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Marx Headroom 003 - Value Price and Profit Part 2
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Speaker 2Uh,
Speaker 1what? Yeah, it's just one of those things where it's like, I'm pretty sure I know what what's going on here, but I cannot for the life of me articulate it. So I'm going to assume that I don't actually know what's going on here.
Speaker 3[inaudible] alright, comrades. Welcome back to market
Speaker 1headroom. Today we are talking about value pricing profit. The final section, we've got myself,
Speaker 4Tiberius, Caracas, Outer Siberia and I'm hope. So last time we got through pretty much the meat of value, price and profit. Just one of you guys want to give us a summary of what we learned or what I learned to what you guys taught me. You want to cover this CBA since I wasn't here. Sure I can. I can go over it. So essentially we learned about surplus value and we learned about the labor theory of value and how those two operate. So the, essentially the way profit is generated under a capitalism under commodity exchange is that the capitalists purchased some lever power from the worker. This entitles the capitalists to the product of whatever the work agrees in that periods of the capitalist is purchased. And the capitalist makes a profit by selling the commodities is the worker produces add value. And the reason that there's a profit, which is Mark's is sort of uh, innovation of the theory of value, which will the labor theory of value, which Marx had not because economists like Ricardo had already thought about it in this way, but the more marks ads is this idea of labor versus labor power. So that by selling something of value, you make a profit because you purchased the labor power, which is the amount of labor it takes to sustain the worker for that period and to reproduce the working class. Right. So that that's the amount of social that's about as socially necessary stuff so that the worker can live and work for you. That's how much it costs to employ the worker. Cause that's the, that's the labor value of, of their labor power. But then the labor value of their commodities is obviously equal to the amount of time they work. And that's always, they always have to work more than the amount of time it takes to sustain them because that's, and that's how the capital is, makes a profit. So the capital is hires them for like say eight hours. Four of those hours are reproduced the value that the worker needs to survive and for the hours become surplus value for cre capitalism. Cool.
Speaker 1And um, just because this is what I got hung up on last time. I just want to maybe point out once more that there's a very clear distinction that Marx has making between the value of labor and the value of laboring power. And the value of labor is kind of a, a nonsensical term under mercy in theory. Because the value of any commodity or any product being exchanged on a marketplace is essentially measured by the amount of labor in it. So that you can't actually talk about the value of labor per se. Because to talk about value under this system would be to talk about how much labor when she went into it. So therefore, uh, you can't really talk about how much labor went into labor because it's, it is in and of itself the same thing. The, the distinction therefore is the laboring power. So, uh, which is, which is what you're saying, the laboring power is the, the value of keeping that worker, they're alive, maintained and reproducing the laboring class itself. Uh, and that is inherently lower because of, um, the, you know, things like technological process and the amount of work a person can actually put in, in a given amount of time is less than the actual amount of work that they need to reproduce themselves and maintain themselves. So therefore that difference between the, the value that they can produce and the value that they actually need to maintain themselves, that is essentially the surplus of value. And therefore the profit for the boss. The profit in terms of interest on the, um, on the owners of capital and the profit in terms of rent on the owners of, if I'm making sense here. Yup. That was all good.
Speaker 5Yep. Pretty good.
Speaker 1Cool. Uh, so then I think we can go into, uh, the 12th chapter here, general relations of profits, wages and prices. Uh, Pope, do you want to introduce this one for us?
Speaker 6So I'm just gonna read the first little bit before we get into some math problems that Mark's really likes to do. Deduct from the value of a commodity, the value replacing the value of raw materials and other means of production based used upon it. And that is to say deduct the value representing, presenting the past labor contained in it and the remainder of its value will resolve into quantity of labor added by the working man last employed. So this is just a worded math equation just saying about how you derive what labor is worth, what goes into making a commodity word, something so on and so forth. If that working man works 12 hours daily, if 12 hours of average labor crystallizes themselves in an amount of gold equal to six shillings, this additional value of six shillings is the only value his labor will have created. This given value determined by the time of his Labor is the only fund from which both he and the capitalist have draw their respective shares or dividends. The only value to be divided into wages and profits is it is evident that this value will, uh, itself not be altered by the variable proportions in which it may be divided amongst the two parties. There will also be nothing changed if in the place of one working man you put the whole working population 12 million working days for example instead of one. So this is just going deeper into explaining, you know, the relation between the worker, uh, the capitalist and then how profit is derived and accommodation for resources.
Speaker 4Right. And so this kind of goes back to his original cause. He originally started this by discussing, uh, I believe he talked to these talking about wages and this one is this the one where he starts off with discussing the sort of idea that raising wages will lower. We'll actually
Speaker 6where he introduces that a little bit, he'll get into it farther, right? Right.
Speaker 4So here he starts to say that, look, the, the thing is that you only have this, the only have this value. So the value that the worker creates, that's the value that the worker and the capital's get disclosed. There's something else. So they split this. So therefore given a fixed value for that commodity, then actually if wages change, she says if the has change, profits will change in an opposite direction because it's splitting up of this value. So some part of it is wages and some part of it is surplus value. So if more part of it is wages and less part of a surplus value and vice versa. Yeah. So skipping
Speaker 6ahead into the next paragraph a little bit. Um, you brought it up and I'll finish it off. If wages fall profits will rise and if wages rise, profits will fall. If the working man on our former supposition gets three shillings equal to one half of the value he is created, or if his whole working day consists half of paid half of unpaid labor, the rate of profit will be 100% because the capitalist would get three shillings. If the working man receives only two shillings works only one third of the whole day for himself, the capitalists will get four shillings and the rate of the profit will be 200% if the working man receives four shillings, capitalist class will only receive two and he just continues on just explaining how, you know, variations and different levels of profit margins go between the capitalist and the worker. Yeah, this is actually, it's really weird
Speaker 4read like sometimes you just go on these math tangents for like a long time and like you kind of like that sort of, the one thing that makes marks a little easier to read is that he repeats himself a lot of times because I guess he's hoping that you get it the third he's like, well look, if it's this much
Speaker 6then it's this and if it's this watch that. It's that. And if it's this much then yeah, and I really appreciate that because you know, some of these topics and trends, they're not very complicated, but sometimes the way he goes about it is very complicated in certain ways. So it's nice that he breaks it down in several different examples. And he does that throughout, you know, this whole series of writings for value, price and profit. And they'll do it even more when we get into chapter 13 but it's just really centering around the point that if you're making a set amount of money per day or per hour or whatever, if it'll get into like, you know, produce mass producing more and more. So you're making the same amount but you're producing more profit for the capitalist. So you're only, you know, working half day paid half day, you know, unpaid or whatever wages out too.
Speaker 4Right. And then at the end of this chapter, the last paragraph talks about how the, the number or a massive commodities produced in a given time of labor. It depends on the productive power of the Labor employed. So essentially if it's socially necessary to take, you can produce things faster, essentially talking about technological progress or other kinds of advances and productive, how are basically, if you can produce more things in the same time, this lowers each of those things value, right? So he says that within one degree, with one degree of the productive power of spinning Libra, for example, a working day of 12 hours may produce 12 pounds of yarn with a lesser degree of productive hour, only two pounds if then 12 hours average labor. We're realizing the value of six shillings. In the one case, the 12 pounds of yarn would cost six shillings and the other case, the two pounds of yarn, what also costs six shillings. So basically the value is, is like how much time it took and how many it's divided among how many things you can produce in that time, which is determined by their productive power of labor.
Speaker 1Yeah, exactly. Which I believe is what he was referring to as the paradox of high price labor producing cheap goods and cheap labor producing high priced goods were in labor markets that don't have the same kind of a technological advantage of say, mechanized loons, but the labor force a works are very cheap. You're still not producing enough to overcome that differential between how many units of something that cheap labor produces versus how many more units of something be expensive labor produces.
Speaker 4Right? Because in fact, the, the, the, the cost of the Labor or the Labor power, uh, well, he, he specifically says earlier that now when he's going to talk about Labor is going to mean labor power, but he says the, the cost of the labor power, it doesn't actually matter to the price of the commodity. Right? So like they pay you some, uh, some about depending on how much it socially considered socially necessary to maintain you and then how much you produce is just, you produce an amount of value equal to the amount of time you work. So how much you're paid for that time doesn't actually correlate to the value of what you produce at all.
Speaker 1Uh, was it this chapter where he talks about, uh, no, I think it's the next chapter where he talks about labor unions. What's the next section? Yeah, main main cases of attempts at raising wages or resisting resisting their fall. Do you guys have anything to add upon the previous chapter?
Speaker 6Uh, not really. I mean it's pretty straightforward and fairly simple, uh, explanation of what he uses. Like the general distribution of, you know, profit versus what your wage is actually drive from where it's, you know, a set price and then you just kinda
Speaker 1figure it out after. Right. Cause I kind of read it as basically being, okay, so we have this, we have this sort of framework to think about value in wages and what's the result of that then? So, so if you get, if you get up to the previous chapters and say, okay, yeah, I see what's going on here. I think, uh, Mark's is basically just laying out. So then this is, this is what this means for profit, which I think we can probably move on to what Marc's proposes to actually do about that. So, uh, chapter 13 opens up with, let us know, seriously considered the main cases in which a rise of wages is attempted or reduction of wages as rezip resisted. Number one, we have seen that the value of the laboring power or in more popular parlance, the value of labor is determined by the value of necessities, the quantity of labor required to produce them. So he's basically saying that the wages, that Labor commands are generally tied to the things that they and society sort of collectively deemed that they have to have and therefore their wages must cover sort of that basic minimum. And obviously this is not something that the capitalists want because of the capitalists are obviously trying to extract as much profit out of the Labor that they can command and if they make more in wages, that's less than profit because as we saw previously, profit is essentially made by capitalist screwing over Labor out of the value of the things that they produce.
Speaker 4Right? At least sort of economic theory work smocks and sort of setting aside the question of the other area of class struggle where for example, the capitalists and the Labor struggle to determine what the socially necessary value is. And in this case he's saying, well suppose we have a given socially edited given moment. We have a certain amount of things that are considered socially necessary for the labor and then, and now he's saying, well, okay, if the price of these things, if the value of these things goes up, because say he says consequent on upon a decrease in productivity, more labor should be wanting to produce the same amount of agricultural produce. So if you need more labor to produce those necessities, then the value of labor, Musk or labor power must go up. So if the Libor then does not demand, does not get increased wages, then if we just did not rise or not sufficiently rise to compensate for the inquiries, valleys of necessities, the price of Labor would sink below the value of labor and the Labor of standard of life will deteriorate. So note that here he is distinguishing between price and value because he's saying that there is, even though he says that in theory capitalism works by selling things at their value at there say at half the price of equal to the value. But in the context of political class trouble sometimes the capitalist class can actually, by using their collective advantage get things to be even more advantages to them than the normal operation.
Speaker 6Yeah. And then skipping ahead a little bit, he talks about working people and you know, resisting to capitalist class, trying to shrink their wages more and more so they can get more profit. He says if the working man should resist that reduction of relative wages, he would only try to get some share in the increased productive powers of his own labor and to maintain his former relative position in the social class. And then he goes into a little bit about corn laws and English, a capitalist class, just shrinking wages over time. And it's really just talking about how if your productivity goes up, you know, Labor's generally would want to try and get the of their labor, obviously while the capitalist class would try to keep them either at or below what their former, a pay rate would be.
Speaker 4Right. So you're essentially saying there's two cases, right? You have your productivity goes if the productivity goes down, right. He's talking about then the production of necessaries, he says he's productivity goes down. That on the one hand then the value of labor rises. So that is to say the value of the things you need to buy to live is greater. So the value of your labors more so now if you don't get increased wages, then effectively you can't buy the same things you could buy before and now you're, you're standard life deteriorates. Or if productivity increases and we just stay the same, then yes you can buy the things that you could buy before your valuable he brook goes down, but the diminished value would come out at the same amount of commodities as before. But now the capitalist class is effectively increasing its profit because productivity is increasing. So more things that we produce, there's more profit. But if the laborers remaining the same, then now the Libor has relatively in the context of what the struggle with the capital, this has relatively less so in both cases of workers get screwed.
Speaker 1Yeah. And I think the anti corn laws thing, while that was kind of a, it felt almost kind of an aside, but the corn laws essentially the, it was a protective tariffs for native grain production within the UK, I believe. Right? Pretty sure.
Speaker 4I don't remember this part in my, what I think this would
Speaker 6small illusion, but I'm pretty sure that it was about like the wheat production predictions.
Speaker 1Yeah. Corn being a British term for anything small and hard. Uh, so you know, any, any grain colonel would have been called the corn
Speaker 4and their temper. Anything small and hard really.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know that, that's why you get corn on your feet. It's, it's a, it's a small hard like nodule of dead skin. The petitioner is really pretty sure. Weird. What's wrong?
Speaker 6What's wrong with, I know absolutely nothing about British anything. Yeah. I'm pretty sure I know that because if Alton Brown, but um, we'll move quickly on, uh,
Speaker 1he's talking about this sort of seeming paradox of, of why the capital class in Britain would want to abolish these laws that protect native production and essentially like the reason why is that other countries are able to produce this commodity much below the cost of native production. And so therefore, importing these cheaper goods from abroad reduces the costs of the necessaries for the laboring class and therefore makes there, reduces the value of what they actually need to survive. And, and therefore, uh, allows the capitol class to reduce wages without as much of a pushback a against
Speaker 4yeah.
Speaker 1Against a, either a fall of wages or a against a rise in profit
Speaker 4that would, um, uh,
Speaker 1effectively mean a lowering of the value that the workers get versus what they produce. Uh, which you know, is something that we see a lot of. You know, as, as time goes on, especially up into the neoliberal era where a lot of these trade barriers start to come down and essentially sort of like destroyed the value of, of laboring power in wealthier countries.
Speaker 4Right. And I'm not, you'll know that at the time of the corn laws were repealed, the Irish genocide has been going on for about two years. The, the famine in Ireland. And this was part of the, I think that, I mean that sort of connects to it because in terms of like when the supposedly the food supply starts to fall and they're like, oh no, we have to get rid of these laws because we need, we need an import more food because there's not enough food. But obviously that's wasn't at all the cause of the crisis. Yeah.
Speaker 6It's also interesting to see like the exploitation of outsourcing in a more imperialist in colonial fashion, even towards, you know, Marx's Day because even then the sun didn't set on the British empire kind of thing going on. Yeah. Just a side note.
Speaker 4Yeah. So anyway, going back to the body here. So the second point in this chapter is that another case of we just possibly potentially use changing is the change in a change might occur in their money prices, but not in their values consequent upon a previous change in the value of money. So he says by the discovery of more fertile minds and so forth, two ounces of gold might, for example, costs no more labor to produce it, a one ounce did before. So he started here. He's talking about obviously you've money, it's backed by gold, but this is basically inflation inflation or deflation. Basically the value of money changes. So he says exactly that, that if, if as inflation goes up, the workers wages don't or they do, but not proportionately to the fall in the value of money than the workers standard of living is going down. Yeah, it's all past history proves that whenever such a depreciation of money occurs, the capitalists are on the alert to seize this opportunity for defrauding the work man. Then we do see that like we know that for example, in the u s in the current economic period, the last few decades in fact in wages haven't kept up with inflation. As a result, their value's gone down. Yeah. Basically for 40 years, the amount of wages has been stagnant while productivity and profits have been, uh, on a meteoric
Speaker 1rise when you adjust for inflation.
Speaker 4Right. So when you just reflections, I haven't been, it hasn't been stagnant, but it hasn't been proportionate essentially. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1Right. And, uh, one of the big issues of the 70s was that there was essentially a, uh, there was essentially an investor strike because they were in a, a situation of economic stagnation and currency deflation, so that if, if you as a consumer or somebody taking out a loan, the value that you actually have to return back for that loan is essentially less than the value that you took out in the first place. So the, the, the lender is essentially like subsidizing you because of this differential and, uh, what a unit of currency is worth at the time of the loan writing and what the currency is worth at the time you're actually starting to pay it back. And, and that's, that's, you know, one of the biggest reasons why basically every single federal reserve or the ECV, uh, have been essentially so paranoid about, you know, trying to keep inflation at a small rise because that is constantly favorable to the investing in capital classes and, um, essentially sucks for everybody else because it just makes it harder for the rest of us to, you know, try and keep our wages up with inflation and try to pay back the loans that were required to take out for our, this, our necessaries and that basically screws the rest of us.
Speaker 4Yeah, that's sort of a different aspect of another aspect of a class struggle with terms in terms of credit, which marks hasn't yet gone into. He goes into some of his other works, not here, here, but I think here is the ones that you're saying that he's talking about how inflation you can hurt the worker if the leeches don't go up proportionately. Yeah. If you guys want to move on to the third section, this is where we
Speaker 1yeah, the working day. Um, yeah. You know basically saying that uh, we have till now suppose that the working day has given limits. The working day however has by itself no constant limit. It is the constant tendency of capitol to stretch it to its utmost physically possible length because in the same degree, because in the same degree surplus labor and consequently the profit resulting there from will be increased. So it's basically your boss trying to look at, especially if you're a salary worker, like I know a lot of tech workers are, is basically your boss trying to keep you there for as long as possible because the longer they're there essentially like the less they're paying you per unit that you actually produce.
Speaker 4And he goes into talking about how like the anti coven war and whatnot,
Speaker 6which is the British Barron's trying to get the working class, which I believe was fought a on Twitter in 27. Sorry, what? Yes. And angrily shouting at the, uh, British capitalist class on twitter.com but he just goes and talk about how it was like at the later end of the 18th century. Working Day was about 10 hours on average and England. And then eventually it moved on to like, you know, a lot of people were even working 18 hours after that. And you know, like you said earlier, uh, it's really comparable today with salaried people, especially in industries like tech and whatnot, where, you know, yeah, you're making, you know, $60,000 a year or whatever, but you're also working like 80 hours a week, so,
Speaker 4right. And so he does, he talks about how the, this sort of like culturally just shifts like, so this is, this is here is a little going, he is going into like the sort of political aspect of classroom. We're not just the economic aspect. Uh, and he's saying that, look here, he's saying a few years before the general introduction of newly admitted machinery and about 1765, a pamphlet appeared in England under the title, an essay on trade, the anonymous author, an avowed enemy of the working classes declaims on the necessity of expanding the limits of the working day amongst other means to this. Then he proposes the working houses, which he says ought to be houses of terror. And what is the length of the, of the working you prescribed for these houses of terror? 12 hours. The very same time, which in 1832 was declared by capitalist political economists and ministers to be not only the existing but the necessary time of Libra for a child under 12 years. Got To love those child labor laws. Yep. So he's saying that like in these sort of, uh, how many years did this piece in these 70 years, 12 hours went from being like a punishment for work, for lazy workers to just, you know, the regular thing that children shouldn't have to work.
Speaker 1Yeah. And, and I think that this, I think that this actually has a little bit less relevant today than it did in Marx's time because you know, back then you weren't really paid by the hour you are paid by, you know, by the week or by the day essentially with so, so the longer they go they kept you during the day. Uh, they didn't necessarily have to pay you for those extra hours. Whereas you know, after the class struggles of the late 19th century, the vast majority of labor is wage labor. And so you're actually, you're actually paid by the actual prorated amount of time that you're on the clock. So, so you do you, you would see things like the state essentially not enforcing overtime laws so that you, the longer you're there after a certain period of time, you're supposed to be paid more. You know, there's, there are things bosses forcing wage labor to work off the clock. But on the whole, I think that the question over the length of the working day is, is really more about respecting the, the working classes. Like need for leisure time more than it is about actual pay.
Speaker 4Yeah. This is
Speaker 6present day. This is more applicable to a like under the table labor, uh, illegal labor, things like that as well as a, even a lot of construction industry type jobs that you know, might not necessarily be like federally or you know, state regulated. I know I do a lot of construction where can, a lot of stuff, it's you get paid by the day or you get paid by the week kind of thing. It's not taxed anything like that. So it's still, you know, you could make the same amount of money if you're working four hours or if you're working 20 hours.
Speaker 4Right. And I think here's the thing though, even though it is true that through the struggle of workers, like there's been a lot of progress achieved in this area. Nothing, nothing is set in stone because I think we still see that. Like, I mean there's plenty of examples of just this exact thing, you know, that happens today. Like, uh, I remember the case of Amazon when in order to go work in the Amazon warehouse, I believe you have to go through the security checkpoints. And that takes a lot of time for like people to go through those. But Amazon went to court and fought for, it's right to not pay them for the time they have to stand in line there, uh, even though they have to do it in order to get to their job.
Speaker 1Uh, things like that. And I think, like we said, this is, this could be something that we essentially radicalized tech workers over because I, I went to school for, for computer science and basically left because fuck silicon valley. But you know, I have, I have a lot of friends there who complain bitterly about the fact that they're salaried employees and they're, you know, if you work for 40 hours, like if you work a normal working week, a lot of times, especially if you're in your young twenties, uh, you're looked at as lazy, you're looked at as not a team player. Like you're, you have a bad time, you know?
Speaker 4Right. So yeah, for sure. What worker couldn't see the relevance. Here's, let's just read this part of it where Marcus like talks, talks about it in like sort of more stark language. He says in their attempts at reducing the working day to its former rational dimensions or where they cannot enforce illegal fixation of a normal working day at checking over work by a rise of wages are rising not only in proportion to the circle, same exact did, but in greater proportion. Working men fulfill only a duty to themselves and their race. They only set limits. The tyrannical user patients of capital time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of whose whole lifetime apart from the mere physical interruptions by sleep, meals and so forth is absorbed by is Lima for the capitalist is less than a beast of burden. He's a mere machine for producing foreign wealth, broken and body and brutalized in mind. He had the whole history of modern industry shows that capital, if not checked, we'll recklessly and ruthlessly work to cast down the whole working class to this utmost state of degradation. I think any worker can see immediately that what he's saying must have some validity because that's clearly the case.
Speaker 6Yeah. And even when he finishes up this section, he still just kind of wraps it up with saying, even with given limits of the working day, such as they now exist in all branches of industry, subjected to the factory laws or eyes of wages may become necessary if only to keep up the old standard value of labor by increasing the intensity of labor a man may be made to expend as much of vital force in one hour as he formerly did. And to this has to a certain degree had been affected in the trades placed under the factory x. And he just goes on to just keep talking about, you know, inflation as well as productivity directly negate the needs of the worker. And there's something that the capitalist class uses to expunge even more profit from.
Speaker 4Right, exactly. And so what, what he's telling us in the hole is that, look, the capitalists are constantly trying to fuck us over in different ways. If they, if they try to attack the, the time you work. If they can't do that because of legal limits and they tried to attack how hard you work, they try to get you when inflation lowers the value of your wages. So like all of these things, they tried to get you on, on the value of necessities when it changes, all of these things mean that just to tread water, just to stay in the same spot, the worker in the working class, we have to struggle. We can't like constantly the capital's is pushing on all these levers and just trying to extract as much surplus value as possible, including at times when the system of capitalism in and of itself falls into one of its multitude of periodic crises. Right? And we can see that like it'll go outside the law, like we said, like, like, uh, like an undocumented immigrants here. Right? So like capital uses that to divide the working class to, to like make some workers not be able to be employed without having to follow standard laws about how labor is supposed to operate. Right? So things like that show that like capitol is trying, it's, it's, it's just, it's, it's trying by any way it can to give you less and take more. Because again, as mark said, there's this, there's a commodity and it's split between your wages on the one hand and the surplus value on the other. So if they want to increase the surplus value, they've got to decrease the wages.
Speaker 6Yeah. And if they can't do that, they have to find another means. Switch back to like undocumented labor is like all the, uh, seasonal farm hands. Whereas some of them are undocumented laborers and if they get hurt on the job, they just get deported so that the company doesn't have to pay anything. And when Tiberius was talking about, uh, you know, like cycles of periodical crisis and things like that, Mark's goes in talking about all of you know that for reasons I've not now to explain capitalist production moves through certain periodicals cycles. We usually a state of Quinn sense growing animation, prosperity, overtrade crisis and stagnation, the market prices of commodities and market rates and profit will follow these phases now sinking below their averages now rising above them. And that's something that we see even today, especially, you know, with the recession in 2008 or you know, like the stock market crashing in the 20s and it's just everything's cyclical and there's always cycles of exploitation and profits and historically the capitalist class has come out on top almost every single time.
Speaker 4Right. And here's the thing that we also can see in our, in our like life today. So I think that like, like everything mark says, it's just very relevant in today's economy. Like we see that, like he says, if during the phases of prosperity, when extra profits are made, he did not battle for rise of wages. He would taking the average of one industrial cycle, not even receive his average wages or the value of his Labor. It is the utmost height of folly to demand that while his wages are necessarily affected by the adverse phase of the cycle, you should exclude himself from compensation during the prosperous phase of the cycle. And that's exactly what happens, right? Because we see that like when capitalism has a crisis, it's time for austerity and everyone has to pay for that. But when capitalism is booming and you don't get anything right, when Catherine was in it
Speaker 1booming, oh, we need to set aside money in order to compensate for the fact that capitalism will go into a crisis soon, it's always soon. So we can't pay you as much right now because we have to have a war chest for when the crash comes that we're going to pay ourselves because we have to have golden parachutes. You, you plebs don't.
Speaker 4All right. And again, then we see that like, Hey, wait a minute. On average that means is constantly going down because when the crisis happens, your wages fall and when the crisis stops, your wages don't go up.
Speaker 6Yup. Yeah. And even says it would be absurd to treat it on one hand as a commodity. Uh, and two on, on the other hand, to accept it from laws which regulate prices of commodities. And that's just going more into, you know, your relation to what you're producing and when there is a crash versus, you know, when it is booming. And like we said before, you know, you get dick basically, if the economy's doing good and you get even more trash, it when it's doing bad, he goes on, say the slave receives a permanent and fixed amount of maintenance. The wage labor does not, you must try to get her rise of wages in the one instance if only to compensate for fall. The wages in the other fees resigned himself to accept the will, the dictates of the capitalist as a permanent economical law. He would share in all the miseries of the slave without security of the slave.
Speaker 4Yeah. I think there has been some announced about Marcus's analogy to slavery, which was possibly, I'm not a great one,
Speaker 1uh, on the whole, yeah. You know, it, Eh, yeah. That's, that is there. Yeah. He was, uh, he was, uh, you know, middle class white dude and the height of old school imperialism. So he was woke for his time but dude had some bad opinions.
Speaker 4Yeah, it's, yeah. Um, and then so the last section of this chapter is sort of a, a conclusion of this and he says that look basically says, look, all of these things are a result of previous changes. So he says by Trina struggle for a rise of wages independently of all these circumstances by looking only upon the change of wages and overlooking all of the changes from which they emanate, you proceed from a false premise in order to arrive at false conclusions. So he's saying that like something like the, we can look at something like the fight for 15 campaign here, right? Where it's like to suggest that like this is just workers like randomly just want more money because they're like lazy or greedy or whatever. We just like Bush all were up again that you constantly hear, it doesn't like, it makes no sense. It's like independent of the circumstances in which the workers have to struggle just to stay at the same level, not even to make gains. Yeah. Like
Speaker 6in a more a pungent way. Capitalists think all workers are just fuck you pay me when realistically it's the other way around. Um, and with them just continually extracting stuff when you're the one producing all of the riches, all the goods, so on and so forth.
Speaker 1Yeah, I mean it's basically just fuck you work for me. I think we can probably roll into the final chapter here. The struggle between capital and labor and its results. So the first one, having shown that the periodical resistance on the part of the working men against the reduction of wages and their periodical attempts at getting a rise of wages are inseparable from the wage system and dictated by the very fact that the very fact of labor being assimilated to commodities and therefore subject to the laws regulating the general movement of prices. Having furthermore shown that a general rise of wages or general rise of wages gotta hate saying that out loud would result in a fall. In the general rate of profit but not affect the average prices of commodities or their values. The question now ultimately arises how far in this incessant struggle between capital and labor did the latter is likely to prove successful. Uh, which I, you know, it's, it's really like the, the essential question of the socialist struggle
Speaker 4really. And so here he starts going into, okay, so let's talk about these as there are some peculiar features. We'll distinguish the value of the laboring power or the value of labor from the values of all of their commodities. The value of Leo in power is formed by two elements. The one rarely physical, the other historical or social. So this is what I've been talking to in terms of like the political aspect of class struggle. So obviously he says there's a physical element that is to say like you literally can't work more than a certain amount. Like you will just drop dead. Like the human body has certain limits. He says this is both in intensity and in the length of the working day is billing. The working day is also limited by old ultimate, although very elastic boundaries. But the thing is that it's rarely the case that the sort of struggle is only roving around that because I mean the class struggle of Labor's means that they are usually able to get at least better than the like literally bare minimum where they're just not dropping immediately dead on the factory floor. Although that did happen in the past and does happen now, but this is not the only element besides the smear physical element. The value of labor is and every country determined by a traditional standard of life. So here he means that this is the socially accepted things that you need to live, right? He says that the, for example, it says the English standard of life may be reduced to the Irish standard. So again, he's talking about here, this is like, you can see that systems like racism are coming into play here in that the, for example, the English worker, it might be considered a hat needs socially more than the Irish worker because of this system of racist colonialism in place in England
Speaker 1or the immigrant Mexican worker needing less than the native American word or the locally born American work. Yes. Um, I actually kind of have a, uh, maybe a little bit of a tangential question for you guys, but like something that I've been kind of thinking about it, you know, especially as from reading this is that the state under capitalism is essentially a tool of the bourgeoisie for the control of the working class. And, and I think that in especially in, instead of like recent times, there has been this idea that especially among a Antarctica circles that the fight against or, or the, the, you know, like unionizing efforts in these kinds of things don't involve the state somehow. And you know, could, because you can kind of think of welfare programs, social programs, these kinds of things as essentially the whole of the capitalist class paying the whole of the working class, uh, a certain amount of wages so that individual capitalists can maintain their own profits. Right. Because we see this as a, like a Walmart for example, would probably, you know, if not go out of business than be like Ha, have their profits dug into tremendously if there are forced to actually pay a living wage to their employees,
Speaker 6their employees getting food stamps and stuff.
Speaker 1Exactly. So, you know, the, the, the struggle against the short term struggle against the capitalist class four for minor gains in the short run. Like I think that we do, we still need to consider the struggle for minor gains in from the state as essentially the representative of the whole, of the bourgeois class, you know, in that struggle. Uh, which is, uh, you know, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of an interesting question. Um, like especially for me coming from a more anarchist background there, there is, you know, essentially an open question of whether or not like actually having these kinds of struggles for immediate reform actually hurt your longterm struggle. So
Speaker 6yeah, I mean I think that's a really good point or like Kinda like question you're praising right now because if you look at things like the new deal in America, that without it there most definitely would have been a much bigger rise in, you know, class consciousness, a socialist ideology, things like that. And it definitely benefited a lot of very wealthy people, made some people even more wealthy. It did help most people pretty much out all of the way, but we still need to consider, you know, who benefits from things like that as well as when we're talking about things like ubi today about is this just something to keep people at bay like, Oh look, we have this great thing now. So people you know, a summer back down for a little while and lose interest in, you know, completely like pushing onto the next yard line instead of, you know, just getting complacent and that's, I don't know, it's something that I definitely don't have an answer to and a lot of people don't. And even, you know, between mls and anarchists and everybody in between and farther away is really, we need to be careful when we're backing reforms because it might not be a bandaid or is it a tourniquet, you know, which is it. Right. I think that that sort of does tie into what mark is saying here that like look, the, we're screwed. We're fucked. Like the capitalists are constantly, even when we, we get something from them, they are, they want the, they find going to find ways
Speaker 4to continue to extract more surplus. Tell you constantly, and they're going to do this. Like while we're doing one thing capitalist, we'll be doing 15 other things that they can do, right? So the class struggle has to proceed on all fronts. You have to remember that like you actually can't, like you can't get something and then stop because then the capitalists are always going to, they're always, always going to like push on that and they're going to push on other things. And so you can't, like there is no point where we can just win something and then we can leave it because that, that'll never work. Which is sort of that sort of thing. And the social democracy, right. The thing you know is like, like they like implemented the social, like Social Democrats were like, yeah, this will be great. We'll do this. And then eventually it'll lead a socialism and instead eventually it led to worse.
Speaker 6Yeah. It just leads to austerity or you know, now neoliberalism, which is, you know, we had strong a strong economy and the end of the forties fifties early sixties and whatnot. And then we started getting comfortable. Businesses started getting really, really too big to fail. You know, we'd been seeing that term a lot in the past decade really. And they just see, you know, constant reform and austerity put into place and economic action. And that's definitely what we're seeing there and what we're seeing today and how we have to be cautious about social democratic reforms such as things like universal basic income. You know, again, is it a bandaid, is it a tourniquet, is it chemo, whatever it is. As far as like metaphors go.
Speaker 1Right. I saw a great take on Twitter that was basically FDR was the last grade a democratic socialist and I'm just like, uh, no. I mean the dude basically like bragged about saving capitalism. So I don't, I just read, I just read that as a massive Oh, and on democratic socialists. Yeah, yeah. Basically, um,
Speaker 6like, yeah, the, the new deal and FDR did a lot of good for a lot of people, but it also prolongs the life expectancy of American capitalism. So we just have to understand the implications of unintended consequences or why some people might be supporting the same stuff that we are supporting.
Speaker 1Yeah. Like Peter Teal is, is a backer of ubi.
Speaker 4I'll note that here. The, the, the, the thing you mentioned, uh, to various about the, uh, welfare sort of being used as a supplement wages instead of paying the things people need to live. Actually, Mark's actually talks about this actually didn't, didn't notice this, I think maybe one that I had read this the first time, but I just noticed the sentence just now in this chapter. He says, during the time of the Anti Yacob and war undertaken as the encourageable tax eater and Synack purist old George Rose used to say, to save the comforts of our holy religion from the inroads of the infidels, the honest English farmers so tenderly handled in a former chapter of ours, depressed the wages of the agricultural leavers even beneath that mere physical minimum, but made up by poor laws, the remainder necessary for the physical perpetuation of the race. So he's saying that, yeah, here in, during the war, uh, the actually cut wages even below the like physical minimum, but was made up by welfare.
Speaker 1Right. And, and, and that's what I'm just like being in a, in a union or being in a political organization that extracts essentially got, what's the word I'm looking for? Um, concessions. Yeah. Extracts, concessions out of the business that you're in or of the bourgeoisie class as a whole. Like that's I think necessary and important. But, um, yeah, the, the fact that, you know, like Mark's basically points out to at, at the end of this chapter, the struggle between capital labor and its results, really the only thing that's actually going to, to have any meaningful, lasting impact upon the working class is essentially the abolition of the wage system in and of itself. Because, you know, as he keeps pointing out every concession that, that we extract, uh, the capitalist will begin undermining immediately while they are at the same time, uh, working to screw us in, in any number of other ways that they have the resources to actually accomplish.
Speaker 4Right. And I mean, the, the, the issues, what sort of bureaucratic trade unionism has been a long discussed topic, right. Even even lenient wrote about that in back in like 1917, so yeah.
Speaker 1Yeah. And, and I lost, uh, uh, something like a dozen, 15 followers to the other day because, um, I was, I guess getting into an argument that I didn't need to get into with some posts, leftists about, uh, being a part of an organized political movement and thinking that that is a good thing. Um, yeah, this definitely, it's definitely the, the argument
Speaker 4going on nonsectarian podcast. Right. That's it. That's all right.
Speaker 7We just all need to hide in our collective, uh, separate caves and just yell at the wall about our own interpretations of Marxism and socialism. I'm [inaudible] I will agree with that same as fuck. Uh,
Speaker 4all right, let's go to the, it's good. Could just finish up this work here. So he's talked about the aspect of lowering the value of laboring power, which capital tries to do, uh, and he says that that's, that's sort of the maximum of profit is when the worker didn't just barely, barely, barely, literally survive physically as a human. That's like the maximum of profit. Cause, obviously you can't go beyond that. So then he talks about the working day and he says that never risen. The in in England is in all the country has never been settled except by legislative interference. So here again, he's actually talking about this sort of like, uh, extracting reforms in the state. Right? He's saying that, uh, he said the very necessity of general political action of Ford's the proof, then it's merely economical action capital is the stronger side. Right? So he's saying that the workers have to do politics because if we just, if we're just in the realm of economics, capital wins every time,
Speaker 1right? Because they have the, they have control over the economic resources and society and you know, in politics in essentially bodies matter and, and we definitely have the greater number of bodies potentially on our side.
Speaker 4Yup. Okay. So here he talks about a sort of the limit to the value of labor. Um, and he's also about how in colonial countries, the law of supply and demand favors the working man. What he means by this is that the relative high, high standard of wages in the United States, it cannot prevent the labor market from main continuously emptied by the continuous conversion of wage laborers in the independent self sitting presidents. So here he is talking about like, oh, colonialism by the u s so that like, because the US was a colonial establishment that wage laborers, American wage believers would just go and you know, going to the west, right. And they would continue to colonize more and more of the native American territory and that boosted the wages of labors in the United States because that means that like you, you can only pay them so little or they'll go and become settlers,
Speaker 1right. Because the, you know, uh, a big part of how the capitalist system got started to begin with, which a Marxist and actually talk about in this book is the process of primitive accumulation whereby the self sufficiency of the peasants is essentially kneecapped by the state as captured by the bourgeois class. And there are forced to essentially become a part of the boot, all economic system by removing their ability to be self sufficient on their own plots of lands through things like the mass purchase through eminent domain or collecting taxes in the form of money that you as a self sufficient peasant don't really have access to unless you have to go and then work at the factory down the road. These kinds of things like you said, and in America it wasn't very easy, but it was, it was practical to essentially like pick up and a, uh, discussing factory town and find a plot of land after you killed the Indians on it and essentially work that to be self sufficient or you know, possibly even grow extra in order to actually participate in the market for like grain commodities for example.
Speaker 4Right. So know that this is actually a perfect example of racism and colonialism resolving a contradiction of capitalism, right? So it's, it actually has a dairy use the word Marcus is talking about the intersection of those two things here. Uh, because he's saying that you can, that capitalism's using that sort of system that, you know, Co colonizing that land to resolve this sort of contradiction between and the struggle of, of wages.
Speaker 6Yeah. And to continue on that, he starts talking about, uh, you know, if you think about more old civilized countries in which capital domineer is the whole process to production, he starts talking about, you know, England, uh, as far as agricultural wages in the middle of the night, 19th century about how, you know, a lot of the laborers wanted dino up their prices for, you know, wheat and grain and things like that, but they couldn't because of, you know, uh, imports and all that. And then he also starts talking about, uh, like modernization and automation type stuff with this is the general method in which a reaction quicker or slower of capital against arise of wages takes place in the old settle countries. Ricardo has just remark that machinery is in constant competition with labor and can be often only introduced when the price of labor has reached a certain height. But the appliance of machinery is, but one of the many methods for increasing product of powers of labor. So it just goes into saying that, you know, such as machinery, milling, things like that can make jobs easier for, uh, things to be profitable. But it also makes productivity, uh, skyrocket for laborers in the striving down what they'll actually make
Speaker 4profit. Yes. And note a very important point here that'll be extremely critical to Marco's theory in other works like a capital, but simultaneously what the progress of accumulation there take place a progressive change in the composition of capital. That part of the aggregate capital, which consists of fixed capital machinery, raw materials, means of production, and all possible forms progressively increases as compared with the other part of capital, which is laid out in wages or in the purchase of labor. So what he's saying is that what happens is capitalists are spending more and more of their money on machines and less and less of it proportionally. Obviously they're spending more on both in terms of raw numbers, but proportionally they're spending less and less of their money on wages. Yeah. You don't have to pay machines, you just have to pay to fix them or upgrade.
Speaker 1There's also the move from fixed intangible capital to financial capital. But um, I don't think, I don't know if Mark's actually really touches upon that very much. I think that that was probably less of an issue during his time.
Speaker 4Volume three is the one where he talks a lot more about finance, capital and volume. William too, I think only two of volume three Israeli talk about those. Yeah,
Speaker 1I was going to say, cause he at least doesn't remark upon it. And in this text here.
Speaker 4Yeah. So he says, so these few hints. So again, he now he's going to wrap it up and he's going to say these results to fight to show that the very development of modern industry most aggressively turned the scale in favor of the capitalist against the working man. And that consequently the general tendency of capitalistic production is not to raise, but to sink the average standard of wages or to push the value of labor more or less to its minimum limit. So note that what he's saying here is that this is the tendency of capitalistic production. That doesn't mean that what he's saying is this will always, always happen, right? Because again, he, he is acknowledging the existence of other potential systems, like for example, racism, colonialism that can be used to counteract this tendency. But he's saying in general there is this pressure to push wages all the way down, like all the way down. And he says that in 99 cases, out of 100 their efforts at raising wages, so he's talking about the work, the workers here are only efforts that maintaining the given value of labor and the necessity of debating their price with the capitalists is inherent to their condition of having to sell themselves as commodities. Right? So this essentially like stuff like the fight for higher minimum wage or going on strike that is just, that's a necessary part of negotiation. Yeah. And so here's the, the final sort of conclusion here is that because capitalism just inherently just tries to fuck us over. So instead of saying instead of the conservative model, a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword abolition with a wages system.
Speaker 1Yeah, I actually liked the, the way that Mark's raises is that here they ought to understand that with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present systems simultaneously in genders, the material conditions and the social forums necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative model, a fair day's wage for a fair day's work, they ought to inscribe upon their banner the revolutionary raw watchword abolition of the wages system. And then he goes on a after this very long and I fear tedious exposition, which I was obliged to enter into to do some justice to the subject matter. I shall conclude by proposing the following resolutions. Firstly, a general rise in the weight and the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities. Secondly, the general tendency of capitalist production is not to rise but to sink to the average standard of wages. Thirdly, trade unions work well as centers of resistance against the encroachments of capitol. They fail partially from an ingenious use of their power. They failed generally from the, from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war against the effects of the existing system instead of simultaneously trying to change it instead of using their organized forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class. That is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system. Uh, which I think does, does touch a little bit on the question that I pose to you guys a little bit earlier. It is important to make sure that we are taking care of the people in the here and now, but it's also incredibly important that we don't look at reform in the here and now to the detriment of the actual abolition of capitalism
Speaker 4self. And even though Mark's is probably a bit more of an acceleration of sin, Marxists later became because he thought that capitalism would fall a long time ago. Sorry. That's a little depressing. Yeah, he's, capitalism is depressing. He's, he's, he still says that, uh, it, they fail from limiting themselves to a guerrilla war, but they didn't even to say that we don't shouldn't do that. He still says he's saying that you shouldn't only do that, you shouldn't only try to resist the effects of the existing system, but you should do that. And also you should use your organized force to deliver for the final emancipation of the working class. Uh, that, I mean they can walk and chew bubblegum you guys. Yes. The thing we can do. Yes. Got It. So you then take steps, same time and that is value, price and profit, which is basically an intro to capital volume one. I think the doesn't capital volume one, once you read this is going to have very familiar arguments in a lot of points. Yeah. This, this is kind of like what I, I like to think of is like a good introductory usage. Some of the concepts and ideas, almost like a little glossary, more so for capital. The same way that I like, uh, going over, uh, the principles of communism before going into the communist manifesto for like reading groups and things like that. It just introduces some good phrases and key concepts. You as an aside, I think the communist manifesto, it's a really bad place to start reading works actually, but yeah,
Speaker 1yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, principles of communism and socialism, scientific and Utopian are probably the two texts that I would recommend above the communist manifesto. And actually I don't really recommend the communist manifesto. It's, it's an interesting document, but it's, it's definitely a document of its time. It has some, some things to say about our current structural struggle, but yeah, it's dated.
Speaker 4The other two that you mentioned, uh, are very much less dated and still massively relevant outside of the, uh, I guess audacity of what the Communist manifesto represents in and of itself, right know to the communist manifesto isn't a work of theory. It's the work of propaganda, particularly this contact. Right? So he's there, he's not writing to necessarily explain something. He's, he's trying to like rally people buy and, and state. The a quick summary of his points and placed them in the in in that context. He's not trying to develop his political theory. All right, well should we go to the feedback section?
Speaker 1We're actually over an hour right now, so I think if we do get, if we do get enough feedback we'll probably do maybe like a 2030 minute segment covering that feedback. If we don't then either people aren't listening or people don't think we're awful. Yeah. Or or people uh, you know, we've explained things well enough that everybody understands it and everything's peachy.
Speaker 4I'm going to assume it's problems. Who are these fine clowns? They're not even one of the well known clouds.
Speaker 7They get their PhDs in Marxist Leninism they didn't go to Pyongyang University major in Haiti. You don't know me. You're right. I don't know that you didn't study in Pyongyang for effect. You could have and that would be very interesting and I would like to do an interview about that. You did it
Speaker 4isn't, isn't Pyongyang University like an evil and Juggle Christian one?
Speaker 7I, I think it, it's actually, I think it's Kim Il Sung University is what it's actually called
Speaker 4because I looked up [inaudible] university of Science and Ecology is North Korea's first privately funded university. It is founded, operated and partly funded by associations and people outside the country. So this is uh, this is like, yeah. Okay. So the US and China initiative,
Speaker 7I think I'm talking about Kim Il Sung University, which I think that's,
Speaker 4they're like Capitol University or whatever. So maybe, I don't know.
Speaker 7I don't know enough about the DPRK. Yup. Okay.
Speaker 1Do we have a, I think we pretty well covered value, price and profit. I think that was fairly thorough, at least for my own understanding. Yup.
Speaker 4Okay.
Speaker 1So do we have any, do you guys have any remarks that you want to end on?
Speaker 4No, not really. Reading this again, it after like a couple of years, it was just really neat to see like where I first started getting like, okay, so this makes sense. Especially about like the part about working. Like once half your day's over and you've made all the money that you'll make for that day and the rest of the day you're working free. I'm just like, Huh man,
Speaker 7that fucking sucks. Yeah. This has been an APP that's not cool for years. What the hell
Speaker 1that is in no way. Cool. Yeah. Capitalism is shit. Who'd a thunk? Yeah. Who'd a thunk except for the people living in it? Yeah. Uh, yeah, so uh, that's a pretty well that's a good wrap on value pricing, profit. So the next step for us would be if we get feedback, we're going to cover that on a sort of mini feedback episode. Otherwise we are going to be rolling into capital itself with a chapters one and probably two if we have time to get to it. Cool. Cool. Except for capital chapters one and two not, not same volumes one and two chapters one and two. That seems ambitious. I think we need more than one section per vote for chapter one. Chapter one is actually a really long,
Speaker 7I don't even know where my capital's it, but yeah, it's long as shit. You don't know your capitals at you, you don't even know where it is and now you don't even know where it is. So much capital. I don't even know where it is. I'm just as you can tell rolling in capitol right now.
Speaker 1Yeah. Anyway, my red and black won't stay up on the wall. That's the only reason why it's not here right now. It's, it's pretty long, honestly, but we can try to get through it in one sitting, I guess. But I don't think, yeah, I think chapter one is already kind of, I don't, I'm like, we're going to get to chapter two. I mean, probably not, but we can be ambitious. It's always good to have goals. Yep. Okay. So that, uh, that's a wrap for this episode. Thank you all for joining us. If you want to find where I'm at on Twitter, I am at Checka informant, c, h e, k, a informant, all one word
Speaker 7again. I'm pope. You can find me on Twitter at Antifa. Your score.
Speaker 1Pope, uh, is that how you pronounce Antifa? That's how I do it anyway. Or You could find me at outer Siberia. Uh, I'm a dog, a very small dog in a very small tank. It's a, it's a large tank. Okay. That's the completely different, is it a t 34? Absolutely. All right. Comrades and remember, you have nothing to lose but your chains, which that, how was it? That was a terrible way to say that. One of these days I'm going to get it right. But, uh, today is not one of those days.