/lit/ - Literature

>>18428615
>which traditional schizoids insisted was gold, thankfully cryptotards have disrupted that narrative
If anything crypto has done the opposite. Gold has remained the same for 5000 years, meanwhile crypto is just a ponzi, where fucking Elon Musk that decide what goes up and down with a few words on twitter.

Stay seething.

>>11917332
To quote Marx in 1847 celebrating the Ten Hours Bill:
>This struggle about the legal restriction of the hours of labor raged the more fiercely since, apart from frightened avarice, it told indeed upon the great contest between the blind rule of the supply and demand laws which form the political economy of the middle class, and social production controlled by social foresight, which forms the political economy of the working class. Hence the Ten Hours’ Bill was not only a great practical success; it was the victory of a principle; it was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class.
The science of the bourgeoisie had predicted new restrictions on the hours of labour destroying British industry... but the opposite occurred and Marxs analysis could explain why. You had investment in fixed-capital and the rise of high-pressure steam with the unintended consequence of completing the victory of fossil fuels over renewable water power.

>>11918224
Capital deals with a "pure" abstracted theoretical state, the geopolitical realities distort this of course, and if you had read all three volumes closely you would know Marx acknowledged this. You had abnormal growth in wages for a while as a concession to the perceived threat of the Soviet challenge. Since the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system you have seen, and most everyone in the first world empirically feels this very real change.
Of course there's a bigger "middle class" worldwide, as a mass, but relatively against the mass of proletarianized workers, which have grown much faster, for every new investor you get many more peasants being pushed into slums worldwide.
Why did "revolutions" occur in the third world and not the first? The imposition of state capitalism, the monopolization of ownership of productive resources in the hands of the state, onto peasant societies in the 20th century was an odd phenomena and I'm not going to try to explain it here but it was essentially a speed run of the enclosures that occurred in England. All historic revolutions have been essentially transformations in the forms of property ownership, from this perspective the US "revolution" was obviously a counter-revolution to protect slave holdings e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerset_v_Stewart
Before the US civil war the countries productive resources were largly still in private hands but afterwards with the legal transformation in corporate law in the late 19th century the productive resources were socialized, even if on a non-egalitarian basis, in the form of "share capital". This was a legitimate revolution which is still being carried out on a world scale. The next legitimate revolution must transform global share capital onto a new higher basis.

>>11496384
That income was never [by the mid-20th century any ways] a serious factor in household budgets, it was pocket change mostly going towards going to the movies and such. The portion going towards "entertainment" today is probably much lower all things factored in with the much more rapid increase in prices of essentials. Kids were out of the house before they were making any serious income. My point is a family could manage a relative standard of living relatively better than today with a single family member employed i.e. take a family of 4 with one employed breed winner from 60 years ago and compare their Quality of Life with a similar arrangement today. Yes things like televisions are bigger/better today therefore people are getting a "better experience" but these sorts of intertemporal comparisons are stupid because individual utility can't really be quantified or compared and you can't even talk about things being "necessary" outside of a social context.

>>11496484
Well from a Marxist perspective it's really best to look at things in terms of gold and real wages from this perspective have actually been totally obliterated much worse. How many ounces of gold did you're average house exchange for in 1950 vs. today? WOW, BIG DIFFERENCE. Why did the Nixon government drop their pledge to keep exchanging dollars for gold at the same rate? One of the reasons was it was a way for the government to radically reduce real wages of workers beyond just the geopolitical manoeuvring.
The thing is "luxury" consumption hasn't really been increasing, what's considered socially necessary has been increasing in cost and the arrangements of financing have been becoming more predatory. More income today is relatively going towards paying rents than purchasing goods/services.

>>11302238
Value is regulated by social labour, the point is commodity production is a social process... wealth isn't just a product of labour it exists in nature as well but becomes subsumed under capitalism by alien laws. Also profit isn't just unpaid wages exactly, that's an over simplification, phenomenal categories like profit and wages mask a deeper reality of an underlying value structure. Actual profits never correspond to surplus value since such an economy couldn't function. Debt is just a redistributive mechanism required to equilibrate profit rates otherwise capitals with different organic compositions would naturally yield different amounts of profits and that wouldn't work.

The amount of speculative paper claims on potential future profits can amass faster than the growth of real wealth and if everyone tries to cash out the illusion will pop but Marx didn't really see that as the central issue that would doom capitalism since he always saw it coming from resistance at the immediate point of production. Crises and devaluation of fixed-capital enforced by competition actually should delay the implosion of capitalism because it causes a rise in the rate of profit for new firms when old firms have to "write off" their past investments. This depreciation actually temporarily rises the rate of profit! The thing is Marx never fully flirted around with the notion of governments actively attempting to maintain unrecognised depreciation expenses in the interests of the private stakeholders and allow it to accumulate as potential illiquidity and the exact dynamics of that and the thing is that's exactly what's going on all the time: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/01/trump-plan-bails-out-coal-and-nuclear-plants-for-national-security.html

>>11304633
Marx didn't think living conditions would get absoultly "worse" per se just relatively so, look up what the average annual income/average house costed in the 1960s in a stable price unit. People have actually gotten used to putting up with much lowered exceptions today than just a couple generations ago, yes technology has advanced and consumer goods are cheaper but that's not the whole picture.

Declining profits is just the logical corollary of mechanization, in an economy that depends more on machines than labour expect book depreciation >= reported profits since machines become outdated quickly and have to be replaced/updated with newer ones that cost more than the old... the thing is accountancy is a black art and corporations are always cooking their books to make things look good. You can't find the truth on a corporate balance sheet.

>>9526329
Marxs whole work was a critique of the classical economists conception of the LTV and is entirely premised on the law of value having to breakdown. I would say this did in fact happen in the 1930s i.e. the first measures Roosevelt implemented to end the Great Depression was called the Agriculture Adjustment Act of 1933, when Roosevelt simply stepped in, purchased all the excess crops and destroyed them to support crop prices. The second example was Executive Order 6102, where, to reduce wages in a comprehensive fashion, rather than slashing them factory by factory, Roosevelt simply devalued the currency from $20.67 to $35, where they stayed until the United States debased the currency altogether in 1971 by the fascistic Nixon administration when it got off the gold standard:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Adjustment_Act
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
His mistake was assuming an emancipatory socialism would emerge instead of a violent statist regulatory corporate liberalism.
Today we can clearly see freedom isn't NECESSARY [in the sense classical german idealism conceptualized necessity] (technological development doesn't guarantee freedom, it's enslaving us more in new ways) nor is history NECESSARILY rational.
If abstract labour isn't abolished production will destroy itself... the petro economy will either disappear [climate change] or be destroyed [politicans, CEOs, etc killed in mass]. Capitals automation is making proletarians, with the capacity of an expansive awareness, disappear. But even a "societal collapse" resulting from dramatic climatic change offers a window of emancipatory change, marauding stateless gangs organized on democratic principles could be the agents of revolution.