Charles Hope and the Luminous Top

The labor theory of value

A recurring theme on this blog is the different conceptions of value and the resulting effect on worldview and policy because I am fascinated by how such a philosophical dispute can impact real-life.  I suspect that a subjective theory of value (which I support) leads to acceptance of free markets, and that objective theories of value (which I disparage) lead their rejection.  For a deal can provide subjective value to both participants, whereas if the important measure of value is objective (and it's quantity conserved), an exchange transfers value from one to another, and all profit becomes theft.  The consequences are profound!

When arguing with haters of capitalism, like a grappler who takes the fight to the ground, I prefer to head straight to these fundamental differences rather than bickering over their conclusions.  However, since most people lack the stamina or bravery to inspect their premises, I find few takers.  In my new friend Professor Andrew Austin it seemed I had discovered a leftist with the wherewithal to get to the root, but unfortunately he too tired of discussing essentials, preferring to return to writing monologues about the election circus, leaving me to wallow in what he called my “mythology”.

My viewpoint is considered a subjective theory of value because the only two types of value I recognize, expected utility and price, are subjective.  The expected utility is the amount of usefulness or enjoyment an individual predicts a good or service will provide.  The price of a successful sale, being bounded by the customer's expected utility, is equally subjective.

To what could the idea of  “objective value” possibly refer?  The word “value” begs the question “of value to whom?” Evaluation implies awareness.  Value lacking an evaluator is a purely metaphysical entity, a figment of mystical language.

Undeterred, proponents of an objective theory add to those two types of value at least one more.  The most popular form, expounded by Marx, is based on labor.  Here the value is equivalent to the average amount of time generally required to create the object.  Marxists are quick to demand bourgeois credibility by pointing out that the labor theory of value comes from earlier, more conservative economists.  Nevertheless, I will explore the labor theory of value as interpreted by Ernest Mandel in An Introduction to Marxist Economic Theory.  He writes:

As soon as a regular system of exchange between the farmer and the textile craftsman was established, standard equivalents were likewise established -- for example, an ell of cloth would be exchanged for 10 pounds of butter, not for 100 pounds.  Obviously the peasants knew, on the basis of their own experience, the approximate labor-time needed to produce a given quantity of cloth.  Had there not been a more or less exact equivalence between the time needed to produce the cloth and the time needed to produce the butter for which it was exchanged, there would have been an immediate shift in the division of labor.  If cloth production were more lucrative than butter production, the butter producers would switch to producing cloth.

If an hour's quantity of cloth is equivalent to an hour's quantity of butter, how could anybody determine that production of one was more lucrative than the other? Nevertheless, we have determined that an ell of cloth had a exchange-value of one hour, and that 10 pounds of butter also had an exchange-value of one hour.

The exchange-value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labor necessary to produce it. The quantity of labor is measured at the length of time it takes to produce the commodity. Expressed another way, the exchange-value of a commodity is not determined by the quantity of labor expended by each individual producer engaged in the production of this commodity, but by the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce it.

Exchange-value must be measured in hours. Now let's explore the concept of surplus-value.

We can therefore say from here on that surplus-value is the difference between the value produced by the worker and the value of his own labor-power.  What is the value of labor-power?  In capitalist society, labor-power is a commodity, and like the value of any other commodity, its value is the quantity of labor socially necessary to produce and reproduce it, that is to say, the living costs of the worker in the wide meaning of the term.

What is the value of labor power in terms of exchange-value?  Exchange-value is measured in hours, therefore the value of an hour of labor is exactly 1 hour. There's no possible difference between equivalent quantities. Measured by exchange-value, surplus-value is always zero!

To discover the surplus which provides business profit, we must use the subjective concepts of expected utility and price.  For the worker, the expected utility of his wage is higher than the expected utility of his labor.  Reciprocally, for the employer, the expected utility of the products are higher than the expected utility of the wage.  To be sure, the employer pays a wage less than the expected utility of the laborer's products. However the employer is not an end-user, whose purchase price is bounded by his expected utility of the product, but a reseller, whose expected utility is the difference in purchase and expected resale prices, which reduces his willing purchase price.  In this way employment may be approximated as an equipment loan to the worker, who enters into a production agreement with the owner, who is a reseller.

Exchange-value is a notion of dubious metaphysical basis, which is at best useless in the analysis of economic reality.

Government, Supercapitalist

It occurred to me that, under the Marxist view of capitalists as exploiters, we have evolved past the era of capitalist government as the executive committee of Big Business, past the point when the bureaucracy has adopted a motive force of its own, as it did under Stalin and Mao, and has positioned itself as a superexploiter, exploiting worker and capitalist alike. Does the worker today pay more surplus value to capital owners, or to taxes?

Is this the second synthesis of authentic Marxism and Libertarianism, the first being the situationism of The Right to be Greedy?

Do the Democrats really oppose Republican evils?

All Democrats, whether in office or in the ranks, are obliged to answer these charges by Arthur Silber:

Anyone who actually believed in democracy and the rule of law...would already be calling for the prosecution of Bush and his minions for these capital crimes. This goes double for anyone in public life, holding public office, with a national platform to speak from, and institutional tools at their disposal for investigating these crimes.

It is the judgment of the Democrats -- and it is the judgment of Barack Obama -- that none of these acts merit impeachment. None of these acts is “exceptional.” Thus, the next President will take office knowing that he or she can repeatedly commit and order torture, murder and genocide, proclaim those acts before the world, and nothing at all will happen to him.

Is the GOP a party for smaller government?

All Republicans, whether in office or in the ranks, are obliged to answer this charge leveled by Bob Barr.

They claimed to be Republicans and for a smaller government. Instead, with a complicit Republican Congress, they moved to dramatically expand the size, power and scope of the federal government. I concluded that the party I had been associated with for decades was no longer that party I had joined and no longer had an interest in smaller government. They no longer had an interest in increasing individual liberty and showed no signs of changing in my lifetime.

Glenn Greenwald continues:

Few things are more striking than the gap between the actual power-expanding behavior of Republicans when in office and the manipulative limited-government rhetoric they spew when they want to win elections or attack Democrats. What Republicans claim to despise when they are out of power is exactly what they do when they are in power.

A belief in endless expansions of government power is – along with endless wars – now the defining feature of today’s Republican Party...according to our nation’s right-wing liberty warriors, the American Founders risked their lives and fortunes in order to wage war against Great Britain and declare independence from the King, all in order to vest "near dictatorial power" in the American President in all matters of foreign policy and national security.

Political Science Prof who finds Constitution funny

Writes the Terre Haute Tribune-Star:

Ron Paul’s consistent, by-the-letter application of the Constitution is unique, said Gerald Wright, IU professor of political science.

“It’s charming,” he said, chuckling.

ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers fails to answer Hannity's smears

Bill Ayers has a blog, and says:

I’m often quoted saying that I have “no regrets.” This is not true....I’m sometimes asked if I regret anything I did to oppose the war in Viet Nam, and I say “no, I don’t regret anything I did to try to stop the slaughter of millions of human beings by my own government.” Sometimes I add, “I don’t think I did enough.” This is then elided: he has no regrets for setting bombs and thinks there should be more bombings.

If he doesn't regret his antiwar activism, then he doesn't regret having set off bombs. So if he rejects the “elided” conclusion, he must be denying it's second part, that “he thinks there should be more bombings”. But why does he think there shouldn't be any more bombings? The slaughter he decried continues to this day! Is this an unfair conclusion? He continues:

Terrorism—according to both official U.S. policy and the U.N.—is the use or threat of random violence to intimidate, frighten, or coerce a population toward some political end....I’ve never advocated terrorism, never participated in it, never defended it.

Really?

“The primary purpose, and the stance, of our organizing,” writes Shin'ya Ono about Weatherman, “could not possibly be to 'turn people on,' or to have them like us, or to make them think that we are nice, but to compel them to confront the antagonistic aspects of their own life experience and consciousness by bringing the war home, and to help them make the right choice over a period of time, after initially shaking up and breaking through the thick layers of chauvinism-racism-defeatism.”

It appears to meet his preferred definition. Take a look at their premises:

We are within the heartland of a worldwide monster, a country so rich from its worldwide plunder that even the crumbs doled out to the enslaved masses within its borders provide for material existence very much above the conditions of the masses of people of the world.

The US empire, as a worldwide system, channels wealth, based upon the labor and
resources of the rest of the world, into the United States. The relative affluence existing in the United States is directly dependent upon the labor and natural resources of the
Vietnamese, the Angolans, the Bolivians and the rest of the peoples of the Third World. All of the United Airlines Astrojets, all of the Holiday Inns, all of Hertz's automobiles, your television set, car and wardrobe already belong, to a large degree to the people of the rest of the world.

That era brought an explosion of anti-imperial and anti-colonial revolution throughout the Third World, mirrored by the increasingly radical struggles of minority communities in the US. World events pointed to a colossal showdown between white colonizers and the Rest of the World. And justice unquestionably appeared to be on the side of the Others.

However, the quotation reflects a deep theoretical error.  Any theory of objective, zero-sum value unfairly indicts every economic exchange as a form of theft. But wealth exchanged through voluntary transactions enriches all parties; value cannot be siphoned from one party to another without force or fraud.  Never having critically analyzed Marx's theory of value burdens with the left with inability to distinguish peaceful free market transactions from the organized crime that is imperialism.

Nevertheless, this spectacle of personal trivia, so tediously focused on the candidate's associates, manifests the refusal of the established media to discuss all but the shallowest issues of personality, and their subsequent inability to digest a candidate like Ron Paul who insists on directly confronting the largest issues we face today. For as Anne Applebaum writes concerning London's upcoming mayoral election,

It's nevertheless worth watching because this campaign could well be a blueprint for the elections of the future since it is postmodern and post-ideological in the deepest sense: In a world in which “issues” are not the issue and no one takes political parties seriously anymore, there's nothing left to talk about except who said what to whom and whose tongue was sharper while doing so.

What Authentic Conservatism sought to conserve

Joseph Stromberg writes:

Felix Morley's conservative classical liberalism and republicanism sprang from his membership in a genuine American elite. It was "bourgeois" but cherished classical education and civilized values which gave a larger context to the market economy. It was – of course – white, Anglo-Saxon, and largely Protestant.

My point is that the vanishing bourgeois elite justified its existence precisely by producing people like Felix Morley who understood the old republic, the constitution, peace, and free markets, as well as their opposites, empire, lawless rule, war, and generalized statism. Of course it was other members of that same elite who pursued the Open Door and set us on the path of empire. If Morley's analyses hold true, it was these clever fellows who began, however unintentionally, the unraveling or deconstruction of authentic American life. Their descendants pursue the good work intentionally. 

System Equivalents and Computers

There's an equivalence between quantities in mechanics and electrical circuits. Given the similarity between F = −kx = C dx/dt = M d²x/dt² and V = Q/C = R dQ/dt = L d²Q/dt², we can say that Force : Voltage, Springiness : Capacitance, Mass: Inductance, and Damping: Resistance.

Is there any equivalent to the quantities we care about when designing software, such as CPU operations, memory, network bandwidth, and disk speed?

More Machine-Gun-Toting Officers To Patrol NYC Subway

WCBS informs us:

It's a first for mass transit in the United States. NYPD officers, armed with rifles, submachine guns, body armor and bomb sniffing dogs will begin patrolling the city's subway system....

What sort of terrorists are deterred by jackboots?

"It's a very good idea. It's like a deterrent. It's going to make me feel safer, much safer, yes it will. It's a good idea," said commuter Patricia Knight Williams.

Does this make you feel safer? What will happen if we try to photograph them?

Workers unite against the Corporate Left?

There is something wrong with our language when Big Business is considered Leftist:

It is the Corporatists, the corporate left, who encourage and direct these policies and the politicians who listen to corporate money instead of the people who elected them.