libelous_slander posted:

are there actually mtw people? I thought it was a big joke by some dutch guy

no it's sorta real. probably a few dozen real members total though.

getfiscal posted:

i actually liked maoism-third worldism for a while off-and-on in 2007 and 2008.

i think mccaine still buys their value flow argument which i find preposterous.

really? why?

Keven posted:

No. It was some 3rd world solidarity movement not a I/P related thing in general. But they supported Palestine and a bunch of other stuff whcih mtws explain as not being truly, truly, truly, proletarian. w/e it doesnt matter b/c they're probablyt just another internet thing.

kasamaproject.org?

jools posted:

Keven posted:

No. It was some 3rd world solidarity movement not a I/P related thing in general. But they supported Palestine and a bunch of other stuff whcih mtws explain as not being truly, truly, truly, proletarian. w/e it doesnt matter b/c they're probablyt just another internet thing.

kasamaproject.org?

not sure iom gonna chzeck tho. ty mate.

getfiscal posted:

well i shouldn't talk about mccaine's views since i haven't talked to him much over the past few years. the maoist-third worldist ones i know though.

their basic argument is that you have to look at the global division of labour and see who is producing the means of subsistence. and since most industrial and agricultural workers are in the third world, and since america and europe have service economies that are deindustrialized, that must mean that the value that is being consumed must be coming from the third world. the common-sensical idea behind this is that productivity across workers must be similar within modern production conditions.

there are a few ways to dispute that. the most obvious is that industrial output and agricultural output are not very low in the west. for example, the most industrially intense economy of the world is switzerland. beyond that, ha-joon chang notes that productivity really is hugely uneven, at least mostly. american factories have substituted towards capital so much that you can't measure by labour costs alone, given automation and such.

another issue is that actual trade is fairly low. most trade in the west is internal to the west. like i'm sure canada-us is still more "value" (by any measure) than china-us.

i think 3rd worldism is sort of right in inverse, though, in a moral sense. this is the obvious point they really rely on. like if the world income average is $10,000 or something then why do americans get to have $35,000 a year or something. like if we were trying to build a just economy then why would we be telling americans their lives are going to get better in terms of more money. the narrative in the US for socialist parties should be about employment, stability, social welfare, etc. but instead all parties tend towards pandering about things like a $20 minimum wage.

the counterpoint in economics is usually that you need to pay people equal to the marginal product of their labour or else someone else could bid them up. like if you stop paying americans a lot of money then they'll stop producing so much. i don't mean like bankers i mean like factory workers. like the old joke in east berlin: a reporter asks a factory foreman how many workers work in this factory - the foreman says "at least half"

they would just say you're committing an error of commodity fetishism by taking the dollar prices of commodities produced in exploited countries as directly representing their value, ignoring the role of imperialist monopsony.

you have a situation where the price of a toy leaving a shenzhen factory can be $1.20, and its sale price under the mattel/hasbro/whatever brand in a Milwaukee ToysRUs is $4.99; it looks like $3.79 of value was added between production and sale, but that doesn't make a lot sense for marxists since the toy is practically a finished use-value in shenzhen, and we know transportation costs aren't nearly enough to make up the difference. it doesn't make any sense in a marxist framework to attribute higher wages to a higher marginal productivity, just as it doesn't make sense in a marginalist framework to attribute profit/interest to surplus value.

swirlsofhistory posted:

they would just say you're committing an error of commodity fetishism by taking the dollar prices of commodities produced in exploited countries as directly representing their value, ignoring the role of imperialist monopsony.

you have a situation where the price of a toy leaving a shenzhen factory can be $1.20, and its sale price under the mattel/hasbro/whatever brand in a Milwaukee ToysRUs is $4.99; it looks like $3.79 of value was added between production and sale, but that doesn't make a lot sense for marxists since the toy is practically a finished use-value in shenzhen, and we know transportation costs aren't nearly enough to make up the difference. it doesn't make any sense in a marxist framework to attribute higher wages to a higher marginal productivity, just as it doesn't make sense in a marginalist framework to attribute profit/interest to surplus value.

well that's unequal exchange, which isn't the precise argument that maoist third worldists tend to rely on (though they do sometimes). but that doesn't make as much sense for exactly what they are arguing because obviously america (or britain) was an industrial powerhouse for most of its history. it wasn't until the neoliberal period that the rust belt developed. like the specific argument is that americans live off surplus value which is created in the third world. i think that's false. obviously america is rich because of imperialism and unequal distributions of wealth, and it enjoys unequal terms of trade and a global parasitic relationship with finance.

getfiscal posted:

the counterpoint in economics is usually that you need to pay people equal to the marginal product of their labour or else someone else could bid them up. like if you stop paying americans a lot of money then they'll stop producing so much. i don't mean like bankers i mean like factory workers. like the old joke in east berlin: a reporter asks a factory foreman how many workers work in this factory - the foreman says "at least half"

was late 60s-early 70s wage restraint in the west associated with lower productivity

jools posted:

was late 60s-early 70s wage restraint in the west associated with lower productivity

well the argument (i don't know if it is actually true) is more just simple math. like if one factory bid below the cost of additional profitable output for a worker then the next would come along to close that spread so they could make profits, at least shaken out over a large economy. to say that doesn't happen across an entire economy on a massive scale means you believe there are obvious ways to join in and make huge sums of money. that's what makes it implausible on the surface. any time you think that capital makes large, important, predictable mistakes that someone with a little bit of knowledge could exploit to make a fortune makes it unlikely, i guess.

my assumption would be that capital is "good" at that sort of math but bad at systemic math, which is the real determiner of everything i guess. like, wages in some specific sectors are probably close to marginal product, but how everything that goes into that is determined is connected to capitalism as a complex system. and in a lot of sectors wages are probably almost completely arbitrary because it is almost impossible to determine what their contribution to output is. like... managerial work is very high paying but it's hard to see how they come up with it.

getfiscal posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:

I don't follow...capitalism in its competitive era is not especially parasitic on other countries, nor when it first starts to export capital to colonies/neocolonies. only when trade starts to flow the other way is the trend for productive capital and productive labor to transform into finance/merchant capital and unproductive servant labor; for the country to become more externally parasitic overall. at least that's the traditional view.

yes. the maoist-third worldists agree with that as well. but the scale of goods involved is so massive (according to them) that they believe americans are bought off en masse, as in, except for small groups of people like prisoners and some people in ghettos, the entire population is non-revolutionary. that's why they support a sort of denazification of the united states rather than trying to advocate for revolution within it.

maoist information web site made a comparison of FDI and unequal exchange and decided that the latter is quantitatively greater and is the major mechanism in international value transfer. unfortunately the site was taken down a couple years ago and is only partially available on archive.org. this is the relevant article: http://web.archive.org/web/20090426062420/http://maoist.ws/theory/economics/ecdraft.html

...The basic position that MIWS has committed to is that abstract labor (a category in Marxist theory) exists internationally and Third World labor time can be compared with First World labor time in the world economy. Applying this idea in analysis, MIWS argues that there is a major disproportion between price and value internationally, and Third World labor is undervalued in price terms. By no means is this conclusion or the preceding idea unique to MIWS or Arghiri Emmanuel. By contrast, the basic position the majority of pseudo-Marxists uphold is that the amount of labor that produced Third World goods doesn't matter in analyzing international economic relations and class structure, there is no international calculation of surplus value that is important, and the only transfer of value that can take place involving First World workers is from First World workers to capitalists. Excluding a certain portion of parasitism from consideration is built into the pseudo-Marxists' ideology. These pseudo-Marxists rarely articulate their theory. Instead, they avoid theories and arguments that have the potential to upset their preconceived notions. Global class analysis and economic analysis may be avoided altogether, something that is significant in its own right.

swirlsofhistory posted:

maoist information web site made a comparison of FDI and unequal exchange and decided that the latter is quantitatively greater and is the major mechanism in international value transfer. unfortunately the site was taken down a couple years ago and is only partially available on archive.org. this is the relevant article: http://web.archive.org/web/20090426062420/http://maoist.ws/theory/economics/ecdraft.html

thanks for this. the central assumption seems to be here:

Regarding the representation of labor-time in MIWS's fictitious example above, MIWS is aware that in order to quantity exchange value or abstract labor-time there needs to be a calculation of socially necessary labor-time. It appears that only concrete labor-time is dealt with in this example. Nonetheless, what is important are the relative amounts involved, and MIWS sees no reason why the assumption should be made that Country B's labor-time, for example, should be reduced to 15 labor-hours or some other amount, instead of 20, or instead of both Country A's and Country's B's labor-times' being reduced to 15 labor-hours. That would be a chauvinist assumption resulting from trying to superimpose the First World worker productivity myth on Marxist concepts.

but this would seem to begin from the assumption that productivity is equal, so obviously if they are paid differently you'll see a commensurate difference in consumption.

never mind i see my error there

edit: actually no i don't? what?

Edited by getfiscal (Oct. 6, 2012 01:50:07)

getfiscal posted:

jools posted:

was late 60s-early 70s wage restraint in the west associated with lower productivity

well the argument (i don't know if it is actually true) is more just simple math. like if one factory bid below the cost of additional profitable output for a worker then the next would come along to close that spread so they could make profits, at least shaken out over a large economy. to say that doesn't happen across an entire economy on a massive scale means you believe there are obvious ways to join in and make huge sums of money. that's what makes it implausible on the surface. any time you think that capital makes large, important, predictable mistakes that someone with a little bit of knowledge could exploit to make a fortune makes it unlikely, i guess.

my assumption would be that capital is "good" at that sort of math but bad at systemic math, which is the real determiner of everything i guess. like, wages in some specific sectors are probably close to marginal product, but how everything that goes into that is determined is connected to capitalism as a complex system.

in mathematical terms this is the difference between local and global behavior in dynamic systems.

and in a lot of sectors wages are probably almost completely arbitrary because it is almost impossible to determine what their contribution to output is. like... managerial work is very high paying but it's hard to see how they come up with it.

isn't that because managerial positions often serve as kind of a guard position for capital? like you don't want to get a starving dog to protect your chicken coop. your managers need to push the interests of the company over the interests of the workers and that is why, at least under capitalist logic, you need to have your managers as a separate class from your workers.

AmericanNazbro posted:

yes, but it's hard to quantify the value they add to economic output for that business. whereas someone in a factory, making X hotwheels per hour, it's easier to put a number on the value of his labor.

well, yeah, that was my point. gaurding sheep is inherently non-productive, and pointless if there are no wolves in the woods to begin with. and if you're creating a society of wolves, you have to ask yourself is this the best society we can come up with.

Goethestein posted:

maybe labor theory of value is nonsensical and false

if it's nonsensical it can't be false

tpaine posted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZYYbg7iNN8&t=15m31s