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 classes, and Marxist quack economics.
I didn't mean he contributed to it - he may have, I don't know. Only that he promulgated its tenets during his long career as a Marxist propagandist and socialist organizer.
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 subjective perception of value.
Profit is compensation for investors that drives, sustains and incentivizes the work of acting as a responsible steward of capital.
> 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 $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjective perception of value.
This is the price, not value. Value is the benefit provided to an economic agent from a good or service, whereas price is the exchange value for a good or service.
Right, the price I get for my labor is the value I am attaining for it. The price the employer gets for the product of my labor is the value the employer is getting for it. The value that I as an employee can attain for my labor is not equal to the value the employer can get for its product. The employer's capital is adding value that enables them to sell the product of my labor for more than I can sell the labor alone for.
There is no grand con in the free market exchange process. No exploitation that Marxists uncovered that condemns all employers as exploiters who deserve to have their property seized.
> The price the employer gets for the product of my labor is the value the employer is getting for it.
This is demonstrably untrue. Your employer almost necessarily needs to profit from hiring you. If they hire you at 30$, they may make 40$. So, the value they are provided in hiring you is roughly 40$. The price they pay is 30$.
Edit: this was likely a bad example because people are going to fly off the rails thinking I'm advocating for the LTV, but the point I'm trying to show is this: the employer is willing to pay the price of 30$ because they value the employee's work higher than the cost of the currency. So, to state it again, the price is 30$, but the value is > 30$.
This isn't even a marxist critique. This is mainstream economics saying that value and price are distinct.
> There is no grand con in the free market exchange process. No exploitation that Marxists uncovered that condemns all employers as exploiters who deserve to have their property seized.
I don't care. I'm just hoping that you can use basic economic terminology correct before calling others quacks.
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)
> 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.
>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.
Marx stated that constant capital contributed no new value to the production - that its contribution was equivalent to its depreciation, and thus on the balance, zero. This is more of his pure economic illiteracy and quackery.
So no, Marx did NOT recognize "the value that [the investors'] capital provided" in the production of goods/services. His silly theory put the net value contributed by the capital at zero. Apparently working for years to create a machine that can automate berry picking is identical in value to picking berries every day for years - the long-term investment of time into a project to raise productivity added no value according to him.
The man and his economic theories are absurd. In one sense, they are exactly what they claim to be: anti-capitalist. They are hostile to the processes that build capital.
at first i found it odd you would dismiss trotsky's intellect (a task traditionally carried out by marxists) on the basis of his economics, but now it's obvious that "inflammatory classist conspiracy theories, hate propaganda against the properties classes, and Marxist quack economics" was just you repeating yourself three time.
i thought there might be something particular about your intense reaction to trotsky's name, but your account of marx's political economy is so broken (e.g. for marx profit and surplus value are two very separate categories, and in marx's analysis employers indeed do not attain labor power below its true value) that there can't be any foundation on which you could legitimately criticize trotsky's intellectual work. this makes sense because you also just admitted to not actually knowing anything about what trotsky might have written.
>>e.g. for marx profit and surplus value are two very separate categories, and in marx's analysis employers indeed do not attain labor power below its true value
For Marx, the employer's profit was solely expropriated surplus value generated by workers:
>>Marx uses the term Mehrwert to describe the yield, profit or return on production capital invested, i.e. the amount of the increase in the value of capital. Hence, Marx's use of Mehrwert has always been translated as "surplus value", distinguishing it from "value-added". According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.
>>We have said: "Wages are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by him. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power." But the capitalist must replace these wages out of the price for which he sells the product made by the worker; he must so replace it that, as a rule, there remains to him a surplus above the cost of production expended by him, that is, he must get a profit.
The man also believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
since you haven't got to capital vol 3 (or read any text that covers that material) you do not have the knowledge required to engage in a conversation about marx's derivation of profit from surplus value. you simply do not have a handle on these categories of political economy. there's even a keynesian here demonstrating your illiteracy in orthodox economics. if this stuff interests you i suggest you study rigorously but if it doesn't interest you then that's fine -- you can be a fantastic anti-communist without it
e: as far as the increasing wages of english workers towards the end of the 19th century, you would have to look at engels' criticism of the bourgeois labour party (written to marx) and the continuation of that work by lenin (imperialism, etc). i don't think you actually care about any of this. the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack (not even the grimiest neoclassical economist would go this far). whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
I don't need to read the entire corpus of Marxist literature to conclude that Marxian economics is quackery. A few choice statements from Marx, demonstrating his economic literacy and belief in basic economic fallacies like Ludditism, is quite enough.
>>the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack
Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in. No one with even a moderate grasp of economics would believe this. He was a quack.
>>whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
You are promoting a man who had an amateur understanding of economics, and whose doctrines wherever they came to be adopted led to tyrannies the likes of which the world had never seen before.
>I don't need to read the entire corpus of Marxist literature to conclude that Marxian economics is quackery.
You do have to read about modern Marxist economic replies to objections over a century old. The likes of Guglielmo Carcheidi, Kliman and Freeman, and even non-Marxist economists sympathetic to Marx answer many of these problems.
>Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in.
This is not strictly the claim that Marx makes, and this claim you attribute to him only comes from a particular logical view of Marx rather than his own logic.
For Marx everything is a tendency, in his logic, we go beyond the simple positive statement and into actual historical development, consider for instance he correctly anticipated the fight over wages between the working class and the capitalists (which today precipitates in the creation of many workers' rights laws), which serves to counter-act the tendency, and a greater rate of exploitation (rather than a lower wage) is one of them. The biggest clue against your reading of Wage Labour and Capital is that Marx believed that a rise in productivity tends to a rise in wages.
Marx only identifies the introduction of machinery lowering the wage rate on the idea that with such machinery, workers are more substitutable - but as far as I know he did not account for the rising proportion of people taking up what he described as a "numerically unimportant class", "engineers, mechanics, joiners". In fact, this class of workers has not seen the same reduction or stagnation in the wage rate that Marx saw would happen with low skill workers.
"And precisely taking into account the forms of technical progress which Marx considered - that is the division of labour, capital saving, the mechanization of production and innovations - a fall in the maximum rate of profit can happen only in very particular cases, and no need arises to keep wages at a minimum in order to avoid a fall in the rate of profit."[0]
I was asked by moderators to not engage debates about ideology, so I'm not going to respond to this beyond saying that absolving him of his responsibility for making a prediction that ended up being proven wrong, and for forwarding a claim about the fundamental impact of automation that is a basic economic fallacy, is not intellectually honest.
Even then, it was not obviously a fallacy; several well respected political economists of the time had similar ideas; both Ricardo and Malthus believed that rising automation would lower wages, though without qualification as Marx had.
>He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
Regardless of what you think of Marx's economics (and it seems you haven't thought much about it, since modern Marxist economists have improved some of ideas and rejected others), it is totally incorrect to say he was economically illiterate. Marx had an encyclopedic knowledge of political economy, and all his predecessors, including Smith, Ricardo, Say, Bailey, J.S. Mill, etc. - that much is visible through his notes and published works.
>This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
Please keep ideological flamewar well away from HN. These inevitably repetitive and angry discussions are the last thing we want here. Worse, they are destructive of the thoughtful, curious conversations we do want here, so we have little choice but to ban accounts that post like this repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site to heart, we'd be grateful.
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!
>>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.
Of course real-world economies are highly chaotic/complex and are going to deviate from simple economic models, with numerous outliers that don't adhere to what would be seen in the assumptions of a perfectly efficient/competitive market that exists in economic model, but that is no justification for crude cookie cutter interventions that introduce systemtic distortions.
There is no reason to assume the distortions that exist in an ostensibly free market will generally push wages to below their market rate. They are just as likely to push it above. The most reasonable assumption that the distortions that push it above market wages balance the ones that push it below, resulting in average mostly aligning with the true market wage.
In the absence of definitive evidence either way, we should opt to trust basic economic theories and respect free market rules, and not actively intoduce laws that blatantly restrict contracting rights in the hope that these new distortions will counter-act some hypothesized imbalance of distortion that exists at labor's expense. These remediative rules are just as likely to exasperate existing distortions as they are to counter them, while introducing a host of new distortions that would otherwise not be present.
>>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).
The wage gains are not a free lunch. It comes at some cost. And that cost can include more than employers being driven out of business, though as we saw in the 50s through 70s in the US, that was often the outcome of unions getting a strangehold over major industries.
The fact is, it's impossible to measure the impact of every intervention in a large economy, whether it be rent control, minimum wage, or giving unions a monopoly over a company's negotiation and hiring decisions. In the absence of definitive evidence of the impact of any given proposed intervention, we should opt to trust economic theories that say price floors/caps create and obstructions of contracting rights create economic deadweight losses.
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.
One of the more well-known stories about Sun Tzu, taken from Sima Qian, illustrates Sun Tzu's temperament as follows: Before hiring Sun Tzu, the King of Wu tested Sun Tzu's skills by commanding him to train a harem of 360 concubines into soldiers. Sun Tzu divided them into two companies, appointing the two concubines most favored by the king as the company commanders. When Sun Tzu first ordered the concubines to face right, they giggled. In response, Sun Tzu said that the general, in this case himself, was responsible for ensuring that soldiers understood the commands given to them. Then, he reiterated the command, and again the concubines giggled. Sun Tzu then ordered the execution of the king's two favored concubines, to the king's protests. He explained that if the general's soldiers understood their commands but did not obey, it was the fault of the officers. Sun Tzu also said that, once a general was appointed, it was his duty to carry out his mission, even if the king protested. After both concubines were killed, new officers were chosen to replace them. Afterwards, both companies, now well aware of the costs of further frivolity, performed their maneuvers flawlessly.[11]
My knowledge of history is too limited to comment on either. If Napoleon was more brutal than his contemporaries, then no, he wasn't ingenious, just dishonorable.
Trotsky and his fellow Soviet revolutionaries were proud of mass murder, making them far more depraved than their peers and predecessors in Russia. The term "Red Terror" is not some term used by his opponents to cast him in a bad light. It was a term Trotsky used, to describe the murderous purges his government carried out. He advocated for the eradication of an entire class of people. He was one of the progenitors of the hell on Earth that were the territories under the totalitarian Soviet state.
"Culture of humanitarianism" is not a good description of Tsarist Russia. No, the problem with Trotsky et al is the extreme brutality in the name of liberation.
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.
That seems like a fair reading and appeals to my goal of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for suggesting it. I was worried I might have accidentally framed my post in a way that discouraged gp from responding.
What is less obviously true is the newness. It happened in the revolution directly following Russia's collapse in the First World War; a time of food shortages and massive, unnecessary casualties there as a result of incompetent and careless leadership. If they had learned brutality, they had learned it from the Tsar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
The Russian Civil War (Where the new government was, in fact, surrounded by enemies on all sides, many of them receiving foreign support) was a more relevant formative experience for the policies of the Bolsheviks.
Once their actual enemies were dealt with, they, of course, spent the next three decades finding largely (but not entirely) imagined ones. The Russian Civil War 'ended' in 1922, but died with Stalin, in 1953.
This doesn’t give the Communists anywhere near enough credit for their own depravity or the energy and vigor they put into the suffering of their enemies. I do not recall the Tsarist regime using rape (in order of seniority) as a weapon of terror, or pouring molten lead down the throats of anyone like the Communists did to priests, or rolling Tsarist officers down hills in barrels studded with nails on the inside.
The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison
>The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison
There is a certain danger in this sort of thinking which seeks to compare levels of terror quantitatively with disregard to their qualitative effects and purposes. The Bolsheviks are guilty of many evils, but not for the same reasons or purposes as the Tsar. Remember that Tsarist Russia didn't only operate on cases of immediate violence, it used structural ones too. Structural violence is well understood today.
The brutality under the Bolsheviks was on a different scale than what occurred under the Tsar. According to the Gulag Archipelago, during the 1905-07 anti-socialist purges, fewer people were killed in one year than were killed in single days in the mass executions that took place in the USSR in 1937-38.
Another source on the comparative brutality of the CHEKA:
>>As great as the Okhrana’s reputation may have inflated to, however, its repressiveness never equaled that of the Cheka or later apparatuses. Okhrana agents, for example, did not determine or carry out execution orders, nor did they engage in systematic torture; in contrast, the Cheka’s brutality is often exemplified in s actions during the ‘Red Terror’, during which five hundred perceived enemies were executed in just one day.18
The brutality of the Bolsheviks mirrored exactly the inhumanity of the Marxist ideology which animated them. Marxism was utterly hostile to propertied classes. The crude narrative generalized huge populations of people as victimizers, based on a single superficial dimension - their possession of property, and condemned them all to any punishment the proletariat deemed fit.
The class warfare ideology of Marxism was premised on highly prejudicial assumptions about wealthy classes that rationalized extreme class-based bigotry. The dehumanization and bigotry enabled a level of inhumanity/brutality that didn't occur under the more traditional/humanistic Czarist state.
The article doesn't call Trotsky an intellectual. Here's the paragraph:
> In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas — one of the most popular leaders in twentieth-century history — had turned his country into a haven for persecuted intellectuals: after the fall of the Spanish Republic, he offered political asylum to thousands of refugees, and Mexico received a massive influx of artists, poets, academics, and philosophers who played a crucial role in postwar culture. In a world threatened by the rise of fascism, Cárdenas opened his nation’s doors to socialists and fellow travelers of all kinds. Leon Trotsky accepted Cárdenas’s invitation and settled in Mexico City in 1937.
It says that Cárdenas did two things: firstly, after the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, he took in "artists, poets, academics, and philosophers", and secondly, in the face of fascism, he took in "socialists and fellow travelers", including Trotsky, who arrived in 1937. It's the artists, poets, academics, and philosophers fleeing Franco who were the persecuted intellectuals.
As a result, your comment and the subthread hanging off it are null and void.
I agree that it doesn't go out of its way to clarify that Trotsky is not amongst that set. But then why should it? If it had mentioned that Freud would have met El Santo, you wouldn't be raging about how it had failed to clarify that he wasn't an intellectual.
Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological battle. The resulting threads are predictable and boring. We've had to ask you not to start flamewars on HN before. If you keep doing this, we are going to have to ban you.
I could have omitted Trotsky's ideological proclivities, and simply mentioned that describing him as an intellectual given his responsibility in perpetuating mass murder is obscene.
As for the positive/negative connotations of the term intellectual, I would respectfully disagree. No one describes recognized mass murderers as intellectuals, at least not that I'm aware of, and certainly would never limit their description of such a person to merely an intellectual. It would be intellectually irresponsible to not also mention their crimes. It's this lack of recognition that I took issue with. I hope me mentioning that in the future without mentioning ideology wouldn't be deemed as violating HackerNews guidelines.
Perhaps we're running into a usage mismatch about how we understand the same word. That often gets affected by cultural differences too.
Just please avoid flamebait and flamewars on HN and especially ideological battle. Those things are not what HN is for, and they destroy what it is for, so we have to be proactive about them.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadHe 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 classes, and Marxist quack economics.
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 $30 an hour, and we will both benefit according to our subjective perception of value.
Profit is compensation for investors that drives, sustains and incentivizes the work of acting as a responsible steward of capital.
This is the price, not value. Value is the benefit provided to an economic agent from a good or service, whereas price is the exchange value for a good or service.
There is no grand con in the free market exchange process. No exploitation that Marxists uncovered that condemns all employers as exploiters who deserve to have their property seized.
This is demonstrably untrue. Your employer almost necessarily needs to profit from hiring you. If they hire you at 30$, they may make 40$. So, the value they are provided in hiring you is roughly 40$. The price they pay is 30$.
Edit: this was likely a bad example because people are going to fly off the rails thinking I'm advocating for the LTV, but the point I'm trying to show is this: the employer is willing to pay the price of 30$ because they value the employee's work higher than the cost of the currency. So, to state it again, the price is 30$, but the value is > 30$.
This isn't even a marxist critique. This is mainstream economics saying that value and price are distinct.
> There is no grand con in the free market exchange process. No exploitation that Marxists uncovered that condemns all employers as exploiters who deserve to have their property seized.
I don't care. I'm just hoping that you can use basic economic terminology correct before calling others quacks.
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)
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.
>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.
this fundamental concept is called constant capital and it is of course introduced in the opening chapters of capital vol 1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_capital#Why_%22consta...?
So no, Marx did NOT recognize "the value that [the investors'] capital provided" in the production of goods/services. His silly theory put the net value contributed by the capital at zero. Apparently working for years to create a machine that can automate berry picking is identical in value to picking berries every day for years - the long-term investment of time into a project to raise productivity added no value according to him.
The man and his economic theories are absurd. In one sense, they are exactly what they claim to be: anti-capitalist. They are hostile to the processes that build capital.
i thought there might be something particular about your intense reaction to trotsky's name, but your account of marx's political economy is so broken (e.g. for marx profit and surplus value are two very separate categories, and in marx's analysis employers indeed do not attain labor power below its true value) that there can't be any foundation on which you could legitimately criticize trotsky's intellectual work. this makes sense because you also just admitted to not actually knowing anything about what trotsky might have written.
For Marx, the employer's profit was solely expropriated surplus value generated by workers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value
>>Marx uses the term Mehrwert to describe the yield, profit or return on production capital invested, i.e. the amount of the increase in the value of capital. Hence, Marx's use of Mehrwert has always been translated as "surplus value", distinguishing it from "value-added". According to Marx's theory, surplus value is equal to the new value created by workers in excess of their own labor-cost, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit when products are sold.
Read his own words:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>We have said: "Wages are not a share of the worker in the commodities produced by him. Wages are that part of already existing commodities with which the capitalist buys a certain amount of productive labor-power." But the capitalist must replace these wages out of the price for which he sells the product made by the worker; he must so replace it that, as a rule, there remains to him a surplus above the cost of production expended by him, that is, he must get a profit.
The man also believed that automation would reduce the demand for labor, and with it, wages:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour...
>>But even if we assume that all who are directly forced out of employment by machinery, as well as all of the rising generation who were waiting for a chance of employment in the same branch of industry, do actually find some new employment – are we to believe that this new employment will pay as high wages as did the one they have lost? If it did, it would be in contradiction to the laws of political economy. We have seen how modern industry always tends to the substitution of the simpler and more subordinate employments for the higher and more complex ones. How, then, could a mass of workers thrown out of one branch of industry by machinery find refuge in another branch, unless they were to be paid more poorly? and
>>To sum up: the more productive capital grows, the more it extends the division of labour and the application of machinery; the more the division of labour and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.
This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
He was an economically illiterate quack promoting basic fallacies like Ludditism that are popular with laymen.
e: as far as the increasing wages of english workers towards the end of the 19th century, you would have to look at engels' criticism of the bourgeois labour party (written to marx) and the continuation of that work by lenin (imperialism, etc). i don't think you actually care about any of this. the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack (not even the grimiest neoclassical economist would go this far). whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
>>the mere indication of a historical difficulty within the field of political economy is good enough for you to call marx an illiterate quack
Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in. No one with even a moderate grasp of economics would believe this. He was a quack.
>>whatever helps you feel good about your brain i guess
You are promoting a man who had an amateur understanding of economics, and whose doctrines wherever they came to be adopted led to tyrannies the likes of which the world had never seen before.
You do have to read about modern Marxist economic replies to objections over a century old. The likes of Guglielmo Carcheidi, Kliman and Freeman, and even non-Marxist economists sympathetic to Marx answer many of these problems.
>Claiming automation would reduce wages is a basic fallacy that economic laymen believe in.
This is not strictly the claim that Marx makes, and this claim you attribute to him only comes from a particular logical view of Marx rather than his own logic.
Huh? I quoted him asserting that mechanization would reduce wages.
Marx only identifies the introduction of machinery lowering the wage rate on the idea that with such machinery, workers are more substitutable - but as far as I know he did not account for the rising proportion of people taking up what he described as a "numerically unimportant class", "engineers, mechanics, joiners". In fact, this class of workers has not seen the same reduction or stagnation in the wage rate that Marx saw would happen with low skill workers.
"And precisely taking into account the forms of technical progress which Marx considered - that is the division of labour, capital saving, the mechanization of production and innovations - a fall in the maximum rate of profit can happen only in very particular cases, and no need arises to keep wages at a minimum in order to avoid a fall in the rate of profit."[0]
[0] https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/20976/1/MPRA_paper_20976.pdf
Regardless of what you think of Marx's economics (and it seems you haven't thought much about it, since modern Marxist economists have improved some of ideas and rejected others), it is totally incorrect to say he was economically illiterate. Marx had an encyclopedic knowledge of political economy, and all his predecessors, including Smith, Ricardo, Say, Bailey, J.S. Mill, etc. - that much is visible through his notes and published works.
>This was proven wrong in his own lifetime as factory worker wages rapidly grew in industrializing Britain.
Marx effectively writes about this in Capital.
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!
Of course real-world economies are highly chaotic/complex and are going to deviate from simple economic models, with numerous outliers that don't adhere to what would be seen in the assumptions of a perfectly efficient/competitive market that exists in economic model, but that is no justification for crude cookie cutter interventions that introduce systemtic distortions.
There is no reason to assume the distortions that exist in an ostensibly free market will generally push wages to below their market rate. They are just as likely to push it above. The most reasonable assumption that the distortions that push it above market wages balance the ones that push it below, resulting in average mostly aligning with the true market wage.
In the absence of definitive evidence either way, we should opt to trust basic economic theories and respect free market rules, and not actively intoduce laws that blatantly restrict contracting rights in the hope that these new distortions will counter-act some hypothesized imbalance of distortion that exists at labor's expense. These remediative rules are just as likely to exasperate existing distortions as they are to counter them, while introducing a host of new distortions that would otherwise not be present.
>>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).
The wage gains are not a free lunch. It comes at some cost. And that cost can include more than employers being driven out of business, though as we saw in the 50s through 70s in the US, that was often the outcome of unions getting a strangehold over major industries.
The fact is, it's impossible to measure the impact of every intervention in a large economy, whether it be rent control, minimum wage, or giving unions a monopoly over a company's negotiation and hiring decisions. In the absence of definitive evidence of the impact of any given proposed intervention, we should opt to trust economic theories that say price floors/caps create and obstructions of contracting rights create economic deadweight losses.
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.
Do not mistake intellectual with moral, empathetic, or good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Tzu
In longer form:
https://titusng.com/2013/03/04/the-test-of-sun-tzus-art-of-w...
Trotsky and his fellow Soviet revolutionaries were proud of mass murder, making them far more depraved than their peers and predecessors in Russia. The term "Red Terror" is not some term used by his opponents to cast him in a bad light. It was a term Trotsky used, to describe the murderous purges his government carried out. He advocated for the eradication of an entire class of people. He was one of the progenitors of the hell on Earth that were the territories under the totalitarian Soviet state.
What is less obviously true is the newness. It happened in the revolution directly following Russia's collapse in the First World War; a time of food shortages and massive, unnecessary casualties there as a result of incompetent and careless leadership. If they had learned brutality, they had learned it from the Tsar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okhrana
Once their actual enemies were dealt with, they, of course, spent the next three decades finding largely (but not entirely) imagined ones. The Russian Civil War 'ended' in 1922, but died with Stalin, in 1953.
The Communists made the Tsarist regime look like rank amateurs in terror, they weren’t even trying in comparison
There is a certain danger in this sort of thinking which seeks to compare levels of terror quantitatively with disregard to their qualitative effects and purposes. The Bolsheviks are guilty of many evils, but not for the same reasons or purposes as the Tsar. Remember that Tsarist Russia didn't only operate on cases of immediate violence, it used structural ones too. Structural violence is well understood today.
Another source on the comparative brutality of the CHEKA:
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou13987...
>>As great as the Okhrana’s reputation may have inflated to, however, its repressiveness never equaled that of the Cheka or later apparatuses. Okhrana agents, for example, did not determine or carry out execution orders, nor did they engage in systematic torture; in contrast, the Cheka’s brutality is often exemplified in s actions during the ‘Red Terror’, during which five hundred perceived enemies were executed in just one day.18
The brutality of the Bolsheviks mirrored exactly the inhumanity of the Marxist ideology which animated them. Marxism was utterly hostile to propertied classes. The crude narrative generalized huge populations of people as victimizers, based on a single superficial dimension - their possession of property, and condemned them all to any punishment the proletariat deemed fit.
The class warfare ideology of Marxism was premised on highly prejudicial assumptions about wealthy classes that rationalized extreme class-based bigotry. The dehumanization and bigotry enabled a level of inhumanity/brutality that didn't occur under the more traditional/humanistic Czarist state.
> In Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas — one of the most popular leaders in twentieth-century history — had turned his country into a haven for persecuted intellectuals: after the fall of the Spanish Republic, he offered political asylum to thousands of refugees, and Mexico received a massive influx of artists, poets, academics, and philosophers who played a crucial role in postwar culture. In a world threatened by the rise of fascism, Cárdenas opened his nation’s doors to socialists and fellow travelers of all kinds. Leon Trotsky accepted Cárdenas’s invitation and settled in Mexico City in 1937.
It says that Cárdenas did two things: firstly, after the fall of the Spanish Republic in 1939, he took in "artists, poets, academics, and philosophers", and secondly, in the face of fascism, he took in "socialists and fellow travelers", including Trotsky, who arrived in 1937. It's the artists, poets, academics, and philosophers fleeing Franco who were the persecuted intellectuals.
As a result, your comment and the subthread hanging off it are null and void.
the imperiled psychoanalyst would have found himself living among the world’s foremost artists and intellectuals.
And then mentions the hypothetical meetings with Trotsky several times. I interpreted that as Trotsky being categorized as an intellectual.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Intellectuals are no better than anyone else, and often worse, so this ridiculous flamewar started with a non sequitur anyhow.
As for the positive/negative connotations of the term intellectual, I would respectfully disagree. No one describes recognized mass murderers as intellectuals, at least not that I'm aware of, and certainly would never limit their description of such a person to merely an intellectual. It would be intellectually irresponsible to not also mention their crimes. It's this lack of recognition that I took issue with. I hope me mentioning that in the future without mentioning ideology wouldn't be deemed as violating HackerNews guidelines.
Just please avoid flamebait and flamewars on HN and especially ideological battle. Those things are not what HN is for, and they destroy what it is for, so we have to be proactive about them.
Yes understood.