choose to use the maximum amount of automation for everything. For example, a small business may rationally choose to wash dishes by hand rather than paying for a dishwasher. Are their meals more valuable (because more labor intensive) than the big restaurant across the street that does own a dishwasher? You are the one defending the LTV, not me. If value = labor, but not when that would be…
I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the parent comment: LTV does not work like described by that comment. You can not even properly criticize something if you do not understand it.
The moralist excuse to forbid or negate certain knowledge is also silly. Depending on where you live (USA, Europe), you probably post these comments in a society built (and perhaps even mantained) by an even larger kill count, but I never will use this as a way to refuse or negate discussion or knowledge.
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Of "people" having too much choice, no. The vast majority of folks have comparatively few meaningful choices available to them. About things like Android vs. iPhone, sure. But about things that actually matter -- like the fact that they have to work so hard all their lives; and that they probably have to drive a car to get there; that the oceans are filling up with microplastics, and their drinking water with somethi…
Do you think the elites of central planned economies are accountable for true cost of their choices?
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That seems awfully.. tautological.
It's not tautological because it assumes that __management contributes nothing.__ Management's decisions about what to build in, how to build it, etc... are worth __nothing__ to Marxists. Related: when Marxism was actually implemented, they had big problems with not building the right things, and building the things they did build poorly. For example a factory was assigned the task of building N pounds of nails a day…
this is so wrong. management is labor, too.
The anarchist culture of the 1800s and 1900s in Spain, especially the emergence of anarcho-syndicalist structures [0], is certainly one of the reasons for Mondagon's existence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
Why aren’t there more of these if they work well?
By historical reasons the Basque country has an special tax regime and economical benefits from the Spanish government. This may have an influence on the outcome. Is easier to win when the other run handicapped, and not so easy to replicate it if we remove that context.
Most people also ignores that this system exists. Out of Euskadi, the name is more associated to the (in)famous band orchestre Mondragon, that was an appropriately anarchical mess, part circus, part rock band.
Be afraid, very afraid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWKHnjWMTNI
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It's not tautological because it assumes that __management contributes nothing.__ Management's decisions about what to build in, how to build it, etc... are worth __nothing__ to Marxists. Related: when Marxism was actually implemented, they had big problems with not building the right things, and building the things they did build poorly. For example a factory was assigned the task of building N pounds of nails a day…
> Management's decisions about what to build in, how to build it, etc... are worth __nothing__ to Marxists. this is so wrong. management is labor, too.
In the Marxist view, the work just inherently "happens" (like water flowing down a stream) and capitalists can only be like a water wheel "capturing the value" that's flowing past. Of course, this is bullshit, but that is the mentality.
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The market does not always choose to use the maximum amount of automation for everything. For example, a small business may rationally choose to wash dishes by hand rather than paying for a dishwasher. Are their meals more valuable (because more labor intensive) than the big restaurant across the street that does own a dishwasher? You are the one defending the LTV, not me. If value = labor, but not when that would be…
The exchange value produced in the business with or without the dishwater would be exactly the same if they are from the same society. It is not the individual labor, but the socially necessary labor that is counted. Moreover, value is also entirely different than price. I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the pare…
I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor did not produce a different amount of value. Your response has just been that "socially necessary labor" is different than "labor." But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not. Indeed, we have many examples of socialist governments deciding that it's not "socially necessary" for certain groups of people to eat at all -- the Holodomor in Ukraine, or der Hungerplan in Nazi Germany.
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The exchange value produced in the business with or without the dishwater would be exactly the same if they are from the same society. It is not the individual labor, but the socially necessary labor that is counted. Moreover, value is also entirely different than price. I never said anything about "use the theory, except when its silly". What was silly was the example because of the lack of understanding of the pare…
I never said we should forbid discussion of Marxism. I just think it should be treated the same as Nazism, with which it shares many similarities. The general pattern of "find a minority, say that they are the source of all problems, argue for dictatorship so you can solve the problems" is clearly present in both. This is called "vanguardism." I've already presented several scenarios where a different amount of labor…
Your examples are exactly as expected by LTV. LTV agrees that they do not produce different exchange values. The problem is that you are just ignoring what the LTV says, ignoring the theory definitions and is coming with your own ideas of what you think it says. And when I try to give you what the theory says, you just say that it is nonsense, saying more things that confirm that you have no idea about what you are talking:
> But this is nonsense since we don't have any authority to tell us what is "socially necessary" and what is not.
You do not need the authority. The theory describes the functioning of free markets, and capitalism running without hindrances. But taking into account the material reality that you need nature + labor to socially produce things and that in one side you have production, at the other side you have consumption and these things need to be balanced.
Pro tip: LTV was the mainstream of economical theories during the era when Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Marx, and all other classical economists published their contributions. All them agreed with LTV. Do you really think that you can refute it using so silly examples? In fact, there are several criticisms and known paradoxes that applies to older forms of LTV, but your attacks are missing even these older and more naive forms. Which is expected: you cannot formulate proper criticism for things that you do not fully understand and did not study.