My goal is not to debate every marxist i meet. I just don't understand them and i'm still new to start debating them. I've heard that Marx's LTV is wrong and have tried to read up on it, but i still don't understand what it all means. Also, on class struggles as well.
Another thing i don't get are anarcho marxist. I mean didn't the "Communist Manafesto" have many statist policies in it to create a communist society?
If anyone here could help explain to me or show me links on how to understand them i would greatly appreticate it.
http://rdwolff.com/content/marxian-economics-intensive-introduction
thats a 4 video introduction to marxist econ...
here are all his courses http://rdwolff.com/classes
All the courses are pretty long... but if you can get through them, you will have a good understanding of marxist econ...
Although, if you are looking for Austrian references... one of the best books critiquing marxism is Karl Marx And the Close of His System by Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and here is a lecture on critiquing Marxism using Bohm-Bawerk influence
My Blog: http://www.anarchico.net/
Production is 'anarchistic' - Ludwig von Mises
As for understanding the labor theory of value and exploitation theory, this is a good start: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_marxsanalysis.html. This is interesting too: https://mises.org/journals/jls/5_1/5_1_6.pdf, but more on the historical aspects of how Marxism is wrong economically and failed in history. And check this out. Here is the Marxism materials list. Of course there's always google and wikipedia. And there is a lot of good material on this place, you can search this site via google by adding site:mises.org to your search.
Your second question, how putting the state in charge of everything will lead to a stateless society, is one I still ask myself. As far as I can tell, they are just wrong. Marxists say that once central planning has lead to superabundance, the state will wither away on itself. So their theory is statist in practice, but they award themselves a honorary anti-statist label for the intention of creating a stateless society in the end. The problem is that their theory is nonsense. Marxian statelessness fails along with their economics, which does not produce superabundance but starvation. So in reality Marxism is just statist.
I would advise you to not take Marxism too seriously. It is not a meaningful, thought-out economic theory like Austrian or Keynesian economics, but rather a semi-incoherent and often inconsistent mess of ramblings that happen to appeal to the intuitive superstitions of caveman psychology. Marxism was pretty much refuted by the time it was published, and it is generally very anti-intellectual and ignores the facts. The only reason they still stick with their objective value theories, which were refuted a century ago by the marginal revolution, is that without it their entire framework would fall apart.
EmperorNero:Your second question, how putting the state in charge of everything will lead to a stateless society, is one I still ask myself. As far as I can tell, they are just wrong. Marxists say that once central planning has lead to superabundance, the state will wither away on itself. So their theory is statist in practice, but they award themselves a honorary anti-statist label for the intention of creating a stateless society in the end. The problem is that their theory is nonsense. Marxian statelessness fails along with their economics, which does not produce superabundance but starvation. So in reality their theory is just statist.
The 'withering away' of the state part is supposed to be the idea that the means of production are slowly decentralised from state ownership into the local hands of the community ('anarchy') but this stage cannot be realised until the bourgeois, whom Marx believed would use military resistance when the proletariat tried to wrestle capital out of their hands through utilisation of the state, had been suppressed.
The anarchists opposed the Marxists long before the USSR arguing that dictatorship of the proletariat (workers' state) would, to paraphrase Bakunin, result in 'the worst form of despotic red tape' (which indeed it did) opposing all forms of hierarchical working class organisation (since the state itself is a hierarchy) and favouring unionism as a revolutionary strategy in which the proletariat could fight against both the bourgeois and the state (which the anarchists saw as being a capitalist institution). Individualist anarchists like Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner and so forth saw this branch of collectivist anarchism as being equally statist/aggressive as Marxism and it is interesting to note that Benjamin Tucker tried to excommunicate Kropotkin from the anarchist movement. The debate between individualist anarchists and communist anarchists in America was highly intense and the term 'anarchism without adjectives' was loosely thrown around (used to buddy up two very highly contradicting ideologies, in my imagination). The problem with individualist anarchism was that they subscribed to the labour theory of value and the Marxian exploitation theory and thought that socialism (individualist socialism, not communism, mind) would be the natural result of a transition into anarchy and that people would naturally want control over the product of their own labour rather than sell their labour-power as a commodity to the bourgeois. They pictured a free market of self-employed producers and entrepeneurs and co-operatives exchanging their goods and service with community based justice, private protection agencies (to defend the land of the workers from the bourgeois seeing that the American government at the time was stealing land and property from people to feed into the hands of wealthy corporations).
Anarcho-capitalism is just individualist anarchism reconciled with good economic theory (AE and marginal utility theory) although anarchy would be somewhere in between the two with bustling market places in virtually every street (no regulation, just prosperity), widespread promotion of co-operatives and self-employed entrepeneurs, some capitalist hierarchy also (which is fine as long as it is voluntary), possibly a few neighbourhoods that are socialist communes and a more integrated society with the extended family model. Some socialist ideas are perfectly reasonable (a good thing, even) and can be incorporated into right-anarchism although the vast bulk is junk/violent economic creationism.
Thanks, you answered a question I was wondering about for a long time - the withering away of the state. I even attempted to read Marxian literature to figure it out, but it was always so long and bulky that I never had that question answered.
Might I ask from where you got the term 'economic creationism'?
EmperorNero:Thanks, you answered a question I was wondering about for a long time - the withering away of the state. I even attempted to read Marxian literature to figure it out, but it was always so long and bulky that I never had that question answered.
'An Anarchist FAQ' ( anarchyfaq.org ) is more comprehensible than a lot of Marx's stuff which strikes me as being rather similar to the bible. On the downside, the AFAQ repeats a lot of points about hierarchy being bad ad nauseum so if you read it, you're in for a lot of boredom.
Oh, I read something by Harvey or Wolff (can't remember who) or someone using the term to deride the Austrian School and I thought *hmm* that sounds like a more fitting term to use to describe someone who wants to centrally plan an economy than someone who specifically rejects the notion that an economy can be pre-determined or planned as such.
Are anarcho communists / Marxists for local self-sufficiency, or do they favor interchange between communes? It would be manageable to exchange resources between communes that are close to each others, but it wouldn't be doable between communes that are far away. They probably don't support capitalistic markets to exchange resources between communes according to supply and demand. Or do they say that there should be no markets within a commune (people get paid with labor vouchers, or whatever), but communes should have capitalistic markets to trade with each others?
A typical position of the early individualist anarchists (which was basically derived from the labour theory of value as formulated by the early classical economists) was the theme of 'Cost is the Limit of Price' (from Wendy McElroy http://flag.blackened.net/daver/anarchism/mcelroy1.html):
'The second mainstay of 19th century individualist anarchism was Cost the Limit of Price, a version of the labor theory of value. This theory states that value results from labor and can come from nowhere else. If I work to produce something and sell it for $1.00, it is assumed that I have received the full, just value of my labor. However, if an entrepreneur who paid me $1.00 turns around and sells the product for $1.50, the question arises: where did the extra 50 cents, the extra value come from? Since all values under my theory comes from labor and since I provided all the labor that went into the product, the extra 50 cents of value obviously represents my labor which the entrepreneur (read capitalist) stole by giving me less than the full value of what my labor produced. In other words, profit is theft. Or as Sam Konkin put it so well in his last S.L.L. talk, the labor theory of value recognizes no distinction between profit and plunder. As another example, imagine that $1.00 is the just reward of my labor and I lend that dollar to you on the condition that I receive back $1.10 at the end of a year. Where did the 10 cents come from? Certainly not from my labor since I have already been paid in full. The 10 cents must result from your labor which I am stealing through interest. All profit was theft. Not metaphorically, but literally theft and the fact that people willingly paid interest and willingly sold their labor to capitalists did not mitigate the fact that a theft had occurred.'
To which, my response would be that the extra value (of the 50 cent) is the labour expenditure by the entrepeneur, associated with the risks he must take/costs he must go to (including the hiring of machinery, empty buildings, necessary equipment, underconsumption, purchasing of necessary raw materials, the value of time and so forth).
However, it is reasonable enough to believe that if we have a shoe shop where the owner hires a shoe manufacturer to expend $1.00 worth of labour but then exacts 50 cent on top for the extra costs he has gone to, that there might just be a couple of market stalls in the street outside of shoe manufacturers who are not going to any additional costs; they are just making the shoe and selling it on for $1.00 (and getting all the consumers as a result without having to 'sell their labour as a commodity to the shoe shop owner') - no extra 50 cent needed for running the shop and lack of regulations means they can very easily sell their product on the street (though they may have to pay rent to someone who owns the street). And this is where individualist anarchists are coming from when they say that 'individualist socialism' would be the natural result of the transition phrase to anarchy because no-one will want to be wage labourers to evil capitalists anymore; 'the bottom claim of socialism,' says Tucker, 'is that labour should be in ownership of itself'.
But then we really are playing the crystal ball game here.
Another tenant of individualist anarchism is that banks wouldn't exact interest on loans (but we know now with the development of neoclassical economics that there is definitely such a thing as time value) and people would be paid according to the socially necessary labour time.
EmperorNero:Are anarcho communists / Marxists for local self-sufficiency, or do they favor interchange between communes? It would be manageable to exchange resources between communes that are close to each others, but it wouldn't be doable between communes that are far away. They probably don't support capitalistic markets to exchange resources between communes according to supply and demand. Or do they say that there should be no markets within a commune (people get paid with labor vouchers, or whatever), but communes should have capitalistic markets to trade with each others?
I've never been entirely sure on that one. Perhaps the labour voucher would become universal (so a person delivering x to commune B would get labour vouchers worth x which he could deposit in commune B [to be destroyed] for goods/services worth y). I'm pretty sure that Marx believed the labour vouchers were a transitory phrase that should (eventually) be abolished. I'm not sure what his alternative was but that he believed value should be assigned according to abstract labour embodied in a commodity which most socialists use as a rebuttal to the economic calculation argument; to which a Misesian would reply that labour is not a homogenous quantity (as Marx believes - if you read chapter one of capital, he talks about complex labour as being a larger quantity than simple labour) but rather different *types* of labour have different qualities which are valued differently according to the actors' own ranking of means and ends. Then there is the whole idea of diminishing marginal utility; the theme that each successive unit of a stock satisfies ends ranked lower by the actors' own scale. You can see this with money; £150 might pay this weeks rent, gas, electricity and cost of food. So I value the first £150 which satisfies my most immediate and highest ranked ends more than the excess of cash I have which I can use to spend on trivial things like nights out, alcohol, movies, fancy clothes and so forth. Or alternatively, I can invest in capital goods which will reap long term benefits.
EvilSocialistFellow:To which, my response would be that the extra value (of the 50 cent) is the labour expenditure by the entrepeneur, associated with the risks he must take/costs he must go to (including the hiring of machinery, empty buildings, necessary equipment, underconsumption, purchasing of necessary raw materials, the value of time and so forth).
To which I would respond that profits are not shared between capitalists and workers at all, labor is a commodity whose price is determined on the market. The workers are paid according to supply and demand, not a share of the profits. In this model the capitalist produces the entire output of the factory, is paid the market value of his product, and labor is part of the means of production which he has to pay the market rate.
EmperorNero:To which I would respond that profits are not shared between capitalists and workers at all, labor is a commodity whose price is determined on the market. The workers are paid according to supply and demand, not a share of the profits. In this model the capitalist produces the entire output of the factory, is paid the market value of his product, and labor is part of the means of production which he has to pay the market rate.
I knew this, actually, but didn't want to go into too specific detail; you are right - labourers receive a market wage. The entrepeneur must pay his work staff regardless of any losses s/he makes although s/he (as a shareholder) also receives dividends of the company when the business is in prosperous times. The 50 cents exacted on the shoes is just a simplification for the purposes of illustration.
The capitalist does use his own capital goods (which may have been acquired through the expenditure of labour or inheritance) but he does not produce the phyisical output of the factory itself physically (mental opposed to physical labour) and this is very much what socialists are getting at when they argue that all products of physical labour should be in self ownership, production being for the specific purpose of use value, not exchange. Its hard to argue that the capitalist physically produces wealth; he is not physically getting out there with the cement and bricks to build up his factory (or he may do, in which case he assumes roles of both capitalist and labourer by socialist definitions [not by AE definitions which consider just about all humans a capitalist]) - but I realise this co-ordination the entrepeneur provides to be necessary (the division of labour saves everyone from breaking their backs in the long run, even if it means all physically abled human beings do not have to their 'fair share' of dirty, hard, risky labour).
EvilSocialistFellow:Its hard to argue that the capitalist physically produces wealth;
I'm sure you know this already, but wanted to point it out anyway. Physical activity, in and of itself, is not what produces wealth. Every laborer is free to move a random pile of bricks from location A to location B and back to location A, as many times he wants. No one would be wealthier for it.
z1235:I'm sure you know this already, but wanted to point it out anyway. Physical activity, in and of itself, is not what produces wealth. Every laborer is free to move a random pile of bricks from location A to location B and back to location A, as many times he wants. No one would be wealthier for it.
RE: Ok, so what I meant was (and to now elaborate) the capitalist produces wealth through mental labour, rather than physical labour. But that doesn't mean that physically labour necessarily creates wealth. For physical labour to necessarily create wealth in a complex economy requires organisation, preferably motivated by a price mechanism (for the purposes of economic calculation so the producer knows the future value of his 'prize' and can compare the recipe involved in the production of consumer's goods with the profit derived from other recipes used in the market) than centrally planned. I could spend all day digging and filling up holes to no end.
While socialists recognise the necessity of management (though they fail to address the issue of calculation), they believe that physical and mental labour should be combined (though the labour must be useful labour - it must create actual wealth) and organised into rotatory roles for the worker in society so each has his fair share of menial tasks, the opportunity to manage/co-ordinate economic activity and the opportunity to engage in science/literature/the arts.
In many ways capitalism/the division of labour is rather ironically the best way to achieve this, since technology/the division of labour reduce the time required for labour and, in practice, socialism is the antithesis to this idea.
Hoppe points out that Marxism has some correct conclusions when discussing exploitation, class conciseness, and historical theory. But Marx defines the classes wrong. It’s not the workers vs. the capitalists, it the state vs. the producers. His lecture and paper:
It is logically absurd to claim that a person who homesteads goods not previously homesteaded by anybody else, or who employs such goods in the production of future goods, or who saves presently homesteaded or produced goods in order to increase the future supply of goods, could thereby exploit anybody. Nothing has been taken away from anybody in this process, and additional goods have actually been created. And it would be equally absurd to claim that an agreement between different homesteaders, savers, and producers regarding their non-exploitatively appropriated goods or services could possibly contain any foul play. Instead, exploitation takes place whenever any deviation from the homesteading principle occurs. Exploitation occurs whenever a person successfully claims partial or full control over scarce resources he has not homesteaded, saved, or produced, and which he has not acquired contractually from a previous producer-owner.
The ruling class (which may again be internally stratified) is initially composed of the members of such an exploitation firm. And with a ruling class established over a given territory and engaged in the expropriation of economic resources from a class of exploited producers, the center of all history indeed becomes the struggle between exploiters and the exploited. History, then, correctly told, is essentially the history of the victories and defeats of the rulers in their attempt to maximize exploitatively appropriated income and of the ruled in their attempts to resist and reverse this tendency.
The class consciousness must be low, undeveloped, and vague. […] Only if and insofar as the exploited and expropriated develop a clear idea of their own situation and are united with other members of their class through an ideological movement that gives expression to the idea of a classless society where all exploitation is abolished, can the power of the ruling class be broken.
I agree with your post.
EvilSocialistFellow: I could spend all day digging and filling up holes to no end.
You could also spend all day doing mental labor (solving crossword puzzles, contriving world-domination schemes, writing on Mises) and still not create one $1 of wealth. Not every combination of mental+physical labor creates wealth, either. Far from it -- most of them don't. This comes tautologically from the logical feebleness of LTV.
Here is my post Marxism- A Materials List
There can really be no such thing as an "anarcho-marxist." You probably are talking about anarcho-communist such as Bakunin.
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
Why would you have any interest in debating what you don't know about or understand?
I don't want to yet. Just what to learn more first. I have a little understanding, but still have a lot to learn.
Well you will come to find that there aren't many actual Marxists left. They may say they are but they don't have any real understanding of his works. It's all emotions with them.
I hope you're right. Youtube is full of them.
http://www.youtube.com/user/lilhavanaboys
EvilSocialistFellow:I knew this, actually, but didn't want to go into too specific detail; you are right - labourers receive a market wage. The entrepeneur must pay his work staff regardless of any losses s/he makes although s/he (as a shareholder) also receives dividends of the company when the business is in prosperous times. The 50 cents exacted on the shoes is just a simplification for the purposes of illustration. The capitalist does use his own capital goods (which may have been acquired through the expenditure of labour or inheritance) but he does not produce the phyisical output of the factory itself physically (mental opposed to physical labour) and this is very much what socialists are getting at when they argue that all products of physical labour should be in self ownership, production being for the specific purpose of use value, not exchange. Its hard to argue that the capitalist physically produces wealth; he is not physically getting out there with the cement and bricks to build up his factory
The capitalist does use his own capital goods (which may have been acquired through the expenditure of labour or inheritance) but he does not produce the phyisical output of the factory itself physically (mental opposed to physical labour) and this is very much what socialists are getting at when they argue that all products of physical labour should be in self ownership, production being for the specific purpose of use value, not exchange. Its hard to argue that the capitalist physically produces wealth; he is not physically getting out there with the cement and bricks to build up his factory
And that's the crux of the issue, that's where socialists go wrong. When we are in the abstract world of economic theory, it does not matter who physically assembles the widgets. As such, there is no physical labor in economic theory, only ownership. The worker sells his labor to the capitalist for a wage, at that point it is the capitalist who produced the widgets.